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A Short Rant About Working Remotely

ericfarkas.com

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Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#161

Post by babuskov »

speric wrote: post #7
babuskov wrote: post #4

It's all about trust. Can the employer trust the employee to work honestly and be dedicated to the company without having another job or occasional project on the side. When startup is small, every minute of focus counts. Easiest way to make this work is to give developers enough equity, so they are motivated for startup to succeed more or equally as getting the paycheck. Eric's POV stands, but he's a co-founder, he…

Your point is taken, but it seems to me that if my employer can't trust me to work remotely, then they shouldn't hire me at all. How can you employ (or work for) someone you can't trust?

I'm speaking from my own bad experience with some remote employees. Accidentally learning from another founder that this guy ALSO works for them, was a really bad experience with remote workers for both of us.

He was covering up his lack of productivity for some months with "personal problems" on both sides, while not being focused in either company. If you have many employees, such behavior can go unnoticed for a long time.

OTOH, after this event, I tried giving significant equity to some other guys on the team, and their productivity went up. I guess some of them had side projects as well before that.

Maybe one can work around this by requiring full-time Skype camera access during work hours, or similar, but I hate to be "the police". I feel much better giving away some equity in exchange for loyalty.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#162

Post by Irregardless »

Yhippa wrote: post #132
Irregardless wrote: post #86

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? 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 e…

Like a few others who have responded, you're not seeing the forest through the trees. That's somewhat alarming for a group of people who are supposed to be creative problem solvers.

Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something. As a resource to the team, you hurt it's overall performance by making yourself less availble.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#163

Post by adrianhoward »

darkarmani wrote: post #100
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…

I don't think extroverted helps in a disruptive team war room. Most "collaboration" is someone interrupting to ask a question they could have asked in email and waited for an answer.

This sort of thing is the thing I'd love to see more evidence about.

Getting interrupted kills my flow. I'm less productive as I get back into flow (although I have techniques now that let me get into flow much quicker - but that's a separate post).

However - is that drop in productivity outweighed by the increase in productivity of the interuptee not having to wait / switch tasks / fumble on and make a mistake / build the wrong thing / etc.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#165

Post by crazygringo »

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 completely agree. Dealing with remote team members has always been difficult with teams I've been on, and I would guess they have been only half as productive.

This isn't through any fault of their own, but they just can't be "in the loop" as much. Most communication takes way too long to type out in e-mail or IM, so you need to get them on the phone -- but calling and getting transferred, and then they're not at their desk, etc., is just too much of a pain. There's a HUGE difference between waiting until you see that someone is at their desk, and repeatedly remembering to keep trying to call them -- or sending them an e-mail to call you, and then you're out.

They can't see when someone on your team is having a little difficulty and instantly help out, turning someone's hour task into 5 min. They're not involved in the informal meetings behind someone's screen where a feature is changed slightly. They're just missing out on a lot of "informal" information that is crucial for productive development.

And even over the phone, I find it's much more difficult to explain things and make sure they're understood crystal-clear. Sometimes you need to see the understanding in their face. Sometimes you need to draw, sometimes you need visual aids, sometimes you need to pull up a web page, but it's too much work to pull up videoconferencing or something.

In the end, all these problems are "technically" surmountable, sure, but I've never seen it work. Maybe remote work would be fine in a waterfall-type development model, but with modern-day "agile" development, it just doesn't work as well for collaborative teams.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#166

Post by adrianhoward »

uniclaude wrote: post #148
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…

Not saying that you are wrong, but none of the studies you quote was done in the last five years, and most of them are actually more than a decade old. The technologies we use to communicate evolve fast, and I would bet money on the fact that (probably because of mindset evolution and tooling) developers are now more efficient when working remotely than they were ten years ago. Moreover, as we are on HN, we are not n…

Not saying that you are wrong, but none of the studies you quote was done in the last five years, and most of them are actually more than a decade old.

Actually - several of them are. For example:

"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)"

This is one of the things I find fascinating. You see the same kind of thing over thirty years as technology changes radically. This makes me think that there's something quite interesting happening in meat-space.

Startup environments are not average, and this must be why companies like Github and 37signals can be successful while having remote workers.

Just to repeat. I am not saying that you cannot be successful being distributed. There are lots of good and sane reasons to be distributed.

I'm saying that there is a bunch of evidence that being co-located is more effective.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#167

Post by drawkbox »

babuskov wrote: post #4

It's all about trust. Can the employer trust the employee to work honestly and be dedicated to the company without having another job or occasional project on the side. When startup is small, every minute of focus counts. Easiest way to make this work is to give developers enough equity, so they are motivated for startup to succeed more or equally as getting the paycheck. Eric's POV stands, but he's a co-founder, he…

True but many engineers and game devs I know spend lots of time on personal projects while at the office. So side projects are really just what engineers do whether they are at the office or at home. Also if the engineer is getting the other deliverables, does it matter they have an occasional side project? If it starts to distract from work produced it is much easier to see remotely but probably matters less remotely.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#168

Post by crazygringo »

markshead wrote: post #129
jaggederest wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That actually sounds pretty effective, and would get around a lot of the inefficiencies I've had in the past with remote workers.

Curious, is it just a window with all the other video feeds that you keep in the background? Or a thumbnail version of to the side? Or a second monitor? I'm curious as to the difference between it being always visible, or something you have to pull up.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#169

Post by drawkbox »

asmosoinio wrote: post #48

I think it's "No One Ever Got Fired for Recruiting On-site Employees". And I think this is changing. I work in a startup spread to three continents. Works very well when everyone knows their role and makes sure information is spread properly.

At a certain point, getting access to enough good team members requires remote. I.e. a game company starting in Idaho might find it hard to hire local game developers but they could be a force to be reckoned with with a few remote employees and a standard engine like Unity.

Remote work and offices create opportunity. They also focus on product, look at 37signals and how they remote. Would that company even exist as they do without remote work? Remote working is freeing and opens up all sorts of competitive advantages.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#170

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Scottopherson wrote: post #104
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am beginning to feel even a daily status meeting is too much - I would much prefer to take on tasks of around a couple of days, and when done, demo. Otherwise just skype and chat keeps one in touch (I would be tempted to mandate a person to person chat for each team member to each)

I am beginning to feel even a daily status meeting is too much - I would much prefer to take on tasks of around a couple of days, and when done, demo. I feel the same way. Often times I really have nothing meaningful or relevant to share with the team on a daily basis. "So yeah, that feature we all agreed would take about 3 days to complete? Welp, it's day 2 and I'm still working on it. Progress is good." Any other d…

I find status meetings become:

1. The managers way of finding out what is going on instead of seeing git, running latest code.

2. A way of giving developers bi-polar disorder as they either happen to have just checked in a working piece of code (up) or are still ploughing through on what they said they would do yesterday (down).

It can be good - but only when it requires execution not thought.

My solutions:

1. A selenium / CLI recorder. We make changes to a piece of code - which is covered by ten tests. You fill in the bug report and the recorder does video grab of the selenium web broswer doing the ten tests. Then anyone who is non technical can see what the actually results are - on Youtube!

I heard of some "developer lead development" in a job ad - I think it was Sky. The idea was github like I suppose - devs think "what we really need is" and go do it.

The boss effectively has a veto not a driver. The boss becomes a government.

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