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A Short Rant About Working Remotely

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Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#171

Post by lifeguard »

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…

I think the "war room" solution is often a symptom of generalized poor management. And bad project management drives away experienced staff.

The open office plan is a nightmare for tech work IMO.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#172

Post by adrianhoward »

romaniv wrote: post #149
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…

1. How do you define group productivity? 2. I'm willing to bet that most of those studies looked at what happens when you take some "on-site" positions and simply hand them to remote team members. Why? Because that's what usually happens. Companies do not want to alter any processes, team structures or responsibilities to explicitly deal with remoteness. Naturally, if you pretend that someone from another state is si…

* I'm willing to bet that most of those studies looked at what happens when you take some "on-site" positions and simply hand them to remote team members.*

You'd lose that bet. There are a variety of different methodologies and areas studied.

Companies that embrace remoteness from the start (like GitHub) seem to be doing fine, precisely because they treat remoteness as an asses, not a minor concession someone had to make to workers.

Again - not trying to argue at all that people cannot be fantastically successful as a distributed team.

What I am saying is that every single piece of research I can find says that colocated teams are more effective. This is... interesting... to me.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#173

Post by Irregardless »

marknutter wrote: post #124
Irregardless wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The referenced study answers all of that: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sillito/cpsc-601.23/readings/...

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#174

Post by smurph »

I find that the people who supposedly want everyone to work on site will always make exceptions if it means getting an employee they really want. You know that if offered to work for you, but only if they could work from home, you'd probably make an exception. If the person who's been your rock star coder for the past couple years needed to move away for family reasons, but would be willing to stay on if they could work remotely, you would make an exception. The side effect is that you are now telling all the regular people who show up to the office every day that they are not as valuable as Mr. Works Remotely. How do you justify having potential new hires relocate to work for you when they find out some special people don't have to go through that?

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#175

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#176

Post by adrianhoward »

lifeguard wrote: post #171
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…

I think the "war room" solution is often a symptom of generalized poor management. And bad project management drives away experienced staff. The open office plan is a nightmare for tech work IMO.

Then how do you explain the many happy teams I see working in exactly that environment, and how do you explain the research?

(Part of the confusion may be that "war room" and "open plan" are not synonyms. The former only includes people actively working on the project. This is not the environment where you have the sales guy yapping on the phone.)

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#177

Post by crazygringo »

etherael wrote: post #88

If you're doing software development without an asynchronous work pipeline in 2013 then you have a problem. Regardless of remote or local work, long periods of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast majority of productive work is performed in any given software project. That being the case it makes perfect sense to optimise the pipeline around this very basic fact. Once that is out of the way, whether y…

> long periods of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast majority of productive work is performed in any given software project.

That's only true in some projects, and perhaps not even the majority.

It seems like a very developer-centric perspective. But there are a lot of projects where the real value comes not from the actual programming, but in how everything is tied together, in the prioritizing, in consistency, in common understanding, with continuous improvements that deliver what's actually needed. The programming may be relatively trivial, but good management and teamwork is highly complex, and you need smart employees who are all able to see the big picture and keep on top of it.

This is a very common scenario (more common, in my experience), and whether you're local or remote makes a huge difference.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#178

Post by erichocean »

crazygringo wrote: post #156
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…

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…

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.

You've essentially described every job I've had since college. That's exactly my experience of how companies actually work in practice.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#179

Post by Irregardless »

mlwarren wrote: post #72
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…

My main drivers for working remotely are what you just described and eliminating commuting time. I find I'm much more productive and happy without those inconveniences in my life.

Yeah, I get that. You are more productive. You are interrupted less. You can focus more easily. You are happier at home.

Now, where's the consideration for everyone else on your team? That seems to be the one thing missing from all these counter arguments, yet it's the crux of the matter.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#180

Post by caseysoftware »

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…

If the alternative is not having a person at all isn't a competent remote person preferable?
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