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We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

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Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#51

Post by JoeAltmaier »

pre wrote: post #49
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sococo (I work there) does a good job. Share apps (not desktops); talk and video, pointers and web apps all work together to make pair programming pretty seamless.

Heh, it looks like a game. Gauntlet or something. Strange model to deliberately capture the office layout even. It looks so much like a game of "Cluedo" I'd be tempted to try a murder to see how it worked. "It was Thad, in Patrick's office, with the pistol"

Yeah some issues with the graphics causing credibility problems. But that's exactly what makes the presence work so well - "Patrick is in Thad's office, and they're both yelling!" Try that with any other tool

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#52

Post by rifung »

robhack wrote: post #38
smackfu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when I was bad at work/life balance when I first started working from home... I still saved an hour-and-a-half each and every day by not having to commute or iron clothes or make my lunch.

I guess that depends on everyone's personal case. But I for one like my commute: 10min by bicycle or 15min by foot, with a nice parc with lots of birds on the way. So in my case, the pros of working from home are almost void compared to the pros of a workplace.

You sound like you have an awesome commute; consider me incredibly jealous.

On the other hand, I think besides the commute itself is the freedom you get from not having to constrain yourself to living in places where the commute is doable. I work in downtown Seattle and I would love to move to the suburbs but I'm not sure it's really feasible to spend 45 minutes on the bus to get to work.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#53

Post by ericbieller »

MetaCosm wrote: post #48

An unexpected tool has helped tremendously for our teams in terms of remote work: Mumble ( http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page ). Mumble is a cross platform, open source VoIP application. Often used for gaming in a group (like Teamspeak or Ventrilo). It has the idea of channels (rooms, offices, etc) is very high quality, low latency and low bandwidth installed on your companies servers in minutes, always encrypted…

One of the big downsides of Mumble, Teamspeak and Ventrillo is that they aren't made for business. This means they are really hard to get up and running, which is especially annoying when you are just just trying them out. We're actually working on something similar to these tools but built for business.

We're currently in private beta and I'd be interested to get your input on what we're building. We've got a quick walkthrough here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV7HBXuhT7Q and you can signup for the private beta at http://speak.io

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#54

Post by alfg »

MetaCosm wrote: post #48

An unexpected tool has helped tremendously for our teams in terms of remote work: Mumble ( http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page ). Mumble is a cross platform, open source VoIP application. Often used for gaming in a group (like Teamspeak or Ventrilo). It has the idea of channels (rooms, offices, etc) is very high quality, low latency and low bandwidth installed on your companies servers in minutes, always encrypted…

Interesting. I know Mumble is used a lot in the gaming community, but I never thought of the idea of using it for workspace/business.

I wrote a webapp targeted for gamers to easily setup temporary Mumble servers (http://guildbit.com). So I'm sure someone can build a service similar to wrap the Mumble API for workspace users. Similar to Slack with IRC.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#55

Post by smackfu »

robhack wrote: post #38
smackfu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when I was bad at work/life balance when I first started working from home... I still saved an hour-and-a-half each and every day by not having to commute or iron clothes or make my lunch.

I guess that depends on everyone's personal case. But I for one like my commute: 10min by bicycle or 15min by foot, with a nice parc with lots of birds on the way. So in my case, the pros of working from home are almost void compared to the pros of a workplace.

Heh, I was going to add that another big advantage of working from home is that I can go to the gym at lunch time.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#56

Post by callmevlad »

clay_to_n wrote: post #50
ryanSrich wrote: post #31

Although I disagree with the overall sentiment of the article (remote working doesn't work for generalists). I commend the author for at least trying remote work (especially as a YC company, an organization that openly discourages remote work). Full disclosure, I work remotely and it's by far the best decision I've ever made in my entire life. So to address a few points. Collaboration to me is when a group of people,…

How does pair programming work over chat? I feel like pair programming relies on you both looking at the same code + talking things through while one of you is actually coding. It seems like having to switch over to a chat client to communicate would decrease productivity a lot.

http://screenhero.com/ is perfect for this, soon to be integrated natively into Slack.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#57

Post by wlesieutre »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #8

Having had teams that were half-remote before, and all remote now, doing lots of hangouts seems to fill the remote-feels-weird niche pretty well. Just having long conversations in chat tends to not be productive, but you need chat. Something like Slack is a good choice if you can't get everyone on IRC. Somewhat still wanting for better "whiteboard simulator" type options. Ultimately not having an office not only save…

For having a remote whiteboard, shared OneNote notebooks on a Surface Pro 3 is fantastic. It's not 100% realtime sync, but it's close.

Except that nobody else has a Surface Pro, so the only time I've tried it was with a friend with a Bamboo on the other end. Maybe someday.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#58

Post by pre »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #51
pre wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, it looks like a game. Gauntlet or something. Strange model to deliberately capture the office layout even. It looks so much like a game of "Cluedo" I'd be tempted to try a murder to see how it worked. "It was Thad, in Patrick's office, with the pistol"

Yeah some issues with the graphics causing credibility problems. But that's exactly what makes the presence work so well - "Patrick is in Thad's office, and they're both yelling!" Try that with any other tool

But part of the advantage of remote-work is that you can be in two or more conversations at once, that you can be in two or more 'places' at once.

No?

Seems odd to use a location metaphor, when online you can be in more than one place at a time.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#59

Post by OmarIsmail »

This is one of the reasons why I'm so excited about VR.

There's still an issue with timezones but I think the communication/camaraderie problems will be fixed in a VR workplace. This gives you all the benefits of remote and mitigates many of the downsides. If the downsides are sufficiently depressed then many more teams will be able to be remote and distributed and that may have a dramatic effect on society.

Re: We Tried Building a Remote Team and It Sucked

#60

Post by stevewilhelm »

Shorel wrote: post #46

What about: Work remote. Get all the company together to a trip to Hawaii each year. I'm sure this can build camaraderie and morale, and I hope someone gives it a try.

"Companies, too, are drawn to the intimate communal areas, amenities and activities of co-working/co-living spaces. Nine remote-working employees of Automattic, a web development corporation gathered for a work meetup this month at the Surf Office in Gran Canaria, taking over the 10-room property for six days “to build relationships, have real-time interaction and also work on projects that are best done in person,” the company said." from

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/business/co-working-on-vac...

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