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A Short Rant About Working Remotely

ericfarkas.com

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Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#221

Post by jes5199 »

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…

> Isn't the isolation during the working hours hard on you?

I worked in an office for the last several years, and finally just being around people all day every day just got unbearable.

I've been working from home for the last few months, and having 8 hours completely alone every weekday is wonderful.

And my coworkers skype and chat so I get low-grade social interaction.

So I guess that's the answer: for some people being around others is more stressful than being alone.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#222

Post by aantix »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #145

"...But I don't see a reason why, in 2013, given the tools we have, a developer has to be on-site at a desk every day, as the normal operating procedure..." I am struggling with this same question, but from the other side. I help teams become more Agile, and I'm a startup junkie, so all I care about is performance here. I want to know what works best in terms of product quality and pivot ability. And guess what? So f…

I'd contend that the tools just aren't there.

When I want to chat with someone, I want to do it instantly, like walking up to someone in the office. The Skype concept of "dialing" someone is old, antiquated and feels... laggy.

There was a video chat client promoted on Hacker News a while back that allowed for instantly initiating a video chat session with a colleague.

Sococo, a distributed agile client (with video support) also claims to do the same thing, allows for you to instantly create a video session with anyone in your virtual office.

IM works because it's immediate. Video chatting must be the same in order for a distributed team to work.

The tools aren't there yet.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#223

Post by lotyrin »

adrianhoward wrote: post #163
darkarmani wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 / bui…

Times when I've been put in a war room were absolutely infuriating for me, but the tighter loops in bringing people in on what you're doing got the "why not just do X" questions answered much faster. As much as I disliked the interruption, I'm more thankful for all the code that didn't get written because we talked it over first.

If I were to estimate, this probably doubled efficacy of our junior devs while halving the (direct) productivity of senior folks. In my cases, it was immediately apparent that we came out ahead: the former outnumbered the latter by several times.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#225

Post by jes5199 »

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…

well, for me, right now, not only do I demand that I work from home, I require the latitude to have side projects. I tried committing 100% of my time to a company, and it sucked, and my productivity fell below 50%. So if I work on your project, you'll get up to 75% of my work-time. Or 100% for short bursts.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#226

Post by dirkk0 »

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.…

You are absolutely right IMHO.

Same problem (seems off-topic but i am not so sure it is) is for someone who doesn't smoke. I don't and I thought about starting (or at least getting myself chocolate cigarettes) to join the colleagues outside during the break to stay in the information loop.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#227

Post by zevyoura »

ignostic wrote: post #98
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…

When it comes down to research vs. your subjective experience influenced by your personal preference and opinion, why would I put more stock in the later?

I don't think that's being fair to the parent post's point. They're implying that the research, by focussing only on a productivity metric, may miss out on job satisfaction issues that cause top performers to leave. They're not contradicting the research, just pointing out that the issue is complex.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#228

Post by zevyoura »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #74
pc86 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that it's not as cut-and-dry "driving to an office in an anachronism!" as most on HN would like it to be, you're not going to win any converts by quoting studies from 1972 and 1977.

I think its a measure of the paucity of Software Engineering as a discipline that a intelligent and motivated person as the parent, is unable to find any research later than the 1970's (It seems to me that most software research stopped as the PC revolution took off)

Clearly you didn't read his post, because several of the links were published since 2003.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#229

Post by jackalope »

unreal37 wrote: post #146
pknerd wrote: post #121

I have got chance to work both in 9-5 environment as well as working in isolation. Working for home was my own choice so that I can give time to my infant kid which is most important for me. Working from home gave me relaxation. I could work on my chair or on my bed, nobody was going to ask me how I sit. Second most important thing which helped me a lot was to have a feeling of helplessness . When you work in an offi…

This is why most people don't get to work from home. Spending time with your kid and being constantly relaxed, working from bed, is counter to the serious business culture of most companies. Don't take this the wrong way, and it's not a dig, but from the way that you wrote that, it sounds like you only work a few hours a day casually. I can see why Big Bank X would not allow their employees to do that.

On the other hand, hourly-paid remote workers can be a tremendous value, since their pay is limited to the time they actually work and they usually don't receive many benefits.

Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely

#230

Post by chris_mahan »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #74
pc86 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that it's not as cut-and-dry "driving to an office in an anachronism!" as most on HN would like it to be, you're not going to win any converts by quoting studies from 1972 and 1977.

I think its a measure of the paucity of Software Engineering as a discipline that a intelligent and motivated person as the parent, is unable to find any research later than the 1970's (It seems to me that most software research stopped as the PC revolution took off)

It seems to me that software research moved out of the Hallowed Halls of Academia and into the nasty pizzabox-laden basements of geeks' parent houses, where thousands of people hacked (no chicken involved) on massively capable inexpensive hardware.
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