We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams
remotebase.io
remotebase.io
Today I got tired at 1 PM, got up from my desk, got my bike and went for a ride in the park nearby. Once in a while I would take the phone out of my pocket and give quick answers on Slack, but most of my time I enjoyed what is the beginning of autumn. You can feel it in the air, it's more chilly, the light gets warmer and the color of the trees start changing. It's by far the most beautiful time of the year for walking in parks. And it felt great. Now I'm back home and I'm thinking of finishing my work, but after I eat something.
And I do this all the time, while managing to get shit done. Many times I work late to finish this or that. But I'm a responsible software developer, I care about the project and I can work without somebody watching over my shoulder.
And surely there are those times where you need to do design sessions with the rest of the team. But we do those over Skype and every once in a while we travel in order to meet face to face. There are challenges in communication of course, but we make it work.
Many other corps in many other parts of the US are perfectly compatible with what was described.
In a previous life, I was chained to the desk 8-5 with lunch breaks - but that's one of the reasons I left.
Are you sure? Having experts in a given field isn't an advantage to look for? The mere fact that you're able to turn on a dime if necessary without having to reorganise thousands of employees and projects towards your new goal?
If your definition of "startup" includes "doing things that literally anybody else with enough money could do" and "trying to establish a monopoly at all costs", speed and agility are things you need. Unfortunately, that's the definition that most of SV seem to use. But if you're trying to push boundaries and do something new with experts in your chosen field? Not so much.
1) It gives you time to reflect on whether the direction you are going makes sense and is aligned with others.
2) It gives you time to sleep and exercise, which makes you more focused and effective at work.
3) It removes the illusion that you can ignore planning/reflection and just pour more hours into something in order to make it successful.
4) If you are demanding people work really bad hours as a matter of course, then that scares experienced hands away. Given that most employees won't see any payout from an exit, those with experience will demand to be paid in cash and will demand that much more if you expect long hours.
It took me too many years in the industry to figure this out. When I'm in "get it done" mode spanning consecutive long days, I do not think calmly or clearly enough to recognize the opportunities along the way that I could have taken to achieve my goal faster/better. Since realizing this, I cannot count how many times I have come in the next morning with new and better ideas and approaches after reflecting on the previous day's sprint during my own, calm, personal time.
No wonder why almost all of them go straight into the wall, head down.
More lile, every second you are not at your desk appearing to work. I've seen this in established companies in the US too, so it's not exclusive to startups
Working down to the bone, "every second", will lead to serious burn out. Your mental health suffers, as do your relationships.
I won't make any assumptions about who you are or how you work, but I tend to see this mindset from new blood who wants to get the edge over others. I understand this mindset, as it's very productive - like a short sprint - but it's not sustainable.
If you want to last the whole race, you need to pace yourself.
For you. I worked remotely for an American consulting company a while back and you were expected to be reachable during the business hours and respond in less than 30 minutes. If you missed that window more than once, that number shrank to 10 minutes. The turnover rate was high.
I agree with everything you're saying, but not all remote employers agree with us.
As long as you reply in your 30 minute deadline, i dont see how you still can't do what he's doing. I have my phone on me all the time and if there's an emergency or some sort of window where i must reply, i hop on the phone or go back to the desk and get it done.
That said, my reply wasn't intended to be a blanket statement of all remote workers.
One example of where it doesn't work is at U-Haul. A lot of uhaul customer service is people sitting at home glued to their computers, waiting for calls. There is no 30 minute window there.
My point was that it's not as impossible as the comment author made it seem. A balance between "riding in the park" and "answering my client within 30 minutes" is possible here.
While on one hand I am strongly against employee-abuse and working over an 8-hour day: I guarantee my employer that I'm available near-instantly for 8 hours straight (barring lunch) and I have my head down working during that time. Then I disconnect, and go love my family.
As such, my employer trusts me and if I ever did happen to disappear off on a bike into the forest they have no concerns I wouldn't handle my work. I call it an "honest 8", so they are guaranteed to get what they pay for with no concerns of me screwing off, and everyone is always on the same page.
All that said, I do not work well with mediocre people who don't try hard in everything they do, and put pride into their work. So I might be an oddball in the US, and fit in better with a less abusive, but more orderly, stringent society like Germany. Where coincidentally, most of my family came from to begin with so it may just be a difference in cultural norms passed down.
The headsets had a little pad that sat on your desk for changing volume, music tracks, accepting/cancelling calls. They were noise-cancelling headsets, had a flip-down mic that stowed in the headband out of the way when not in use, and had a push-to-listen where you press in on an earcup to cancel the noise-cancelling functions and hear what was going on in the office around you.
I think most employees worked with others from remote offices regularly, though I'm not sure how many actually worked from home. It just felt like a very seamless system that allowed everyone to be connected to each other.
To me it's clear that remote working is (should be) the way to go (why on earth tech jobs and consequently tech workers should cluster in small geographic areas, spend hours in commuting and feed our salaries to landlord rentiers is beyond my understanding). Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction.
PS: Of course RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore which makes the whole thing more of a mixed bag of blessings and curses - like everything else in life :) .
(1) I think the trend started off by M.Mayer's move to roll back RW in yahoo (<cynic>leading to the spectacular yahoo growth we all know of</cynic>) but I'm not sure.
I don't think so. Offshore comes with its own challenges.
Europe is still catching up with US in terms of outsourcing, specially from richer countries into the lower wages ones.
People who've made their careers as "non-technical people managers" have no. freaking. idea. what to do when you put them in a "remote office". They've gotten by with their free donuts twice a week, their wry smiles, their nice suit, their good posture, and their firm handshake all of these years and work makes no sense to them if you can't have these things. Reading technical mumbo-jumbo in a Slack channel and having to pretend to know what it means is their worst nightmare.
It seems that every technical organization these types touch quickly begins to adopt nonsense practices and make really dubious overall business decisions. Sometimes the manager/executive's connections can help give the company a kick in the pants, but it usually won't survive the new employees' MBA-informed directives too long before fresh MBAs come in to issue a fresh kick in the pants or someone competent eventually ascends (rarely happens).
The really scary thing about the MBA-types is that once you let one in, they invite their friends, and then they're impossible to extricate. Then you start getting "technical" people (read: management's buddy who fixes his computer on the weekend) getting big titles, pretending they know what they're doing and making technical decisions that are absolutely, criminally disastrous in the medium and long term.
Then they call their friends at the trade mag and get an article written about their new revelation, which starts a trend that a lot of normal tech people inexplicably try to copy. :|
The primary time that pattern is subverted is when a technical person gets overly concerned with appeasing a non-technical boss. That happens because the non-technical bosses want it to happen. They don't care about the engineering. They are trying to remake the technical side in their image, which is part of why they bring in the aforementioned weekend-computer-fixer and give him a fancy title like "director and architect". This makes it so that he doesn't really have to do much if any technical work because there is plausible deniability -- he can say he was busy doing "direction and architecture" so he didn't have time to write the code. Especially true if subordinates get added.
With non-technical types, successful interaction in the workplace goes from being half-about feelings and half-about demonstrable truths to being completely about feelings. To them, no arguments matter. For example, a non-technical manager or a faux-technical person will always be looking for ways to deflect blame because admitting you're wrong is weakness, it doesn't play well emotionally or superficially. If you want them to change something, you have to make it so that there is no possible superficial negative interpretation of their actions, and then you must show them why it's in their interest to do what you want them to do with emotions, because they don't operate in a world of rationality.
Technical teams are driven to improve their product even if there is blame involved or the possibility of a negative perception somewhere because there are actually consequences to failure or inefficiencies. The program will stop, the data may be lost, etc. Non-technicals don't have this type of real consequence behind their work.
For the non-technical MBA crowd, work is entirely a dance where you curtsy to the other entity's interest in authority, power, respect, and similar emotional expectations and (in)securities in the correct sequence. The dance program must be completed successfully. If it is, the other party rewards the participant(s) with a sum of money (aka "strippers and steak"); if not, offense is taken.
People from that world hate remote work because remote work takes away 97% of their dance floor. With few inflection points for emotional manipulation, they have practically nothing to work with. Technical people love remote work because it trims their "dance floor" down so that the emotional dance area is only there on the fringes, and the technical work can take what they feel is its appropriate place at center stage.
I'm not trying to wholly discount the emotional components that come into play in the workplace or say that they're necessarily wrong. But in work that comprises something more than pampering/nurturing the right feelings, it is obviously beneficial to minimize that aspect.
I think managing RW teams well (getting needed work and shielding members from most non-tech crap) is a pretty rare skill.
In any case, if you want to do X (work remotely) and your management sees this as a problem, not a solution, consider looking elsewhere.
I can't agree more, here's an article elaborating on the topic :
http://read.reddy.today/read/3/remote-teams-are-the-future-b...
This is, I think, because most management techniques don't rely on any sort of objective measurement to determine effectiveness.
Using measurements can have its own dangers if done poorly, but subjective observations and feelings about how productive or effective a team or individual is can be even more dangerous.
I've been on the receiving end of subjective judgements that have ruined a good team.
Besides, it's not a day by day review, it should be week or month. If you haven't produced any artifacts in a week or a month then...
You are more efficient when you work less (obviously, because you have an internal deadline that says you want to finish before your time is up), it is just that the culture surrounding software engineering is biaised towards long hours, half in which you are not really working or working with a terrible productivity, or worse, be in endless meetings. It also pleases management to work more hours, because you "work harder" :-).
People living far from office location were allowed to always remote work. However team members living in the same town needed a really good excuse to actually be able to do remote.
Why giving excuses?
I really think that for some types of work, for which you might have been hired for, being at the same office is important. Remote work is not easy nor for everyone and being able to work with remote team members neither it is. The easiest path is to have everyone at the office unless it's physically important to have someone you have in your team there.
Probably not. It would be available to those that are considered living too far away from the office. Those that work within a range that is considered close enough are expected to be in the office and attempting to negotiate that would take you out of consideration.
It's gotten much easier since Video Conference became ubiquitous but there is still no contest when comparing face to face communication to a Video Conference or Conference call. Now I happen to think the benefits of remote working outweigh that loss of bandwidth but I don't think you can make the case for it without acknowledging that loss of bandwidth.
A remote team is good at maximizing those benefits while minimizing the costs. But some people are just incapable of managing remote teams. I'm dealing with one right now and the pain is real on both sides.
This is so much truth.
The solution, I think, is for companies to properly define which roles are open to remote — perhaps it might be time for developers to receive a comp differential for being office-based — and to make work in the main office more appealing. Good food, a nice office, and other quality onsite benefits are ways this can be achieved.
[Disclaimer: I'm working remote now]
Sorry, but I've got to be the party pooper in this thread. I have worked with teams over the years that indeed DO work better co-located, and who ARE more productive when forced to communicate in an open office environment, etc. Night and day difference. When not in that environment they reverted back to the ol' "do something in isolation, throw it over the fence, wait days for feedback, then iterate" mode. I will stress that not all teams needed co-location, but many absolutely did.
This whole thread needs to be filed under the category "different people/teams thrive in different environments", because right now it's a "remote Work is best for everyone" echo chamber.
If its within team communication, and with slack/trello/github/standups and the team members are not speaking except every few days then thats an issue.
If its with external teams, then perhaps its an opportunity for self service api's or automation? I.e. let me query your api instead of having to meet with you. Understood that most cultures don't function this way but is there argument with the ideal?
The key word there is "forced".
Working remotely is great for ones health. Co-working is best for synergy and communication.
It's all about the balance.
Edit: I'm not sure "is willing to" is the right phrase. You have to have a brilliant PM, period. I've worked with bad PMs, no PM, and a few great PMs, and it really is night and day. A talented PM can make an organization sing.
The great thing about remote work, IMO, is that there is NO remote culture and therefore, you don't have to be subjected to the above as much or as often (the actual article sounds like some generic marketing speak to me about something that doesn't exist). It's one of the huge perks I only realized after starting remote work. Mind you, there are whole classes of people, especially many middle managers, whose only job is to create the above things and call them "company culture," and they are typically not so happy about not controlling those below them through abuses of this idea. Thus, they want to pull the remote workers back into their sphere of influence, where they can be controlled, and their jobs' existence justified.
As far as being off shored: if they thought that was a good idea to begin with, the company would have already done it and I wouldn't be working remotely. They probably also wouldn't be in business anymore.
Of course they want to, that's how they justify their existence. The question is do they need to have that constant ability to look over your shoulder for work to be done.
I don't think so, because the Queen probably didn't have the skills of an explorer. Great leaders have always delegated ;-)
So he had enough supplies for the journey he made, that part was actually planned. No luck involved.
A lot of people died doing things that way. A lot.
I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem.
Working remotely is awesome. All power to remote workers, but no amount of collaborative tools replaces the value of face-to-face communication.
f2f is way better for teambuilding though. Hard to go out to dinner together over Slack.
At least Slack allows editing of messages...
I have literally had colleagues complain that they were offended by the way I sat in my chair (and, I've since learned that at least one of my friends has been subjected to this same criticism at a separate workplace). Remote work strips away all of that inconsequential crap and leaves you to focus on the data.
This is one of the major unsung benefits of remote work: it removes a huge amount of office politics and allows employees to concentrate on working and think less about campaigning.
I've had colleagues resent me for not bringing enough free snacks into the office when I was in a supervisory role. Yes, really. Anything that can help mitigate that kind of thing is great.
When I'm having a rough day, I might be sitting there silently thinking negative thoughts about some situation I just dealt with through the computer. But if someone else exclaims some frustration aloud while I'm also in a bad mood then I'm more likely to join in on the bitch session. Eventually I realized how toxic the environment was, and I started working from home as often as I could get away with. Occasionally I was reprimanded for not showing up enough, but that led to an Office Space-like situation where I would show up just enough to avoid the hassle of "a talk."
My productivity at home was well over double (or in the office it was far below half, depending on how you look at it) and my outlook on life became a lot more healthy.
I can't tell you how many times being able to look something up to respond in a more concrete way has solved countless meetings.
Luckily, this company doesn't have many meetings, so it isn't a big deal.
Meetings can be valuable if people take them seriously (and if there aren't too many).
Clear agendas don't solve the problem of a bad agenda.
Meetings can be valuable but not nearly as valuable as peer to peer communication in the office. Meetings are almost always a waste of time where I work.
But when the questions and comments are not well expressed keeping the loop in text (email or Slack) makes the things worse. Obviously if you can just fire a voice conference everything can be sorted out but in my, just personal, experience remote workers are working more asynchronously and you don't expect to talk immediately without scheduling it earlier, much earlier than on-site where it is spontaneous.
Half of the time, you end up not sending the e-mail because you found the answer while organising your question.
Personally I like having things done in writing as you have something solid to refer to afterwards.
When you have a decision born of a conversation, the only useful thing to do is to write that distilled, focused result on some median other than the discussion itself.
This problem ultimately has little to do with remote vs colocated; The same applies whether the discussion happened in verbal discussion, a meeting, an email chain, messaging, etc.
But the main argument I am making here is not that virtual communication is superior to a human one. Rather I am saying that a vague notion of culture is all that ties remote workers to their virtual teams.
But maybe I badly phrased it here because what I call culture is also man-made.
Worked this way for 5 years. One of the best work experiences of my life. So I don't believe folks who dis remote working, if they've never tried this.
Less face-to-face interaction == less politics.
Emails vs. "face to face" - there's no need to actually be in a physical proximity for that conversation to take place.
As a single data point my experience as a hiring manager and allowing remote candidates allowed for a much higher level of talent to draw upon. Furthermore, I have had remote teams develop a great culture merely by turning on their cameras during the daily standup.
Finally, I also question the productivity of team building 'dinners' and other one-off activities. Having been part of teams with lots of corporate dinners and teams without its hard for me to really call out any specific value.
I truly do want to be convinced otherwise, but the strongest argument I have seen here so far is a vague 'Face to face is superior' when I have had great remote teams with cameras on. Anyone have a more data driven argument? Even if its a few data points?
the only thing i'd add/modify is i do like to meet up with everyone at least once every 12-24 months, usually in a town where a convention is happening.
note we don't actually go to the convention, which i think are largely pointless, but it's good to take advantage of when a bunch of colleagues are in town. that's when we bring the new hires in to meet the team and network with the industry at large.
1. "Onboarding + noob training". Sure, this can be done remotely but it's vastly more effective face-to-face especially when the tech isn't limited to the computer and there are "real life" gadgets involved in getting set up for development.
2. If the team isn't 100% remote it takes extra effort for those in the office to be "inclusive" so that remote folks are 100% up to speed. Just like with any extra effort in an already busy environment this doesn't always happen. Can't really blame them either - if a decision is made on the fly between two busy devs hacking their asses off and they rely on you seeing their PR to derive what they decided on that's just how things go sometimes.
The point is there are cases where face to face is preferable.
That's true, there is just a shortage of the job offers. I'm looking for a remote job now. All the job boards have between 2 to 5 job offers per day. To each of them answer thousands of people.
The aggregators are even worse. They are automated. That's why they contain an ad even when it has no remote allowed.
cheers.
You have to have a culture and technology that supports it, or else if you take that remote job, you're getting set up for failure.
If everybody else is having water cooler conversations, and making binding decisions based on them without email or chat, any remote employee is going to be constantly blindsided, and not rewarded by the organization.
I worked on one (and am currently working on another) highly distributed team, and the amount of whip-cracking that my manager had to do to make sure everything was documented and accessible to everybody on the team was incredible.
There is absolutely no excuse to not have remote jobs.
The technology is there, it wasn't ten years ago.
Now, it comes down to management setting strict guidelines and enforcing them.
What good is it to pay for Jira accounts when nobody uses them? Or what good is it to have Github and everybody ends up hosting their own private repos?
That is definitely a management mandate, and logistically, it's a lot easier to manage a group if they are all in the same place.
I'm all for remote work, and would love it to work for me, but the culture needs to be right to support it.
I absolutely agree with you though that the culture of making sure everything is done using those tools is the important part. You essentially have to give up most of the benefits you might get from some members being colocated and do everything as though you were all at separate sites.
E-mail, chat system, telephone, version control system, remote access were indeed there and are still enough for most use cases.
What was missing or not very good or reliable? Video chat and screen sharing, perhaps? I dislike the first, I find it almost doesn't bring anything positive compared to the phone but has drawbacks. And the latter makes me seasick.
Btw, Google/Facebook do not use distributed source control, and they are quite relevant.
The point is the communication tools. If you are not accustomed to jumping on chat with somebody with the same comfort as walking over and tapping their shoulder, it doesn't matter if you pay for VC software licenses.
If you talk to somebody in person, and then decide something and act on it, without looping the entire team in on the decision, then remote employees are going to feel like outsiders, even if you are paying money for email software.
I was talking about a job a while back where I would have been the first and only remote worker. What was a 'no' for me was that not only would I have to do my day job, I'd also have to be the one the pushed the remote agenda - which is a large job in it's own right. If there had been support to help the business migrate this way, then I'd have been more interested, but my feeling was that although they wanted me I'd always be the spare wheel causing additional effort for a whole team.
I operate an engineering team as a seed stage startup across 2 coasts of the US, multiple parts of APAC, and europe.
We are around 13 full time with a few part timers. We started as 2 people. Our first hire was co located with us. Our next one was remote.
From there we've made our hires only through referrals or our open source channel.
We did YC W16 this year as ~6 people and most of us remote. We've more than doubled the team after having raised nearly 3 million.
A few notes on what's worked for us:
Remote first office, no one (even if there is an office in your area) is required to come in (at all). We use https://gitter.im/ to interact with our open source community, partner companies, and team members.
Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well.
Some of us choose to for a separation of work and home.
We don't have job postings either. We do this on purpose. We tell engineers the same thing: Show up in our open source channel. This offends some people, but has worked for us. I won't claim this scales long term, but there have been fairly large companies (~800+) that have scaled this way just fine.
We've found productivity to be quite high overall. A lot less noise and very efficient communication.
Part of it is self management. The hires we make tend to have that part down pretty well. I've learned to spot bottlenecks. Part of that is just by keeping an eye on a lot of channels. Proactive reaching out if there are problems helps a lot. Periodic check ins are a must.
We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a standup.
For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching.
Happy to answer questions or expand on anything that sounds interesting.
Can you please elaborate on that?
We compare notes and see if interests line up. From there it's negotiations.
I've already seen their code and interacted with them for a few weeks by this point, so the interviews are painless and obvious.
One thing I make sure to do is be very clear/direct that we're a business. Here's how we make money, here's who our customers tend to be.
This demonstrates a few things to me:
1. You know our codebase
2. You can build things we need
3. I've already collaborated with you
4. You're proactive and interested in solving problems we would have for you.
5. You're able to collaborate with others remotely.
The key for the hiring on the open source component is, we use this in our daily work, and it's directly useful when people work on it.
The open source project itself is fairly popular though.
The easiest analog here might be something like a react js.
I definitely don't claim to have this generalize well, only that it's worked for us, and some companies do this to an extent. I'm not sure how many companies hook their hiring in to this though.
If more hiring engineering managers were aware of their open source presence, and who did what on there, it could make hiring more efficient.
We've had very good retention over the last few years, because there's some pre vetting that happens at the very minimum.
I'm currently looking at formalizing this in some form, but there's a trade off to how much formalization you do vs making the process inefficient.
Too bad I am not a java developer! :)
One of the things I wanted to do was avoid using a degree or "pedigree" as an indicator. I myself dropped out of my undergrad at a no name university in the midwest. I don't have "pedigree".
I'm also not a large believer in the way things are done in the valley (did 2.5 years, that was enough for me..).
This is my opinion, I don't claim this is fact, but I know again, this may offend some: A lot of the emphasis on pedigree, but there are a lot of dead startups with people who have degrees from stanford,mit, harvard etc.
It's a self perpetuating echo chamber with a lot of money flowing through it. The group think is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
I love the valley, and there are a lot of good things about it, but the perpetual group think with the larger part of the population is a problem.
That being said, I don't think I would found a company anywhere else. I tried 3 times in Michigan, and it's just a lot harder. I learned a lot quicker in the valley. You have to learn what to watch out for though.
Anyways:
I also live the same life style we hire by. I mostly travel. My cofounder is in san francisco. I travel all over different parts of APAC with an established office in tokyo. There's only 2 of us in japan right now though. A lot of us are in the apac "time zone".
I suspect Python would be fairly popular amongst companies looking to build deep learning based products.
We are going to interop with keras with our scala api: https://github.com/deeplearning4j/Scalnet
That will allow us to benefit from what that community is building in terms of neural networks. We want to be the "deployment path" for those kinds of models while we focus on making c++ on the jvm as fast as possible.
We basically focus on the hadoop and spark crowd. We're already the industry standard in java/scala:
https://tech.knime.org/deeplearning4j https://www.rapidminerchina.com/en/products/shop/product/dee... https://www.lightbend.com/blog/meet-deeplearning4j-and-bidda... http://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/dl4j-in-the-wild
>>> For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching.
This sounds like a pretty nice granularity -- glad to hear that it seems to be working out.
Most of the trouble I have with standups is the "daily" part...
Are there any downsides you've found to this kind of rhythm?
We try to keep most communications there so other people see what's happening too.
For business development we have "growth channel" that does the same thing, but for cross functional marketing and sales.
The week long projects do 2 things or us - it gives us the ability to reassess if someone needs help, and it forces people to plan a little bit.
Other than that, async communication throughout the week has helped a lot. That usually replaces the "walk up to desk" thing people do.
The key here is you're not expected to reply right away.
Of note is we do the hangout on Tuesday of the week.
This means you can get your act together on monday and prepare, tuesday we have the 1 meeting and
try to cluster other meetings around that (usually another hour at most) and then the rest of the week is free to get work done.
I'm thinking of making it a standing thing one day weekly to work this way. There's certainly a distraction tradeoff, but the communication bandwidth is just phenomenal.
Has anyone tried it?
Obviously people could switch off the screen or the feed if they needed to make a private call, or if they were taking a lunch break.
People talk about Hangout windows and so on, but I think having something you can glance at but not have right in front of you would be a better representation of current offices.
A big attraction of remote work to me is that I don't have the feeling of being overlooked while "in the zone" (which tends to mean that "the zone" never really happens). Video might actually be worse in practise than an open office. Could turn it off, of course, but it's the kind of thing that could easily end up as a "not a team player" flag in the modern software world.
There are things like PukkaTeam[1] which go for snapshots rather than video. Less bandwidth and perhaps marginally less intrusive, but still means people are looking at you...
This is the number one factor for me preferring remote work. Commute and housing costs are also attractive, too, but an on-site job would be fine if it came with a private office.
I became remote worker to get rid of all that synchronous crap, to work at my own times etc. none of these constant "pop-in-for-a-question thing"s
If something is really important call me, otherwise email/chat is enough.
Probably the main reason I want to get a remote job. Constant disruptions.
I love helping others, but being interrupted constantly is incredibly frustrating. It can wait until tomorrow.
The problem comes when you have people that don't work well under that model, and who need continual check points to ensure they really are doing the right thing, and that you haven't just wasted a bunch of time.
Getting these two groups to work together is hard, when sadly, getting great people is hard.
Having said that I agree also that there are also trust issues. Forming trust is a hard thing.
It's a shame, because programming (from at least my perspective) is one discipline, where the quality of work is so much higher when you are "in the zone" and can concentrate on a single task without interruptions.
My best decision was probably offloading team coordination to a dedicated "community manager". Even an undergrad working part-time and using mobile Slack / GMail can be trained in an afternoon and be 110% effective. The amount of bandwidth it frees up so you can focus on strategy and product is a Godsend ;)
I really, really prefer being able to shout out a quick question but the friction costs (and fear of interrupting deep thought) about calling someone, sometimes even a Slack message, prevents communication at times.
The times where I've been pairing or on a long call "in the background" have been great I thought. Any downsides for those who do this regularly?
Wrote about it here, if anyone's curious. Recruiting is a trail of tears: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tX...
In open-source, you have nearly perfect information: the contributors see the company's code and how they operate as a team; the company see the contributor's code, persistence, reliability and friendliness. And anyway, it's open-source, so everyone is solving their own problems for their own reasons, so they get something out of it in the end no matter what.
I think this is really overvalued: "communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a conversation".
Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working. This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next to eachother.
Communicating by text is also better because you never have to say/type the same thing twice. You never forget what a teammate told you because you can look up the conversation.
Company "culture" must be something for people who don't have families or friends. Personally, I don't get it.
I have worked remotely for 3+ years as a contractor. The last office I worked at involved a long commute even though I mostly communicated by Hipchat.
I don't ever see going into an office again unless it my my own leased space. Remote work is the future!
>>> This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next to eachother.
I probably fall into this category (actually, for a lot of "serious" things I prefer e-mail to Slack/Hipchat/whatever), but I'm not at all sure this applies to "anyone technical": there does seem to be another culture of technical folks who genuinely do thrive on open offices or "team spaces" and lots of discussion.
I don't think there's any environment that will keep everyone happy.
I wonder if we'll eventually see people sorting into distinct introvert-oriented and extrovert-oriented organisations?
Despite all the advances in technology for working remotely, face-to-face remains the best even for digital businesses. Facebook and Google are evidence of this: working remotely for these companies is the exception rather than the rule.
I think more than anything I just want freedom. I don't want to be locked into 8-5. Some days I want to work late and do stuff during the day (yardwork, appointments). I just want flexibility.
Yeah there are coffee shops. But really how much time are you going to spend working out of a busy coffee shop? Maybe 3 or 4 hours before you realize that you can't hear anybody on a conference call or you're irritating someone next to you who's studying for an exam.
There are also co-working spaces, which cost on average about 25% of what I pay for my apartment. Seriously, if you're thinking about working remote REALLY consider what you're getting into. Being stuck in 4 walls 8 hours a day does amazing things to productivity but is ultimately a fucking mental torture.
https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/
https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/
Whose fail? Gitlab's or RemoteBase's?
https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/
https://remotebase.io/company/gitlab/jobs/developer
So I suspect thats a remotebase.io issue. The links you're after are:
While it's being fixed, here are the correct links:
I'll take phone calls, answer questions from a script, whatever I have to do.
Also, what marketable skills should I focus on developing if I want to work remotely in an actual, skill-required job?
I'm not incompetent: I'm proficient in plenty of basic office software, I can troubleshoot/fix a computer, and I can type 90wpm. You know, the fundamentals.
Thank you in advance.
They ended up selling some of it, or downgrading because teams just stayed at the nicer satellites and some ended up getting poached by cunning recruiters and other internal teams.
Edit: The floorplan was pretty far out there and I think they were emulating some European layout. It was super dynamic, so people and teams could migrate between conference rooms, private enclosures, private shared offices, lounges, etc... as they needed or desired and remote conference to the main office. Though after some super important team that had the floor above us lost several key developers and admins to a local company , and people from the main offices were commuting to the satellite offices instead, they started selling off floors or closing off access.
You can start consulting / freelancing.
Or existing job can be made remote. Employer must trust you.
{ I own stock in Sococo }
I already look forward to living in a little house on cheap ground somewhere in the nowhere and do my fork from there :)
The author is probably talking about naive remote job seekers who focus on the job but don't consider the team culture. I was one such naive job seeker and used to think in that manner until a few years ago.
If I were to join a team of people I've never met to work remote there are too many subtle unasked questions in the background. For example, right now I have one guy I work with who I only met - and only briefly - after months of working together. I often was in doubt about Skype chats and emails, did I go too far? Was that humor appropriate? His response seems chilly, and he hasn't responded for 5 minutes now but until I said THAT he always responded right away, did I offend him?
You can just brush it off and ignore it, and it may work out - or it may accumulate under the surface until some day it explodes. Or more likely, it's going to fester below the surface and hinder communication: You are less likely to communicate and when you do then only the minimum when you are unsure of the other guy, even if it is just slightly. It really does not need to be a major disagreement, the small and sometimes (when remote, often?) imagined ones are that hurt.
It feels much safer to work away from others when you already feel safe about what will happen when you screw up, or when you make a mistake on the project or in the communication, when you understand the other side from experience. Otherwise imagination takes over, your brain fills the parts that are not visible in remote communication, and when it has no data to do so it will just fill in something, and if you don't feel extremely secure in yourself and in your relationship that may very well be small subtle fears.
The point the article is making (a point I understand really well, as a remote worker and a non-24 sleeper) is that a remote job isn't simply "do your exact same job, except do it at home". To actually have it work, you need to fully account for your remote employees. This affects your company, it affects work management, planning, execution, everything. It affects how the work is assigned, how it's prioritized, how the meetings are held. It completely changes the social aspect of the job, so that needs to be accounted for both from the employees' and employers' perspective.
Or you can just ignore all this, interpret the article's title however you feel like, and talk about salary. Whatever.
It does help that the office parts of the team are scattered between 2 offices in widely different time zones - people in the other office may as well be working from home. This is for a 24/7/365 support organization.