The last project I worked on, the company insisted I be on site. When I got there, nobody talked to me in real life for six months. If everyone is on IRC and using a ticket tracker, bug tracker, github, status blogs, email, Skype, iChat etc, I'm not sure what the point of being on-site is, other than organizational inertia.
A Short Rant About Working Remotely
261–270 of 339 posts
Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#262I agree entirely -- I've been telecommuting for ten years now, and this is easily the #1 reason the recruitment process fails with me (with small companies as well as large).
we love the fact that we can recruit folks from anywhere in the world and not disrupt their lives, since we are completely remote. it opens up a much wider talent pool and allows you to benefit from local economies as well, without actually being there.
Companies seem to forget (or not put much emphasis on) another aspect of having telecommuters: you don't get tunnel vision due to locality. I've worked for offices around the globe, and one thing that's always struck me about remote vs local is that remote can bring in a new way of thinking that you don't always get locally due to local cultural thought processes.
Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#263(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…
What about this case study on the development of Windows Vista? -- http://macbeth.cs.ucdavis.edu/distributed.pdf Granted, it doesn't study efficiency but defect rates, but having development distributed geographically was shown to have little negative effect.
Thank you! Somebody had pointed me to that before but it hadn't made it into my reading pile yet. Added to the list.
Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How does one acquire the connections to be called in as this type of engineer?
I'm constantly learning, and seeing when things become "possible" with the current state of knowledge. Whenever I see that, on my own, I'll sketch out how the solution would work.
Then, I look around for companies that need a problem I already have a solution for solved, and I pitch my solution to them. Sometimes, I'll take jobs to solve problems I haven't considered before, but that's rarer.
If they like my solution, I set up a contract to implement it for them.
I'd say about 50% of the time I pitch a pre-existing solution, I get work. What's great is I'm essentially picking my own work and I get paid well (because the problems are hard).
The downside is you pretty much always have to be coming up with new solutions to things, and stay very current on technology.
I'm generally into something long before the "early adopters" get there, and I'm gone by the time it hits the mainstream. For example, I was working on a Google Spanner-like database while Google was doing the same.
At the time, no-one thought something like that was possible (outside of Google -- and they didn't tell anyone). I implemented different parts of the solution with three different clients over a two year period, none of whom hired me to create something like Google Spanner, but all of whom needed one part of the whole package solved.
Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#265I have a new startup, two cofounders and a remote full time engineer. Things are working splendidly, but the reason is in large part because of how well we communicate. Yes, of course chat, video conferences, and email are important. But I think our wiki pages and pull requests are what make it work. We also have been making information dense screencasts for each other. I'm going to be so bold as to say a remote engi…
Definitely want to know about your toolset.. would like to structure my new startup this way. What are you using for making and hosting screencasts?
Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> 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. Team productivity is the sum of individual productivity though. Having all of the individual productivity disrupted is going to lead to lower team productivity. I think Joel said it best 13 years ago: http:…
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Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#267Earlier 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…
I'd be interested to know what your 'getting back into the flow' techniques are?
Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
If you're looking for a self-hosted solution to keep you from becoming overly dependent on Github, take a look at Gitlab [1].
Since you're using Git, all those repos are presumably backed up on individual development machines. Or you could easily write a cron job to mirror them every day or so.
The real problem is other content like issue tracking, wikis, and pull requests. If keeping these is important, you may be locked into the platform, at least as far as existing projects are concerned.
Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#269Couldn't agree more. Companies of all scale need to be receptive to remote work, otherwise they will never be able to fill in any of their job roles.
Re: A Short Rant About Working Remotely
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people believe they are able to deal with interruptions. Very few people are actually able to do so in an even remotely efficient manner.
Still teams of gifted individuals tend to achieve more than sum of gifted individuals working alone, distractions notwithstanding. Anyway I'm reserved about the very thesis that office life is particularly full of distractions. At home office you might have spouse and kids who are even less understanding of your "zone" than your coworkers. If you are single it might be neighbors driving their renovation project with…
Remember there is a distinction between remote working and working from home.