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We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

blog.statuspage.io

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Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#41

Post by vhost- »

pre wrote: post #30

I can't imagine how you'd do pair-programming remotely, certainly. Some kind of shared-screen skype-call? Two sessions into a remote-desktop? Collaboration over the wire is slower than collaboration in person and less enthusing, but it's also more considered, more precise. We each have different styles I guess. Introverts likely prefer the considered precise way, extroverts the enthusiastic fast-paced way. People who…

I work for a 100% remote company (no office at all) and I remote pair program almost every day.

We use Google hangouts and tmux for most of it. If I'm working with certain people, we end up using ScreenHero.

You learn to say things like "you take over" or "I'm taking over" to make sure the other person doesn't try to type at the same time.

Remote pairing took me all of a few hours to get used to and it's been very productive.

As a lead for a team, I have to take meeting minutes and it's been a dream to just mute my mic and not have people get distracted by typing, coughing and other noise while they are speaking.

I can share more about my remote pairing experience if you'd like. But I think the above covers it.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#42

Post by JoeAltmaier »

pre wrote: post #30

I can't imagine how you'd do pair-programming remotely, certainly. Some kind of shared-screen skype-call? Two sessions into a remote-desktop? Collaboration over the wire is slower than collaboration in person and less enthusing, but it's also more considered, more precise. We each have different styles I guess. Introverts likely prefer the considered precise way, extroverts the enthusiastic fast-paced way. People who…

Sococo (I work there) does a good job. Share apps (not desktops); talk and video, pointers and web apps all work together to make pair programming pretty seamless.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#44

Post by wbachnik »

senko wrote: post #25
mpdehaan2 wrote: post #8

Having had teams that were half-remote before, and all remote now, doing lots of hangouts seems to fill the remote-feels-weird niche pretty well. Just having long conversations in chat tends to not be productive, but you need chat. Something like Slack is a good choice if you can't get everyone on IRC. Somewhat still wanting for better "whiteboard simulator" type options. Ultimately not having an office not only save…

If I can shamelessly plug my project: we're trying to solve the "whiteboard simulator" part of the picture by focusing on the essentials and getting out of your way. If you'd like to give it a spin: https://awwapp.com/ All feedback welcome!

Thanks for this very useful tool! It became an essential part of online meetings with my team -- it's been working great for us. We love the simplicity. For me it's missing only a single feature: ability to draw basic shapes like lines, rectangles or squares.

Thanks again!

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#45

Post by mc32 »

otakucode wrote: post #33
gtaylor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my current company, we worked together on-site for about a year and a half. The last three and a half years, I moved off and worked remotely. While I can agree that there are benefits, I think the company would have been better served to have me local. This is all anecdotal, of course, but I think younger, smaller companies should consider the tradeoffs carefully before having remote co-founders/management. A most…

It sounds to me like you expected managing remotely to be exactly the same as managing locally. You expected to be able to gauge the morale of the team, to know what people though of the groups future, etc without having to actually DO anything. When working with people locally, you at least get the impression that you understand these things from general interactions. You are wrong, of course, as your intuition is j…

Would you have any links or references elaborating on brainstorming being a hindrance toward finding ideas or solutions? I'm interested in learning about this.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#47

Post by darklajid »

I'm working completely remote [1] for 2 years now.

Wouldn't want to miss it again.

I have two kids, 2 and 1 years old, and the office was the far noisier environment. Constant nagging, "Can you just for a moment" interruptions and people playing foosball (or whatever you call the tables on which you can waste a lot of time shouting and kicking hard plastic around) in the next room... Not for me.

Home does have its challenges, certainly. But for me it's the far better trade.

Now, communication and tools: I prefer less. We're a Windows/MS shop, so it's Office 365 (worst. thing. ever. [2]) and Lync (sad..) for us. I'd prefer mail, in a decent way, and a reasonable chat (IRC would work fine, but HipChat et al might work just as well). I have a corporate phone, that is with me all the time. People _can_ reach me - in theory - 24/7 with that.

That's enough. I have no need in this job for sketches on a virtual whiteboard. I couldn't care less about conferences (aka discussions with > 4-5 participants). Phone's fine, mail is for persistence and tracking, git is for source code and .. that works pretty well.

Sad to hear that it didn't work our for StatusPage.io, but I'm convinced that this model can work perfectly fine.

1: Remote as in 'Less than a single digit number of days in the office per year', although the distance to the Real Office™ is manageable at about 90-100km one way, same country.

2: WSDL files? Can't open those in OWA for example, because everything that looks like XML is obviously 'scary'. OWA 'protects' you and according to our IT Office 365 doesn't allow you to fix that. WSDL is just one example of gazillion, I should by now create a template for the "Sorry, dear customer. Our mail server is batshit crazy and acting up. Can you zip that stuff/share it in other ways?" mails I send regularly. Your company/coworker uses s/mime? Forget about using OWA, it will either throw around scary warnings or .. just refuse to open the message completely.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#48

Post by MetaCosm »

An unexpected tool has helped tremendously for our teams in terms of remote work: Mumble (http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page).

Mumble is a cross platform, open source VoIP application. Often used for gaming in a group (like Teamspeak or Ventrilo). It has the idea of channels (rooms, offices, etc) is very high quality, low latency and low bandwidth installed on your companies servers in minutes, always encrypted... and clients are available for linux, windows, os-x, android, ios, etc.

So you can have channels like "Bob's Office", "Working on XYZ problem", etc. People can come into these channels to speak to you and can leave them. It feels a bit like an office environment, I can pop into Jay's office, talk to him about an issue, and go back to my office. I recommend people setup Push To Talk, which really helps create a silent non-annoying environment. Basically, me and another developer can be working on an issue, but maybe not actively talking, but in the same channel -- and there is blissful silence... I don't hear the fan, the cat, the fact that his wife came into talk to him for a minute, etc.

When I start my work-day -- I start it by logging into the mumble server (or more accurately, moving myself out the AFK channel) -- and when I end it, I move myself back into the AFK channel. This is a realtime communication system, async work still happens... well, everywhere else.

It is easy to be on all day as an "in-office" experience... when I am eating lunch, I create a "eating lunch" channel under AFK and put myself there.... We find it works so much better than video chat (or really anything else), is far more casual (like an office) and far more fluid... it is like having an open door policy. Sometimes I might be in a channel that says "Debugging Race Issue Go Away" -- but it technically doesn't keep anyone out, it is a request.

Using mumble day to day basically changed the experience from mediocre to great for us. We still use everything else, but mumble is our real time core, and slack is our async core.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#49

Post by pre »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #42
pre wrote: post #30

I can't imagine how you'd do pair-programming remotely, certainly. Some kind of shared-screen skype-call? Two sessions into a remote-desktop? Collaboration over the wire is slower than collaboration in person and less enthusing, but it's also more considered, more precise. We each have different styles I guess. Introverts likely prefer the considered precise way, extroverts the enthusiastic fast-paced way. People who…

Sococo (I work there) does a good job. Share apps (not desktops); talk and video, pointers and web apps all work together to make pair programming pretty seamless.

Heh, it looks like a game. Gauntlet or something. Strange model to deliberately capture the office layout even.

It looks so much like a game of "Cluedo" I'd be tempted to try a murder to see how it worked. "It was Thad, in Patrick's office, with the pistol"

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#50

Post by clay_to_n »

ryanSrich wrote: post #31

Although I disagree with the overall sentiment of the article (remote working doesn't work for generalists). I commend the author for at least trying remote work (especially as a YC company, an organization that openly discourages remote work). Full disclosure, I work remotely and it's by far the best decision I've ever made in my entire life. So to address a few points. Collaboration to me is when a group of people,…

How does pair programming work over chat? I feel like pair programming relies on you both looking at the same code + talking things through while one of you is actually coding. It seems like having to switch over to a chat client to communicate would decrease productivity a lot.
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