A Short Rant About Working Remotely • Hacker News Board

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#131

Post by randomdata » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:32 PM UTC

dewitt wrote: post #36

Having worked in both environments before, one thing that I observed is that working remotely can indeed be highly productive, but it's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to do it successfully if only a few employees are working remotely. Otherwise what happens is that the people who can see each other face to face and in the hallway will of course do it, leaving the odd remote person out of many conversations.…

Perhaps a better way to put it is that it is difficult to retrofit an office to allow a few telecommuters.

In my experience, I was working remotely in the company's early days. The in-office employes really started to grow after me. While I remain the only one that really works outside of the office, the culture of remote workers was instilled from nearly the beginning and don't really find any of the problems you suggest to be true in my case.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#132

Post by Yhippa » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

Irregardless wrote: post #86

stephencanon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you require that local employees be physically visible at all times? What if they need to take a walk to clear their head and focus on the problem at hand? What if they need to go to the bathroom ? Do you require that local employees drop the task they're working on to respond immediately to any question from anyone and completely lose focus on real work just to save you from a minute of reading some documentation…

> Do you require that local employees be physically visible at all times? What if they need to take a walk to clear their head and focus on the problem at hand? What if they need to go to the bathroom? Yes, remote and physical team members must have a mobile webcam that they bring with them on all breaks. The webcam must have RFID tags built into it, and their homes and frequent break locations must be equipped with…

I think after reading the tone of your response I can determine that I would have a difficult time working with this type of personality. As a developer interruptions are a huge productivity drag. I have to stop whatever I'm doing, answer your question, and figure out where I left off and get back into the right mode to program which can take a while.

Right now I have a few work-from-home days a week and I find I'm enormously productive on those days due to lack of interruptions. If the company cannot sacrifice face time and trust for higher developer productivity (even in the name of teambuilding) then I wouldn't want to work there.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#133

Post by darkarmani » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:34 PM UTC

emp_ wrote: post #23

ZiadHilal wrote: post #5

I've been working remotely for 1 year and 3 months. The company I'm working for checks in once a week for about 20 minutes, other than that all communication is done through basecamp. I have to admit it's really hard for me and I just handed in my two weeks notice. I feel so isolated working from home and not being around other co-workers. I miss seing and interacting with other people. I'll be looking for a new job…

In my case, getting paid $110k/year in a country that pays $40k/year as the cap (and the currency is 2:1). I'm at it for six months and I have a huge family around me -- helps with the isolation. I will jump on a plane friday and work 3 weeks from the beach, and once I feel this remote thing has stabilized I will move to the countryside to about half the cost of living, so in one year going from the local national ma…

Where is this? Can i join you?

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#134

Post by dsrguru » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:34 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #113

jaggederest wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, you're assuming that the best developers are going to be more introverted than the developer culture/profession as a whole, which I don't think is accurate. I don't think that's the assumption at all. My personal experience is, unless you happen to be located where one of the "best" developers is, they simply won't move. So you have your choice of them working remotely, being lucky, or not hiring them.

> Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave. I took this to mean (a) be relative to the office specifically, not the industry generally, and (b) that those very best will get sick of the required face time, quit, and get a better job (the insinuation being that that better job will likely be majority or entirely telecommuting. I may have misunderstood the intent as I commented pretty much immediatel…

> ... favors your more extroverted engineers. My experience has been the engineers I really want to keep, the ones who solve the really hard problems, are much less likely to be in that group.

I, too, read "group" as "extroverted engineers," and I don't really see alternative readings.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#135

Post by famousactress » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:35 PM UTC

rrhyne wrote: post #75

famousactress wrote: post #19

The irony I keep seeing is that at a small startup, everyone's output is severely visible.. regardless of where you're at. I was the first technical hire at the startup I'm with now (details in profile), working remotely from San Diego while the cofounders were based in SF. There's definitely never been any question about what's getting done and by whom. In a lot of ways I understand the challenge that being a larger…

Would you consider moving when the team gets larger? If you don't do you think you'll get 'left behind' as the local culture develops? We're also in SD, but trying to build a team here and not finding as many local applicants as we'd like.

We've considered moving, sure. For us though the cost of moving houses in this market, and my wife's local reputation-based business (wedding photographer) would make it an extremely expensive proposition in the short term. I think getting left behind is definitely a risk. So far I'm the only employee outside of the bay, but the culture has remained pretty asynchronous and conducive. If we continue to find talent local to SF I imagine there's a solid chance that'll change, if we happen upon more awesome remote talent it might not. I think it'll just depend on who we end up hiring over time.

Early on though, getting big enough to have that issue sounded like a very high class problem so we decided not to care much where people were and focus on getting things built.

[Aside: That's awesome that you're in SD! Drop me a line and I'd be happy to pass your details along to some of my SD developer friends]

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#136

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:38 PM UTC

dewitt wrote: post #36

Having worked in both environments before, one thing that I observed is that working remotely can indeed be highly productive, but it's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to do it successfully if only a few employees are working remotely. Otherwise what happens is that the people who can see each other face to face and in the hallway will of course do it, leaving the odd remote person out of many conversations.…

[deleted]

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#137

Post by miloshadzic » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:38 PM UTC

dewitt wrote: post #36

Having worked in both environments before, one thing that I observed is that working remotely can indeed be highly productive, but it's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to do it successfully if only a few employees are working remotely. Otherwise what happens is that the people who can see each other face to face and in the hallway will of course do it, leaving the odd remote person out of many conversations.…

This parent post is what I came in to say. I'm a sole remote employee at my current company and I think I miss out on like 75% of discussions that go on.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#138

Post by wglb » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:39 PM UTC

In my career, I have seen and participated in both kinds of offices.

Strong factors for success in a distributed office are:

  + Fit with the company culture. High-ceremony or even medium-ceremony development patterns work less well or not at all with remotes.
  + Fit with the personalities and work habits of the staff. Not everyone is capable of working remotely.
  + Industry requirements. Some high-security situations require that work be done on premises.

I once ran a very successful remote project where everyone worked at home. All had a separate office in the home that they could close the door.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#139

Post by seddona » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:39 PM UTC

We founded and developed https://circuithub.com/ largely as a distributed team (all members in different locations).

This is a complex topic that i intend to discuss more in long form, but in short, with contemporary communication and collaboration infrastructure the productivity of small highly skilled dev teams is unaffected by location.

I can prove this for our case at least (5 team members).

I am writing this from a coffee shop in Mexico, we currently have people in South Africa and San Jose, if this lifestyle appeals, please do get in touch!

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#140

Post by j45 » Thu, Jan 31, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

First, there is no one magical formula of totally being ok with remote working vs not.

The world isn't that binary.

One main issue is that these decisions need to be made based on the discipline of the developer to work well in their own time. It's not an issue with self-directed and self-teaching developers, but the simply, just, aren't.

I've worked remotely for a good 5-6 years now. You really have to still be reasonably available by phone, IM, and for meetings as reasonably needed. You have to provide benefits only available by distance.

One that I share a lot is remote screen sharing. You have to cram in beside each other on a computer, so pair programming actually works not bad if you need to help someone, or do something together.

Sometimes I have to give up an afternoon to do a larger "state of the project" meeting once a month, which is fine. Ultimately it's about a balance that all projects need. You do get some benefits from being in the same room with the right people that you won't distantly. With those right people, though, you could probably be away. The problem comes in when you're dealing with a productivity level that is average because of the people involved.