This is great. The Digital Nomad future is upon us. I've been doing it for 3 years and it's wonderful. Live where you want. Get out of the Silicon Valley rat race.
We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
31–40 of 184 posts
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#32I'm partially remote working (RW) at an organization that is slowly rolling back its RW culture(1). The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away). "Culture" is used as a smoke screen for more sinister incentives. (I can say that with confidence because I can…
Yes. There is a pernicious group of candidate employees lurking outside of every organization all of the time, and if you let these people in, this is the kind of output you get. People who've made their careers as "non-technical people managers" have no. freaking. idea. what to do when you put them in a "remote office". They've gotten by with their free donuts twice a week, their wry smiles, their nice suit, their g…
A lot of bureaucracy and politics are coming from tech people too. Turf wars, ego issues, you name it. But yes, collocation seems to be of particular advantage to the ones being talented at 'being pleasant to the right people'.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#33My team just started a large project; a few of us work remotely and a few are in an office. For the project, we opened a Zoom video channel, and all sit there with video chat running on our second monitors. It's working out great . We very much have the be-able-to-pop-in-for-a-question thing going on like you would in a project war room. I'm thinking of making it a standing thing one day weekly to work this way. Ther…
I've long assumed that prior to HMDs taking off, we'd see people work with a video screen at the side extreme of their desk, showing a view of someone not physically adjacent to them, and the reverse for that colleague. So, you'd have a representation of a teammate beside you. Large LCDs are cheap. Connectivity is getting to the point that this wouldn't tax some office connections.
Has anyone tried it?
Obviously people could switch off the screen or the feed if they needed to make a private call, or if they were taking a lunch break.
People talk about Hangout windows and so on, but I think having something you can glance at but not have right in front of you would be a better representation of current offices.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#34I think the main point of this article (which could have been half the length) is that you can't just declare a job remote. You have to have a culture and technology that supports it, or else if you take that remote job, you're getting set up for failure. If everybody else is having water cooler conversations, and making binding decisions based on them without email or chat, any remote employee is going to be constan…
Technology is there - Jira, Slack, Skype, GitHub, email... There is absolutely no excuse to not have remote jobs.
Well - if everyone else is co located, then changing the way they work to support a new group of remote workers actually add a cost to the local team. This is why it needs to be at a culture and people level, not just a tech level. The tech can be there and the local group can just ignore it, leaving the remote workers out of the loop.
I was talking about a job a while back where I would have been the first and only remote worker. What was a 'no' for me was that not only would I have to do my day job, I'd also have to be the one the pushed the remote agenda - which is a large job in it's own right. If there had been support to help the business migrate this way, then I'd have been more interested, but my feeling was that although they wanted me I'd always be the spare wheel causing additional effort for a whole team.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#35> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. There is no catered lunch or a hip office with table tennis table. Everything artificial is stripped away. I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem. Working…
I think remote teams are in a never-ending pursuit to replicate that face-to-face communication. But as you say, nothing can really replace the face-to-face interaction. So I agree with you.
But the main argument I am making here is not that virtual communication is superior to a human one. Rather I am saying that a vague notion of culture is all that ties remote workers to their virtual teams.
But maybe I badly phrased it here because what I call culture is also man-made.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technology is there - Jira, Slack, Skype, GitHub, email... There is absolutely no excuse to not have remote jobs.
Did you not read most of my comment? The technology is there, it wasn't ten years ago. Now, it comes down to management setting strict guidelines and enforcing them. What good is it to pay for Jira accounts when nobody uses them? Or what good is it to have Github and everybody ends up hosting their own private repos? That is definitely a management mandate, and logistically, it's a lot easier to manage a group if the…
Totally and wholeheartedly agree. You cant just solve a problem with tech, you also have to think about who you will move the people.
I'm all for remote work, and would love it to work for me, but the culture needs to be right to support it.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#37I get what this is saying, but there does seem to be a nearly-unspoken assumption here that the "perfect" working environment involves high-frequency communication, including regular synchronous communication -- i.e. replicating the open-plan/daily standups/short iterations model of programming that seems to be the current thing for in-office programming jobs. That's a perfectly reasonable model, and clearly suits a…
It's hard - when that model (leave people to do the right thing) works well - it is amazing. It needs skilled and engaged people.
The problem comes when you have people that don't work well under that model, and who need continual check points to ensure they really are doing the right thing, and that you haven't just wasted a bunch of time.
Getting these two groups to work together is hard, when sadly, getting great people is hard.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#38It is somehow ironic that not so long ago we could send ships on a 4 month trip around the word, could manage the construction of amazing buildings or sent armies to fight wars on the end of the word without being able to communicate with the people doing their job/duty. Nowdays we can barely let change the font size of a button on a webpage without having a stand up meeting or a conference call.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#39My team just started a large project; a few of us work remotely and a few are in an office. For the project, we opened a Zoom video channel, and all sit there with video chat running on our second monitors. It's working out great . We very much have the be-able-to-pop-in-for-a-question thing going on like you would in a project war room. I'm thinking of making it a standing thing one day weekly to work this way. Ther…
lol, this sounds even worse than working at the office.
I became remote worker to get rid of all that synchronous crap, to work at my own times etc. none of these constant "pop-in-for-a-question thing"s
If something is really important call me, otherwise email/chat is enough.
Re: We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
#40"Communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a conversation."
Probably the main reason I want to get a remote job. Constant disruptions.