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Lessons from 2 months of remote working

iamnotaprogrammer.com

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Re: Lessons from 2 months of remote working

#71

Post by epsylon »

lkrubner wrote: post #47

I had an experience this year which made me aware of some of the ways that remote work can go wrong. Although in my case my work was not "remote" in the sense of being away from the office (though sometimes I worked from home). My work was "remote" in the sense that the tech team was all in one office in London, and I was the first programmer they hired in the New York office. Before I get into the details, I'll offe…

> there was a lot of turnover in the London office

That's a huge red flag imho. I don't think your experience speaks against remote work in particular: it's a just a communications problem between teams / departments, and that's very common in most companies.

Re: Lessons from 2 months of remote working

#72

Post by agentultra »

lukethomas wrote: post #70
agentultra wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As to your first question I don't have a good answer. I cannot think of a way to quantify something that I can only intuit about. You can think of any metric by which to measure the progress of a programmer and you will find an endless debates about its usefulness. It's inherently a qualitative value in my experience. In general though I am motivated by accomplishment. I feel good about doing a good job. It is its ow…

Thanks so much for your thoughts - this is extremely helpful as I'm trying to find balance with remote work.

Well if you ever want to chat don't hesitate to look me up.

Re: Lessons from 2 months of remote working

#73

Post by nitrogen »

bleachtree wrote: post #50
nitrogen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also had some exposure to Sqwiggle. It works very well for quick interactions with other developers; the call quality is good, latency is low, etc. I just wish there was a "knocking" feature for someone starting a chat, and/or additional states between offline, busy, and normal. Introverts may not like the constant camera exposure, and developers "in the zone" may not like the sudden presence of a voice and watc…

Hey nitrogen! Thanks for the thoughts. We actually do have all of these options. Just log into Sqwiggle and click your own video which will put you into "Busy Mode". From there, users will have to ping you to chat. Thanks! -Matt (Co-founder)

Hey Matt, thanks for your reply. I guess busy mode's UI looks too much like I'm not being a "team player" to me, at least in the Chrome web UI. My ideal, and I recognize this may not align with your target market, would be snapping a single image to use as my avatar for the hour/day/week/month, with knocking before chatting, but no indication that I don't want to be disturbed. I do like the UI overall and think you've got a good thing going.

Re: Lessons from 2 months of remote working

#74

Post by atox »

pault wrote: post #31
atox wrote: post #22

Interesting read. I recently moved to a country with a low cost of living whilst continuing my old webdevelopment role as part of a remote team. Some things that we do: - daily short standup on google hangout - everyone is available on an instant messenger when working - every office/home office has a continuous webcam feed going on over google hangout - remote pairing (not the biggest myself) Planning to do a writeu…

> every office/home office has a continuous webcam feed going on over google hangout We've talked about doing this with my all-remote team, but it seems incredibly invasive. How has your experience been?

For me it did not feel very invasive, but I did buy an external webcam so I could get some distance between me and the camera.

It felt a bit like sitting at an office, people can look at me there as well.

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