Don’t work “remotely”
blairreeves.me
blairreeves.me
Am fortunate to work in a place that offers "agile" working (it's not a developer focused environment, so that word isn't loaded for us). You go where you need to to get the job done, within a set of core hours work how you need to. You can work from home independently for days or weeks on end, or you can turn up to a desk every day, or you can collaborate in a meeting room, on Skype, or in a cafe.
We have an HQ, but not enough desks for everyone to turn up every day, so there's an expectation of being fluid in how you work. Every meeting has a video conference link, and very few decisions are made by the proverbial watercooler. It takes time and discipline to make it work, but that's spread by default and expected across the entire workforce.
Management by musical chairs?
There's no hierarchy to seating, and although it's an open office, disturbances are quite well contained.
Well, yeah... if you've designed your office to deliberately not hold all employees, then having a regularly in-person event in the office for all employees is evidently going to be a problem.
But either don't hold all-hands meetings in your general workspace where every employee will need a desk, or for 4 days a year where it's an issue, vs 250-or-so where it's not, work around it?
I'm definitely not attached to my employer, but based on the balance of pros and cons by embracing this approach across all staff, I'd find it hard to rationalise moving back to a different environment.
Apparently, it does.
Self-link with some good additions, along with a previous storypost about this kind of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3345896
It will obviously depend a lot on how the space is managed. If a company likes to see high utilisation of the space (so they aren't "wasting" money), then you will have more contention for chairs, desks, etc. If the company doesn't mind having some empty seats most days, then it will be easy to accommodate days where more people show up.
I mean I'd be pretty pissed if I commuted into the office just to be told there's not enough deskspace today...
However, TBH I don't find this an issue. I'm often at various company locations and I can always find a space to plop myself down and work on my laptop whether it's some sort of enclave or just the cafeteria.
Everything has a cost, the false positives (empty desks where no one's coming) and the false negatives (people without desks). You have, as in the movie "Fight club", to figure out whether p * c0 < (1-p) * c1 or the other way around.
Distributed teams develop a culture of communication that does not rely on frequent face-to-face contact. I personally suspect that they tend to be even more productive than completely co-located teams, because, based on a sample size of one, I've seen that the communication methods they develop will require fewer person-hours to share more information at higher fidelity.
"Remote" tends to imply a large chunk of the team is co-located, and one or more of the members are not. My experience here is that the remote people tend to not get the memo, or people fail to invite them to meetings because they don't want to bother with the conference room's videoconferencing equipment, or they do invite the remote folks but then the first 15 minutes of the meeting is devoted to figuring out how to work the Polycom system, etc.
I had the pleasure of working on a distributed team that became a team with remote workers as a result of being acquired by a company that decided to only hire new people to work in their home office. It was impressive how quickly things fell apart after that.
(Edit: This isn't to say that P's team isn't working well with a flexible approach, but it sounds like there's a big difference between it and many other non-distributed teams that have remote work: Everyone is in it together.)
In my experience, the former is far more effective, for a very simple reason: informal communication channels quickly break down. In the latter approach - you have decisions discussed between some people, with others not informed, not documented properly, forgotten after a while, shifting agreements etc. Because the team can be more "agile" it's less structured, and while on the short term it may seem to be a good thing, on the long term it really hurts it (working on the wrong things/ on things that are not needed anymore, constant overhead for on-boarding new people, loss of team knowledge with every "old" team member that leaves, etc).
I'd say the distinction between "remote" and "distributed" workers is on how serious the team is about enabling remote work. If it treats remote workers as a secondary, "extension team" - things don't work well. If that's the primary mode of operation - things actually end up working _better_ than in co-located teams, in most situations(read: as soon as the team/product grows big enough).
I've long had a suspicion that this is why co-located companies tend to require so very much management overhead.
100% this. source: am remote.
"Oh, we talked about that... when was that, three weeks ago?"
I don't view this, per the example, as a positive pattern. Such things become anti-patterns.
They're also another reason that meetings become long, confused, and drag on. The first one third, one half, maybe even two thirds can be spent syncing the team up with all these conversations and their data, that have taken place out-of-band.
I guess agile, scrum, and the like are supposed to reduce this. But when people go to training to become certified "scrum masters"... Bureaucracy is winning, once again.
(I remember one big, corporate "agile" name coming to speak at our campus, back when it was new. I think it was "agile"; the waves up corporate uptake start to blur, after a while. People actually showed up for it. And were rather disappointed: Same shit, new name.)
This is a strategy and culture fail, in my opinion. Our team has a rule that sneakernetting is allowed but anything substantive that comes from it must be communicated immediately on our collaboration platforms (Slack/Box/etc). No "meetings after meetings" when people aren't connected and over-communicate whenever possible/necessary. If you discuss something and there is information that's needed that you're not communicating to people effectively, that's on you, not on the people working remotely.
Distributed is a mindset that is different from primary-secondary
I think the main key is that you need to have management on board. It is trivially easy to cut a remote developer out of the loop. Any kind of petty office politics around remote work can sour the deal pretty quickly. Our biggest improvements came when management decided to transition from "Core development at the office with remote workers" to "We're remote first with some limited ability to work from the office if you want". That change in mindset made it much easier for people to make appropriate decisions.
Since the company I work for is growing rapidly, I don't think we can even go back to the way it was -- we don't have enough desks. Management is loving the cost savings and even those that were opposed originally seem to be big fans now. We've even started having some of our call centre work remotely from time to time (which, if you know the culture of a typical call centre is astounding).
Despite enjoying working remotely (and being grateful that I can), I've always preferred office work. However, with very few exceptions remote work is just superior. Communication is explicit (if it's not written down in an accessible place, it didn't happen). Work is inclusive. Generally things are more focused. However, it's really important to work hard on the social aspect of the job (because people can get isolated quickly).
If you need to meet face to face, it's because you have to "arm twist" people to get things done. And/or it's because you have a knowledge/learning/teaching impedance -- a disparity between these abilities in roles and co-workers -- that is too large. Speaking of "knowledge work".
In the physical world, an example can be worth a thousand words. But when you have to keep showing someone the same thing over and over...
In knowledge work, I find frequent, repetitive meetings to be a version of that "over and over".
They will talk about "body language" and fail to recognize how often such cues are interpreted wrong. They fail to see their discomfort as a flag of a problem and instead see IT as the problem. They (and many if us that prefer text communication) fail to realize that communication is a skill like any other that requires deliberate practice to improve in any great degree.
An example: dont ask a question with two alternate examples, you'll get a "yes" or "no" that isnt helpful and require at least one more cycle for them to clarify (usually more than one, because THEY know what they meant, so unless you explain your confusion well, it is 1+ cycles to explain your confusion and then another to get the answer. )
DON'T: "is the shutdown this weekend or next? "
DO: "the shutdown is this weekend, correct?" Or "the shutdown is this weekend and not next, correct?"
You wouldn't expect a "yes" answer to the "or" question, but it happens all the time. Conversations are "time-delayed" - our minds are constantly back filling guesses at the meaning, and often we respond when we have the wrong guess.
Changing this is HARD. I seriously think modern conversational practices have a lot of redundancy in them for error correction, but this also makes people find any impediment to communication (such as the quality of a call or having to wait for someone to pause so you can actually be heard) more annoying.
This is much easier in a company that is 100% remote. The OP suggests using the word distributed company. I noted that many companies with multiple locations. So we used the term 'remote only'. We didn't like the sound of that so we changed it to 'all remote' https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/
It's a way of distancing yourself from the failures of companies that tried remote without actually committing to it. You signal that you're all in on remote, and structure your leases such that moving back to co-location is impractical, at the least.
You have to do that, because no one in their right mind will believe that they are valued equally when the company has 90 co-located employees and 10 remote employees. No, this is not the "remote work" you may have been burned by before. This is different. This actually works.
- If you're single, working at an office is good for you. Surround yourself with people who share a common interest. Yeah, it's work, but I'm sure you'll meet people who have similar interests outside of work. Go share a 2 bedroom apartment with someone else in downtown and enjoy the social life.
- If you're married (or even with kids), remote work is what you should be looking for so that you take away the bad energy you collect at the office and you don't bring it back home. You can spend more time with your family which is what matters the most. The bad energy includes a long commute to get to work since you can't afford living next to the office. Competitive environment and politics. Dress code, loud open space environments where you can't get anything done, constant distraction, having to fake working 8h straight sitting in front of a screen while anyone can look over your shoulders. You need to be able to afford a bigger home to host your family so you need to move far from your office.
You can get flexibility in both, not only remotely. As long as you're not forced to commute more than 30 min to work, usually Tech giants are flexible companies in terms of hours, etc.
From what I've experienced, this is true only until your late 20s, or about 20% of your career.
This is really true. I made amazing friends at my first 2 jobs and since then, nothing but work. The culture has changed as well for the last 10 years. Colleagues don't even say "hi" anymore. When you're already established in your life you usually don't have time to make friends at work.
That's where remote versus non-remote jobs could make a big difference in your life. Hope this help ;)
Good social life doesn't mean you need to be always around someone. I do catch up with my buddies over weekends. My mom is a cancer patient so remote work provides me quality family time.
A single or childfree worker can structure her leisure time at will, spending it socializing or engaging in activities, such as a sports league or making music. Work can be done in the home office and social activity later.
A worker with a family has much less control of his leisure time, being obliged to pick up or drop off children, and to be present for dinner. Socializing is much more opportune at the office.
It seems that your basic premise is that being at the office is unpleasant. I posit that being at the office can be pleasant and productive, and lead to social situations that otherwise would be harder to justify to one's family or encounter naturally.
Looking at spending 8-10 hours at the office plus 1-2 hours on your way to the office and way back home, when you want to spend time with your kids it takes away a lot of your happiness. It all depends on your priorities I guess. Everyone is different :)
Regarding remote working, although it's great to have the flexibility of working at home with a family around I much preferred going into the office as I found it was a much better working environment. It's also good be be with other creative people so you can thrive in the mental energy there. My family were good at not interrupting when working at home, but it was always there looming in my head.
I still prefer being in the office but do some days at home as I get less interruptions there now the family have grown up.
I've worked in open plan offices and have always had my own desk so can't compare to hot-desking which must be hell, especially for anything creative.
Yes I can still hear some noise on the background (wife/kid) but I can pop out of my room at anytime and chill with them. Rather than having a 10 min lunch with colleagues talking about work, jumping back straight to my screen listening to everyone else’s stories.
1. I usually wind up alphabetizing my socks at some point.
2. a lack of face to face contact and the setting of being in my own space keeps me in a semi-permanent doubt/guilt cycle about my work quality and how my effort and reponsiveness is being perceived.
American Culture in particular pushes a lowest common denominator of what it thinks work should be: 7-6 while counting commute, sporadic overtime paid or otherwise, and various other things that are entirely not to the benefit of the individual worker. It's crazy.
Rather than alphabetizing your socks, go to the gym or improve some other skill set interspersed with your paid work.
Embrace the fact that you can build a schedule around you and your wants and desires and not that of your companies.
2) I've also found that talking on the phone makes remote work much better for me.
Semi-synchronous communications are a trap for distributed workers. It makes it feel you are more accessible (actually true of course), but it drives the discourse to the trivial and makes raises decision thresholds. I feel that if a decision needs consensus, either circulate an appropriate email, or do a skype/hangouts/whatever real-time conference.
But this doesn't work well for junior team members who need more handholding. I'd say that's the one area where distributed teams don't work well.
Since I'm not forcing him to meet my emotional neediness, why should he force me?
That way you're not bugging people with a voice call for what turns out to be easily answered questions. But the culture allows for quick transition to voice and you don't get sucked into long IM conversations spinning your wheels due to miscommunication.
Not responding to IM until later with a 'sorry, was heads-down/afk/whatever' needs to be acceptable too, otherwise you get the problems of people expecting everyone's instant response all the time.
That said, I miss the old MSN messenger feature of 'buzzing' someone, which would animate/vibrate their IM window and play a soft buzz sound. I sometimes use the slack call feature for this (just ring and hang up), but that doesn't quite relay what I'm looking for - something less urgent than an immediate voice call, but lets the person know I'm likely blocked waiting for their answer. There's always that game that plays in your head - if I get an answer in < 1 minute, I'll stay on this task; if it takes longer, I'll spin up a different task I'm not blocked on...
In my last job I had a rule: People who are with me on the site have to come to me physically (or email if not urgent). Remote people can use Skype, but they must call me - not IM. Of course, they can still email if it's not urgent.
People still called, but the volume went down quite a bit.
Flow feels good, that doesn’t mean it is good, or that interrupting it for collaborative work isn’t overall more beneficial.
Still, text messages (SMS or Slack or what have you) are even more convenient. So I would say it depends on the question. A question like, "What is wrong with the syntax in this line of code," is far better by text. But a question like, "How do you suggest we reconcile these two contradictory requests from our customers," might take less time over phone.
The rule I'm trying follow is this: If a reply to one of my emails suggests disagreement or misunderstanding, I usually try to catch them on the phone, rather than trying to clear things up with another reply. My experience is that these emails take several replies to clear things up, and sometimes there is a damage to rapport. A friendly phone call keeps rapport at the same level or even adds health points.
A remote organization may even have an advantage here, if there is a well thought out internal communication strategy aiming at keeping everyone in the loop and up to speed.
I think this is true for some people, but not others. I find it easier to read through a block of text and break it down so that I can ask follow-up questions on things I may not fully understand. If I listen to it instead, I may miss some important detail and just not remember it after 30 minutes unless I take notes (in which case, it might as well be written down in the first place).
I just spent the last two hours helping a dev on my team write some code in an area of the project he was unfamiliar with. We did it all over Slack, with liberal use of code snippets. I can't imagine how a phone call would have helped.
Also to be clear, when I say "phone call" I mean audio + video. So Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, etc.
in fact, in general, maybe a regular therapy session should be considered a standard part of remote work. in-office we all use our coworkers as a social support network whether we mean to or not, so it makes sense that many of us would need an alternative to help cover that gap.
I'm not even saying that it'd be a good thing (replacing a dozen interpersonal relationships with one) but its a hedge.
The latter is valid. Face-to-face communication carries a lot more information than messages on Slack. If a company hasn’t developed a remote-first culture, feedback can fester instead of being communicated. Regularly-scheduled phone calls, one on one with critical people and team-wide from time to time, in my experience, alleviate this greatly. (Paired with occasional flyings out.)
1. Totally unable to take care of home chores and errands. Often falling way behind on organizational or personal administrative tasks.
2. Fully exploited by my work place. I know I don't need 8 hours a day to be very productive. If I'm not working from home on my own schedule, I feel taken advantage of.
If having alphabetized socks keeps you happier in your space, then that's a good thing, right? :)
If someone is having mental health, emotional or personal issues they should not look to solve those issues through their workplace and instead keep their personal life as partitioned as possible from their professional life.
I totally agree with the parent poster - keep personal life personal. I never mention anything personal to anyone at work.
In this case, we're not even talking about personal issues, but guilt at work. If your manager can't help you with that, he shouldn't be a manager.
The second issue is a personal one, and not exclusive to those that work remotely.
I've worked remotely for about a decade now, and have been hiring other remote workers for about half of that time and in my interviews with people, I spend a solid chunk of the time pushing them hard on understanding what it actually means to work remotely - I want them to be damn sure that they are paying attention to their own need for things like contact with other humans, because I've seen enough people burn out on loneliness and quit because they're miserable.
It's more like, cities are not built for everyone to work remotely. If remote was a lot more common, the support structures for it would be more common (some exist, like shared/coworking spaces etc). As remote work expands, cities will adapt to accomodate people working without commuting (which was the norm before industrial times anyway)
Due to other aspects of my personal life I feel like my mind is completely spiralling into a black hole. Lack of seeing my team/manager day to day means they won't see this happening, and I also find it difficult to bring up due to limited contact time between my manager and I.
If anyone has any experience of suggestions, I couldn't be more open to them right now.
My advice is to find something else within your timezone +- 2 hours (i.e. at least 5-6 hours overlap with other colleagues)
Very likely not what you wanted to hear but that's my immediate reaction.
I don't get it :-/ Can someone please explain what that is supposed to mean?
This seems like a personal issue rather than an issue with the concept of working from home. For me, personally, I don't care about when/how people work as long as they're delivering on what I'm asking from them. I may just be extremely fortunate that my team is very responsive but I never have issues with being available for my team or them being available for me and that kind of negates any kind of guilt cycle there could be.
Here's a tweet today from the creator of Babel on how he is moving to the east bay because housing is more affordable. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1064252136349822977 .
If someone who's created that much value is not able to afford an area then it's insulting that tech giants expect us to move there (or have a 2 hour commute to somewhere affordable).
There's this terrible myth that I want to kill; that software engineering is a well-paid field. That's a lie.
Here's something pharmacists, account managers, farmers can afford: 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom houses near where they work.
We can't. We're asked to live in apartments in Jersey and commute 45 minutes to Manhattan every day.
Or we work remotely and are expected to take a smaller wage, where the company can't wait to get big enough so that it can force us all to move.
There are tradeoffs, sure. But it's not a lie to say software engineering is a well paid field.
- stories I read about bay area devs here and
- stories from the people I work with here in my state (there are maybe 5 real tech companies in the state, and I know people at all of them).
Even the people on my team who make lower salaries (say 70k-90k in the midwest), half of them have spouses that don't work and they are doing just fine with kids and enough house to support them all. Compared to this dev who created Babel (and is probably a better dev that anybody on my team), it seems insane.
It sounds like you're not disagreeing with the tradeoffs, you know them well if you live here. So what do you mean is atypical?
I am paid the same as a remote worker in a suburban area as those who work downtown. The only way to make change is to stop giving into tech companies and VCs wanting to force people into moving to high cost areas. I like to think I do my part when I decline any interview requiring onsite by explicitly stating why I will not accept it.
Can we also add "have to be where the talent is" that is thrown around often?
For me it's been very profitable.
> Here's something pharmacists, account managers, farmers can afford: 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom houses near where they work.
I can easily afford that. Most software engineers I know can afford that.
> We can't. We're asked to live in apartments in Jersey and commute 45 minutes to Manhattan every day.
I don't live in NYC. I work from home or from an office 5min away from my home.
> Or we work remotely and are expected to take a smaller wage
I work remotely and earn more than most engineers in SF. I save 300-400% more.
> where the company can't wait to get big enough so that it can force us all to move.
I've never experienced this.
> I run a high-grade 2-person consultancy that works with both established companies and passionate entrepreneurs to help them polish their ideas, turn them into state-of-the-art working products, and bring those products into the market.
Sounds like you own a successful business. Congratulations, that is very impressive.
Keep in mind though that entrepreneurship is far riskier than employment, and this discussion is around being an employee. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
You wouldn't call $5/hour folks on upwork "business owners". We're basically doing the same thing, selling our time for money.
Small business owner: files 1099, pays self employment tax.
Employee: files 1040, doesn’t pay self employment tax.
Feeling victimized because you have to commute for 45 minutes, do your cushy job, and get paid incredibly well compared to most of your fellow citizens is just sad.
This mentality does not represent the majority of software engineers. Most of us are (among other things) grateful and content, thank you.
> Product Management is mostly about consistent execution of plans, not painting high-level visions.
It's a common view that software developers are an output device, like a printer. You tell them what to build by sending them very detailed instructions. They follow the instructions to the letter, and their work is judged by compliance. Perfection is perfectly conforming to some one else's plan.
I think this is bunk. It might have made a little sense when releases were every 18 months to 3 years. But in an age where companies are releasing dozens of times per day [1], it's foolish. Perfectly following a plan means you believe nobody will learn anything during the time it takes to follow the plan. But if you are releasing early and often, you can learn a ton from users. You can be much more innovative and much more effective than competition.
That only happens, though, if you treat team members not as rote plan-followers but as creative professionals who are deep collaborators. Where vision isn't something a few HiPPOs hammer out in exclusive twice-annual sessions, but where everyone constantly participates and refines it. If a company's process has already shut down collaboration, then of course the difficulties of remote collaboration aren't a problem. The challenge -- still unsolved, I think -- is how to maintain both a high level of collaboration and fast iteration without having to have everyone together.
[1] E.g., https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/03/etsy-deploy-50-times-a-da...
Usually products without someone filling the product manager (not project manager) role in some way suffer for it.
I don't believe his view conflicts with yours.
I think it's very possible to have someone present to help define value and priorities, and focus on the people part of getting shit built, while giving engineers a lot of creative involvement and ownership.
I've lucked out and most plans I've worked with are super, super high level and gives everyone a lot of freedom.
Fowler cites Jack Reeves, who said that the parallel to a construction blueprint is not some UML diagram but the source code. Therefore all programmers are designers. Programming has a parallel to construction workers, but they are not people, they are the compiler and linker.
Software would should, as much as possible, be design of novel things. And the only way we know whether something novel really works is to see what happens when people use it. The shorter that feedback loop, the more effective we can be.
Like?
> It's not just that I don't trust myself, I don't trust other people too.
This sentiment seems to say that you don't trust your colleagues in general, and that doesn't really make a difference remote or at the job. There are plenty of "chair warmers" at every office...
That's definitely so. In the same way as 5% (read in some study quite long ago) of us are capable to manage other people.
Remote work requires self-discipline/determination to reach end result. Looking on developers I know personally I would estimate 30-20% of them are capable to do remote work.
Actually that is not about just remote strictly speaking. In office those 70%-80% require tight supervision/mentoring/other forms of motivation.
What is the difference of working remotely and working in office with your headphones on, only using slack to communicate? I know several places like that.
I’ve worked full time remotely for the last 6 months it’s been absolutely wondrous. I would hate to have to commute and go back to an office.
If so, that's unprofessional.
I have multiple colleagues who just casually disappear from the office (sorry, "work from home") for days to weeks and it's beyond irritating and disruptive to the rest of us.
In any case you seem to have a real issue with your coworkers wherever the actual fault lies. Doesn’t seem sustainable.
> I have multiple colleagues who just casually disappear from the office (sorry, "work from home") for days to weeks and it's beyond irritating and disruptive to the rest of us.
I cannot agree more. I would also add that (you might not agree with this) this is not just a tiny, minor problem, inconvenience, I think this can possibly cause major problems, especially in the design phase of systems. If the design is not communicated perfectly there will be problems and the only way to ensure this is to communicate face-to-face long enough that all engineers agree design is impeccable. Call me old school.
> grace us with their presence.
> someone deliberately absent is insulting.
It seems you and the parent comment are conflating working from home/remote with playing hookey, which might be the case for your co-workers/organization and that sucks, but for a lot of companies that's not how it really works.
For example, my organization is spread out across the country, so even if someone on my team isn't working from home, they are still working remotely (from my perspective). This means as an organization, we have to establish communication channels to avoid the pain points you mentioned. I've been in "whiteboard" architecture discussions without being face-to-face with every person on my team and I would argue our way of accommodating remote teams is far superior to your in person discussions for the simple fact that we record all of our meetings and they can be reviewed by anyone at anytime.
Maybe recording these types of meetings (or all) might be something for you and your organization to consider? It seems like it would make you a lot happier and it is very beneficial to come back to a recording of this type of meeting months later and remember why you decided on a certain direction.
Anyone who knows more about this than I do, are we close to that day?
I've been in two startups, one working remotely ("distributed") and one working in the room with the CEO.
The degree of situational awareness was very different.
When I was sitting 5 feet from the CEO, I knew the company was in the tank and in grave danger of going under. We turned it around.
When I was remote, based on the daily/weekly phone calls I knew the project I was working on was in trouble and way behind, but had no idea till the CEO drove up to meet me that he and the other execs had no salary for 3 months and the company was out of money. (They found a buyer for a pittance within a year to save face.)
I had a sense of urgency in both cases... but the urgency was different when in-person. And the awareness was WAY different.
Which one helped you better focus on your role and deliver what you needed to help the company?
Hearing all these things in-person can definitely be good context, but there is also a risk that you hear something wrong, succumb to gossip, or lose focus based on worries that may not be necessary. (Of course I’d argue it’s best for the employee to judge rather than be left in the dark, but I’m curious here specifically)
Part of this comes down to company culture as well - getting remote comms channels down is really hard, and takes a LOT of effort from senior management, especially for things that are nuanced or may change. How do you not panic anyone but also let them know there may be a need for urgency, etc (in-person works well for that)
When you were remote, was the CEO remote as well, or just you?
As I moved up in the industry it eventually became normal for my peers to be two floors away and I never see them IRL, or later on, for my boss or peers to be 100 to 2000 miles away.
If my closest (in the sense of daily peer cooperation) coworker is three hundred miles away, does it matter if I'm at home or in an office with 600 people that I don't directly work with in it?
Not ever job will forever be entry level with a dozen IRL peers within a dozen feet. Companies that can't scale, do not survive long term.
If your CEO had a private office with a closable door, it would have been a lot easier to conceal the urgency of the "money" calls and conversations.
I think your experiences may have had more to do with the openness and transparency of the CEO to the line employees, rather than a matter of mere proximity. It's certainly easier to hide things from employees when they aren't all in the same room, but if the execs decide to keep bad news from you so you'll keep working instead of jumping ship, it's not going to matter where you sit.
Personally, I'd rather not have to deal with the pressure of keeping the whole company afloat, rather than staying on my oar and pulling on the drumbeat. We divide labors and trade different areas of expertise to be more efficient economically.
Were I sitting 5 feet from the CEO with the knowledge the company is in the tank, I would look at my ownership stake in it, likely find that it was worthless even if I busted my ass to turn things around, and would then put all my extra effort into shopping my resume out to companies with more runway--after hours, keeping it secret. If things are that dire, my loyalty can only be secured with ownership, not promises and dreams. At that point, everyone still left hanging on might as well be co-founders, because the originals couldn't pull it out themselves.
Hardly a representative sample.
I've worked with offshore resources on and off in my career and have a variety of more mundane (?more representative?) experiences pro and con.
In my experience, it's hard to transfer knowledge, wisdom, and strong (micromanaging?) technical/quality-oriented direction offshore. Onshore tech lead becomes a bottleneck. If there are strong persons offshore leading efforts, or some rotation onshore of people from offshore largely focused on communication I've seen it work out better.
But whatever word is used.. maybe it won't matter for that much longer? I think another thing that will be interesting to watch is if/how quickly the extra word "remote"/"distributed"/etc disappears because it becomes redundant or outmoded.
Think of the internet: every service on the internet was once "e-{service}". Over time that mostly just became "service", because the fact you are on the internet is now assumed, and doesn't have to be qualified. Indeed, if you're not on the internet that might be the thing you have to qualify now.
Will we see job listings in 10-15 years with "Engineer (Colocated Office)"?
And you won't, either.
I think this is very simple. Either you are a distributed team working on digital artifacts that live primarily online .... or you are a cross-functional team trying to creatively solve a problem for somebody.
If you know what you're doing, the solution is locked in, and all you're accomplishing by showing up somewhere is moving cards around on a wall? Stay home. If you don't know what you're doing -- requirements are in flux, the customer can't decide, the project is high-risk/high-stress, etc? Show up where the other people are.
And it doesn't have to be one way or the other. I've worked great projects where we all co-located, got into a groove, then finished it up from home -- only to repeat when the next big hunk of problems showed up.
So many of these tech essays seem to based on turning the contrast way up, insisting that the answer must be X or Y, then defending it. Why can't it be both? Seeing success in teams working both ways, wouldn't the more logical position be that in some cases each has its advantages?
What I noticed is that in early days of my startup when I was working remotely I was able to contribute much more than now, when I'm required to work from the (open plan) office. Working remotely gives flexibility on work hours (i.e. I could do normal 9-5 and then in the evening I usually checked in to add some extra but I could do that as I did not have to wake up early in the morning in order to commute to the office).
Working remotely makes it more challenging (for some) to resist temptation to procrastinate. And also it requires leaders to understand how to measure the output (although, of course, leaders need to understand that despite the fact where does the worker deliver their work from).
Reading, and scrolling down a bit on the mouse, so the content I'm reading reaches the top of the page. Maybe a second after I stop scrolling, boom, suddenly the header re-appears out of nowhere and covers right what I'm reading. I actually gave up reading the content, not because I wasn't interested, but because that damn header kept hiding the content.
(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()People should not underestimate the value of getting an "urban" salary in the sticks, it can be the equivalent of a huge relative pay increase.
One day someone will figure out how to be a salary calculator for remotes and this benefit will go away as employers will try to tailor the salary for local cost-of-living.
They were unrelated to the government, but I think one of the original founders had military experience so they went with what they knew. Not a perfect solution, but an easy one.
Just wanted to post so folks understand there is a range of opportunities out there... you just need to find them...
I've been distributed/remote for almost 10 years and my experience hits all the same points you made. I also have no doubt that my choice has limited my career. But career is just one scope of life. Not commuting to an office has afforded me the time to exercise more, see my children every single day, participate in their lives in ways that would not be possible otherwise, eat healthier, spend time with my aging parents who come to see my children at least once a week, and on and on.
On the other hand, I agree it is unlikely for the majority of remote workers. Depends a lot on your skill level and how rare/in-demand it is I suppose.
At most places the "talent is your #1 resource" is bullshit. Ours is not and is a key to us being profitable (it's actually rolled into our comp model).
I am relatively new to remote work so I am still adjusting but I find that for me the negatives are that I actually work more hours as its harder to gauge how I am thought of without face to face time and the lack of real human interaction can lead to feelings of isolation. Working to get past that. I currently live in a city but am planning on moving to a cheaper area and taking my higher urban salary with me which is great. Even thinking about just traveling every summer with my family, as long as I have internet connection I can work and get paid and I have the unique opportunity to show my kids areas of the world they would never see.
(Edit: I'm not actually looking to change jobs right now, so don't take the first sentence literally and start sending me positions. But I'm contemplating a move out of state next year, and if that happens I'd be seriously tempted to look at remote work.)
My actual work experience has been quite deep in a lot of those areas, though obviously not as much as person that only does those things with their career.
That's a function of the scope of my interests and the size of the company.
I am 100% fine not "advancing", because there is no "advancement" to be had at a small firm. We just get pay raises and more days off. I dunno what else I am supposed to want.
And I certainly wouldn't be allowed to play banjo if I had to go into an offie.
We started as a conventional company located in San Francisco.
For some context - we're https://www.datastreamer.io ... we provide data feeds around blogs, news, and social media to search engines, and data analytics companies. We have about a petabyte of content in our index now.
Our SF location was SWEET. Downtown. 100 year old building. Brick walls, super nice place - until they tore it down to build the new Transbay terminal.
Long story short but at that point we decided to give distributed work a try.
Back then there weren't many companies doing it but I decided to embrace the benefits of it in terms of what it could do for my company.
This isn't discussed often but there are actually PERKS to distributed work.
If your team is in different timezones. This means you can coordinate ops so that if there's an emergency no one actually has to wake up.
This has massive long term implications for morale and hiring!
You can now hire ops people and tell them that they never have to be woken up in the middle of the night.
We will often have issues with data indexing of sites at odd hours. We can't control when a site being indexed breaks so it can happen at unusual times. Usually at 5AM when I'm sleeping.
One downside is that each country has its own hurdles for hiring.
My advice is find 2-4 countries (including your own) that are close to your timezone. You will have banking, political, and infrastructure issues so limiting the number of distinct countries you work with reduces your risk.
We prefer the US, Poland, Germany, Spain, and Brazil.
It definitely takes some re-thinking in terms of tools. Lots of video conferencing. Lots of slack. Lots of email. Lots of Github issues.
I think it's worth it though.
Also, don't rule out being a hybrid company. If you have a central office (or offices) you can have the benefits of both worlds.
https://fridayfeedback.com/p/how-to-make-remote-work-more-co...
I think finding this balance is the crux of the remote work experience. Meetings are necessary, but where is the line drawn? Collaboration is important, but do you need to have whiteboarding sessions to get things done?
1. Just because a system is distributed does not mean you have a lot of very small machines (eg. a system with 10 machines each with 1MB RAM will beat one with 1000 machines each with 10KB RAM). Similarly, having 5-10 distributed offices could net all the benefits mentioned in the article while avoiding costs of having 500 employees working from home/wework/...
2. Just because your system is distributed, you don't locate one machine on each continent. Machines are still arranged in proximity and having cross datacenter communication significantly erodes performance. Similarly, having distributed offices in far away timezones (eg. US west coast and India) imposes tremendous costs on collaboration. Having office in nearby timezones would be much better (eg. Seattle, Denver, SF). One particular case where far-away timezones help is ease of having 24-hour oncall support.
3. Different machine profile in your system, or different composition of your clusters, makes it harder to tune the system for performance or quality. Similarly, having employees in vastly different jurisdictions would mean you have additional costs on compliance / regulations / etc.
4. When you are prototyping or bootstrapping a new product, you do that quickly over a small setup (one machine). Similarly, it might make sense to bootstrap your startup in your garage (or a single city) until it is ready to scale.
I've been part of startups where VCs would stop by to pat on the CEO on the back, take a little tour of the office, happy to see 15-ish bozos banging on the keyboard. Sometimes they would invite some of their buddies to show off their monkeys. I don't know, maybe it was the VC version of a dick fight.
I actually ran into the CEO a year after this happened and he still believed it to be true. "There's no way we would've been able to pull off our last pivot without everyone sitting around the table late at night spitting out ideas".
Oh well. I'm at a better company now.
A reductive narrative: a lot of investors like to pattern-match, and SV is full of many more success stories of a small tight-knit team collaborating well in a tiny shared garage office than it is of teams who managed to create a functioning collaborative distributed workflow.
(In our case, we've managed to sidestep this so far by working with smart angels who get it, and by working in a space — indie games — where distributed teams are comparatively common. Also helps that my cofounder is in SF and can take in-person meetings. I do worry we'll feel pressure at the A round to consolidate, but I'll be pushing hard against it.)
pro of "decentralized" work
- no itinere ⇒ no travel cost, wasted time, bad weather...
- comfort at work
cons:
- tech limitation, you are often forced to use bad proprietary software that really suc*s
- if your partner also work from home maybe more family stress being more time together
- a tendency of work more while being rewarded less
Other things balance, for instance connection problems may cost you but that's the same for protest or adversity on roads. You pay less for travel but you generally pay more for "personal hardware" etc.
I naturally gravitate to remote work -- it works for me. Where it's tough is at the edges of "my" work. What is mine, and how does it interface with everyone else's? This was a constant struggle with distributing the work at my old company (and this was prior to Slack's ubiquity, which doubtless would have helped).
My current company uses Holacracy as its organizing system, and even besides the fact that the tools are better now, the role clarity and distributed authority provided by Holacracy make an absolutely massive difference. From talking with friends at other Holacracy-powered companies that aren't remote, the difference is still big there, but a lot of the highlights are extra-highlighted in a remote setting. Things really get "distributed" in a meaningful way.
It saves gas, etc. I don't need the social aspect of work (I'm introverted). I really, really like working remotely.
But it's not for everybody. Sub-par performers especially will drag down productivity
So it's a mixed bag, IMHO. But for me, I love it.
If you don't like to work in an office, then don't.
For whatever reason.
But your assumptions are mostly false: I've actively brainstormed and planned with people in voice-only sessions -- and they rarely exceeded 25-30 minutes. And that went on and on for the 1-year contract, every week or two, and only once did we have trouble getting a message across.
Building trust can take anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks if you are a down-to-earth productive programmer -- which I am. Not sure where your multi-year idea of building trust comes from?
I am not attacking you. But I can't stand behind this very widely believed legend that face-to-face trumps everything. That's provably false in literally half my work relationships during my 17-year-long career.
When people have common vision and are working honestly for the interests of their employer -- and are professionals -- things go pretty smoothly and the machine gets oiled fast.
I think it works just fine when the domain in which you're mentoring is like software engineering.
It's not like you need to show them the proper technique for wielding an axe or anything else with a lot of physicality to it.
Fail these two and of course you will think remote/distributed doesn't work.
It's not for everybody. I only find myself improving all the time by working at a home office.
I respect the people who dislike it but they rarely return the favor.
This is... quite the statement. Teams hold more meetings as the size of their organization increases and any one individual cannot complete the work on their "shared digital artifact." This horrific, pre-digital concept termed "teamwork" emerges and the team discovers the most effective form of getting work done, as a team, is talking to one another.
In my case, I chose Remote option as a necessity when we had our kids. Due to the necessity, the client agreed for a partial remote work arrangement. This gave me a sense of satisfaction and balance in work/life.
After this experience, I continue working with other clients with option of partial remote work.
It's like that Yogi Berra saying, "Nobody comes here anymore. It's too crowded."
I would like a large-ish collaborative drawing surface, and ability to see the faces of my collaborators (2-3 people), as well ability to request and grant control of the board.
So much of our design came out of impromptu design sessions, I don't see a future without it.
I don't even mind the buzzword, it maybe even captures the point of companies such as 37 Signals better than "remote." But I am bothered by the "fault tolerance" section. Because it pretty much boils down to "it's easier to find a scab." In fact, the term might be a bit unfair to the "replacement" worker, as it's unlikely they have the means to find out that the previous employee has left for reasons they're comfortable with.
This is just another time when I'm worried that "distributed" work might be a double-edged sword if it ever becomes truly common. I still think it's worth it — as an autistic person I _really_ appreciate being in control of how and when I socialise and the amount of stimuli I receive — but it's not all roses.
Accept it as the trade-off like I have. It's just the cost of doing business.
Distributed companies i.e., Elastic seem to have solved this issue. Being a remote team member on a collocated team has this issue in spades.
the only companies where everyone is involved in every decision they want to be involved in are <3 people.
The name matters.
1. I now get more sleep
2. I see my kids playing, i often take 5 minute break to watch them play and this motivates me more
3. I usually bring down my pace upto the 5th slowest employee in the team. (40 people in our team)
4. I don't try to do a lot. If a task is estimated as 2 hours and i did that in 10 minutes, i go to gym or roam around the market, till 2 hours have gone. Then i report the task as completed.
We use discord, somtimes i record the "i am working noise, keyboard chatter etc.." on a recorder and leave it on my desk playing when i leave.
People end up thinking that i am at the desk working.
This motivates other people to work, so don't seee anything wrong with this