101–110 of 228 posts
Then again, I'm at a senior principle engineer level, and need to have face time with my VPs and directors in addition to other devs. I don't believe it would be possible to work at the level I'm at remotely, nor to be promoted to such a level. And my commute isn't horrid at ~25min.
I'm the founder of my own company and my co-founder and I both work from home -- our respective homes that is. I know my experience is probably not what people have in mind when they think of a work-from-home employee, but for what its worth -- my productivity is orders of magnitude greater than it was when I was employed (at Yahoo!) Productivity is more a function of motivation(+) and bureaucracy(-) than anything el…
>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely . Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction. Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking abo…
github was an example until they changed their policy - no ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The days when people were trained on newsgroup netiquette are long gone. That is why it is hard to do decisions by email. Also, poor thread representation by email clients doesn't help. Chat has the potential of being used efficiently, where arguments are stripped of their emotion and converge faster to a point without rambling. To your point, chat can be made high-bandwidth, with multi-sentence points made in a si…
Chat (both video and text) also suffers from not having a easily usable whiteboard. And if you want to talk to someone about some code, hopping around between different bits, that needs screen sharing including remote access, so either person can hop around, highlight code, etc. It's all just fiddly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a big proponent of remote work but I think it's harder to manage a remote company. Automattic and Basecamp have excellent people in leadership who have a clear understanding of their company. A lot of mediocre middleman managers in the typical company aren't capable of setting expectations and evaluating work results. You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company.
> You need very good workers and leaders in a remote company. I think that's a point that some people miss. To have remote workers, you need people who can effectively work remotely. It's a learned skill, like any other, and not everyone will be good at it. Saying "we're only local" or "we're only remote" is a bad idea, you can have both and call it a win on both ends.
Honestly, I think it needs to be one or the other. Mixing some remote people into an otherwise local team often doesn't work.
I personally would love to give the ability for my employees to work at home, even if I didn't. I don't understand the mindset where people don't want things to be better for someone else... even if they can't also be better for you. This happens even when those benefits to others come at no cost to yourself.
Does anyone else have any experience overcoming this with someone else? Like it's bad to the extent where if this person works late he'll be passive aggressive towards everyone who doesn't have to also work late.
How can you have good office culture if everyone works from home?
>Objections to work from home fall apart Essays from workers like Jen McCown isn't going to work. What works is to have massively successful businesses that beat the competition because their employees work remotely . Since no multi-billion dollar business has demonstrated that specific cause & effect, the idea doesn't gain traction. Yes, businesses like Basecamp and Automattic have remote workers but I'm talking abo…
I don't follow your logic. The vast majority of businesses aren't like Google or Facebook. The vast majority of the nation's GDP isn't created by companies like Google and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are the size of Automattic, Basecamp, or smaller. Those businesses employ the the vast majority of workers. Therefore, Basecamp and Automattic are excellent role models. Unequivocal success does not mea…
For my own edification, I looked this up.
There are about 125 million full-time employees in the U.S. [0] Of which, there are:
* 35 million Fortune 1000 employees [1]
* 22 million government employees [2]
So, government and the Fortune 1000 account for about 45% of all employment.
I also found a census reckoning [3] (that seems to exclude government altogether) that puts large- and medium-sized enterprises at 65% of all employment (and growing).
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192361/unadjusted-monthl...
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-are-there-in-the-Fo...
[2] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/govern...
[3] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Edited to fix sources.
I worked remotely, from home, for 5 years. These days, I work mostly in the office, with a 40 minute commute each way, despite the option for occasional working from home. There's a few reasons to prefer working in the office. The single biggest one is the hard delimiting of the work day; when I'm not in the office, I'm not working, I'm not available on email or chat, and unless it's an exceptional situation, nobody…
I've never understood why private news servers and groups never caught on. Company newsgroups on a company news server seem to me to often make a lot more sense than company mailing lists on a company mail server or company forums on phpBBB or similar.
News readers generally do a much better job than mail client of organizing discussions into threads, and the hierarchical structure of the newsgroup namespace fits well with the way most companies and projects are organized.
Nowadays the argument for NNTP is weak because the decline of Usenet has, I believe, reduced the number of good, maintained NNTP clients. But I don't understand why NNTP wasn't the first choice for these things 15-20 years ago.