The benefits of a more asynchronous workplace

The article starts by simply assuming its conclusion in a complete non-sequitur: that all the listed benefits of remote working stem from asynchronous communication.

Sharing the space with your children or partner? Asynchronous communication. Being able to take short breaks in your own space? Asynchronous communication. Not being distracted by people chatting about their weekend? Asynchronous communication.

One of the major benefits of remote working, for me, is just not having other people around. It's not much a matter of communication but simply of the relax and focus I get when I don't have to be aware of others.

I vouched.

A thing to consider is that these remote methods are not bound to remote workers. I had a job were I had two choices when a certain situation occured that stopped me from finishing work:

1. Find the person involved, talk to them and try to resolve it right away

2. Write a mail to them, print it out, clamp it to the related paper and hang it on the wall.

We were a very tiny 7-person company with rooms in the same building and still the approach outlined in point 1 rarely was more productive than just waiting for them to reply. For situations that happened more often I created email templates so there was even less work.

Another advantage of method 2 is that unresolved work in the end of the day is already taken care of and if you are working in shifts the handover is easier then.

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 make us happy but actually don't. Examples seemed to include anything that takes you away from people. One example was the ATM machine. It's more convenient than a bank teller but interacting with the teller adds to your quota of needed interaction for happiness. Things like the fact that you can order a Starbucks coffee on your phone and pick it up with no interaction as another tiny example. I'm sure those were minor examples but she was basically claiming we're often inadvertently choosing things that actually make us less happy.

For me I prefer in office work because I want to be around other people. I want them to interrupt me too. Not 100% of the time but I enjoy the camaraderie, the conversations, going over solutions together, etc...

So in that context, is it possible the push for remote work fits in that line? We think it will make us happy but it for many people it will have the unintended consequence of isolating them and actually make them less happy.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be given the choice. Maybe you are different. Maybe you have special needs (someone you need to take care of for example) or maybe you're remote location has family or friends around. But, if Laurie Santos is correct then maybe a large percent of people are actually making a bad choice?

PS: I don't know if I trust her research. I'm only passing on my interpretation what I though she said in the interview.

> I honestly think that EVERYONE should be using a ticket tracking system and just put assignments in a person's queue. I don't see why this is such a big deal or looked down upon.

As I see it, none of the queuing stuff is really controversial.

> It's so easy to see what everyone is working on, run reports to see how long things took

This, on the other hand is usually what's controversial, and the reasoning behind that is that it often leads to management using past data as a stick to drive "faster" future development, with silly statements like “Well, the average plugin took 2 days to write, why is this one taking 7 days? Oh it must be that the person doing it is lazy. Better give them negative feedback on it and tell them it can affect their promotions”.

The example is contrived, but the motivations and behaviors are very real. Competent developers tend to leave companies where they are constantly badgered about stuff like this by managers who have never developed software. In the extreme case (very few organizations are this bad, but they do exist), all you end up with is the remaining ones who know how to show that they are doing a lot of work, but are generally afraid to show their lack of knowledge in any area for fear of being dinged by the data-equipped management for it.

Since this is not conducive to the technical health of a software development team, estimation practices that purport to be unrealistically accurate are what's looked down upon.