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Why I Only Work Remotely

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Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#101

Post by jgrant27 »

Klathmon wrote: post #12
elliotec wrote: post #5

I work at a company which has a beautiful building, I spend the majority of time in the office which is fantastic, the social aspect plus internal networking is very good. I work from home on average maybe 0.8 days a week, for various reasons, but I get lots of work done and am quite productive from home. There are some things that you just can't do the same from home. You can be much more agile when working in proxi…

My workplace is 80% remote, but not in the way you might think. Just about everyone works from home 4 days a week, and comes into the office one day. It expands the hiring pool by a pretty significant amount, one of our devs is 2 hours away (4 hours round trip, and he still commutes less than his wife does every week), it lets us get a lot of the "face to face" benefits done in one day, and the rest of the time is re…

This actually sounds workable. One other thing that is clear is that a 5-day onsite 40 hour work-week is not productive. IMO a 4-day week split between office and home would be way more productive.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#102

Post by chriogenix »

I've been 100% remote for the last 8 years. I recently have been commuting for personal reasons and its only 30 min each way and I can already feel the drain it causes. Over a working career a normal commute(30min-1hour) each way can add up to a massive amount of lost time. Working remote is optimal for the kind of work I'm doing now. Previously I was running a larger business and we started to run into issues around 50 people on a remote team. There's advantages to both. I think the ideal environment is 4 days remote, 1 day in an office for in person meetings. To combat being out of contact with people in the business/industry, I attend as many conferences and meetups as I can.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#103

Post by gozur88 »

d357r0y3r wrote: post #31

I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain. The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend m…

>I've seen engineers spend months regularly obtaining "flow" with few interruptions or meetings, only to have the projects scrapped because they weren't what the business needed.

That's just a sign of bad or nonexistent management. If you're managing remote people you need to know what they're working on, and you need to make sure it's aligned with the company's goals. If that's not happening you're not doing your job.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#104

Post by citizens »

dahart wrote: post #90
d357r0y3r wrote: post #31

I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain. The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend m…

Really well said. It has taken me a long time in my career to realize the things I wanted - to be left alone to code - weren't translating into the product getting done any faster when I actually was left alone. I've watched other programmers fight for and get left alone, and then watched as they went off into the weeds coding things that solved problems we didn't have. Sometimes being left alone even increases my st…

> coding things that solved problems we didn't have

Couldn't this be solved by using a project management app?

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#105

Post by [deleted] »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #79
d357r0y3r wrote: post #31

I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain. The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend m…

"I don't want to get blocked from doing my work because you've gone dark on slack." That's poor project/task management if your whole day grinds to a halt because of a single blocker. There should always be more/other work to be done while waiting on a blocking issue to be resolved.

[deleted]

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#106

Post by blizkreeg »

In my experience, both, an entirely distributed team and an entirely localized team do well. It becomes exponentially harder to pull it off when you have some people working in the office, and others distributed.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#107

Post by jgrant27 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #19
tswartz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. It's often stipulated in the contract or made clear during the interview process what the expectations are, which is good. The unfortunate part is that employers may not realize that their policies are actually decreasing productivity.

Maximizing individual employee productivity may not be even in the top ten list of company priorities. For one, making sure that what the company wants to be built is actually built is massively more important. This seems to be hard for many companies. My roommate's startup has gutted their remote team, only one guy is still there and his days are numbered. From what my roommate told me, managing remote employees can…

It's a fact that having everyone in an office 5 days a week sadly and far too often does not result in a company getting what it wants built. The problem with that lies elsewhere, usually with management and hiring.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#108

Post by porpoisemonkey »

snarf21 wrote: post #68
d357r0y3r wrote: post #31

I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain. The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend m…

I agree with you. I personally am much more distracted at home because "I'm home". When I'm at work, I'm in work mode. I also find that I solve a lot of yesterdays roadblocks during my commute (20 mins each way) and the shower. Solving problems is not always about characters per second of new code. Over the years, I can't even count the number of times that I heard a conversation taking place and was able to step in…

> personally am much more distracted at home because "I'm home". When I'm at work, I'm in work mode.

Not sure if you've tried this or if it's practical for you, but I've found that having a completely dedicated space, with dedicated tools, can create a working context that helps boost productivity. I won't name them due to privacy concerns but my company has been very good about dealing with remote workers and provides a basic set of office amenities to any worker who is selected to go remote (convertible standup desk, remote access point with office telephone, all-in-one printer w/ ink refills, etc.)

> Over the years, I can't even count the number of times that I heard a conversation taking place and was able to step in and say "that's wrong" and stop several people from a multiple day detour.

I'm not sure what your experience is but a trend I've noticed is that this tends to occur when only a subset of team members are remote - in fully-remote teams the use of collaboration tools (mailing lists, Jabber, IRC, etc) can often replicate these kinds of ad-hoc conversations with the added bonus of automatically capturing the information discussed.

I generally think environments where ad-hoc conversations are necessary to maintain overall effectiveness as being tool deficient.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#109

Post by gumby »

I pretty much strongly agree but I will offer one defence of "work rules" that isn't completely pointy-haired.

The reality is that not everyone has the same level of productivity or commitment. With a few rules it's often possible to get more than their salary's cost out of them. Sure, we'd all like to work in an environment of nothing but awesome co-workers, but that doesn't scale. Hell, you presumably support "rules" like "we've decided that the implementation language is L" so everybody's code works together.

What is brain damaged is that some companies are too stupid or fearful to understand when the rules do and don't apply.

Re: Why I Only Work Remotely

#110

Post by jgrant27 »

stevesearer wrote: post #8

For as much as people like to hate on open offices on HN, it still baffles me why there aren't more Y Combinator startups founded with remote work or private offices as core company principles. Just a guess, but I wonder if the decision to just go with open offices has to do with the ability to scale such a plan quickly and easily, whereas scaling a remote team is too difficult or building or rearranging private offi…

What would you guess the average years of experience are for a Y Combinator founder ? I say this not as a judgement but simply because people earlier on in their careers often need more face to face guidance to help them get to the point where they have more experience.
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