Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#61

Post by davidw » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 11:29 AM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #32

cletus wrote: post #21

Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of…

"Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of code you write. In even small companies (maybe even especially small companies?) culture is important. Culture transmits largely by physical proximity. Osmosis if you will. There is value in team camaraderie, whiteboard sessions, going to lunch with colleagues, sometimes just sitting around and shooting the breeze about whatever." You're waiving your hands…

> You're waiving your hands here; flailing, even. None of this is quantifiable

Just because it is not easy to quantify does not mean there isn't some truth to it. 'Flailing' and 'hand waving' seem exaggerated.

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#62

Post by adrianhoward » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 11:37 AM UTC

cletus wrote: post #21

Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of…

Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument

There's at least one more camp. Those who think that there's large body of evidence that, all other things being equal, a good co-located team will be much more productive than a distributed one.

And I say this as somebody who lives in a relatively rural part of the UK, runs their own company, and spends a pretty large chunk of my time telecommuting and working with other remote workers (because, often, all other things are not equal :-)

For example:

http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008

"It doesn't take much distance before a team feels the negative effects of distribution - the effectiveness of collaboration degrades rapidly with physical distance. People located closer in a building are more likely to collaborate (Kraut, Egido & Galegher 1990). Even at short distances, 3 feet vs. 20 feet, there is an effect (Sensenig & Reed 1972). A distance of 100 feet may be no better than several miles (Allen 1977). A field study of radically collocated software development teams,[...], showed significantly higher productivity and satisfaction than industry benchmarks and past projects within the firm (Teasley et al., 2002). Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases."

http://www.springerlink.com/content/0137yud7c3k8xryw/?MUD=MP

"Based on the empirical evidence, we have constructed a model of how remote communication and knowledge management, cultural diversity and time differences negatively impact requirements gathering, negotiations and specifications. Findings reveal that aspects such as a lack of a common understanding of requirements, together with a reduced awareness of a working local context, a trust level and an ability to share work artefacts significantly challenge the effective collaboration of remote stakeholders in negotiating a set of requirements that satisfies geographically distributed customers"

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?reload=true&#...

"Our results show that, compared to same-site work, cross-site work takes much longer and requires more people for work of equal size and complexity. We also report a strong relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy"

http://kraut.hciresearch.org/sites/kraut.hciresearch.org/fil...

"Our findings reveal that: software developers have different types of coordination needs; coordination across sites is more challenging than within a site; team knowledge helps members coordinate, but more so when they are separated by geographic distance; and the effect of different types of team knowledge on coordination effectiveness differs between co-located and geographically dispersed collaborators."

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi?doc=doi/10.1109/...

"One key finding is that distributed work items appear to take about two and one-half times as long to complete as similar items where all the work is colocated"

http://possibility.com/Misc/p339-teasley.pdf

"Our study of six teams that experienced radical collocation showed that in this setting they produced remarkable productivity improvements. Although the teammates were not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time they realized the benefits of having people at hand, both for coordination, problem solving and learning.Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity"

I could go on....

There are certainly arguments for telecommuting being more productive if you have a bad onsite working environment. My ideal solution is to fix the bad environment if at all possible, rather than distribute the team.

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#63

Post by stfu » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 11:42 AM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #32

cletus wrote: post #21

Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of…

"Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of code you write. In even small companies (maybe even especially small companies?) culture is important. Culture transmits largely by physical proximity. Osmosis if you will. There is value in team camaraderie, whiteboard sessions, going to lunch with colleagues, sometimes just sitting around and shooting the breeze about whatever." You're waiving your hands…

Oh if only social interations were that easy quantifiable. Life would be a lot easier. We could avoid all wars, be full of love and full of love and happiness, developing only the most successful products without ever failing to understand the (irr)ationality of our clients. Social data is so subjective, as it is almost impossible to control externalities, and something like the (un)importance of "facetime" is in my opinion always circumstantial. Therefore I would agree with the gut feeling comment, as it comes really down to the individual employee to evaluate his intentions/priorities/relationships and what works best for that situation.

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#64

Post by adrianhoward » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 11:46 AM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #32

cletus wrote: post #21

Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of…

"Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of code you write. In even small companies (maybe even especially small companies?) culture is important. Culture transmits largely by physical proximity. Osmosis if you will. There is value in team camaraderie, whiteboard sessions, going to lunch with colleagues, sometimes just sitting around and shooting the breeze about whatever." You're waiving your hands…

As a result I'm more productive than the average non-telecommuting worker.

Although sometimes optimising somebody's individual productivity gets in the way of optimising the productivity of the company as a whole.

You need to figure out where the bottlenecks are before you know the right place to optimise :-)

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#65

Post by adrianhoward » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 11:51 AM UTC

w1ntermute wrote: post #25

cletus wrote: post #21

Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of…

As is often the case, the best solution is a compromise. A policy of allowing 2 or 3 days/week of working from home would allow for "real" work to get done from home (not to mention the gas and time savings) while also having the advantages of physical proximity.

As is often the case, the best solution is a compromise

Nope - there isn't a best solution.

It depends on the company, the project, the team, etc. Sometimes everybody telecommuting is best. Sometimes a mixed model is best. Sometimes an everybody-onsite model is best. Sometimes flying everybody to a common location for a month is best. Sometimes...

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#66

Post by adrianhoward » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 12:04 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #18

Let me explain this to you in simple terms. If your manager appreciates 'blow your trumpet' culture where 'making noise' is more important than work, then Working from home might be disastrous to you. But if your manager understands the wastage of time during travel/commute. The troubles faced by programmers due to frequent meetings and interruptions, the need for solitary isolation to think and work on tough problem…

Where do the managers (and team members for that matter) fit in who have tried telecommuting experiments, seen productivity drop, moved back to co-located teams, and seen productivity rise back to previous levels again?

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#67

Post by adrianhoward » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 12:07 PM UTC

seivan wrote: post #12

That seems like it only applies to WidgetFactories and not FilmCrews. Read more here; http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814 I wouldn't make my career in a WidgetFactory anyway.

That seems like it only applies to WidgetFactories and not FilmCrews.

Why?

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#68

Post by adrianhoward » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 12:14 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #43

mechanical_fish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed so far. What's wrong with working from home? When the CEO brings guests to the office so that they can "meet the team", you're never there. When the guests ask about your project, someone else on your team will represent you. When your manager is muttering jokes to the team during the design meeting, you won't hear those jokes. Some of the jokes may involve the projects that are already being discussed in othe…

Everything you just wrote applies to working from home when other people don't . Very little of it applies to working from home along with everyone else . If most of your company/team goes to work in person at the same site, you'll miss out on some things by not doing so. If most of your company/team works in a distributed fashion, you can do the same without missing out. Prisoner's dilemma. :)

Everything you just wrote applies to working from home when other people don't. Very little of it applies to working from home along with everyone else.

It still applies - it just applies to everybody. The disadvantages are still there if everybody has 'em :-)

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#69

Post by theorique » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 12:18 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #32

cletus wrote: post #21

Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of…

"Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of code you write. In even small companies (maybe even especially small companies?) culture is important. Culture transmits largely by physical proximity. Osmosis if you will. There is value in team camaraderie, whiteboard sessions, going to lunch with colleagues, sometimes just sitting around and shooting the breeze about whatever." You're waiving your hands…

Raises and promotions may be a function of relationships, but perhaps they shouldn't be? Perhaps they should be based on performance.

Not saying you're wrong - performance is a great metric to use for gauging contribution to an organization. However, I find that proposals that begin with "people should" or "groups should" are often about as easy to implement as cat herding.

Re: Why Showing Your Face at Work Matters

#70

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 12:30 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #21

Working from home is a popular topic for us engineers. Generally speaking there are two broad camps in this argument: 1. Those who want to work from home and argue largely from that position. They say they'll be just as productive, you can write code from anywhere, having a more flexible schedule will make them happier and more productive and so on; and 2. Those that think there is more to your job than the lines of…

You also have a camp of people who wish to practice their craft, period.

If your goal is to move up the organization, being a remote worker is similar to working in the Iowa field office -- you're not making the personal connections with the bigshots that you need to make to get the promotions. Being in the right place at the right time and luck are big success factors, imo.