Remote work: 6 months later
tailordev.fr
tailordev.fr
Years of socialization training stemming from childhood to gauge whether it's really worth interrupting people. I do enjoy the opportunity to do remote work, but even in the office, I'm finding an unstated expectation that I should always have a second pair of eyes on my slack notifications. It's not really consistent to praise the elusive "in the zone" state where developers get their most productive work done, and simultaneously expect that they should break what they're doing to bucket the importance of every little IM. The need to walk over to another person when you have something important to say, and use your human senses to determine whether this person should really be distracted for what you think is important at the moment puts the onus and effort of distraction on the asker where I think it best belongs.
I'm still not sure how to deal with this, because everyone does it so I'm the weird one for finding it rude and disruptive to the conversation. The only thing I've come up with is to politely ask the people I interact with regularly and the people close to me to not check their phone during a conversation we're having.
(interestingly enough this usually sparks a conversation where they also express a dislike of constant interruption...)
If someone sends you a direct message they have the option to interrupt you if it's really important.
That's a minor thing but 'Zzz' really sends the wrong signal to the sender: if you are not available, then you are sleeping (i.e. unproductive).
Other chat systems offer the ability to attach a message to your AFK status, which can be pretty helpful for setting expectations about when you might be back. Last time I looked, Slack seemed kind-of resistant to doing anything like that.
Working remotely, is that a bad thing? If you are unavailable due to deep coding or a need for a nap does it matter?
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/214908388-Do-Not-Di...
It may seem different on the surface, but it really is the exact same communication as you would have in person... you just need to ask. And much of the time, real-time responses aren't truly necessary... so you can just IM someone a question, and know they'll get back to you when they can.
I don't want my phone to notify me immediately every time a team chat message goes through. Direct hangouts messages have a higher "weight" and are useful sometimes, too, though.
Basically, this is just a cultural problem that needs to be worked out. Sort of like the (usually) understood idea that you shouldn't disturb a person wearing headphones and working.
No, it's absolutely not like that. The use case for "not dropping messages" is that you send a message and know they received it. You don't have to remember it manually, you don't have to introduce another chat system just to asynchronously remember to resend messages later. The other guy can respond at their convenience. Dropping messages would make the application a critical failure for any serious business uses. There are lots of features to mute notifications per room or for time durations.
Having multiple chat systems is ok, if they actually serve multiple purposes.
I make about 20% more money (before tax) than on my last job.
I save 1h every day on commuting, which I had to do on my last job.
I buy my food in my local store, which is much cheaper than buying food in the city.
I have my "own" office, without any people talking, getting sick, etc.
I probably could improve things a bit, by moving into a cheaper city, but overall I'd say, remote work has made my life much better.
The ?? $1k I saved per month is not worth all the good stuff I lost from the city (but it depends what you value)
For example, Berlin is much cheaper than Munich.
I'd never move to the coutryside again. I'm just no small-town guy.
I got almost double the house size, and 1/2 of grass to call my own... but now I can't walk anywhere, and life is too short to spend it on a mower. Plus I now spend a ton to take care of my house/yard, and I need a car, etc. etc.
Big city life is the way to go ;)
I'm living with a friend who also works from home, so I get a bit "kitchen-talk" every day with him.
Also, one of my girlfrieds is working shifts, so this gives me the opportunity to work from her place, when she works late, so we can still see us and talk a bit. The other one works near her flat, so when I work from there, we can go to lunch together.
How many girlfriends do you have? ;)
Two at the moment and I don't know how I could do it, if I had to be in office 40h a week.
Both of them live 20-bike-minutes away from me.
For instance, I work in a co-working space where other co-workers are either remote or freelance. I chose a co-working space that is not IT-specific, which is even better. So I have sort of colleagues there, we discuss about many things, sometimes about our respective jobs/works, but most of the time about life in general.
I work 70% of my time at home and 30% where I just happened to be :)
But I got the best equipment (table, PC, chair) at home, so I prefer to work from there.
Building app stacks, games, trying out new things, talking to people about it :)
o/~ Move to SV, move to SV, move to SV sure there's some poo on the streets but...move to SV. o/~
Many companies run remote fine. Schedules allow people to be home with their kids when needed, no commute over head for most. Emphasis is on self management. Communication is async. We have 1 stand up a week.
We have 1 weekly standup at 3:00 PM PST which is ~8am Japan Time (where I live). All of our messaging is async. Most people manage themselves. Tasks tend to be longer sprints.
Half of our team has kids. Work is more independently scheduled. We all collaborate asynchronously.
We use gitter for all of our communications. The reason for this is customer support, user support, team chat, all in 1 place. It works fairly nicely.
All of our communication is remote first. This means most things happen via text or hangout.
Our business development is split in 2 main time zones. "Asian timezone" and "US timezone". Many of us fly.
Marketing material gets cross pollinated across language and time zone via 1 shared folder. (Language is important due to selling in japan,korea,china, and parts of the US).
I usually come back to the US every few months for conferences to try to keep touch.
I also get on a call every other day or so with my cofounder during his afternoon and my morning to make sure things stay in sync across time zones.
We started as 2 people in San Francisco.
Does anybody else have any other tool that they would really recommend for a remote team?
I've had to work with a french dev that only wanted to write emails in english and refused to speak it on the phone, maybe because his office mates could listen.
A francophone boss that was so overconfident in his english ability, that he considered using "yeah" instead of "yes" as rude.
You mistyped Mattermost :)
Seriously, no reason to share all your company inner workings with a random 3rd party when it takes literally 5 minutes to set up a completely private (and also free!) clone of the same.
I have a work phone that I take with me when I am on-call or on a customer site. Slack (or whatever we decide to use) absolutely has to work here.
I might trust Github more simply because their entire product and value proposition is built around the use case of storing code while some company that builds a restaurant app -- their primary business isn't building code storage infrastructure. So why add operational overhead because of unfounded paranoia?
Unless you're running your own metal in your own data center, there's always 'risk.' Even then, if your system is connected to the internet there's still risk.
Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that hazard occurring. Then mitigating that risk in a way that is commensurate with those variables.
I'm not bashing GitHub, but some people find more value and less risk in using git in its "native" distributed mode.
Risk analysis: using online DVCS/bugtracker/chat service you are one compromised password away from letting an attacker read the whole contents and potentially alter them. Many of those passwords will be stored in browser. Browsers are known for being softer targets compared to servers, generally speaking.
Contrast this with an on-premise services: You still have login credentials but also require people to badge-in to access the building and login on the desktops or start a VPN (often requiring creds and 2fa).
When self-hosting you have to care about your service-level agreements and trouble solving. If you rely on it you quickly need a growing IT/operations team. sometimes it's cheaper to pay somebody how is specialized on this. Of course one has to evaluate the company, with the ones which make money from selling information (to advertisers) I'd be more critical, but that's a matter of evaluation of options.
Now, just like GitLab, it is a very serious thing and we consider using it instead of relying on a 3rd party. Yet, we are a very small team and cannot dedicate too much time in maintaining/upgrading apps :\
Just look up Digitalocean or Bitnami.
Rather than 10 people writing "agree" one can react and others can click the reaction similar to an upvote. That cuts down considerably on the noise so yes, I'd say it enhances professional communication.
But they're also doing consulting. What if one client adds them to HipChat and another to Skype? Three offices this way?