A Short Rant About Working Remotely

It appears that the gains from team dynamics (packs) outweigh the average individual quality (lone wolves) for most tasks. The optimal solution in finance, at least, is having the bulk of work done with co-located teams with telecommuting being an option when recruiting niche geniuses for specific tasks.

The ability to effectively work remotely is entirely determined on a person-by-person basis. And it's clear, especially from the mixed feelings in these comments.

People come in all breeds, and I know that some people absolutely cannot get work done unless they are around others working, whereas others need quiet and the comfort of their own home to be the most productive.

What it comes down to is if you want to hire remote, you need to make sure that your talent is self-motivated enough to do their best work at home (or wherever). If you require an office, make sure the culture fits, otherwise you'll have employees constantly distracted and grudgingly coming into the office every day.

You can have mixed teams, and it doesn't even matter the ratio. I've been on extremely successful teams where only two of the 30+ engineers were remote, and they did their best work remotely. For others, separating work from home greatly improved their productivity.

Don't forget -- your empty house can be the most distracting environment you have access to. It's all about personal culture and fit.

> Do you require that local employees be physically visible at all times? What if they need to take a walk to clear their head and focus on the problem at hand? What if they need to go to the bathroom?

Yes, remote and physical team members must have a mobile webcam that they bring with them on all breaks. The webcam must have RFID tags built into it, and their homes and frequent break locations must be equipped with RFID scanners to verify the location of the camera and prevent any funny business. No exceptions, ever.

Also, when people ask questions they never EVER preface them with "Let me know when you have a second".

Seriously, are you in third grade? Can you read something and not interpret it literally? The Greek knew reduction to absurdity was a shitty argument more than 2,000 years ago... how come you still haven't figured it out?

From adrianhoward above:

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

If you're doing software development without an asynchronous work pipeline in 2013 then you have a problem. Regardless of remote or local work, long periods of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast majority of productive work is performed in any given software project. That being the case it makes perfect sense to optimise the pipeline around this very basic fact.

Once that is out of the way, whether you're local or remote is basically irrelevant. All the disadvantages to remote work have always centered around an insufficiently asynchronous work pipeline. I say this as someone who presently travels the world and works on a large array of projects and would never even consider a role that attempts to change that part of my life, simultaneously in the past having worked extensively in async and non async environments both local only and remote.

Sorry, but I disagree with this:

"you'd have to be pretty ignorant to claim remote workers are able to communicate as well as on-site workers. If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately."

And here's why, Skype overcomes this problem... I've worked remotely in plenty of team situations where I've sent a chat message, and got instant response, consistently.

When I get a Skype message in these situations, the only reason I wouldn't respond is if I wasn't at my desk for the same reasons someone wouldn't be at their desk in a face-to-face office situation.

I think, as a business community, we just need to get more and more comfortable with remote working arrangements, and implement policies that could cover the various productivity issues (if you don't respond to a message within 'X'... this happens etc...).

I also think we have to remember there are productivity issues in the face-to-face office scenario as well, when people get together they tend to "talk around the water cooler," they tend to "go out for drinks, then call in sick the next day" etc... and other social-oriented productivity issues.

Not all productivity issues are bad either, if someone working remotely doesn't answer a chat message in 7 seconds, they might be improving themselves in some manner. ;)