The Remote Work Report by Zapier | Hacker News Reader

The Remote Work Report by Zapier

zapier.com

29 pointsamursft12 comments

Working 100% remote (software dev) for about a year and a half. 15 years in various offices before that. I can’t imagine having to get up extra early, get ready, drive across town, park, walk into the office, settle into my open office air space, finally get working...then reverse the process at the end of the day.

A recruiter cold called me recently on a local full time dev position at a big bank. He asked “...how do you feel about wearing a tie to work?”

Not only is that all dead time but since starting to work for myself I've found that the hours right after I've just woken up, assuming no alarm clock was involved, are the most productive I have.

I wake up, put on pants and a shirt, walk over to my office, and just dive right in. I'm not historically a person that does that. I waffle about and waste a tremendous amount of time. But now it just sets the tone for my whole day as productive. By the time I'm eating breakfast or dealing with another person, I've knocked out a few hours of work. It's just a really good position to be approaching the day from, like no matter whatever happens to it now it at least wasn't a waste.

Turns out my problem isn't so much that I'm just generally not that productive so much as once I start faffing about I struggle to stop.

The thing about office jobs these days is you usually have multiple locations and people working from home. Working in the office is still working remote. It's kind of a waste.

Has anyone here had good luck with junior engineers working remotely? (I'm sure companies like Zapier have solved this). I've found that with senior engineers (defined not by the job title but the ability to take a coarsely defined problem like "figure out what is causing the I/O performance issues on this service and fix it") it's very easy to have them remote. Junior engineers with a senior engineer leading/managing them on-site, also fine. But I have not been able to successfully work with junior engineers who need mentoring and learning remotely.

What processes/practices/tools have people succeeded with here?

Many software companies lack formal training programs and documentation processes that juniors need to grow. They come to depend on informal training/documentation like tapping a senior on the shoulder to ask about a legacy piece of code.

The solution is to invest heavily in regimented training programs with clear KPIs (key performance indicators), better documentation, and a certain level of redundancy so that remote stakeholders can hold eachother accountable.

Obviously this isn't super attractive to C levels so they are trying to hire "Senior" developers who "don't need training". It's not working out great for them (IMO).

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Realize how I don't mention remote once because failures by remote worker are symptoms of problems that still exist even if everyone is in the same broom closet all day.

If you can't read the code, you drag those who can down with you.

Hired folks who can read the fine manual.

I remote work because I don't want to commute.

I was pretty surprised by some of these numbers about remote work in the U.S. For example, 31 percent of Millenial knowledge workers surveyed work remotely full time. 27 percent for Gen X.

Wonder how they sourced their survey respondants.

Good question. They did it through Harris Poll, which should make it relatively balanced. Sometimes you see these surveys and the population is sourced from customers/audience of the company, which obviously tilts the kind of responses you're going to get a bit.

Offices are gonna be as dead as brick n mortars and theaters.

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