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Comment by pweissbrod | Hacker News Reader

The key to being a successful remote worker is a foundation of trust. Its unfortunately Human Nature to assume the worst when a remote contact is unreachable when you need them . Therefore it's crucial to establish a reputation where your co-workers trust you to do the right thing connected or not. The moral of the story is not about abusive bosses or misaligned corporate goals. It's just about maintaining that crucial level of trust in the team. And it's a two-way street . Both manager and employee play a an active part. Personally I would never hire a remote worker I could not confidently trust nor would I work for a place that didn't implicitly trust me

Edit - I've been a remote worker for over 10 years and will likely continue as long as I possibly can

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I find managing upwards is the best way to deal with these situations. I've had micromanagers before and no one enjoys that random "hey wheres X at?" question so what I do is give status updates every so often. I avoid the stressful question entirely this way.

It makes your managers life easier and yours as well and allows you to give updates on your time instead of theirs.

This works remotely and in person. I work my face off a lot of times so it's valuable to turn the tables and not get caught in the middle of something with a question that can take me out of work flow.

At the end of the day, managing people is very hard. Transperency works very well for me.

I can't stress how good the above comment is at dealing with this. As a long time manager, people that behave this way are a total joy to manage.

Also, if you have a smartphone and your company uses slack, there is no reason to be unreachable, unless you are in a deadzone of cell reception or driving. But, if you practice the above, it shouldn't be an issue. For example, a post to #OOO: hey, running an errand for the next hour, offline.

> if you have a smartphone... there is no reason to be unreachable

It is totally fine to be unreachable nights and weekends[1] without providing notice to your employer; being able to detach from work completely from time to time is key to minimizing burnout risk, and what you do on your own time is none of their business.

[1] With the exception of formalized support rotations, of course

I certainly hope parent poster meant being reachable during working hours.

Never assume management's expectations.

I meant regular working hours.

Being unreachable during core business hours is definitely a huge problem from the perspective of the non-remote employee (me) who's in the office for the typical eight hours a day trying to get something done and being blocked by a coworker who's unreachable because they're remote. If you a remote worker, the onus is on you to never let the fact that you're not in the office become a burden on your coworkers. If you end up being harder to work with because you're less reachable then your coworkers will begin to resent you for it, and that doesn't lead down a good path.

If you're not online and available during the expected business hours for your position then you're not really doing 100% of your job, because you're not able to assist your team members as is expected of your role.

Note that this applies to members of standard software engineering teams, and not necessarily to contractual work that involves delivering products on certain timetables but not necessarily close collaboration with a team.

Lots of places offer flexible business hours, even for people coming in the office. Not everyone always takes lunch at the same time either. Even people in the office are not 100% available all the time. Your attitude towards remote workers seems unnecessarily hostile.

You're misinterpreting my post. At my current job we are flexible -- people come in and leave at different times, eat lunch at different times, etc. I'm not expecting everyone to be at their desks from 10-6 all day every day. That's why I said "core business hours". There's a difference between someone who is unavailable because they're off eating lunch and someone who is incommunicado for many hours at a time and impedes progress. I've seen remote workers drastically slow down progress by simply being unavailable while all of the non-remote workers are present and blocked on them for something. In theory an onsite worker could do this too, but in practice they don't simply disappear for hours at a time at the office.

Our team is usually fully remote. I've actually worked my full career in mostly remote positions (15 years now). I've very rarely experienced people randomly disappearing for hours at a time, and usually a simple text will clear things up. However, if you work in a flexible office and your team has core business hours, official or not, your manager should probably convey this. This just falls under "managing expectations", and is not necessarily a failure of the employee.

Sometimes emergencies will necessitate missing even core business hours. This is more a matter of having more responsibilities (family, kids, etc) than being remote though. But if an employee has these sorts of responsibilities, I'm guessing they are more likely to take up remote work.

There are positives and negatives to hiring remote workers, and I think there are several ways to compensate for the negatives. Obviously since I work remotely I think the positives outweigh those negatives. But I also think placing so much emphasis on one of the negatives, that I rarely experience in practice, is extremely narrow sighted. But maybe your remote workers are bad at working remotely, maybe your company is bad at managing remote workers, or maybe there's confounding variables like the one I mentioned above.

I think the answer is that the remote workers were just bad/slackers/not devoted to their jobs. As I said, they failed to move upwards in the company and some were even fired. This was not at a company that was a particularly good or high-paying place to work, mind you. Maybe you've been luckier in the caliber of people that you've worked with, but I contend that, in general, across the entire workforce, it's not rare to see people taking liberties with remote work.

I'm a remote worker and I'm sure it's occasionally a pain that I'm at the gym, or sleeping, or otherwise not responding on Slack or whatever.

However, like many remote workers I work in a distributed team across several time zones. So it's not just "he goes to the gym in the afternoon," it's more like one person leaves the office in one time zone in order to beat the traffic jams, while another person in another time zone has to pick his daughter up from school, another in a third time zone gets up really early but can't do night calls because of family life, and so on. Slightly wonky schedules actually give us more coverage in case of crises, and the only way we could ever line everybody up for the same work hours would be to fire half the team.

We manage it all pretty well by scheduling our meetings in advance, not being afraid to pick up the phone, taking ownership of our work, and having senior people in different zones who can help fix urgent problems.

(However I totally agree with the "need for trust" comment above. I worked locally before going remote in this job, and also in two of the three other remote jobs I had in the past.)

Distributed teams across multiple timezones is a bit of a different situation though; you're naturally going to be more asynchronous there, and the team structure will be different. All of my experience with remote coworkers has been on collocated teams with the occasional remote worker in the same timezone. I don't have any interest in being on a fully distributed team; I like being physically present with my coworkers and I tend to get depressed ("cabin fever") if I'm alone all day every day. I realize that that might work for others, but it doesn't work for me, so I'd never do it.

> I tend to get depressed ("cabin fever") if I'm alone all day every day

I think we found your problem

Humans are social animals. It's not just "my" problem, it's "most people's" problem.

I see you being downvoted, but I don't get it. I actually work in the office, with 3 teammates nominally there too, but often working remotely, so I spend 2/3 of my days without any of my team around. Even the other teams around me are often out traveling, and I'll be the one tripping the motion sensor to turn on the lights at 9 or 10 in the morning.

It's not comfortable for me as an almost-every-day thing.

Too many people think that what works for them must be ideal, and should work for everyone. I honestly think that most people will not thrive in a fully remote, work-from-home environment.

Too many people think that what works for them must be ideal, and should work for everyone.

Agreed.

I honestly think that most people will not thrive in a fully remote, work-from-home environment.

That may well be true. But there's clearly a non-negligible group that swing very much the opposite way. What we're looking for is flexibility, not one-size-fits-all.

> What we're looking for is flexibility, not one-size-fits-all.

And yet people look at me like I have a third eye sometimes (including several posts up in this exact thread) just because I, like many people, don't like working from home.

I can certainly understand that preference, even though I don't share it. I will, however, say that, when phrases like "humans are social animals" get deployed, it's quite easy to read them as implied criticism of those of us who need substantial amounts of time alone.

I am one of those people who need substantial amounts of time alone too. That doesn't mean that I'm not a social animal though, and that there isn't some balance of social contact that is desired. There's only a very tiny percentage of people who truly desire no human contact at all (think hermits); merely being introverted still does not get you close to that level.

In my situation, I feel like the dynamic has changed, and that's part of what bothers me. The team has always had a tendency toward flexible scheduling, since we do have some fully-remote workers living elsewhere. A couple years ago, that meant that someone might be out a couple hours, maybe once a week. Now it means "I've got an errand at 2, so I'll wfh today".

The other members of the team seem happy with the arrangement. Maybe it would work better for my situation if I had a good home workspace available to me, too. There are other things I'm not happy with there, and I'm leaning toward thinking that my time there has just run its course.

We run an entirely remote company, and the cabin fever is definitely a real concern.

If you ever have to be a remote worker in the future, I'd highly recommend getting a co-working space as it really helps fulfill a ton of those social needs. Your employer might even pay for some (or all) of the costs associated.

That's definitely the only way I would ever consider being remote full-time. Though at that point you're still working in an office, just not with your coworkers, so it's still inferior to on-site working in many respects. The biggest advantage I suppose is you can do it from a low CoL area.

I think the other advantage is it totally separate any concept of "butts in chair hours". Nobody in a coworking space is going to quietly judge you if you leave at 1pm, which would be more of a concern at an on-site location.

A co-working space gives you the option to have a social work space, but you get to choose each day (and even each hour) if that's what you want.

I think they other advantage is in a commute. You have many more options about where you want to be co-working than you do about where your company's location is. If your company is across town from you residence, and you have an hour commute you could find a co-working space that is closer to home.

Do you have any other strategies against cabin-fever?

I've tried co-working but once you add in your own chair and monitor (ergonomics) and eavesdropping-proof location (security) and taking the laptop home at night (security) and on top of all that having a commute again, it's kind of a pain.

I will probably eventually rent my own office (at my own expense) near where some friends work, but that's a pretty expensive way to guarantee social interactions.

I'd be curious what else you've come up with.

I'm not the original person you are asking, but over a 27 year career in IT, I've worked from home for 17 of them.

Here's how I stayed social. First, I used the time you would spend commuting or going out to lunch to get non-work chores done. I'd do laundry in the morning when I'd otherwise be in the car. I cut the grass or worked out during lunch, etc. I'd already be fixing dinner during everyone else's evening drive time.

That freed up my weekday evenings to be social, since I wasn't in after work commute-cook-chores hell.

I'd spend time at programming language groups; taking classes related to hobbies (brewing, a little woodworking); going out with friends to nice restaurants on Wednesdays when they weren't crowded; and doing some social volunteering. I got involved in running a couple of software conferences and joined a wine-and-movies social club.

I found—since I am a "gregarious introvert"—that not having to be around coworkers all day left me more energized to socialize with friends and family in the evenings.

And instead of a social circle dominated by coworkers, I have one that provides interactions with people from all walks of life, and have friends scattered around the globe to visit when I retire.

If you plan well and work at it, you can be more social working from home.

Invite local friends to work in your space?

Cabin fever is definitely a risk. I'm quite comfortable working remotely and we have a few others doing it on the team (mostly senior tech people) but most of the team is in one of the various offices.

My preference would be to go to the office and be with my colleagues 2-3 days a week, and work from a home office the other days. We have some people who do that. But all the offices with direct colleagues are at least a 12-hour flight away from me, and I like where I live, so I have to just deal.

If I ever find myself leading a remote-first team I would make it a priority to have good strategies against isolation.

That's certainly a way of working, and if that's what you've agreed too then certainly you should be as available as possible.

There are more asynchronous ways to do things, and not always restricted to contractor-style arrangements.

Personally, I think it's unfortunate if the default way of working assumes such tight coupling: for me at least, it's inimical to achieving any kind of deep focus.

>Also, if you have a smartphone and your company uses slack, there is no reason to be unreachable.

This is a silly attitude if you meant it very generally. Workplaces should set expectations - remote or otherwise. And people should be judged by them - remote or otherwise.

As an example, for my last job (non-remote), I told them during the interview that:

1. I will not be on any IM software.

2. I will check email only 3 times during the work day.

"Is that a problem?"

They said "No".

Just set clear expectations. If you have a remote worker who is often unavailable, but you did not have this conversation when he/she was hired, you are part of the problem.

(I had to loosen 1 above once we hired remote workers - it was unfair to them).

This only works if your management remembers your status updates.

If you're worried about that, make them public. Middle managers are easier to get than programmers, so you may have leverage walking up the chain to your boss's boss.

You should be sending status updates to your team's email list anyway, not just to your manager, as they are useful to all of your coworkers. I can't even begin to count the number of times that, upon hearing in a daily stand-up/status report that someone was working on or was about to begin working on a specific thing, I was able to give useful direction on it that saved hours of work. Teams that go off to work in isolated silos don't have good velocity. Sometimes the five seconds it takes to say "Yeah I tried that approach already and gave it up, so I recommend Y" can save days. And this will come from your coworkers more often than it will from your manager, so always send status updates to the whole team.

Qualified middle managers are not easier to get than programmers, in my experience. And if they (and their reports) are qualified, they'll not micromanage, nor need to.

If your manager is the kind that brow-beats when they can't find you, and, they forget things you tell them (in writing), then reminding them of the thing you have told them, in writing, to their bosses boss, will basically get you fired.

the best is to send them written by email. In that way, it is clear and evident that the status updates were always sent.

Yep. This is sage advice, I think even for in-office workers. Visibility and clear communication to your managers is critical to success.

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