> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work
There are enough companies out there with remote employees and even remotely distributed teams to disprove the assertion that "remote doesn't work".
There are enough companies out there with remote employees and even remotely distributed teams to disprove the assertion that "remote doesn't work".
I met a whole bunch of people who want to be a dev because it pays well. Most of them need constant supervision.
Society has to accommodate for workers that bomb interviews and that you would never hire on your team even if your particular company has the luxury of pretending they don't exist.
Most people aren't inherently motivated by their jobs, and I'd say this applies even more in office settings. Work is work, "work / life balance" exists because work is the obligation that pays for life. If this is indicative of how America as a whole feels, then this has everything to do with remote work.
Anecdotally, if the work environment is healthy (i.e., not open office trash), I think everyone benefits. I personally think remote is a good option if collocation is not possible--but not preferred.
Have you met kids? Many (most?) of them have an innate curiousity which is not hard to channel into a passion for learning given they get to learn things they enjoy, and if you tell them how well they're doing, they can get quite competitive about doing better.
Self-motivation wasn't instilled by a system of proscribing to kids what and how they had to learn, but that doesn't mean a system can't be built around nurturing it.
I myself try to hire for devs that don't need supervision because we're all adults here and being a nanny isn't something I'm interested in. I prefer trusting others to do their work in a timely manner, and if that trust is broken, we move on.
The first few weeks will tell you if they're going to work out or not, and if not, it's better for all involved to move on quickly. They will either perform their duties as an adult, which includes working without constant oversight, or they won't. And if they can't do so, out they go before the probationary period is over, because you can't train someone to care.
One source of variability: some care about impact on coworkers, some don't. Guess who will upset you more. Intrinsic/extrinsic is orthogonal to this.
Sounds like you got intrinsic and extrinsic mixed up, at least unknowingly.
I know, I work remote with people in 4 continents across 6 timezones. It simply doesn't work.
You can't teach people, you can't train people, you can't show anything over a phone or a chat.
On top of that, as soon as you have different timezones with little to no overlap. You cannot synchronise or work with your colleagues at all.
Remote work and remote teams should be limited to people who are already senior, fully autonomous and experienced. And even there, it's a constant battle and it takes a lot of self discipline.
I can concede that remote work doesn't work for everyone. I'll even concede that remote work is probably not ideal for most software engineers and the companies that employ them, even in "high tech."
But I'm going to draw the line there. The team I work with is entirely distributed, between the east and west coasts. For most of my career across several companies I've worked remotely. It works spectacularly well for us because we are all very motivated and have the self-discipline to complete our work according to deadlines.
I have also worked remotely on a team where one person was across the Atlantic. I admit that was a bit more of a struggle because we were frequently not online at the same time, but it wasn't a deal breaker in the end either.
Remote work probably doesn't work for most teams because the teams are very large and the work process requires a lot of synchronous communication. But it's really disingenuous to use a caricature of remote work (distributed across several time zones where heavy mentoring and synchronous communication is required) to say it simply doesn't work as a concept.
When there are people in Europe, Asia, Russia, Australia, it gets a lot harder.
The criticism is more about working across time difference than just remote.
P.S. Mentoring is always required, unless you only hire the most experienced people you can find. Communication is always required, unless you work on trivial problems.
Out of curiosity, what do you work on?
For you. I work in an office where some team members are remote. If something is urgent, you have to consider what's urgent about it. Is it you feel unable to proceed without discussing a topic face to face? If so, you are the problem , not remote work. I'd argue that 99.9% of things people claim are urgent, aren't urgent and could wait 8-10 hours.
Remote work is diffeeent to office work. If you treat asynchronous programming the same as synchronous programming, you're gonna have a bad time. If you design your work and your environment around remote work, it can and does work.
I'm going to challenge that. If you need direct, synchronous, face-to-face communication in order to teach or train, I have to question the quality of your documentation. I would also question whether the people with whom you are engaging in direct face-to-face communication are being trained adequately. For many people, verbal communication isn't the most effective way of teaching. They would rather have a written document that they can refer to, over and over again, as they learn whatever it is they need to do.
Prove me that you can have a conversation with someone who's 8+ hours away and sleeping when you are awake.
Prove me that you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, knowing he's never used a profiler before. (That's one of the thing I had to do last week).
There are remote-only outfits, and they do fine - at least as well "We're not getting any work done because we're in an open plan office and we can't hear ourselves think" outfits.
But hiring policy is an issue, and so is PM. It needs people with a compatible attitude, and that includes management.
It's not that remote is a panacea, but it shouldn't be a showstopper either. There are plenty of productivity killers in non-remote work styles too.
What do you professionals do? They work with other professionals and progress with each other.
What do you do with the world class experts you have? Make them work with other world class experts to make the impossible possible. Again, lots of collaboration and interactions needed!
For anything non trivial or not explained by a stack overflow answer, the "go learn X by yourself" could easily take weeks to years, whereas it could be explained in a few days with face to face interactions.
The "can't hear ourselves think in an open plan" are dysfunctional organisation. Of course, a lot of things do better than that, including other dysfunctional organisations. Let's have a better point of comparison than that ;)
I mean the world was educated through text for over a millennia. It works.
I would replace text with mentors
The original point I was trying to make is you don't have to be "in the office" to learn programming stuff.
You seem to be suggesting that "collaboration" and "interactions" are things that necessarily can only happen synchronously and via richer media than text. Even if you want to move away from OSS as an example, I'd point towards the centuries of intellectual discussion that took place via hand-written snail mail letters.
Is in-person communication faster? No question. Is it the only way to effectively communicate ideas as part of a two-sided discussion? I should hope not.
What's the context of the conversation? That's really important. Of course you can't have a conversation with someone who is sleeping.
Equally you can't expect a well thought out response from your colleague when you are sitting over their shoulder asking them questions, wheeeas you will get that if you give them time to respond.
> prove me you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, ...
Again, why? In that case surely it makes sense for: A) you to do the task (as you colleague can't use a profiler)
B) your colleague to learn to use the profiler. If your job is to teach someone to use a tool over the air, then yes you have a very valid point. If it's mot, then you tell them to earn how to use a profiler or you'll do the task and they should tackle something else instead
That sounds dysfunctional to me. What's the point in having co-workers, teams, company if I am on my own for everything? What's gonna happen when I get hit by a bus? What's gonna happen when another guy get hit by a bus and noone knew anything he was doing?
No. Every problem comes down to "there's a problem that needs to be solved".
6 hours is about the limit to still have a bit of overlap. That's London-Houston for me.