81–90 of 95 posts
Look, make working outside a practical consideration. I need the sun, not shoddy impressionist artwork, not another goddamn water cooler. I want to pull my drink from a nearby stream and then commit my bug.
Get out of my face with your goddamn ugly buildings and their ugly interiors. My code is ugly enough without having to deal with in-building noise and 'in-office' politics.
"Our findings suggest that remote workers might be further handicapped by perceptions that they are not as responsible or committed as other employees. To avoid such unfair perceptions, managers who implement telecommuting and flexible hours should revise their performance appraisals to measure mostly objective outputs, such as number and type of projects completed or expert evaluations of project quality."
Rather, we're _already_ doing this. Check the commit logs. Obviously one can make trait-inferences based on commit logs. If one can infer a "life story model" from a Facebook profile, one can infer a "worker commitment model" from a github profile.
And "... remote workers might be ..."? Seriously? This is the kind of argument coming from MIT? Look, I'm not going to argue the difference between a theory-might-be-true and a theory-is-probably-true. Nor will I argue that they're _just_ working with theories, the just-theory argument. I don't want to bore you to death, but you obviously don't need _evidence_ to corroborate a claim that _might_ be true. I mean, c'mon... A lot of "findings" might be true. That said, who's to say their explanation establishes any causal connection at all. All sorts of things lead to the perception of lack of commitment, but most notably, that someone fails to perform unit tests, or doesn't document, etc. -- but "hallway conversations"? This presupposes that the content of the conversation is even contextualized by the work itself that is to be done. I mean, with such a "finding" there are an infinite number of provisional assumptions which can be thrown in, when there's already a perfect focal point for determining commitment, etc. -- again, the commit(ment) logs.
Is this just bad writing, or am I missing something?
This effect is not about "passive face time" or merely people seeing that you're there from a distance. It is about plugging into the whole environment in the office - which is what you need your leaders to be good at.
Taking it further, a bunch of great happenstance opportunities really come up by being in the right place at the right time talking to the right people hitting the right chords. You will never stumble upon these opportunities if you're constantly away, chucking away at your "assigned" duties.
There's no getting around our monkey brains' desire to see other people's faces and bond with them. But that's just a technical problem: high quality video that starts instantly, or that is always on, provides the same stimulus. The fact that most remote workers don't have that kind of setup just shows why we're not quite there yet.
So the problems with remote work that people discuss endless are not problems with remote work per se. They're problems with our nascent, not-quite-good-enough-yet tools for remote work. But the tools are getting better really fast.
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…
One part of your post intrigues me.
> don't have colleagues interrupting me with questions ever 10 minutes
Let's assume that your colleagues aren't idiots. That they need these questions answered. Either they are having to go away and ask someone else, or they are having to figure the answer out themselves (potentially taking a lot more time than if you had simply given the answer) or they are deciding to make do without the answer.
Each of those is potentially detrimental to the organisation's effectivenesses as a whole. Your "productiveness" is more than simply the sum of the code that you produce.
Moreover you're missing all those 'interesting little problems' that turn up, that you would know the answer to, if anyone only thought to ask you.
You're at risk of diminishing your total value.
(And yes, I primarily teleworked for several years).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 someone else pointed out just because something is difficult to measure doesn't make it unimportant. One part of your post intrigues me. > don't have colleagues interrupting me with questions ever 10 minutes Let's assume that your colleagues aren't idiots. That they need these questions answered. Either they are having to go away and ask someone else, or they are having to figure the answer out themselves (potenti…
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…
It's not such a hard dichotomy. I think working from home occasionally makes good sense, if you treat it like what it is, a productive break. Just the fact that so many request it, should show the benefit of releasing that pressure occasionally. I hate working with tired, overworked people on mental cruise control. The fact is, a big part of the workday is filled with social interaction, whiteboard sessions, etc. But…
It's also massively stress reducing. No daily traffic? It's awesome. I've been working from home for an out of state company for about 3 years now. I could make more money if I switched to a different job, but not having to commute has actually become a massive perk for me.
Having little stress, being able to relax at home, and still be very productive are worth more than monetary compensation to me.
I've got a family member that makes about 15k more than I do, but spends 3 hours commuting each day! That more of less eats up all of her leisure time through out the week. Then weekends are house chores. There is nothing about her job that couldn't be done from home. 3 hours in traffic each day is no way to live..
With no commute, I wake up, do some stretching and light exercise, drink some coffee, and then when I'm ready to begin, I just sit down at my desk and get started.
Worth every penny that I don't make.
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…
Eh, while I agree that this is how it /is/ - this is certainly not how it should be. (I mean, management is a function of relationships, sure, but if you base Engineer pay on relationships, which many companies do, you are going to end up with a bunch of worthless sycophants.)
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…
Embracing the distributed approach and realizing the cutoff point leads to building better tools for collaboration and integrating them into the work environment. Without this recognition, the mentality is that you can always talk to someone in person.
I've worked in multinational companies where collaborating with someone across continents, bar the time difference, was just as easy as working with someone down the hall. I currently work for a company that has not yet achieved this recognition, so working with anyone outside my immediate office takes hard work and determination.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Well, it works for some, so either the team of this theoretical person or manager was a unique snowflake or there were people problems causing this distinction (e.g. people who abuse it, crappy manager who was using stupid metrics that prove their biases).
I was just pointing out that people choosing not to telecommute isn't necessarily caused by management idiocy. There is, indeed, a lot of evidence (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4207309) that the optimum for productivity is a radically co-located team.
Of course there are other issues. Telecommuting is a great option to have and solves some problems. Sometimes the best folk cannot co-locate. Sometimes quality of life issues are more important. Sometimes the on-site work environment can't be made effective due to issues outside the relevant people's control.
However, a lot of geek folk seem to automatically assume that telecommuting == always more productive, and management that prefer co-location == always idiots. This isn't backed up by the facts.