The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace • Hacker News Board

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#211

Post by davidjnelson » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

VonGuard wrote: post #186

fizx wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has gone to the dark side, there's an interesting tradeoff here. There's basically three scenarios: (1) all employees are trusted and unmeasured, but you have to tap people on the shoulder every once in a while to confirm that they're on track. Naturally, this is easier if everyone is on-site. (2) everyone is accountable for producing of tickets, and you can check that everyone is at least doing some w…

Reminds me of an old adage about tech work and other skilled labors: If you give me a task that takes a normal perosn 8 hours, and I finish it in 30 minutes, you're paying me for the skill, knowledge and experience that allows me to do it in 30 minutes. I do not owe you another 7.5 hours of work. I owe you the job being done, not the hours it should take to do it.

If I finish stuff early there’s always more that can be done to help the team. Our ci can be improved, our ux can be polished, app perf can be profiled, engineers can be mentored, customers can be listened to, relationships can be strengthened, unit tests can be added, refactoring can be done, architecture can be simplified, etc.

It feels good to help people, as long as it’s with healthy boundaries so as to prevent burnout.

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#212

Post by umvi » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #200

umvi wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the goal is to keep me busy for X number of hours a day, instead of getting a job done whatever it requires, why am I salaried? The "goal" in a lot of cases is nebulous (i.e. "keep developing the product", "improve stability", etc). There might not be a manager feeding you tasks every time you run out. At least in my company, you are expected to figure out on your own how to continually make the product better a…

So you're not trusting the salaried employee to use their judgement on how best to utilize their time, but instead assuming they instead use their skill to be a butt in a seat and working for at least 40 hours? What's special about the salary then? It's just easier than an hourly system?

You seem to be presenting confused ideas.

Here's what I believe:

If I pay you a salary, I want (roughly) 40 hours per week of productive work at your current skill level. Note: I consider sitting around thinking about things relevant to the product or company to be productive work. If you believe your level of output deserves higher compensation than you are receiving, come talk to me or find a company that will pay what you think you are worth. However, accepting a salary and then doing tasks really fast and then going idle (watching netflix, working on side projects, etc.) until your manager cattle prods you is not acceptable for a salaried employee; that would be more appropriate for a contractor where you can idle on your own dime.

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#213

Post by wolco » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

otakucode wrote: post #185

fizx wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has gone to the dark side, there's an interesting tradeoff here. There's basically three scenarios: (1) all employees are trusted and unmeasured, but you have to tap people on the shoulder every once in a while to confirm that they're on track. Naturally, this is easier if everyone is on-site. (2) everyone is accountable for producing of tickets, and you can check that everyone is at least doing some w…

I would like to suggest a tremendously simple (4) : Every day, each employee spends no more than 5 minutes reporting what they did the prior day, and what they are planning to work on that day. If they're blocked by anything, they can mention that and ask for assistance. I just finished working on a fully remote contract that worked that way, every day at noon there was a conference call that never took longer than 1…

Sounds horrible. Have meetings when they are necessary. Talk to people throughout the day. Send weekly status reports.

Don't waste a day resolve that issue now.

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#214

Post by maximente » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

dunkelheit wrote: post #98

I think I am not really well-adapted for async communication. I can't really do "fire and forget" messaging. When I ask something I want the reply to arrive as quickly as possible because I don't want to lose the context that I have in my mind right now and load it again later when I receive a reply. On an async channel this results in compulsive checking for replies which of course kills productivity. Almost-sync ch…

thanks for your honesty; i think it takes some adjusting both personally and culturally from the company so not entirely your fault.

i would broach the subject with the team to the extent possible. i think it requires buy in from others to the extent that if you're getting stuck with regularity, then those with whom you work don't seem to be empowering you with either the autonomy or information you need to work async.

so, the company needs to resolve that either via empowering you (=> individuals), or get their knowledge/discussion norms set up to empower async/remote type stuff, to include such things as escalation guidelines (e.g. can use phone call for urgent matters, but gitlab issue is 24hr turn around), project planning, decision provenance/knowledge storage, etc.

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#215

Post by JDiculous » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

greggman2 wrote: post #68

Since remote work seems to be the topic this article on async communication spawned I wanted to throw this out there for reactions. First off let me acknowledge that some people prefer remote work and also say up front I do not. I recent YouAreNotSoSmart podcast interviewed Laurie Santos from Yale and if I understood her research basically claims we often both individually and as a society choose things we think will…

I feel like someone always chimes in to say this, but the underlying assumption here is that a significant portion of one's social fulfillment should come from their office workers, which I think is ludicrous.

Let's be real here, what percentage of people - especially engineers - really find that their social needs are being satisfied through their office jobs? After you or your co-worker leaves their job, how many ex-coworkers do you actually still remain in contact with?

I've always found office relationships to be fairly boring. Because they're you're co-workers, you have to keep a certain level of professionalism and political-correctness so as to avoid offending people. This basically confines the realm of acceptable dialogue to banal things like the weather and small-talk. If you want to say anything interesting about anything interesting like say politics, you basically have to first probe them to make sure they're not going to get offended and passive aggressively retaliate. Anything you do outside of work like a cool side project or that band you're in can't be seen as threatening to your dedication to your job, so it's safer not to bring it up.

And I'm prob going to get a lot of flack for this, but I think most office workers are fairly boring - going to work, going home to their significant others/kids, and waiting to retire. Or maybe they're really interesting but don't feel comfortable talking about interesting things at the office for the reasons I mentioned above.

Ultimately I think it's better to find social fulfillment on your own and not expect it in the office, otherwise you're bound to be disappointed. But I get that it's unfortunately hard to make friends after school. I think there are a lot of reasons for that, but that would require another long post that's outside the scope of this comment.

EDIT: Just after I posted this I see this on the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21274511#21274909 Kind of supports my thesis.

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#216

Post by malvosenior » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:33 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #212

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're not trusting the salaried employee to use their judgement on how best to utilize their time, but instead assuming they instead use their skill to be a butt in a seat and working for at least 40 hours? What's special about the salary then? It's just easier than an hourly system?

You seem to be presenting confused ideas. Here's what I believe: If I pay you a salary, I want (roughly) 40 hours per week of productive work at your current skill level. Note: I consider sitting around thinking about things relevant to the product or company to be productive work. If you believe your level of output deserves higher compensation than you are receiving, come talk to me or find a company that will pay…

If this is happening, it's 100% due to bad management. It means the employee wasn't given creative freedom and a strategic direction to go in. The very last thing any manager should ever do is punish their best employees (e.g. the person who can finish a whole day's worth of work very quickly).

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#217

Post by JDiculous » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

settsu wrote: post #22

The issue I often have with discussions of remote work vs. on-site, is how much confirmation bias tends to be incorporated into the conclusions made. After about 16 years of on-site work (at various jobs), I did almost 5 years of remote work (for a single company), having just recently returned to an in-office role (despite focusing on landing another remote position, the best opportunity wasn’t.) And, frankly, I fin…

I find that acceptance of remote work (or conversely, aversion to remote work / working from home) is an excellent signal of whether or not a company will be a good cultural fit for me and a satisfying place to work.

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#218

Post by JDiculous » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #127

BeetleB wrote: post #124

This is amusing. Not long ago I was in a thread about how to do remote work well and the top complaint amongst remote workers was "not responding quickly to IM" ( between remote workers). And the general sentiment was the expectation to respond quickly is greater in remote work. That alone made me not want to take remote jobs. At my current work place, my IM status says that whoever IM's me should not expect a respon…

I worked with both types of people. Funny thing is, when I am a freelancer, who gets paid much more money per hour than an employee, people valued my time and would send me mails or text messages and wait hours or days for an answer,. When I was an remote employee, people paid me less and called me three times before 10am. Somehow, many employers have the perception to own every minute their employees are awake. I wo…

Yea, I'm contracting remotely and the difference between working a full-time job in the office seems to be night and day.

As a remote contractor, they judge me by my results and trust me to do my job however I see fit. No hand-holding or micromanaging, only one standup every couple days.

Meanwhile at the office I've got to attend a morning attendance meeting everyday, a bunch of other useless meetings, and I need to ask for permission if I need to take a couple hours to go to the doctor and apologize if I happened to sleep in one day.

Can't say I miss office life.

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#219

Post by umvi » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #216

umvi wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be presenting confused ideas. Here's what I believe: If I pay you a salary, I want (roughly) 40 hours per week of productive work at your current skill level. Note: I consider sitting around thinking about things relevant to the product or company to be productive work. If you believe your level of output deserves higher compensation than you are receiving, come talk to me or find a company that will pay…

If this is happening, it's 100% due to bad management. It means the employee wasn't given creative freedom and a strategic direction to go in. The very last thing any manager should ever do is punish their best employees (e.g. the person who can finish a whole day's worth of work very quickly).

> The very last thing any manager should ever do is punish their best employees (e.g. the person who can finish a whole day's worth of work very quickly).

They are not the "best employees" if they are constantly idling, waiting for me to tell them what to do next. People here seem to think the ideal manager/subordinate relationship is that of a worker thread pool where the manager fills the queue and the worker threads pull tasks off the queue.

Not so. The "best employees" are ones who can examine the current state of affairs, and then come to me and propose things to work on. The ideal manager/subordinate relationship is actually one where the workers are all artificial general intelligences that learn over time what the product is, how to improve it, and proactively create tasks to work on.

If you are a rockstar but only work as a a super-fast super-efficient thread in a worker thread pool, you are less valuable to me than a non-rockstar AGI who can dynamically recognize which tasks need to be done and only occasionally needs guidance and course-correction.

Re: The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

#220

Post by ergothus » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

davidjnelson wrote: post #206

ergothus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (1) all employees are trusted and unmeasured, but you have to tap people on the shoulder every once in a while to confirm that they're on track. Naturally, this is easier if everyone is on-site. I don't get it - shouldn't one-on-ones and regular progress check-ins (be those standups, metrics (This is your #2), whatever) give you that information? None of those are easier when on-site. In fact, given today's move to…

It really depends on the communication styles of people. I had a manager I loved that would drop by every few days and just ask “how’s it going”? Then I’d fill him in. It was fun and low key and highly productive. Also had managers that were basically invisible but kept a great crap umbrella for us. Loved them too. Ended up working a ton and getting enormous amounts of work done because trust and autonomy are huge. I…

> I had a manager I loved that would drop by every few days and just ask “how’s it going”? Then I’d fill him in. It was fun and low key and highly productive.

> Also, it seems managers get so overloaded that 1 on 1s and stand ups end up being mostly a waste of time because it’s too hard to remember all the little details.

I'm not sure how the first quote doesn't count as a 1:1 - the goal isn't to have a highly formalized process, it's to have communication. Some about the specific work, some about general work and workplace, but communication.

Total agreement about the overloading of management though - I haven't had a boss in years that didn't regularly have most of their schedule booked and often double-booked. I had to fill in for my manager while he was on vacation for week and it reaffirmed my lack of desire to do management - and I only had to deal with pieces that couldn't wait a week! I sometimes think the recent shift to focus on regular management 1:1s is all about reclaiming enough time to actually know what their team is doing.