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A Short Rant About Working Remotely

ericfarkas.com

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Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#151

Post by codinghorror »

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.…

Great point, and I suspect you are right. Either remote is a deep part of your startup culture from day one, or don't even try.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#152

Post by lifeisstillgood »

fudged71 wrote: post #126
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A scary amount of my life and all my business is now on private repos at github.

That's getting scary.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#153

Post by corresation »

grishas wrote: post #103
adrianhoward wrote: post #43

(lightly edited copy of my usual plea for evidence on this topic ;-) Pretty much all the evidence (rather than anecdote) I can find shows that co-located teams in a single team room environment are the most productive - all other things being equal. (And I'm saying this as somebody who spends a lot of their time working from home, and talking to other folk over Skype, etc. There are reasons for telecommuting - person…

A lot has changed in the last few years-- with modern tools (Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, GotoMeeting), it is possible to not only almost entirely replicate being co-located, but to even enhance productivity by spinning out ad-hoc co-located teams to solve individual problems. Need to have a concentrated task force from 5 various departments? No problem, it's a click away-- no need to book a meeting room, take all yo…

This really is the most important facet to this discussion. Virtually all arguments against remote work seem as if they come from the archaic past. If people being physically separated actually hurts communications, you are doing communications wrong.

Not to mention that most productivity studies are bunk.

The real reason many so many managers resist remote work is because, effectively, they want a fiefdom, and the exercise is often about empire building. An empire of a bunch of Google Talk connections isn't as impressive as a bunch of huddled seat warmers.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#154

Post by pault »

agotterer wrote: post #150
pault wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that difficult to type your question into skype or campfire group chat? We're all remote and we have daily 20 minute video conferences, and everyone is always logged into campfire. It's the most productive team I've ever worked with, and if someone isn't pulling their weight, you can tell from their git commits. Every argument I've heard against remote working boils down to that "something special" you m…

It's not the day to day interactions. Hell, most of the companies I work with that aren't remote chat over IM and group chat while we sit next to each other. As I said, I don't think it's a breakdown of the tools. It's not that people aren't productive either. It's the "other" stuff that doesn't fit into those categories. There's no technology to replace sitting around with a group of guys having a beer. While its va…

Point taken; in fact we recently rented a couple of houses in Belize just so we could spend some time together. Funny thing is, I found the entire experience to be extremely draining and couldn't wait for everyone to leave. I had a really difficult time getting anything done in a house full of people, but I think it's just one of those things that varies between individuals. I think the great thing about the rise of distributed companies is they give an opportunity for introverts to come together and thrive in an environment that suits their working style, instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, so to speak.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#155

Post by lifeisstillgood »

calinet6 wrote: post #128
pc86 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rockst…

Totally agree - imagine you could hire Linux Torvalds. He is a great programmer but his best work was sending emails to others for 12 years.

This leads to an interesting thought - if you hired Linus and he started spending all his time emailing sarcastic notes to the other developers, how quickly would he get fired for "not focusing on developing code"?

Perhaps the key for CEOs is not to grow culture but to hire people who will grow it for you. You dont get to choose the culture, or even direct it. The funny Finnish bloke will. You just pay him.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#156

Post by crazygringo »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #63
adrianhoward wrote: post #43

(lightly edited copy of my usual plea for evidence on this topic ;-) Pretty much all the evidence (rather than anecdote) I can find shows that co-located teams in a single team room environment are the most productive - all other things being equal. (And I'm saying this as somebody who spends a lot of their time working from home, and talking to other folk over Skype, etc. There are reasons for telecommuting - person…

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…

It depends entirely on the kind of work being done.

If you've got a super-top engineer who can solve the hard problems, then they're probably working on something of their own, and can be off in their own room / at home / whatever.

But in my experience, that kind of "hard", mentally intense, non-collaborative work makes up only a tiny, tiny fraction of commercial software development (although it contributes a great deal to the value). So it's not something to base general development practices around; it's the exception.

As you say -- "double your productivity for building that CRUD application" -- that's exactly the point, that's what most companies need, and why most companies aren't interest in remote working.

When they suddenly need a top-level engineer to solve a hard problem, they hire one who consults for three months, works remotely, and visits once or twice.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#157

Post by noonespecial »

I generally approve of remote work hardily. But this rant called out early stage startups in particular. In early stage startups you're building your culture along with your product. You have a super limited amount of salary to pay to do both. I can definitely see why you'd want to get double returns with a local hire.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#158

Post by adrianhoward »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #63
adrianhoward wrote: post #43

(lightly edited copy of my usual plea for evidence on this topic ;-) Pretty much all the evidence (rather than anecdote) I can find shows that co-located teams in a single team room environment are the most productive - all other things being equal. (And I'm saying this as somebody who spends a lot of their time working from home, and talking to other folk over Skype, etc. There are reasons for telecommuting - person…

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…

Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave

I've seen that happen (which brings up the separate question of does it matter if the team is N x more productive because of co-location)

I've also seen them stay.

I've also seen them start out very sceptical and then grow to like it (I was in this category - assuming I'm vaguely competent of course ;-)

I've also seen folk I hugely respect advocate and instigate this sort of environment.

.... so which anecdotes win... dunno... hence call for any folks who have found research on the topic.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#159

Post by drawkbox »

npsimons wrote: post #11

100% agree. I'm in a similar position. I will not move from where I live; I like the friends and hobbies I have here way too much. There is absolutely no reason in this day and age why the type of work we do has to be done onsite. The hundreds (probably more) companies working this way are a testament to this fact, and there would probably be even more companies doing it this way if it wasn't for inertia, tradition o…

That is the best part of a remote team, your deliverables are the main way you are reviewed. Superficial things are less emphasized such as if you went to lunch with the right group, were in 8-6 on the dot or work on the right team, have the right office for visibility etc etc. So many levels of extra unneeded layers of fluff in an office when it should be on product development.

I do think it is good to work on site periodically and sometimes at least a day or two per week if you can, not because it is needed to produce good work and products, but because it helps kick off, complete + integration days and earns some office points in the not so fun office game.

Many places that have offices and require 8-6, their engineers end up getting interrupted all day and then do all their work at night. So in that case telecommuting would be a huge benefit to the individual but maybe not as much the company since they get so much extra time out. Maybe it is more a salary thing, getting lots of work out of you. I'd argue it looks like more work is being done at an office but remote teams HAVE to get actual work done, there is no other metric to be measured on.

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