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We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

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Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#91

Post by darklajid »

s73v3r wrote: post #69
darklajid wrote: post #47

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 ch…

Just because you don't need to collaborate or whiteboard things out, doesn't mean others don't find it useful.

Arguably I am collaborating just fine.

I agree with the whiteboard part of your comment, but don't feel that I stated something to the opposite effect in my original comment?

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#92

Post by patroqueeet »

Hey, I fuly agree with what yor saying, having let dev teams for agile projects for more then ten years, all remove attemts we tried were not producing results as good as those of the onsite teams. I assume facing the same walls, being integrated with the full team dynamics, feeling all everyday emotions does integrate all team members much better and enables them to contribute much more efficiently...

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#93

Post by gtaylor »

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…

> 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.

No, I think this is pretty far off. I knew it'd be different being remote, and I knew I'd have to work harder to be in touch and involved. Being remote ended up working OK, it just wasn't as optimal as being on-site. I missed being there on-site, and felt like I could have been more effective had I been. It wasn't for any lack of desire or effort, it's just a sub-optimal arrangement for us in particular.

The rest of your reply seemed to assume that I thought there'd be no difference in remote vs on-site (which is incorrect), so I won't respond to the rest.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#94

Post by luckydude »

Hi, a guy who has managed a remote team for 15 years here.

What it sounds like to me is that they don't have someone doing the communication. I get all the bummers that is no face time, no hallway stuff. But we are systems programmers (he said generalists and I think it is sort of the same thing, everyone does everything, there aren't any narrow roles) and we have made it work.

Some ramblings on what works for us.

IRC is big. We're all on it, if there is no chatter I know something is wrong.

Weekly staff meetings. I hate meetings but the team needs to sync. So do those. Maybe even twice a week.

Phones. So much phone, you have no idea.

This is perhaps the biggest thing. Here's how we do design. It's all on the phone and it is all someone talking about a picture. Then the other person talks about the picture. Then the other person. What I mean by picture is we're trying to solve $PROBLEM and we have a proposed $SOLUTION and we talk about the solution. Someone leads because they believe they have a real solution. So they articulate that and the next person either articulates it back or proposes a change. When you go around the circle and everyone says the same thing, you are done. Start coding. Don't code before that, you need to have all the people seeing and saying the same picture.

We've made it work. It has not been easy and someone needs to step up and be the communication dude (that was me). That person has to see everything that is going on and know who needs to know what and make sure they either get the info or talk to the person who can give them that info. It's a lot of work. Many, many hours on the phone. But it can work, we've been doing it for 15 years, we gave you distributed source management as a result, all that work was with a team that didn't live in the same city.

I would not give up on remote teams so quickly, they can work.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#95

Post by luckydude »

hacst wrote: post #82
MetaCosm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any of the core developers considered creating a very polished / simplified / professional supported client for business? Stuff like "native look" on OS-X, some shiny features and ability to be easily pre-configured and shipped to people. So I could just give a pre-configured little bundle and they just run it, it would generate the cert and do the wizard, but we would have stuff like default push-to-talk, a few…

I have actually though about a boiled down client with baked in default configuration before. I wasn't considering business applications though but was thinking about the use in podcasting. Never got started on it though. We work on Mumble in our spare time and as such developer time is scarce. We try to focus on what we think most users are going to benefit from. There's a long "Would be neat to have X" list ;) One…

So I hate C++ and have no spare time but if my team likes this stuff I could throw some money or hardware at it. Let me know if that might help.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#96

Post by bradleyprice »

deedubaya wrote: post #27
sunils34 wrote: post #23

This is a great post! Our entire team is fully remote all over the world, with 31 people in 22 different cities in each major continent. I'm quite glad the OP wrote this because it talks about the very first thing I try to say when people ask about what it's like for remote working: Remote working doesn't work for everyone. Some are energized by an office environment with face-to-face time, and others are more produc…

This. You can't just hire anyone remote. You have to hire people who want to be remote, embrace the isolation, and moreover, fit well into the culture you already have.

I don't think I necessarily agree with any of this.

First:

If you're hiring for a remote position, I think hiring people who "want" to be remote is obvious.

Second:

Hiring remote doesn't mean that you have to "embrace the isolation." There are plenty of people that do like the isolation, but I've worked with plenty of remote developers (I'm remote as well) that aren't isolated. We stay on hangouts/chats, work from coffee shops, meet up to work with colleagues/friends, or even work from someone else's office.

It's quite easy to meet other people in the same scenario (remote workers) that are more than happy to meet up to work, even if you're working with different companies. Just to have casual chat throughout the day or to bounce ideas off of.

Third:

I think "fitting will into the culture you already have" should be a requirement in general. Just because I worked on site wouldn't mean that I'd want to sacrifice culture anymore than I would if I worked remotely.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#97

Post by kazuyan »

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!

Awesome. I will try this for the next team meeting!

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#99

Post by gtaylor »

mc32 wrote: post #45
otakucode wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's funny, because "brainstorming" means different things to different people/companies in different contexts. For us, it's sitting with a coffee and talking about a problem and possible solutions randomly. It's not even a formal process. This kind of thing just naturally happens when you are on-site.

This guy is just looking to be contrarian to be contrarian. I'm not sure you're going to want to take his reply as potentially useful.

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