We're all remote: how we deal with a 100% remote dev team | Hacker News Reader

We're all remote: how we deal with a 100% remote dev team

dt.deviantart.com

197 pointskemayo80 comments

I would like you to think about the question "Why is talking on your cell phone when you drive 'bad', but talking to the person in the passenger seat 'ok'?"

I submit that because the person on your cell phone doesn't have the same physical context as you, they don't know they need to shut up for a moment while you try to avoid a three-way with an overly aggressive BMW trying to split lanes. There is a certain amount of 'shared context' that isn't part of the discussion.

Now programming isn't the same of course, and working at home when your single is different than working at home when your married which is much different than working at home when you have kids. Ever data driven, Google documented that people who had kids and worked from home had their productivity plummet between 2PM and 8PM. Is that bad? probably not, can you plan for it? sure.

If you're managing a team, you can get a sense for how overloaded someone is at work, when they are working at home it is hard to keep your employees from burning themselves out. (Some people literally don't know when to stop working)

By the same token a group meeting can be a great place to rapidly resolve a bunch of problems and to air a bunch of issues. On the phone you can't tell that someone is wincing when another team member is estimating 6 weeks for some effort, you can't know if they think that is aggressive or weak and why they think that, the conversation never comes up.

Finally, if the overall percentage of your conversations are in email, rather than speaking, you add to the distraction issues facing people rather than letting them work smoothly.

Bottom line, working from home has its place, but the value of being in the same space has its benefits too.

>Ever data driven, Google documented that people who had kids and worked from home had their productivity plummet between 2PM and 8PM.

Interesting. Do you have a link to any of this information that Google collected?

Sadly no. Sometimes they will publish a paper or make a blog entry about some learning they have developed but unless they do it stays buried inside their data collection containment vessel.

I work at home at my current job about 95% of the time. I don't mind it, and it does have some serious advantages. But I still feel having your team in one building is the better way to go. It can also get a little lonely, and spending so much time in your own home does get old.

The trend of the "virtual company" where everyone works remotely will only increase, and I think it might even become the norm. So I'm getting used to it and looking to ways to make it truly ideal for me. Recently I've been contacted by companies about potentially working with them and when I tell them I really can't move, every one of them has said working remotely would be fine. Even just a year ago that wouldn't have been the case.

I do hope this becomes the trend. I'd love to work mostly from home, or at least from where ever I want. I don't like offices much.

If it did become the norm, imagine how much less downtown office space we would need.

Indeed, and how much fuel and pollution it would save from people not having to commute every day.

Also think how much person-to-person social interaction would be wiped out. Not very pleasant from my point of view

This is not zero-sum. Spend those 1-2hrs a day not commuting with your family, friends, playing sports, etc.

It also isn't mutually exclusive. Just because you don't work from home doesn't mean you have a 1/2 hour commute each way. It also doesn't mean that you spend your commute by yourself. Carpooling, taking the bus, or metro all offer chances to socialize with people outside of your current friends and family group. A large part of interacting with people at work is that they are outside of your current social circle. You can branch out and get to know people that you wouldn't normally associate yourself with.

Also, working from home doesn't guarantee that you will be working the same hours . I know a few people that are expected to work extra hours because they have more free time from not commuting.

> I know a few people that are expected to work extra hours because they have more free time from not commuting.

That's a silly thing to stand for

I live in a part of the country that has pretty mediocre tech options, which means that anyone doing any interesting dev work telecommutes. The result of this? There's a growing community telecommuters that all hang out with each other, meet monthly, do hacknights, drop by co-working spaces etc. It's actually pretty awesome because rather than just your coworkers you have this "other office" of people you get to learn from. As telecommuting/remote working grows I think we'll see much better social interaction start to form, communities that are more based on what your passionate about rather than that you happen to share an office space. Additionally with remote work comes a lot more flexibility, which means a lot more social flexibility, it's easier than ever to grab lunch with a friend an in entirely different industry. I think basing social interaction around a 9-6 schedule and being locked in a building is much more damaging than the alternative.

Thats really cool how all you you have found each other and are able to get together regularly. I'm in Columbia, SC (not exactly the hot-bed of tech) and we have a similar situation.

But from a long-term sustainability stand-point, we want to grow local tech companies that contribute to our own economy and give us control over our city's well-being. It would be interesting if a bunch of you who telecommute could band together to start a company. Seems like you already get along well outside of work

Very good point. If you want the interaction, you could get together with your friends (assuming they telecommute too) and code where ever you want, instead of just with the people that were for some reason assigned to the same box X in building Y.

The flexibility will make social life more interesting instead of less.

Another good thing would be that you can move to any nice place you want, instead of being bound geographically to the (usually expensive and small) homes in the area around your workplace.

If you need a friend, get a hobby with people.

They call it your social life for a reason.

I for one love not being constantly yipped at while deep in though about what I'm being paid to do, then going and doing what I want, when I want, with people I actually like.

Well, I'm torn on this. My initial, non-thinking reaction was one of rabid agreement. This is very correct if you're a 9to5er. If you are at the office to put in your 40 hours and then leave, I would agree that there is no room to inject a social life into this. There's also the issue of breaking flow, which you alluded to.

I think the typical startup lifestyle changes this a bit, though. We who run startups( generally )don't work 40 hour weeks, and if you're even a bit extroverted, chances are you're going to need to "get energy" from social interaction with your coworkers, since time to do this outside the office is fairly limited.

With the standard introvert archetype, this is likely a non-issue. My money is on samtp being an extrovert, and you( and I )not capable of empathizing with the odd need they have for such interaction.

I am an extrovert.

I just don't find the pleasure of talking with someone compatible with parts of my job. The other parts it works wonderfully with.

You think long hours are unique to the startup world? You can have a social life and work long hours. You just have to intentionally do it. IMO its a sign of maturity and adulthood.

I don't subscribe to dividing your life into clean boxes of 'work life' 'social life' 'family life'...

I think you need all the different elements in your life, but it is often most effective to combine different needs together (such as socializing with work friends or helping social friends with a work project). It offers opportunities to make more meaningful friendships and a better work environment.

Oh I socialize plenty with people I do work with....with my clients on the other end of the country, with co-workers in Canada and parts of the US, etc.

Then I turn off the skype chat and knock out a iPhone app when it's time to stop chit chatting.

I also help setup NSLunches in Atlanta with other iOS people and setup lunches around town with various other folks.

I find it depends a lot on the person.

I don't think online communication and in-person communication are identical, but depending on the person, they aren't necessarily better/worse. The people I know the best personally are people with whom I talk at least semi-regularly via all three of: IRL, real-time text chat, and email; and who are themselves also at least somewhat "fluent" in all three media. Some of my closest friends are people I see occasionally irl but often online, so I'm not sure it even correlates that well (at least for me). You get different sides of a person via each of them I find. Some people are of course much stronger at one or another one. There are some people where if I were required to only interact with them face-to-face it'd be weird; and other people where if I were required to interact with them only online it'd be weird.

I think it would also change the job market. With the artificial boundary of geography lifted, suddenly companies will look for employees very differently. What would the effect of that be? Rock star employees can demand higher salaries? Average joes forced to accept lower salaries? Will every company incorporate in Delaware? :) I'm not an economist, but I do think things along those lines would happen more.

Following the recent earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand this is a subject of interest.

With the central business district closed for 5 weeks and counting, many people who were formerly office-bound are now working from their home or offices being set up in suburban housing.

It will be interesting to see how much of this change will be permanent.

In my experience the social aspect is the hardest part of remote/home working to get right.

I do think the loss of a more intimate social cohesion does increase the risk of off-shoring/in-shoring positions to cheaper locations. As someone who moved from the Midwest to be closer to where the action is, I suppose that would have been good for me before, but both nationally and globally it won't be a transition without a lot of growing pains.

Indeed, this has become a secret recruitment tool: http://www.flickr.com/photos/technomancy/tags/remoteoffice

Working remote is good but it also depends on the type of position and type of remote. There are definitely unique challenges depending on the type of positions. For example, IMO:

Solo Backend Developer = Remote Anywhere=OK

Backend Developer with a team = Remote within the city= Possible; Remote outside of city=Challenging; Remote International=Hell No;

Front End Developer = Alway prefer in-house; Remote (depending on how good they are) within or outside city=Possible; Remote International = Hell No

Front End Developer with a team = Almost alway prefer in-house; Remote (depending on how good they are) within or outside city=Challenging; Remote International=Hell No;

Out of interest (and as a freelance developer), could you explain what the differences between positions are?

I wear all of those hats from time to time, and I'm a Remote International, and it works ok.

I've been working in a home office for the past five years for two companies: one large, one small. WFH can be and has been a great privilege. It doesn't work for every personality or organization type, but I've seen far more benefits than disadvantages.

Merits aside, there are a few things almost everyone faces at one point or another:

You are likely to gain weight.

You may be surprised by how often work overlaps your personal or family life.

You will probably end up developing a good amount of your own communication tools rather than license third party collaboration software.

You may be surprised how soon you miss working in an office environment.

This is a good post, but I would take issue with the following:

"You are likely to gain weight."

It is fairly trivial to stock your cabinets and refrigerator at home with healthy food options. Contrast this with an office environment. Between the morning donuts, the snack bins, the beer kegs, the pizza delivered for meetings, and the endless birthday cakes - sweet lord, the birthday cakes! - it's far more likely that you'll gain weight there than at home.

Mmm. Office Food. Thankfully I avoided that anyway.

In a WFH situation, it's actually the lack of exercise or commute that I'm talking about.

Walking or biking to work and walking with co-workers to and from lunch several times a week is healthy.

One has to make up for these lost opportunities by exercising more simply for the sake of exercising.

The social element of work has a lot of advantages.

WFH took me from riding/walking 20 miles per week to near zero.

It's taken a lot of discipline and time to duplicate that.

Why do you associate commuting to work with exercise? Not commuting means extra time for exercise.

At least for me, commuting by bike is just routine. Now that my current gig is within walking distance, these about 5 hours of biking per week just disappeared. I think that's because I find biking, running, swimming, actually anything stressing endurance an utter chore after a few weeks. Whereas while commuting a can use the time to spin up my brain and preload the working context. And in the evening it's a nice way to cool down and put everything aside.

I'm trying to compensate by going for a longer walk after-office, but because it's not a necessity I'll drop that far more often than not. I'm a lazy bastard, after all ...

Yeah I find working at home allows me a full kitchen and groceries to make healthy food for myself instead of going out and getting takeout like I'd do in the office.

I also switched to a standing desk about six months back so I don't sit hunched over in a chair all day long. This would be difficult to do in a cube or open planned office (the environments I worked in before I started my consultancy).

I also get a lot more sun than I'd otherwise do because I can pick the nicest spot in the house to work rather than being stuck in some big room surrounded by fabric walls. Plus I can open the windows in the summer and get plenty of fresh air --- and walk around without disturbing people.

All in all, I find my home work environment much healthier than any office I've ever worked in. The only downside is that when I had to commute, I'd commute by bicycle as much as possible, so now I bike much less than I used to.

I'd say switching from a bicycle commute and a sedentary 8 hours in an unhealthy office to no commute and low-intensity exercise at a standing desk in a healthy environment has been a wash for me. But the bicycle was the only healthy part of my old situation, so for people who don't do that, I can't see any downside to working at home unless they make really bad choices.

I sometimes I feel like a rare case when I say I really dislike working remotely. I find it a pain having to call people, and I feel it's tough to have meaningful discussions using text-based forms of chat.

I just feel like communication is much easier and more effective to communicate face to face with people as the norm. And being able to just talk over my cube to another member of the team is something I would have a hard time giving up.

I'm about two months into my first remote gig and I have to agree with you that communication is the worse. Sometimes I feel like I'm pulling teeth to get an answer out of anyone.

I think this depends on your requirements... if you are a liaison between departments, or the specs of what you are trying to do aren't well defined, there's too much to communicate.

Some remote jobs are great: they lay out what you need and you provide it without having to pester people for information.

I do think that it's not for everyone. Some people have a communication style that works much better for in-person interactions. However, I suspect that the people who are suited for remote-working are rather concentrated in the engineering disciplines. :)

As far as the final question of better communication tools. At our company (even though we aren't all remote) we use OpenFire[1] as our communication platform. By tieing it in with LDAP we can automatically add new employees to everyones Roster quickly. It's worked out great over the course of the last 2 years. We do have gateways enabled to allow employees to use it as their all-in-one IM system, and we were going to experiment with the video-chat features but never got around to it. It's worth looking in to IMHO.

[1] OpenFire - GPL Real Time Collaboration Server: http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/

I don't think most business owners or bosses are mature enough for this yet... they just assume the remote worker is sloughing off.

No use trying to convince them otherwise... they think their staff is slackers. Period. (Not all business owners or bosses, just those that lack the maturity to direct a remote workforce.)

But for the seasoned manager, it's no problem at all.

This drives me nuts; either I'm checking (timestamped no less!) code into the repo, and delivering what I say I'll deliver by the appointed deadlines, or I'm not.

It's not like you can fake productivity as a coder.

You can (or at least they'll assume you can) if you have input into your own deadlines: they'll say you're padding your estimates.

I love when non-coders tell me how long a coding task should take. This is one reason why I decided to work for myself.

Let's be honest, coding is really only half the story. There's lots of deployment, debugging, and maintenance work that is much fuzzier and harder to measure. In fact, if you are actually actively coding for more than half your time, you're either really lucky or you don't have any users yet.

> Pair programming or a scrum, for instance, just aren't the same without colocation.

This actually works great for us, but only because everyone uses Emacs. Running over SSH and tmux is a huge win.

What do you guys do with tmux? (as opposed to screen)

tmux's permissions model is a lot better, but the other huge win is that it resizes to the smallest screen. With screen we would always have to shuffle around so the person with the smallest screen was the first to join each window; it was a huge drag. The better key bindings and config files are just gravy.

I have been working from home for the past 12 years. Some was for a company with about 1000 employees, with about 5% working from home. The second was with a company of about 100 employees again with about 5% WFH. Now I am working for a start-up where the founder has decided that for now everyone will work from home. Although - I traveled frequently including back to HQ in the previous jobs I always felt a bit out of the flow of the office relationships. It is nice to be in a situation where the WFH is the norm. If we succeed in some substantial way I expect that the founder will establish a physical office in the greater Boston area - but I know from talking with my co-workers who are in that area they will not be very willing to put a significant commute back into their daily schedule. I suspect it will end up being an office for the founder, a big conference room for group work and some flexible open office workspace that people share on a rotating or as needed basis.

Payroll is the big thing stopping me from growing my team with work-from-homers. What if a member of the team is from another country? Do members submit their time each week, or are they all salaried? Trust is key in these situations too. Do you monitor code commits? Numbers of lines submitted each week? I worked from home when I was with IBM, and I always put in more hours than they paid me for. I would like to see more articles on how to make this work.

Trust is key no matter where they work. With a small company if you can't trust someone to be as productive as you need them to be (regardless of if you're looking over their shoulder or not) you probably shouldn't hire them. The exception to that I guess is people who just don't work well remotely. But the whole comment about monitoring code commits just seems nutty to me. My company is remote, and it works because I trust everyone to do a good job. I wouldn't hire someone I didn't trust.

>Trust is key in these situations too

No it's not. Do they perform? Are their numbers out of whack? => They keep job.

Do they not perform? => They lose job.

Why are you paying for asstime anyhow? Pay for results, not work.

That's where the expectations system comes in. Are they meeting their expectations? Then they're doing as much work as they're supposed to. Not meeting them? Then there's a problem, either with them or with the expectations.

If they're meeting expectations and you feel they're not working enough, then that's not their fault; it's the fault of the people setting expectations.

Regarding group chat, I strongly recommend HipChat - (http://www.hipchat.com). We're in there all day at Mixpanel.

It's like IRC but easier, with persistent chat storage, file sharing, etc.

On Skype: I've found that running our own IRC server and setting up ZNC* with accounts for all employees/developers has made a huge difference. The bonus for us is that since we do alot of open source work, it encourages developers to connect with other open source developers over IRC which is a great way to grow knowledge or get quick feedback for whatever framework/language/library we're working with at the time.

* http://en.znc.in/wiki/ZNC is a IRC bouncer that allows each user to keep their choice of clients, but still have catchup if they're offline.

I'd actually love to use IRC... but we're just not confident that it'd work well for the non-technical people, and we need them to be able to get into the project chats and demo chats.

Possibly we're selling them short here.

We're experimenting with IRC at MyEdu; while it hasn't been awful for non-technical users, it's not necessarily great either. The above-mentioned HipChat seems like it could be more viable, so I'm adding it to the candidate list.

EDIT: Not primarily for remote working, granted, but for quick collaboration and some dev-related announcements.

There's a plethora of IRC clients available, many of them very easy to use. No, you do not need to be a genius to be on IRC. Administrating channels (/mode and such) is a bit harder, but not everybody needs to do that.

Well, it looks like I'm applying for a position at DeviantArt, then.

Our company is distributed in a pretty similar way: 11 people in five different countries and in eight different cities.

For us IRC is our life line, and we regularly use skype. We meet twice per year with the whole team, each time at another location.

There are hardly any serious communication problems, nothing worst than I experienced in a previous job where all were in the same building. You learn to read between the lines when you are all day hanging out on IRC together, potential problems are probably easier to spot this way than IRL. At least for us it works :)

At some of the big companies I've worked for in industry, there is such a segregation between cubicles and closed office doors that I find my remote side projects much more productive and efficient.

I am not sure of the costs/hardware involved in running this software, but I am in a distance ed. computer science program, and we have had great success (team software engineering projects) utilizing Adobe's Breeze meeting software, hosted through my university: http://www.adobe.com/resources/breeze/

My apologies.. it's now called Adobe Connect: http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html

tap tap tap also made a blog post on working as a distributed team, focusing on the tools used to keep everyone in sync http://taptaptap.com/blog/tools-for-effective-iphone-app-dev...

(shameless plug disclaimer: I work for them. That said, it's on-topic and a good overview)

The Oatmeal's take on working from Home: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home

Minor nitpick: Scrum pre-dates Agile.

If you want to go backwards in time and start adding in other methodologies under the Agile umbrella, you need to add RAD and JAD, which VB programmers (and others) were doing back in the mid 90s.

I secretly roll my eyes whenever I'm working with an organization that claims to have developed their own custom Agile process, because 9 times out of 10 it turns out to be just RAD, aka Agile without the silly/braindead/religious bits.

This description of process made me think this would be a nice place to work. Really sensible!

I'm also working remotely, and it's absolutely fantastic. When people don't have to commute, and live where they want, happiness level is through the roof.

We also use Skype mostly for communication (although it's pretty shitty when it comes to searching chat logs).

Skype chat is definitely the weakest link the chain for our remote team as well; it's basically unusable beyond a handful of groups. We've been migrating over to IRC for as much as we can. We also briefly toyed with using Mumble (http://mumble.sourceforge.net/) for voip, and while it was pretty compelling in terms of cross-platform stability it never really took off in our organization.

The article mentions only moving off Skype if it's sufficiently advanced beyond Skype. IRC by itself is not, but we've got our own IRC server that adds some important features like indexing and catchup: http://writequit.org/blog/?p=444

Convore is pretty new, but have you tried it for private chats? When it was announced, I immediately started to think how much easier it would be to set up for my non-technical co-workers.

Link that explains basic functionality: http://gigaom.com/collaboration/set-up-real-time-conversatio...

Convore looks promising, hope it will get support in clients soon .. either twitter-ones like tweetdeck, or im/irc ones like pidgin.

Tying you to the browser is only slightly better than tying you to a single client; textareas are not the kind of place you want to spend much time. I'd be game if there were an Emacs client.

It's true that there aren't a lot of clients out there for Convore yet. There are quite a few Convore projects started on GitHub (https://github.com/search?q=convore&type=Repositories) and more clients are welcome!

I've certainly decided that remote-working is worth a reasonable chunk of money in my salary when negotiating. It's not quite a must-have, but it's close.

Don't sell yourself short. It's also good for the employer. They can afford to pay you MORE if you're remote.

It's more that I'll consider a lower offer from a remote-friendly company than I would from one which requires in-office work. It's worth money to me to not have to commute, essentially.

Actually making the offer to them of "I will take $X/year less if you let me work from home" wouldn't be smart, just because if they took it then it'd put me into a weird special-case category which wouldn't be at all good for my integration with their team.

Another happy remote worker!

Microsoft Office Communicator is great in that sense - it nicely integrates with Outlook(Calendar/Free-busy/OOO etc.), chats are searchable from within the OS and within Outlook just like emails. Best part is if I am outside with my phone (haven't found a nice OCS client for Android yet) and I miss a conversation it emails me with the conversation which I can continue over email.

The advantages of working at home are great until something goes at work like.... How long you were working? The company I worked for never realized how much time it took me to do this design work and I'd get calls the next day asking why out of 10 designs I only turned in 9 and why I was still working on the last one? In reality each design should of taken a day for about 2 of them.

Also, when it came time for layoffs it was easier for them to let the people at home go. No face to look at of explain anything too. They told me a few times I was about to be let go, but the never did and let others go. I ended up quitting and still trying for my own big win. :)

>Also, when it came time for layoffs it was easier for them to let the people at home go.

I think this is the biggest drawback. If you start at the company as a wfh person, or you transition to it and do it long enough, nobody in the office can put a face to your name. Outside of your immediate group, they don't know what you do. You're just a name on a chart. "Hey, look, without that box the chart is a little more balanced!"

In every company I've worked where wfh was tried (starting about 15 years ago), the wfh people were always the first to go when there was layoffs.

I think people need to get better about communicating about their jobs in general. Sounds like you weren't telling them how long it took you to do this stuff.

The layoffs thing was sort-of addressed in the article as being a benefit of being 100% remote. Because there's no "core team" in an office, there's no group of second class citizens working from home to be quietly fired.

The issue with how much time things take is one of the more difficult aspects of it. It's ultimately a communications issue, though. If you're in an office then you don't have to explicitly communicate about it; people can see if you're putting in ridiculous hours on a project. If you're at home and putting in the same hours then they can't be expected to know unless you tell them somehow.

Only problem working from is the damn cat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com