Changing my mind on remote, moving the team back to San Francisco
flocrivello.com
flocrivello.com
https://flocrivello.com/ux-ex-the-painful-truth-about-custom...
Even more context is that his previous startup focuses on creating software for remote sales teams - so this guy should know more about how remote teams work than many.
Personally, as someone who's part of a remote pre-PMF team, I feel that remote work makes it somewhat harder for us all to be in sync, build together, and feel a sense of focus. That said, I assign a non-zero value on not having to sell my stuff, leave my friends and family, and move to the other side of the country.
Things like DevOps ("why spend time making internal tools for maintaining infrastructure when we could manage it by hand?") and data engineering ("in the time it takes you to replace our manual Excel process with Python, we could have come up with 3 new insights for our stakeholders!") rarely prosper in situations where EX is totally discounted - even though they end up paying big dividends for the business in the long run.
Most importantly, employees are human, and dejected employees won't do their best work for you. I agree that the best place to be is somewhere on the pareto frontier, and most startup CEOs are fooling themselves if they think they're already there.
I don't get the communication issues, nor do I get the project planning issues. Some of the companies are established while others are new, some are one product, others are many.
We have regular catchups, some of the teams I work with even meet in person occasionally.
I think though in the post the 2 bits which stand out to me is the VC reason, but also having a small team and not being able to align them.
I am going to make the judgement that small means less than 10, it is hard to manage teams but it's not that difficult. Teams are not hive minds, and if you cannot align a small team of people who probably spend the majority of their time working individual, then there is something else missing.
There is no 'wrong' with deciding remote/office/hybrid per se; the reasons for deciding it can be though. I mean they could just say; I prefer the office and that's it; the author is the CEO and decides. The reasons this article states are just more of a management thing than a remote work thing. The CEO/author seems to 'have tried' some type of remote work mimicking an office and wanting the same (overbearing; the reason I cannot sit in an office; it's not the office, it's the management; offices an sich are fine) control of an office situation where you can grab someone at a whim and ruin their productivity for that day.
Remote work requires everyone to change their mindset in the company; it does not mean you can sit in your underwear all day and play with your kids & dogs most of the time while working here and there a few minutes. It also doesn't mean, as a manager, that you can just hit Zoom every 5 minutes and get frustrated when there is no answer immediately. It requires a different way of working; you cannot mimic the office.
Remote does not inherently mean "everybody gets to come and go online whenever they want". It's perfectly reasonable to require people to be online during the same hours that you'd require non-remote people to be in the office.
How? It would be nice if the author would have put some link or resources for the readers. I don't really have any clue about what this person did.
All the argumentations against remote work on this article don't have nothing with remote work, but bad management. I identified two main issues:
1. this founder is trying to mimic office work in remote setting. It doesn't work that way! It really requires to rethink about process, culture, etc... in a very different way;
2. this founder like 90% of startup founders is a bad manager. Lack of alignment, poor coordination, poor feedback management, low trust are all the main symptoms that this person doesn't seem to have the appropriate skill level to manage a team and a remote org.
I think that remote work also requires stronger leadership and people management skills. But many founders don't really care much about those things as they should. Which also tells a lot about what these people value.
"More money is raised in SF!" At one point the richest city in the US was Detroit. The innovation hub was the cities around Lake Erie: Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Times change, SF well on it's way to being irrelevant. Besides, who cares how much money in total is invested in this county or that county. What is the probability of investment in your company is the question that should be asked. What talent can your company recruit (and afford) in this location or that location?
The author lives in SF. They feel like people at the company they run aren't 'getting enough done' and their solution is to force everyone to move to SF, where they happen to already live, rather than learn to lead a team and have some way to understand what people are doing and how long it is taking them to do it. This is the kind of founder who's first hire is a junior engineer and second hire is a PM, and then they wonder why nothing gets done. I wish I could short this company.
Love the extensive quoting of Mark Andreessen about why it's so important to be in Silicon Valley in 2007. What was important in tech 16 years ago is no more relevant now than Windows 3.0 (launched in 1990, 16 years prior to the blog post) was to Mark Andreessen in 2007 when he wrote that blog post. Doing little blog research projects is a way better use of a CEO's time than, say, figuring out how you are failing to do your job and as a result employees aren't productive.
Lost me. I have family and friends for fun, you should get some as well. Using your employees to fill that void in your life is ... petty, to say they least.
My Friday nights are for the abovementioned family and friends. Which you should, as I had mentioned, consider getting.
Tricky for new English learners to see the nuanced difference, admittedly
This is something bosses need to understand in general—something that you mean to be low-pressure and optional is not going to come across that way to the people whose paycheck depends on your goodwill.
If you are forced to do these things, then your career is already suffering. A career is not a hypothetical future promise of a nirvana-job. It's the thing you live throughout your life, every moment of it.
This quote pretty much hammered in the last nail in the coffin. He has no idea how to run teams.
Very much so and that’s the big red flag. I’d pick someone with a diametrically opposite preferences and lifestyle to me, over someone who’s judgmental and narrow minded, even if I happen to agree with them at the moment. This post reeks of “there is only one way” mindset, which is particularly ironic given that the domain is innovation.
Anyone who asserts this without evidence loses large amounts of credibility.
You are a startup. In SF, the big guys easily outcompete you for the best software folks even with their current layoffs--you are a tiny fish in a pond with big predators. Practically by definition, the people you can get are the second and third tier.
If you're really interested in getting good technical folks, put your engineering in a secondary market like Pittsburgh and put your fundraising executives in Silicon Valley. You will be a big fish in a small pond (although that may have changed a bit with work from home) and can pull in way better people for the same amount of money and those people will be more likely to stay with your company.
Udi Nir, who was CTO of Modcloth, actually said as much in a video somewhere, but I can't seem to find it anymore. Maybe the HN collective can cough it up.
A typical 9 hour day in the office was broken into 2 team coffee breaks, meetings, lots of distracting conversation and a feeling of low productivity at the end of each day.
Having said that, OP is in an extremely competitive space and appears to be building an AI tool, similar to recent features in Office and G suite, so it makes some sense to steer the ship together and focus 100%.... But they're going to take a hit in the short term, getting everyone to relocate, replacing people who don't move, onboarding etc. Seems like 2 steps backwards to me.
As several have already stated, async means less context switching. So what I think the author's actual problem is is that there is more context switching for him as he needs to wait for responses and finds something else to do.
> Colocation is more fun too. You get to have lunch with your team, grab beers on Friday nights, play video games at the end of the day in the office, etc…
> This matters not only because fun is fun, and building community is super important, but also because it helps build trust, which improves our work. You second guess each other less when you trust your team, and know you can give feedback more directly.
So what about those on your team who aren't into a beer and the end of the day, or don't care about video games? Are they not able to gain trust and function in your company?
The same tired tech. bro arguments. When this dude's company fails, it won't be because of remote.
Have working hours. Have calendar invites. It's required to make use of in person collaboration so do the same.
I miss the non task related communication. Small-talk was never my strength and I suspect I need to get better given the remote working hurdles.
Well of course, if you're the boss, one of the perks is you get some 'friends' who will hang out with at lunch and after hours.
It's critical for their careers to not have families. Instead they can have beers with their colleagues.
Wouldn't async interactions lead to less context switching?
> It’s harder to get a hold of each other, as we’re not online at the same time. “I’ll talk about it when I see him tomorrow” — these delays compound in a huge way.
What? What does working remotely have to do with people working different times during the day? Core hours should be a thing - regardless of it being remote of in the same building.
> So most interactions are async, leading to lower bandwidth, more context switching, and more things falling through the cracks.
I can't wrap my head around why async communication results in more context switching. You literally decide when you engage with async information.
> Even sync chats aren’t as good. People can’t interrupt each other or have sidebars, and there are bugs with video, audio, screenshare, etc… These frictions compound too.
Ah here we go. Bro culture coming into play. If you have to interrupt each other in order to have discussions something is off.
> This causes us to be less aligned. We’re only a few engineers right now, and yet people feel out of the loop on who’s building what.
Now we're on it. The problem isn't remote work. It's how you are handling work and the process. If you think the only way to solve this is to put people in the same room then you are destined to fail on how to build stuff. You are limited in your thinking on how to work as a team and are going to greatly reduce your ability to deal with variations unless it "totally aligns with how you know how to work." This pretty much explains it all right here.
As a principal engineer who left the Bay Area in 2010, this post obviously excludes me. If I have my choice, I’ll never go back to the office.
(Yes, I know all the recent stuff about SF, but as they describe in the post (and as has been my experience in other demonized places), it's not really relevant.)
(An unhoused person brandishing a weapon would be arrested or shot instantly. They have no rights at all and are brutally overpoliced - I've heard a police officer coach a room on what to say to get someone arrested. They are humans who are trying to survive; they aren't crazy and don't want to be attacked by police.)
Crime and drug use are issues in rural areas as much as urban. The post-pandemic crime increase, at least according to ~1 year old FBI or DoJ data, is as much rural as urban and everywhere in the country. The lower population density means you'll see less of everything - bad, good, criminals and restaurants and neighbors. Also, not much opera.
Right? It's rude to question someone's personal experience; that's what makes it such an awesome trump card. But I'm also not going to stand quietly any more and let the disinformation BS pass. I don't know your experience. I know cities, and it's very hard to believe most of these reports on HN are true.
> police brutality, racism or sexism
A great signal of this stuff, the equivalency facade. Those things are the powerful abusing the vulnerable, a serious concern that oppresses and kills people. The vulnerable discomfitting the powerful - with human feces! - y'know, suck it up buttercup. Not a crisis.
> you may have intuitions about where and when to go or not to go, and how to act to discourage troublemakers from approaching.
Actually, my well-developed intuition is that you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, and you'll be fine. People live in these neighborhoods their whole lives are 99% are fine. I mean, read the room a little - whatever neighborhood you're in, if someone looks like they are upset or busy, don't be some rude idiot. Just be a human being. Don't look tense and people won't be afraid of you and react badly. Act nervous and they'll be nervous.
> You may just look not as the type to mess with.
Actually, people talk to me all the time. It's just people.
Perhaps it’s more tempting to blame remote work than to blame one’s own leadership, or whether one has the right team.
And, async doesn’t have to be lower-bandwidth. With even a modicum of planning, engineers can be set up to pick up the next most important thing if they’re blocked waiting on a response from someone else.
This is not rocket science. Tons of successful companies have done this since long before COVID.
Have they? I can think of a small number of majority-remote companies, but none of them stick out as being wildly successful. Of course, being wildly successful is rare enough that it may not be solid evidence one way or the other.
> Perhaps it’s more tempting to blame remote work than to blame one’s own leadership, or whether one has the right team.
1) I'm sorry, but damn near every online meeting we spend 5-10 minutes waiting for somebody that has to fiddle with their AV setup. When people show up 5-10 minutes late for real meetings, management is going to have a chat with you for wasting everybody's time.
2) Not everything is software. For example, it's still stupidly difficult to replicate whiteboard interactions with online technologies. And if you have any contact with hardware, the lab is extremely difficult to replicate.
3) WFH is not heading toward more async, it's heading toward more sync. As someone pointed out in the comments, being forced to be on a call continuously for 8 hours is starting to become a norm. At that point, I'd rather be in the office.
And I do agree about the whiteboard thing, to a point. My team tends to do more long-form writing instead, and if diagramming is necessary, we use something like Monodraw.
WFH heading more towards sync than async feels like a cultural problem, perhaps partially rooted in a lack of trust if management can’t look over everyone’s shoulders. I’m sure that there are companies that are doing this, but I hope that this is not part of some wider trend.
It was bad even when in the same room. Finding out which input of the projector the cables are connected to, adapters for vga/hdmi/dp, getting the laptop external output to work, ... screen sharing is resolved much quicker on average.
Although, I have noticed more problems now that Apple doesn't have HDMI ports on anything. However, we plebians outside the Apple ecosystem are generally still fine.
Lots of people live to 100 smoking cigarettes their whole life, but that doesn't make it ideal.
Sometimes! The hidden assumptions are that you have a backlog of independent tasks to pick up, and that most dependencies are well-defined enough that there's no need for a back-and-forth to understand the problem. I don't think those are crazy assumptions, but in the kind of company the author is running (a startup building new stuff trying to find product/market fit), neither is typically going to hold.
But, I think for most startups, there is _so much_ to do at any given time that, in general, no one should be left twiddling their thumbs, especially with smaller teams.
These are absolutely all things that can be perks for some people, but I don't like it when social interaction is the proscribed 'fun'. For some of us, the job is a job, not our life, and we have other things we want to spend our time on besides work.
On top of that, petty middle managers drink the cool aid because that's what they do. On top of that, a fully staffed office gives them that sweet, sweet feeling of hierarchy and importance.
In the meantime, the big shots will continue to offshore to Asia, Africa and South America. Startups can't do that because "remote bad". Cui Bono?