Our company’s remote work system failed
medium.com
medium.com
If management is clear, supportive, and attentive, then things are good.
As a leader, doing this is not easy.
There is often a thin line between being attentive, and being overbearing.
The same can be said for being supportive: helping employees through a rough patch is usually a wise move from a business perspective, but at the same time, you need to know when it's time to cut your losses.
That kind of decision is never easy to make.
And being clear and unambiguous requires placing some tough bets on direction and strategy: you are going to have to say "no" to a lot of tempting possibilities, because the alternative is to try and chase everything that comes your way (a pattern I like to call "Chaos Driven Development").
Organising the structure and location of the team to reduce overhead.
It's a bit like the many discussions we have here on HN around testing and/or static typing, or using frameworks, or full-blown IDE's versus plain text editors: it's a perfectly valid argument that given a good enough team or individual, we can do without any of this, but it doesn't really contribute or help much in many real-world situations where we don't have that luxury.
Chat systems for example like Slack to me are so much more productive than hunting someone down in an office. You are then forced to use that all the time which reenforces productivity in communication. White boarding still sucks remotely though until we have a holographic communication with 3d people on 2d whiteboards or VR.
I tend to be binary in that social interactions distract me so much that I fully engage in them, forgetting the work, tending to tell jokes and am less focused on getting work done although you get a comrade boost but I have such a strong family life that I don't really need that but it is distracting like a drug to me. That I don't have a need to be validated by social interactions at work probably is a huge factor of preferring remote along with not driving.
Alone, I can completely focus and zen out in music, literally getting weeks worth done in days compared to my coworkers having to drive to work which is 2-3 hours less out of your day when you add it up and robs you of energy and things like working out and having more hobbies.
For example:
> Assumptions and lack of documentation became obvious. [..] people reinvent wheel because they are unaware another team member has taken action already.
I can't see how this is related to working from home or not. If your employees aren't documenting what they do and relying on "face to face meetings" to check in on what they did, well, good luck with that, especially when teams start growing in size.
> People who didn’t come to the office missed out on things like ad hoc team lunches and dinners, discussions on the latest tech when a delivery arrives, tastings (wine, whisky, coffee, snacks, and a lot more).
Again: lunches and dinners aren't documentation tools. Missing out on snacks, wine, whisky? Really?
> Efficiency suffers. [...] there can be lags in responses that wouldn’t happen in the office.
"Lags in responses" are productive, imho. I'd rather keep on doing what I'm focused on doing right now, then answer to your question in HipChat, than be interrupted to address "whatever's on your mind".
Remote work will never replace face to face contact for jobs where high amounts of collaboration are needed, too many parts of the signal are lost.
Take for example a few jobs ago when our servers went down because of a local internet outage. The IT guy literally stood up from his desk and said "holy shit anyone that knows our infrastructure get in the meeting room now." We could hear the warning bleeps from the server room merging into an incomprehensible chorus, the death rattle of a company hours from implosion. The seriousness was obvious just from his actions and the sound of his voice. The response time was a few seconds.
How long would this take if we were spread across timezones with different hours and variable lag time between communication? If the internet is down is there any backup? How much would it cost to give every single employee a backup method of communicating? How does an employee separate a desperate please for help from the endless stream of BS emails and messages that aren't terribly important?
Working in one place gives you a very powerful and natural means of communication that's nearly instant and can't be stopped by any hardware or software failure, save multiple employees dying simulatanously.
For things that require physical presence, like IT, sure. Most people don't work on stuff like that. For those people, video meetings, slack, etc., can be fine for keeping in touch and having the entire team feel connected.
And, yes, having a working internet is the single point of failure for remote work. It's reasonable for the office to have redundant connections, but not for people. For the 16 years I've lived in my current place, I've probably not had a connection for no more than 24-48 hours.
Everyone running to a conference room -- feels very Michael Scott to me -- and almost always just as unnecessary.
I wonder about those who claim face-to-face is best explain how Github and Basecamp seem to do just fine. Others point to how Yahoo eliminated remote as some kind of argument supporting same, yet I'd hardly consider Yahoo to be a good example of anything. If "good enough for Yahoo" is an argument, then count me out.
Unless you physically have to touch something, remote can always work (and even be better.) It's a question of establishing processes that work. The 'genre' of remote isn't the problem -- it's always the implementation.
Most of us work in Europe, but our ops team has been created specially to be distributed across timezones. They have rotating pager duty, as you do.
If I am fixing our staging setup, which is not customer can access data with 99.85 uptime required but still can halt team of 50 devs to a halt especially during release-testing, it is ~5 mins to get somebody to help \w slack/irc/e-mail.
> If the internet is down is there any backup?
Internet? No. But we do have several VPNs. Getting someplace where there is internet was reasonably simple so far.
> How much would it cost to give every single employee a backup method of communicating?
Hey, if there is real trouble, I can always call my manager.
> How does an employee separate a desperate please for help from the endless stream of BS emails and messages that aren't terribly important?
We are split into sub-teams, where the 3-8 people you are closely working with would definitely read your message.
having an option of your servers going down because of a local internet outage is a luxury your company had. As you correctly point out, a company with remote employees spread across timezones just wouldn't be able to allow themselves such a luxury, and to me it sounds like a good thing. It makes people and company think and work in a distributed fault tolerant way.
That's not a great example, because that's a problem that's already caused by over-centralizing. If you used colocated servers or cloud hosting, that doesn't sound like a local Internet outage would have been a problem.
More broadly: at some point, every successful company will need to handle workflows of people who aren't in the same physical space. It's much easier to bake these habits in as a small company and grow with them than it is to retrofit them onto a company once it needs to open a second office in a different city or country.
Especially if most of the employees in the new office are new, I don't think it's much or any real work needed to teach people to work with remote employees.
I'm just arguing that decentralizing has a fixed cost of more difficult communication, not something you can save up for or build into your company from the start.
Let me start by saying that I'm not speaking hypothetically. I'm speaking from experience here, having worked for companies both remotely and not-remotely, and seeing where that's succeeded and failed.
It is actually difficult to make that adjustment, because working in the same space breeds a lot of bad communication habits which don't scale.
Working remotely from the start, you end up being forced to document work (even minimally), or to make decisions over a medium that is readily archive-able like email or Slack[0]. This is particularly true if you're working across timezones, even a small difference like east/west coast in the US (3 hours). Reading through an email thread to reconstruct history isn't the ideal form of company documentation, no, but it sure beats not having it at all because all of the discussions happened in real-life and nobody felt the need to send out an email afterwards to formalize it.
If you develop a collective habit of never making important (or irreversible) decisions without some sort of asynchronous and archiveable communication, and always having canonical internal documentation and runbooks for internal systems (because some of the the people who may need to operate them are working different hours), you don't run into the situation where your company has suddenly hit 300 people and needs to open an office in Europe, but can't break the bad habits of relying on information held in people's heads and exchanged in ephemeral, synchronous form.
[0] Lest anyone misinterpret what I'm saying: Slack is emphatically not a replacement for proper documentation. It can, however, be a helpful forcing function to bootstrap proper documentation, and it serves that role far better than meatspace interactions or even video conferencing ever do.
What "ever"? It has already replaced that for thousands of companies, including some valued at billions...
>People forget, humans are not machines.
Thankfully there's this great new technology called IM, where they can ask somebody (and in an even less intrusive manner than directly disrupting their flow going to their desk to talk to them).
I would also argue that McDonald's employees require a large amount of collaboration, but this is built into the operating processes of the company, not face-to-face contact.
On my remote team this has happened 3 or 4 times during production outages. The situation was nearly identical, except for lack of physical server room (we use AWS). Someone wrote an @team message in Flowdock, "Things are broken, we need a war room." Within seconds, people were in a video chat room. Within minutes (or, in one terrible case, hours), the issue was resolved.
The way everyone knew it was serious is because we rarely use @team-mentions and rarely call "war rooms". Also, our automated monitoring was firing and triggering pagers in PagerDuty for the on-call engineer, the log of which was also plainly visible to everyone in our Flowdock Inbox.
So yes, your example here is a nice one, but a strawman. Remote teams know how to take outages seriously.
If you're giving Yahoo under Marissa Mayer as an example of good management, your company was doomed from the start.
Don't work from coffee shops. That's just a bad idea anyway, as your CSO will tell you.
> Three days at home and you feel like a loner.
Nope. I work from home 4 days out of 5, and I'm constantly in communication with my workmates. I also have friends outside of work. Even then, I like being alone. Don't hire autophobes to work remotely!
> Face-to-face meetings are most efficient
I hear people say this, but rarely do I see evidence. Informal face-to-face meetings often end faster, but they often leave important issues unexamined. Face-to-face meetings also prevent everyone from working when they're happening. With email and even instant messaging, I can participate in a conversation even if I'm not available when somebody else wants to start it.
> Technology is always iffy. In meetings, it boils down to Wi-Fi speeds, audio quality, and lags
Learn to use text to communicate. IRC/Slack works fine over slow connections. Plus, the minutes write themselves!
> Remote work doesn’t allow for quick adaptation or response to ad hoc issues.
Your remote workers should have phones. Reserve them for when you actually need to contact them urgently and they won't just ignore them.
> Some PMs are understanding of time zone differences and ad hoc travel reschedules while others prefer fixing meeting times and office hours.
This is a problem with your PMs. You can't have remote working whilst allowing PMs to run projects in a way that's not compatible with it.
> Balls are dropped or people reinvent the wheel because they are unaware another team member has taken action already.
Anyone who's worked in an office will know that also happens in an office. It's important to have a method of tracking what work is being done, or not being done, whether or not everyone is in the same office, unless your company is 3 people sitting around the same desk.
I think it may be the business model that is to blame here, not the policy to allow remote workers or schedule time for in person visits. Some models probably work with remote workers. Some probably don't.
I'm willing to put my money on the one's that do work with remote workers are non-viral models, enjoy a healthy holistic growth, and encourage focus on quality of life vs. access to unique skills in the workforce.
The reverse is true of highly viral models. Those models enjoy rapid growth, large cash injections, highly competitive workforce, optimizations for infra, sales approaches, etc.
This article has good information, given it's taken in context.
Does that company have documented procedures that are followed and kept up-to-date, or are new hires trained via lore?
Not to quibble too much, but as with everywhere, this depends on the office culture. It's depressing but there are many places where people prefer to use Hipchat and Slack to ping a nearby coworker rather than bother to take off headphones to talk to the person several feet away.
I'm not sure this is bad in an absolute sense. If I'm working on something, the semi-asynchronous nature of chat (assuming disabled notifications) allows me to answer questions when it makes sense for my workflow.
Generally, confining in-person chats to blocking questions seems like a reasonable thing to do.
I do that, because that way my colleague can address my query at his convenience, rather than at my own. If we need to, we can then hit a conference room (or go into one or the another's office, if our employer didn't have a godawful open plan office) to discuss.
Sometimes the message will be "Lunch?" and we'll flap our meat to make noise on the walk over to said lunch, during said lunch, and back from said lunch. Or the carpool to/from work.
Nothing depressing about it.
Everyone is still big on the social part - most people all you need to do is ping then when you want coffee or tea and you'll get a message back or have someone at your desk ready to go in a moments notice. Once in awhile though, you get nothing until hours later, which is just a "busy" signal. (no one bothers with statuses since they either forget or no one pays attention anyways).
An interesting aspect of primate dominance rituals at companies with too many managers is demonstrating dominance by asking someone of lower caste to ask someone for you, and the top dog wants proof by a screenshot or forwarded email or whatever, not "yeah I talked to him and he said...".
Operational concerns about demarcations apply too. "I gave that customer problem to XYZ when I passed him in the hallway" is too unprofessional and results in poor customer support. I gave that customer problem to XYZ in written email format is very hard to "accidentally" lose or forget.
It's just that I can drop off a question, come back later to read the answer, we both have time to think about it, etc
We've found it works best when:
Near timezone- Remote people are in the same or near timezone as the home office. This makes it easy to align the work day, schedule meetings, etc.
Remote shared location- making sure a group of people who work remotely have access to a shared location where they can work together has worked far better than people working from home, coffee shop, etc.
Culture- as I write this I'm in a large open floor plan style office. All of the lead devs are chatting away with their team members located in Canada and S.America. We love the ability to pull people in easily and work as though we are all here. Frankly, we talk to the "remote" people in video chats more often than many of the people in other departments. When the day's over we head home to families, sports, etc.
It doesn't work if..
-Your culture stresses in-person interactions during and after work.
-You don't have a culture of trust.
-Your company won't pay for great communication apps & technology including lots of monitors.
-Your team works at home and is distracted by kids, spouses, etc, etc.
Frankly as tech gets better I think that one day the idea of moving to a large city like SF, Austin, NYC, etc for work purposes will be seen as ridiculous, outdated and needlessly costly. Likely there will be shared office hubs in small-to-medium sized cities around the world where people can work with other people in similar remote hubs.
- requires more management, not less
- requires more documentation and communication, not less
- can be equally as expensive (all-in) as colocating.
If you're going remote because you think you don't need to manage people, don't care about documentation or process, and want to save money, you are throwing your company away.
How much management does it take to run an office? "Office Managers" are a thing. They aren't even managing projects.
I don't yet understand how remote work can be as expensive as colocating - perhaps in an extreme circumstance? Surely not in general. Perhaps if you're having your remote people travel several times a year to meet up, but that's optional and depending on the area of the world the office would be, it could still be cheaper than the travel.
Of course you still need to manage people, but in my experience it doesn't take more management, just more discipline. If your people aren't disciplined enough to care about documentation or process or communication, you are throwing your company away.
Daily Scrum, Jira/ticket tracking, Hipchat/slack are are essential tools whether you are remote or in the same physical office.
Prediction: those working remotely will leave or stop working remotely. If everyone else is local and the major form of communication is to drop by their desk, anyone remote will be out of the loop most of the time. That sucks.
Working remotely is a totally different mindset, with different tools, different ways of communicating. When you have NO options to get together in person, you must develop the tools and techniques to make your communications work. These guys gave themselves an out, so they never had to do that.
You're totally right that being distributed forces a company to develop different skills. Electronic communication becomes primary. You have to work hard to eliminate "privileged" information channels (because they de-privilege everyone else.)
I wasn't too impressed with the level of introspection in the article. It seems to be one of those "CEO's Medium article as marketing" bits.
I've seen it described as the difference between "remote friendly" and "remote first".
It's interesting.
Many proponents of remote work point out how much more effective it makes them.
The thing is that really doesn't matter. The thing that matters is how well the team works.
I'm a big proponent of asynchronous messaging when things aren't needed immediately. BUT there are times when immediate answers are needed, and the fact that this breaks someone's concentration is less important than keeping the team working smoothly.
Incidentally, this is a good way for people to actually take phone/voice calls seriously - when they're rare, it really means it's important.
I'm unconvinced.
I'm far from an advocate for pair-programming, but nevertheless I have seen how well it can work. It seems to me that that "shared brain" deep and rapid communication is extremely synchronous.
I wouldn't argue that it is required 98% of the time, but I also think that it being unnecessary 98% of the time is a exaggeration (if we measure based on the team's overall output somehow. Measuring it is of course impossible, but as a though experiment..)
This is true to a point, but is exacerbated by the current fashion for building software in ways that depend on very fine-grained collaboration around small tasks (and, more generally, the idea that teamwork is the only valid way of working on many problems). Coarser grained approaches are possible, and it's not too hard to find examples of them succeeding (e.g. many of the more traditional open source projects).
One person's experience is not a compelling argument against remote work. Thanks for sharing though!
That's why if you want to work remotely, it's best to do it in an all remote setup that's fair to everyone.
>> less than 10% annual turnover for people who pass probation
Or maybe I just lack empathy for this situation because I have never been fired.
A lot of people prefer the distraction free work environment, but I would argue that LOC/hour or developer velocity but not be what is best for the entire team. If everything is isolated and everything has deep domain knowledge, heads down can work fine. When that is not the case, it requires a lot of active investment in over communicating between local/remote people and explicit use of lots of tools.
If the business prefers everyone local, they have to also acknowledge that along with the ad hoc sharing and other benefits, there are also downsides. I've worked at top 5 internet properties where you ended up being in 6 hours of meetings a day. A lot of developers also find it hard to concentrate in a fully open space. The business needs to recognize this and provide smaller, team based areas that are separate from everyone else. They also likely need smaller isolated rooms for people who work best in a quiet and distraction free environment.
I think the thing that I've seen missing in all of these discussions recently is that it has been very I centric. "I hate open floor plan." or "I tried remote workers at my business". This narrative needs to acknowledge that a project/product team is a group of people and compromises will be needed by everyone if the team is to be its most successful at adding value for the business. Well, at least I think so...
The key is that you must work in documented process flows like ITIL, change management, service requests, incidents.
If everyone does that then it's trivial for any manager to get oversight. Problem is that a lot of very smart and driven people hate being penned up like that.
My experience of remote work is that a lot of managers are naturally distrustful and have a tendency to set very short (unrealistic) deadlines (to make sure that they get all of the employee's hours) - This forces remote workers to either work crazy hours or rush things and produce lower quality work.
Over time, the managers become acclimatized to the lower quality code and their expectations for development speed go up. The number of bugs in the system increase and developers spend more and more time fixing other people's bugs.
The ironic thing is that fast developers tend to get all the new features while the cautious ones are the ones who end up having to fix the bugs (produced in a large part by the fast developers).
Would you say that local team dev work does not require a manager, or local team dev work can be achieved with a manager that lacks communication, psychology, and technical skills?
It doesn't seem too notable to me that, for a grand total of four people, they ended up preferring not working remotely. Meanwhile the article suggests that it's at least a decent sized company that tried this and something catastrophic happened as a result of it, which is what I was expecting going in.
Of course. Nearly everyone prefers just walking up to a colleague.
However, nearly everyone also prefers that colleagues not just walk up to them.
It requires discipline to say "sorry, can't help you" and to accept that response and go back to working on the problem on your own.
1 - Do ask questions through Slack, etc
2 - Do make sure you're responsive and if you're not don't complain people come and ask you directly
More important is to understand how async communication works. Otherwise, you have to create a physical boundary (remote work) to enforce this.
That's why I still fundamentally prefer e-mail (with a sensible set of mailing lists and an easily browsable archive) for serious decision making. IRC or Slack are great for building a community atmosphere but best reserved for more ephemeral things.
Also anyone that needs to be in a conversation is in the Slack already. File sharing, code sharing -- all that is much easier than email. With Threads -- conservations are more focused and organized. In-chat images are also super simple (as opposed to sharing actual images or links to images that require clicking as in email.)
I despise email and hate phone calls even more.
I think the 'problem' with Slack is how some people use it. The 'expectation' of a quick answer isn't Slack's fault.
We've been growing like crazy and things have been going well. The important thing is to make an effort to level the playing field between remote and local workers. It also helps that parts of our leadership team are also remote.
I believe success with remote work requires having the right kind of company culture. Everyone has to be aware of the pitfalls of remote work and have the tools, knowledge, and gumption to avoid them.
Some people end up not being able to swing it and others thrive. The biggest advantage we have had is being able to hire from a much larger talent pool.