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How Paul Graham Is Wrong

ma.tt

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Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#121

Post by wiredfool »

tptacek wrote: post #98
photomatt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because someone is on a different kind of contract (say a monthly retainer paid by wire, versus employee of US company paid with direct deposit) doesn't mean you need to treat them differently. Every "Automattician" at Automattic is viewed the same regardless of how their employment contract happens to work, and as you scale larger you can set up subsidiaries overseas to directly employ people. (We look at this…

How are you handling the tax implications of foreign workers? Are you doing something to withhold FICA/FUTA? I'm doing some research and I don't see the exception that says that workers that would otherwise be classified as full-time employees can instead be 1099 contractors simply because they're foreign; on the contrary, the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social securi…

I wonder if the tax situation is any easier if you're dealing with US companies & employees who are citizens, but living elsewhere. At least the SSN number would be already dealt with, but there would still be tax implications that would be affected by any tax treaty between the US and the other country.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#122

Post by zanny »

davidw wrote: post #113
falcolas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another veteran of working remotely, I disagree. Conscious use of collaboration tools offsets not being in the same office together nicely. Real time communication via Hangouts or Skype are at a level where you can hold a good conversation without having to be in the same physical location. Also, most offices (and businesses) are not really built to support proper collaboration and working conditions. As an exampl…

> Real time communication That implies a time zone with a lot of overlap. Rome/Berlin time is 9 hours ahead of San Francisco, meaning there really isn't a lot of overlap. Real time communication also means that you need to consciously set up the call and pay attention to it. Sometimes I overhear something at work, or we talk about something interesting at lunch, or there's an "oh shit" moment (not often:-) when it's…

Run a mumble server and give each developer their own "office" as a chat room.

If you chose not to talk casually when remote that is really up to you.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#123

Post by ownedthx »

I have completely 180'ed on this topic. I used to think to be a successful startup, you all had to be in the same room, ideally at a big huge desk etc.

After working at my current startup, I realize I was wrong. We are an entirely remote operation, and have been since day 1. A few of us are in Austin, and rarely meet for a face-to-face, but it's more of a 'oh yeah, you actually exist' meeting rather than a hash-it-out sort of meeting.

I think the reason we have been successful is because being remote has forced us to write things down, in our wiki (in the form of product specs) and in JIRA (in the form of specific features and bug fixes). With just those two forms of written communication, we've solved 95% of our communication needs. We almost never skype or use video conferencing... it's just not needed.

The other reason we are successful is due to experience. We've all done startups before, so we know the drill. I can't emphasis how important this is enough, but does deserve more explanation. (unfortunately I can't muster the amount of typing atm).

IN the end, we can focus on getting work done... without the distraction of office chatter, commuting, long lunches.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#124

Post by k-mcgrady »

jasode wrote: post #38

>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes…

>> I've been 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace.

As someone who worked remote for 6 years (with a few face to face meetings over those years) and now works in an office I think each have their trade offs and it balances out largely. In an office you can get quick questions answered much faster. If you forget to ask something in a meeting you can find the person and quickly get the answer later that day. Discussions are more natural too. However I've found that when working via email or Skype discussions are much more focussed. We ask our questions, get out answers and get back to work. In a face to face discussions people tend to add words to their sentences to make what they're saying seem longer/more important. Discussions deviate from their intended purpose. Sometimes that can be useful but often it's a waste of time. I've been in meetings which I could have wrapped up in under 5 mins - and the people I'm with are there for 30-60 mins. They talk about irrelevant things, repeat themselves with slight variations etc. etc. Sometimes this can be necessary if you're building a relationship with someone but most of the time it's a waste of time.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#125

Post by jasode »

kareemm wrote: post #49
jasode wrote: post #38

>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes…

> A lot of startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can't compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this has ever been successfully done. MySQL was a 1B company and built with a remote team: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/former...

If you're bringing up MySQL as a counterexample, I think we've lost sight of the original conversation.

The original Paul Graham essay[1] had a lot of focus on "startups". The companies in the early days scratching and clawing trying to make things work. I thought that was the context.

MySQL was started by 3 guys in Sweden working in the same office. Even if they wanted to have everyone working remotely in 1995, there was no technology (high speed internet) at the time to do it. Sure, as a company becomes bigger, and also as technologies improve, there are possibilities for organizing remote work.

Anyways, back to the context and constraints of startups: If you're a startup, it would be great to recruit the "exceptional" talent in South Africa, Ukraine, China, New Zealand, etc (because 95% of the best programmers are not in the USA).

The MA.TT says remote work is the answer. I don't see how because I've not seen any evidence of any billion-dollar American startup that was built by a 100% virtual team from multiple timezones of Europe/Africa/Asia.

If you're creating a 24/7 tech support department that "follows the sun", having staff in far off timezones is awesome and necessary. If you're trying to build a product with hard challenges for the team to solve, MA.TT's "answer" of international remote workers is not an answer.

[1]http://paulgraham.com/95.html

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#126

Post by abalone »

I find this post and many remote-advocacy posts like it are overly optimistic about the problem of timezone differences. A critical flaw is that most of the "solutions" mentioned assume you're all working at the same time. (Skype, G+ Hangouts, chatrooms.) That may be ok for workers living in less expensive parts of America or the western hemisphere, but that certainly doesn't hold true for overseas workers, which is what Paul Graham is mostly talking about with immigration.

An 8-12 hour timezone gap is not something easily bridged by chatrooms and videoconferences. To even have a conversation with the remote worker/team, one or both of you need to schedule time at very early or late hours and even then you only get a little bit of overlap. For the most part you are left to collaborate by email or blogs -- which is a significantly degraded way of collaborating, much moreso than just not being face-to-face. Without an easy way to have a realtime conversation, closing the loop on an issue can take 24 hours.. or several days if there is a lot of back and forth.

This style of working can be very difficult in a highly dynamic, less structured, fast moving startup environment. It is not magically solved by "modern communication tools" or high-latency asynchronous working styles. The fundamental issue is.. daylight and human sleep schedules.

I wish all conversations about remote work would qualify which context they're talking about -- near or far timezones -- instead of just lumping it all together as "remote work from anywhere".

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#127

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jasode wrote: post #125
kareemm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can't compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this has ever been successfully done. MySQL was a 1B company and built with a remote team: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/former...

If you're bringing up MySQL as a counterexample, I think we've lost sight of the original conversation. The original Paul Graham essay[1] had a lot of focus on "startups". The companies in the early days scratching and clawing trying to make things work. I thought that was the context. MySQL was started by 3 guys in Sweden working in the same office. Even if they wanted to have everyone working remotely in 1995, ther…

Here at Sococo we hope to be that team! We're in several time zones, 6 states and three countries. Not to a billion yet; not hardly. But growing!

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#128

Post by gaius »

cgh wrote: post #75
jasode wrote: post #38

>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes…

Harder problems than the Linux kernel? I've been remote for eight years now and I work on a codebase so huge that no one person understands it all beneath the 10,000 foot level. Nearly all of us are remote (only the managers are "local" to San Jose). Once a quarter we get together and meet up, coming from Vancouver, Toronto, Bangalore, Colorado and northern California.

Yes, kernels are not difficult because most of the problems are purely technical problems, that programmers can just decide for themselves any ambiguities, and many of the parts can be worked on separately. Software with users is 10-100x more difficult.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsPayrollHard

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#129

Post by tessierashpool »

PG ignored current trends and recent history to an absurd degree in his recent blog post.

Not factored into the equation: An actual, provable, verifiable history of illegal salary-fixing. The experiential reality that most immigrant programmers get a lot of mistreatment, both from racism and from their own incompetence - and the related experiential fact that a lot of immigrant programmers are utterly incompetent.

The rhetoric of these arguments talks about 10x programmers, but companies really seem to prefer importing 0.1x programmers or even -10x programmers.

Meanwhile, tons of companies have immense success with remote work, and the wage changes associated with the last ten years are not at all commensurate with the increased value of programming work. (See aforementioned illegal salary-fixing.)

Is remote work easy? No. But is PG's business about doing easy things? No.

I literally just ran grep -c "table" against a text dump of this comments page. The count was 122. 122 uses of the table tag. Since that includes , 61 tables.

This whole argument is as up-to-date as the HTML on this page.

Re: How Paul Graham Is Wrong

#130

Post by timr »

falcolas wrote: post #76
jasode wrote: post #38

>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes…

As another veteran of working remotely, I disagree. Conscious use of collaboration tools offsets not being in the same office together nicely. Real time communication via Hangouts or Skype are at a level where you can hold a good conversation without having to be in the same physical location. Also, most offices (and businesses) are not really built to support proper collaboration and working conditions. As an exampl…

Thing I've learned through hard experience: programmers (and yes, I am one) generally over-value individual productivity and under-value communication. So yeah, you can "hold a good conversation" via Skype, but you still have to plan the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration, and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk about the benefits of in-person work.

Programmers tend to want to squirrel themselves away and work on stuff to maximize their own personal productivity, whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group optimum. That means that every individual takes a productivity hit for communication purposes, but that the organizational output is much higher than any individual could achieve. Hence, we get the fruitless debates about working conditions: what you see as interruption might be, from the context of the company you work for, be the most globally productive use of your time.

There's definitely a fine line between communication and distraction and it's hard to hit the balance (I've worked in some horrible "open-plan" environments too), but in my experience, programmers nearly always err on the side of too little communication, especially early in their career.

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