Remote Only

Right before we finally gave up, I went back and looked at all his interview communications. As part of the interview we would exchange several e-mails to see how their communication was, because we lived and died by e-mail with clients. All those communications were totally on point.

So I asked him: Why were your e-mails before we hired you so good? "Oh, my wife wrote those for me." So I'm sitting there thinking "We should have hired your wife."

All of the jobs I have ever interviewed for casually listed "great oral and written communication" as a skill in the job reqs. I have felt that I had a problem in this area.

I have worked as a remote contractor off and on for most of my life and have never run into an issue.

For the past year and a half I have been on a remote team.

It wasn't until my team lead, who did all of the oral and written communication, left, this past month, that I was placed in the position to pick where he left off.

It became immediately evident how poor my skills are in this area. I know that I am a poor communicator, but I didn't realize just how insufficient I was. Not only grammar and spelling, but conveying complex subject matter in a succinct way for folks lacking detailed domain knowledge. This is a problem!

Regardless, there is hope. How do you get better at writing? Write more. At least that is what I am told. I am now chomping at the bit for long-form writing opportunities to get experiencing it putting thoughts and plans on paper, as well as, using a new SaaS app to commit/tracking writing 5 minutes a day.

Any and all tips are welcome.

Regular chatter in public chat channels seems sufficient. What really seems to matter is work ethics.

effective reader too. One should be able to quickly make sense out of several hunbdreds of email messages, otherwise it will end up in "synchronous mode" -- dozen of messaging windows opened at every moment.

I had a pretty poor team leader a few years ago with a bums in seat type job. He would never write anything down and teh result was quite frustrating. The spec used to change frequenty and he would come and verbally tell me it. then he would change it again, then again. A week or two later when I actually got around to implementing teh said feature I would ask him what he wanted done,

"I thought we talked about that." "Yes we did but you changed your mind 4 times and I can't remember what the conclusion was."

I used to regularly ask him to put things in writing, but he was usually to lazy to deliver on that.

So I don't think these problems are unique to remote teams.

Do you have an opinion on what aspects of written communication are the most important for remote work?

Just gathering ideas to write about! :)

Basically this boils down to how strictly you cling to new buzzwords.

I used to work remotely as a freelancer and I miss it so much. I now work in-house at an agency and everyone here fails so miserably at writing. Almost all discussion is verbal, nothing is documented and so much double-work happens it's not even funny.

To make matters worse, the agency doesn't use any project management software. So all projects have seemingly imminent deadlines. It's miserable.

If our team was more apt to learn, adapt and document more, we'd probably be a lot happier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljNabciEGg

not just remote - any and all work will be miserable. I work remote and in person with lots of people who will not write things down. When I call them on it, they say "I'm not your secretary" - but they are happy to have everyone be their secretary.

For me, personally, working from home has amplified the good parts of working with people and human contact and removed the bad parts.

When we do meet in person (4-5 times a year) we have a blast.

When we communicate via video the communication is a lot of fun and very purposeful at the same time. Sometimes it feels like I speak to remote co-workers by video more than family and people in real life! So, lot's of human interaction there.

At the same time, there is now no interruptions when someone gets bored and wanders over for a chat.

There is no need to instantly answer questions when overly eager bosses have a brain... idea.

There is no need to watch the clock and make it look like I'm staying late just cos everyone else is.

And I can work on stuff anytime I like, like if I wake up at 5am by accident I can knock out the current sprint board and have a break during the day.

So, in my case at least, saying "the most obvious are missing real human contacts" is simply not true.

I do think that remote working is a bit difficult to pull off well and I've found the key is to really get to know people well when in person and on video chat.

I'd say "missing real human contacts" is summarized well under a combination of harder rampup/scares some potential employees; as the lack of "Real contacts" seems more of a personal/subjective or team-process-and-tooling-rooted feeling than anything I've observed to be inherent and unsolvable; it's trivial for me to get a face to face with anyone on my multi-national team. Now, to try and read this charitably, if you meant something like "increased difficulty networking" I'd actually agree, but again, if you're at a place in your career where you accept that, it's significantly less of a downside.

Mostly, that's the gist of a lot of the things people list as hard negatives to my ears, including your second point of harder life/work separation. I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." (Edit: see my clarification in child post re: this wording, I came off more accusatory than I'd have liked, but didn't want to rewrite history) With the broad slew of coworking spaces, home offices, coffee shops, and other ways to partition one's time and mental spaces, I don't accept that that's something that can't be solved in the same proactive fashion as a professional would approach any assorted social frictions one might run into in _any_ office environment.

If you read any frustration in this, it comes from a place of, "a lot of the complaints I read are solvable problems or isomorphisms of in-office problems", and a hope that we'd be self-interested enough as a field to be more proactive in seeking solutions, given the benefits that can come from a more distributed workforce. I want to encourage and productively improve sites that try to support this, and part of that is avoiding a re-encroachment of remote work stigma/fear in many people's eyes.

Edit: yes, I'm going to break the HN rules, but christ people, at least _respond_ before blindly downvoting. This was not a glib response, and this topic (remote work) is something we should be able to discuss in good faith without accruing negative score before I even finish grammar-checking my own writing.

I made countless friends while working remotely and a good 90% of them I met in a coworking space (and the so called "digital nomad" community is made of some really awesome people). Plus you have the option to change coworking space if you don't like the people, the coffee, the wallpapers or whatever. You can't do that with a traditional office (or it would be reaaally hard to justify).

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/issues/

Perhaps it would be better to remove "remote" from the title completely. You may have several locations where people can come together, don't call them headquarters and those not there remote, but instead everyone is team member who sits in various sites. Some of those sites have 1 person, others have 4 or 5 or 10. And those with more than an individual

Having clusters of remote workers, perhaps there is a sweet spot.

I just changed job from an open office to remote work, and while everybody thought my new job sounded like a great opportunity, no one was jealous of the remote part - "So, now you have rent a shared office, huh?" (and yes, that is what I did)

The biggest downsides are: loneliness, feeling like a shut in, and working all the time because you're only two steps from your "office". These are NP-hard problems to solve, especially for an introverted 4-eyes like me.

Human contact for me is more about friends and out of work activity. Colleagues are colleagues, if you want "real human" interaction, you'd need to get out of the office anyway.

If you were to write that list, what would it look like?

You can establish policies that ensure life and work separation (as in: "No calls outside of designated work hours") but you can't easily allay an instinctive as well as indistinct fear that everything will go the dogs if people don't work in the same office anymore.

To work at home is not for everyone, it can be lonely, you might not have an extra rooms to use as an office. So with their still the employer paying for your office and for all the infrastructure you need.

http://www.villageoffice.ch/en/the-coworking-network/

Plus then companies can have smaller offices, saving money and energy. People save themselves an hour or two every day by avoiding the commute. You have to wonder how much the butts-in-seats philosophy is actually costing the world.

I was wondering how much work cannot be remoted and it seems a lot. Remote work is a privilege.

The effect of remote work is instead that it no longer matters as much in which city you live, as long as it is large enough.

A lot of the things mentioned in this manifesto are perfectly valid for non-remote work as well. Making sure knowledge is written down, shorter and fewer meetings, 'results of work over the hours put in' seem useful in any work setting.

The team broke the site.

"Oh, but if you ask in a public Slack channel, someone else will answer!", is the inevitable response from someone here on HN. Unfortunately, that is not always the case for a multitude of reasons.

Whenever I've worked remotely, I've always clocked in and out on slack, either through posting in a channel or sending a DM, or by using statuses. That way people can know that I've gone for lunch and will be incommunicado for the next hour.

It's the same as working in a physical office, if you're out of office, your colleagues should know how long for.

After all in remote work productivity is measured about communication, issues , commits and pull requests done.

Sure, have core hours, and make them known.

If I know someone won't be "at" work for the next 20 hours (part time, different timezone) I can factor that into how the teamwork will... Work.

Is something on fire, and only a single person can put it out? A) that's sad B) sometimes happens anyway (and then you can try and fix A after the fire is out) C) depending on what's on fire, contracts etc - you can always call and wake someone up.

But mostly it's just nice to know people's schedules - so one can plan work.

Maybe there's some pair programming to be done (via shared screen session or whatever) - obviously try and schedule that when both parties are available...

It's really not that different to chasing after a manager that's busy with meetings or a co-worker who's part time out of the office doing on-site consulting work.

Even in a shared office, developers need to plan "deep" time when they have time to focus - or nothing will get done due interruptions.

Just because someone is sitting right there does not mean they're "free" for a chat. They could be deep in the debugger chasing a bug.

If that's the case, I hope I don't own any stock of it, as you're a single injury away from disaster.

I still generally agree that knowing when folks are online can be helpful and don’t see a big issue with that as long as you don’t have a culture that starts measuring people by how many hours they put in. Rather than an upfront “I will be working today from X to Y” something passive like a Slack recent activity indicator could be enough.

I'm wondering if that one came from the perspective of those big campuses like Google who have free cafeterias for their employees? Fairly weak point either way.

(Unless you, or someone else contributed that after reading and before I did, of course...)

It seems pragmatic until you actually struggle to get everyone to be on the same page at the same time, then you spend a lot of time figuring out how to be consistent.

I agree the video calls are probably over the top - but asynchronous communication != synchronous communication.

Needless to say, I became a lot more fond of Amazon's pre-meeting written notes after that.

It’s particularly bad when you combine it with timewasting predetermined Agile meetings and distraction-oriented open plan offices.

Employers who want happy, productive, collaborative workers: Stop disrupting people with useless meetings and denying them large chunks of private, quiet time to work however they see fit. Stop embedding them in open plan spaces.

You know, treat them like an adult, with basic human dignity, who wants to be respected and trusted that they will succeed with their own judgment for how to effectively communicate and manage their work schedule.

- Difficulty scheduling a time that fits for all participants. Some team-members are inevitably stuck with a non-ideal timeframe. Often times it's the same employee suffering each meeting, which leads to resentment.

- Interruptions during productive hours. See the Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html) - reacting to interruptions can be disastrous.

- Frustration from choppy/laggy video that results in loss of important parts of updates and valuable information.

I'm actually building an app called Tape to address these kinds of issues and to improve communication and collaboration across teams by integrating into existing workflows not against them. If any of you guys are interested in learning more or trying out our product, I'd love to connect: https://trytape.typeform.com/to/pKe6X5

Nonstop video calls are dumb, but people should try to be on video when there are scheduled meetings. It really helps to see other people when having a discussion.

You need the synchronous communication to have non-work conversations, and you need those non-work conversations to develop and maintain the relationships required (trust, rapport, etc.) for remote work.

> if your organization ever becomes big enough to warrant a physical office

...then you probably don't have enough buy-in to be a fully remote company and that is far harder to work around than timezones.

Sounds like an unhealthy implementation. I've worked 12 hours apart from a main office for 3 years and never worked past my local business hours.

See written & async first communication. Mailing lists work for things like linux kernel development.

Note that people are fine with getting a lower salary in exchange for being able to work remotely.

You could turn it around and say remote employees are "paying their employer what working remotely is worth".

Gitlab does this when calculating salary [1] for their employees. It seems only fair to me.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

People must learn that anyone can be remote, the thing is that everyone must agree to communicate better instead of more.

Only place where I reliably saw 100mbps down was in SFO on tmobile LTE by one very specific window. Go figure...

EDIT: consumer grade connections - if you have a business, gigabit is easy to get in the office.

Could make a web page that is like an In/Out board[1], but looks at the person's git commits (plus Slack, etc.) to map out when they tend to be active.

1. https://cloudfront.zoro.com/product/full/Z-_Ntvfo5oz.JPG

I've long been that "go-to" guy. I'm friendly, I like to help, and I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. That's fine, it's my natural fit and I enjoy it.

I've been working remotely (from home) for about 2 months now and my productivity is through the roof. It's astonishing. When I work 8 hours, I get ~6.5 hours productive work done. That feels like a theoretical maximum. In the office, 8 hours "at work" – read "in the building" – often felt like 2 or 3 hours of actual work, on a good day.

You spend so much time in the office chatting to people, getting coffee, overhearing interesting conversations, waiting in a meeting room for people to turn up, waiting at the door for people to come to lunch, getting there in the first place, setting up, packing up. It's madness, really. (I'm in Melbourne, Australia. I think our work ethic is different to you Americans.)

I'm lucky, my partner is also a freelancer. We wake up – often at 5am – and make a cup of tea and a slice of toast. "First breakfast." Half an hour later we're awake and we wander upstairs to the office. We put some ambient music on, or not. We knuckle down and work. Two hours later, sun's up, we make a coffee and have "second breakfast". :-)

It's transformed how I live and work. I'm lucky in that my boss is an old friend and he trusts me absolutely. The work I'm doing is exclusively for him, so it's not a problem that I'm not around colleagues. We just use the phone or iMessage to communicate.

We set a weekly rhythm so I don't have to tell him when I'm working; but, because he's a friend, if he calls and I'm not at my desk that's cool.

I am in love with this situation. I can never go back.

The problem is that such a situation is often not stable. The next boss will come in and think "these guys work only 5 hours so I either hire less people or give them more work".

When you're figuring out if an idea will even work, you need time to dick around with it and try things to see if it is even possible.

Once you know the possibilities, talking it over in person and drawing pictures helps disseminate knowledge and iron out rough spots.

Then you go finish the work.

One of those needs and benefits from collaboration, the others, it actively hinders

All in all it does take longer, but with prior remote experience it makes it easier.

Unfortunately, what this means for candidates is they may have to compete with a LOT more people.

Another challenge you're likely facing is that a lot of companies are only willing to hire senior developers to work remotely because hesitant upper management thinks they will be more trustworthy (completely ignoring the level of trust inherent in having someone write code for them when they themselves can't even verify it).

That negativity aside, here's some advice: As much as there is some backlash around the idea of a GitHub profile being mandatory, one VERY practical use of an open source portfolio of some kind is that almost all open source project work is done remotely using the very same skills required for successful remote employment. This applies even more so to non-programming contributions, in my opinion, which means you don't even need to contribute code to demonstrate these skills.

Peer review also goes a long way. Your colleagues—onsite or remote—have a pretty good sense of both the quantity and quality of your output.

My quality-of-life improvements have been very similar to yours. I cannot believe how much happier I am now, on a daily basis.

I have written some of the best code of my life while sitting on a picnic table in a park. I see my friends more. I see my family more. I have more energy to put into my work, which results in better work satisfaction.

I pinch myself every day.