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A Short Rant About Working Remotely

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Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#121

Post by pknerd »

I have got chance to work both in 9-5 environment as well as working in isolation.

Working for home was my own choice so that I can give time to my infant kid which is most important for me. Working from home gave me relaxation. I could work on my chair or on my bed, nobody was going to ask me how I sit. Second most important thing which helped me a lot was to have a feeling of helplessness. When you work in an office, you often ask some of your peer to write a part of your code or look into it. When you work alone you have to do everything on your own, finding solution and implement it in your own code. In the era of Stackoverflow finding a solution of your problem is not difficult at all.

It's been a year I am working individually and I am enjoying it. Instead of wasting time in gossips about Boss or management, I prefer to play with my kid, his smile gives me enough oxygen to keep me motivated for rest of the day.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#122

Post by alexkus »

gesman wrote: post #22

It all boils down to preferences of management who are calling the shots. Many of them are addicted to worthless, frequent meetings. Others just don't trust people. Third are control freaks. I personally find a 50/50 balance between working on- and offsite. With 2 dogs and 2 kids and stay-at-home wife - working from home for me is a challenge. But working on-site 15 minutes away from home is a perfect arrangement.

> I personally find a 50/50 balance between working on- and offsite. With 2 dogs and 2 kids and stay-at-home wife - working from home for me is a challenge. But working on-site 15 minutes away from home is a perfect arrangement.

That's my plan.

3 days working from home as daughter is at nursery and wife at work.

1 day working at the house of one of the other founders 20 minutes away, wife and daughter.

1 day looking after daughter whilst wife at work.

Weekend a mixture of family time and work (required since some events relating to startup occur at the weekend.)

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#123

Post by speric »

rwhitman wrote: post #108

A few notes from someone who's worked remotely roughly 60% of the last 10 years - 1) Most investors know that startups are generally at a disadvantage with a remote team and give founders shit for hiring remote people. I've found thats one of the reasons early stage folks don't hire more remote people. And there is some truth to being more creative with a team around you... if the team is awesome. Also communication…

Have any good contacts at these "boring consulting businesses"? I am not averse to an unsexy (remote) job.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#124

Post by marknutter »

Irregardless wrote: post #89
hkarthik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately. And then they stand the chance of losing anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour of productivity thanks to your interruption. Part of the reason remote work appeals to so many of us is because we don't deal well with the constant stream of interruptions that occur in many office environments. I don't beli…

Oh, really? Because researchers disagree with you: > Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." -- http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008 From…

Have you even read the study, or are you just quoting it blindly? Your link provides a very brief summary but mentions no details about what tools and workflows remote workers were using. It also doesn't mention anything about the type of project that was being delivered and the various constraints that it had. Maybe you're just taking this stuff on faith.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#125

Post by releod »

I get your rant, I've done remote and on-site work. I personally prefer a healthy mix of both (http://bigbangtechnology.com/post/an_async_experiment/).

I think having everyone in office in a small company is often more about building a great office culture, and less about it being the only way to build a company. Small teams tend to do more than just work together, they integrate their socials lives. When that is the type of company you are trying to build, remote workers don't fit into that picture right away.

Also you cannot forget the difference between good distractions and bad distractions. Overhearing a conversation (between other developers), is less of a distraction than overhearing a couple of suits on sales calls or talking about the game last night. You can still be in the zone, have good distractions, be an introvert, noise cancelling headphones, etc.

A small team on-site is going to rapidly move through ideas, faster than chat rooms or even facetime/skype can truly allow, as natural as it appears it is nothing compared to in person conversations. That moment when your team discovers their Epiphany, in my opinion, is much more likely to happen in person.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#126

Post by fudged71 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #68
MattRogish wrote: post #38

In general, I totally agree. Being able to hire the best person, anywhere, and allow them to work super-effectively is a strong moat. I share this opinion and hire accordingly. I think the "these companies are wrong" posts, though, are not attempting to see it from the other side. Try to put yourself in the shoes of these startups. In super-super early startups (e.g. pre-profitability or definitely pre-revenue) one o…

I have done and tried to do that very thing. 1. Continuous Integration (and or delivery) This is the sine qua non. Everyone should be able to check out and build a complete working eco system and run all tests on their local laptop or Rackspace cluster you rent just for them 2. Really, get the continuous integration working. Stop now and do nothing else till you have. Tell the dev's remote working is only possible af…

"4. Agree on one place to store all documents, all meeting notes, everything."

This can't be understated. When I ask the founder where the company logo is and they say "it's on one of the external harddrives sitting around the office somewhere", it's incredibly frustrating. The most well-oiled startup I worked for had a perfectly organized central-storage of digital resources, which greatly contributed to the smooth workings of the company.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#127

Post by marknutter »

gavingmiller wrote: post #110

Let me flip this over. If 99% of companies say they don't do remote, maybe the issue is you and not them... Bear with me, because this isn't an attack on you. :D Take someone that's been married and divorced 4 times. Who would you say the problem lies with, the divorcer or the divorcees? If you want to work remotely you're fighting an uphill battle. Most managers/employers know how to manage face-to-face. Remote mana…

In this market, companies are the ones that have to make concessions. There simply aren't enough good developers to go around.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#128

Post by calinet6 »

pc86 wrote: post #73
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

co-located teams in team-room like settings are much more productive Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave. I am a firm believer that you can train yourself to hop in and out of a reasonable facsimile to the "zone" in much less than 20-30 minutes (I do it all the time)[1]; but the level of distraction of the warroom type environment massively favors your more extroverted engineers. My experience…

Most importantly, not every project (nor startup, nor business) needs "the very best" engineers. Not every startup is changing the world, and even among the ones that are I'm sure you can pick out a few that aren't solving massively complex technical challenges that will be discussed in lecture halls for decades. The majority of good startups are just making money (sometimes not even that) until they get acquired. Se…

> Most importantly, not every project (nor startup, nor business) needs "the very best" engineers.

This is highly underrated wisdom.

If you focus on always hiring "Rockstar developers," you'll find yourself in a miserable situation of competition and egotistical conflict. Hire your team, not your developers. Get your team working like clockwork with good systems and good relationships, and your company will be rockstar with whatever people you throw at it. Look at github, stripe, twitter, facebook—you think they only hire the absolute best developers? No, they have a top 2% just like you will—your goal should be to increase the competence of your entire company, not just ignorantly hire the best and fire the worst and hope for the best.

Spot on.

You're right about the other assumptions too (though the parent may not have been that serious about them). IMHO stereotyping introverts or extroverts as being better or worse at certain tasks is a huge --ism to avoid, especially in our field. I see 'extrovertists' and 'introvertists' battle it out all the time with their propaganda and ignorant beliefs about people, and no one wins.

It's far better and more productive to be a humanist and find a good balance. Both extroverts and introverts can be valuable to your team; both extroverts and introverts can be great programmers and workers. You should strive to hire a mix, or stop using it as a metric and naturally get a mix, since these traits like many others generally fall on a normal distribution.

Don't trust your assumptions about yourself, and don't apply them to others. They're probably wrong.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#129

Post by markshead »

jaggederest wrote: post #79
Irregardless wrote: post #33

Who are you to say they don't understand their own business process and culture well enough to determine that remote employees aren't a fit for them? I've worked with several remote team members, and it's always been frustrating. Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello??? Communication is extremely important…

> Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello??? You're confusing people who are bad at communication with working remotely being bad . Maybe you've never worked in an office environment with someone who has the same issues, but they're by no means alleviated merely by having their ass in a particular chair. > Or…

>> I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time. > Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?

I'm actually working with a distributed team that does this. Everyone is on a shared video conference eight hours a day. If you want to talk to someone you look at your video conference team to see if they are at their desk, on the phone, or talking to someone else. If two people need to talk without disturbing others, they mute their video conference mic and jump on Skype. You can still see them, get their attention, etc. but you don't have everyone talking over each other on the main video conference channel.

It actually works a lot better than I expected.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#130

Post by NateDad »

We switched from almost always in the office to a ROWE (Results Only Work Evironment) and now 90%+ of the time we all work from home. According to a company survey of the people in the ROWE, devs feel more productive, and managers feel there has been no change in productivity. I think this is because we are measuring productivity in different ways. Managers measure productivity over a week or month, which has stayed static, whereas devs measure productivity in amount of time they have to spend to get stuff done. When you don't have to spend 1-2 hours commuting, you spend less time "at work" and get the same amount done.

Personally, I like it, but we also already had a culture of doing a lot of talking via IM. In this day and age, there's no excuse for not being able to get ahold of people. But by the same token, you can't always assume someone is going to respond in 30 seconds. I hope no one is so dependent on other people that someone taking 20 minutes to respond is a complete blocker.

We use Google hangouts extensively for meetings and often open them up just to chat and connect with fellow devs.

We have lost a little bit of a sense of belonging to the team. I think extensive use of google hangouts helps a lot with this. With most laptops having a camera, there's little excuse not to fire one up whenever anyone wants to talk.

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