Connected But Isolated: The Real Problem with Working Remotely

Oh, how much I hate when this happens. Biggest problem is of course that people don't even realize the ensuing context switching is a problem, because it still feels like useful progress is being done, when in fact in most cases no progress is made.

The most common case for interrupting a coworker is when you don't know how to do something. As a general rule of thumb, all companies should have internal wikis for all questions that can be answered with documentation. If the answer is missing, then my answer is to write a wiki document for it. There are of course technical questions on the technologies used, which are a Google search away and I have a rule to not answer questions that can be easily searched (teach a man to fish, yada, yada).

Other reasons for interrupting a coworker are for design decisions or for discussing/prioritizing bugs, but those meetings need to be scheduled, preferably in the morning, not whenever anybody feels being chatty.

The real downside of working remotely is the lack of interhuman relationships that happen in a regular workplace, a problem that really can't be solved by technology.

This particular blog post feels like a bait and switch because I clicked the link hoping to learn something new about this real problem that we are facing and it was not until that last few paragraphs until it was confirmed that I was being sold too. Is this really the type of content that we want to promote to the top page of HN, the very same place where so many critical and important issues have been discussed over the last several years?

I hate to be "that guy" but the over last year, nearly every article or opinion piece I think I am reading is someone's blog post promoting their new product. I do realize that products and start-ups are THE culture here but there used to be a lot more actual opinions posted and many less blatant sales pitches.

Sorry for the rant, but I personally find myself visiting the site much less frequently because of this.

“Artists work best alone. Work alone.”

Here's the longer version:

"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

There are those who are miserable in an office, and those who would be miserable working remotely. I don't think any article is going to change an individual's preference though collectively enough of these could sway an industry's management attitude. The fact that we see mostly articles opposing remote work tells me that they aren't written objectively.

I'm with the Woz quote. My preference has always been to be completely async other than perhaps one pre-scheduled meeting per day if necessary. It's not always practical but it's an ideal.

If there actually was a seamless audio/video conferencing technology that still worked perfectly even when subjected to the dumbness of office people, then I think I would have a different opinion of remote work.

But as it is, I think the productivity tax is significant enough to be worth worrying about. Especially since the tax is not just inflicted on the people working remotely, but also on everyone in the office that interacts with them.

That's your problem there.

With your team (and cooperating teams), you should be using real time chat for group communication and IM for personal communication.

Now, HR and Finance and Marketing and Social Influence departments will probably be in annoying "can barely write competent sentences" email territory, but those aren't your immediate concerns.

If everybody is sitting in an open office plan, it's common to start talking to someone over IM, then turn to them and continue the conversation in person, then jump back to IM (especially if you're talking about design or architectural decisions someone else nearby has a strong negative opinion about and you don't want to get them "started").

These days everybody goes into work, jumps into chat, signs on to their local presence system, then exists as "at work." It doesn't have to be at work though. With our erratic work schedules, you don't even know if someone is in the office when you're talking with them ("Oh, you're in China this week? Guess we're not getting lunch then.").

That said, I don't think screenhero is the answer.

I telecommute, and here's a story that I believe is a much better solution than screensharing (how often in a real meeting do we grab each others spreadsheets or open docs?):

I was working on a project with a PM and he wanted to just sit on a call and work through a handful of smaller bugs to prioritize work and maybe knock some things out quickly. We ended up sitting on a Skype call for 3 hours working through things. That's a fair chunk of my day. Do you know what it was? Awesome! As long as both parties don't feel compelled to say something, you can just leave that channel open and it's surprisingly similar to sharing an office.

So here's my proposed solution, but it's not really in my domain to create it:

Spatial VoiP. Everyone in the company dials in each morning and sits online while they're working. Of course, you can drop out, or you could set yourself to busy. But the crux of it is this, instead of a list of callers, you could lay out a digital office complete with walls and doors where you can sequester yourself or a handful of employees for a meeting. And the volume of a person would be relative to how close you are to them in the "digital" office (I know, I know, Skype's volume management wouldn't suffice for this project).

Again, the technical aspects are beyond my abilities, but I imagine you could let the lines run really cold while there isn't a lot of communication so you're not chewing up bandwidth. If you're closed in an office, it could really just close your VoiP connection and poll the server as to the state of your door and dial you back in when it opens.

Anyway, that's a start.

The solution we had to the problem of asynchronous communication was making everyone log on to a TeamSpeak server. As soon as one person talks (you can mute your mic) everyone hears and can respond immediately, as a team.

I thought it was a very good tool for bringing us closer together, regardless of distance.

This oatmeal comic summed up the good and bad pretty good imo http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home

There are frequent days, in fact, when I have no communication at all with other team members about development topics except over the computer. If we need to talk in person about a design decision, it's frequent to schedule the meeting even if it's just going to be 10 minutes.

That type of connection is difficult to establish with our remote members. Because they aren't sitting right next to us, we can't joke around or come over to chat with them in order to get some mental relief from the daily grind.

Essentially, our work environment is enhanced by personal contact with fellow employees, something that isn't easily established with remote workers.