Running a 20 People Business from the Beach
blog.mobilejazz.com
blog.mobilejazz.com
Being able to work remotely sounds great. But I can't help but wonder if the time saved not commuting all gets eaten up by project management overhead and just logging in to all the services every morning.
I get that consultancies have to log hours, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag for the people who work there. And every hipchat room that you have to keep up with is additional overhead.
So you're right that 30 is an exaggeration. But that doesn't mean that they don't have overhead (in terms of time) from using these online tools.
What I mean is that, instead of having 2 weeks of vacation per year, having to schedule it, and when I get to the location I'm out of work mode entirely -- maybe I can up and leave my hometown at will, spend a week at the beach or in the mountains or wherever whenever I wish, and still be connected and able to get my work done.
So, for example, I could get up in the morning and get some stuff done. Around 2 or so I pop out to the beach for a few hours. Then I come inside to finish up with work in the evening.
It's a nice way to only take 2 days off from work but actually get some relaxing time in a different setting.
But I imagine they are more like "sat in a room in a house near the beach"
Same as a normal office, just a better view.
Well that is how it is for me living by the beach in the tropics. I can see the surfing point, I can see the parachutes pulled by speedboats, just a distraction and increases the desire to be "there" and not staring at a screen trying to fix bugs. Sometimes, I just move the table to face the wall.
And don't get me started about trying to work in a bar / cafe / restaurant near the beach. Mosquitos, noise, disturbance, tuts from staff that you are sitting there too long not buying enough.
Each to their own though. I suppose I am jealous of the posts that imply you can work 4 hours on tropical island, earn a western wage and live like a King. Which is far from the case in my experience. Even if I know these posts are trying to sell something based on this dream, or convince themselves they are doing the right thing (despite what they may hear from friends and family)
I dear say some contractor with fantastic contacts and get a great paying contract with a couple of phone calls. Most people don't have this.
It sure is a nice dream to have during rainy winters when you're stuck in a cold office though.
It also helps if all the team is senior and can work well together and understands the business. I can't see this working as well when you have juniors that need mentoring, or seniors that have zero clue about the business side of things so they need constant questioning.
Other companies see remote work mostly as a way to pay less for a developer, but want to treat him like he is in the office (heard stories of some companies wanting to have a constant video link to the office to make sure you aren't goofing off).
My point here was not about working the beach vs. somewhere else. It was about the possibility of working from wherever you want, but it has to be an appropriate place for what you're doing, of course.
For example this article I wrote in a terrace next to the beach. But that's because I love the sea and I found a good place to concentrate. Maybe your place is a quiet space next to the forest, or a lake, or... whatever! Just wanted to share that it's possible!
That's not to excuse their lack of support, but just to point out that alternatives might not be better. I'd rather have one problem in ten years that doesn't get resolved due to lousy support than ten problems, eight of which get resolved with stellar support.
Even if you host yourself, you probably grossly underestimate the likelihood of failure. The wrong set of disks failing at the same time, a fat-finger by an admin, etc. are going to be way more common and can potentially destroy much more data. Not to mention the costs are certainly higher, when you consider hardware and administration.
How? I did volunteer work for a charity and if a collaborative doc was important, on every mobile device we had "keep offline" so even in an area without internet coverage (in a warehouse or got a call while out in the wilderness or something) we had our data.
We had budgets, inventories, checklists, all that kind of stuff.
I guess its a design issue if a tool makes it possible to self sabotage, however much effort it requires, but its not much of a practical issue.
There are parts of it that do suck like other people assuming we had fully featured excel and they do really weird things with the strangest darkest never before seen corners of excel, but overall on average it simply wasn't an issue.
I've been remote for a long time, and have had better results with a different suite of products.
I'm really interested in remote working and how to improve the day to day to work and communication.
By the way, I had too many problems with Hangout so I can't recommend it, even if today I had a four people conversation (audio only) and it was perfectly fine.
But you are right, sometimes Hangouts doesn't work as good as it should, so we use Skype as backup or even Hipchat for internal calls.
Initially most of the work came through our personal networks. Myself I grew up in Germany and lived in San Francisco for some time. My co-founder had a strong network in Barcelona through his previous job at Deloitte. Today we still get requests through our personal network, however, most of our new incoming work is simply referral based. We don't even have a single sales person. So we try our best possible to do quality work, but also are actively involved with our clients and partners and help them improve their own businesses. This is not just an extra effort on our side, but also makes the whole "work" thing way more exciting and interesting for ourselves, rather than just being a sweatshop that churns out code.
We mostly work with startups, some of them as clients and some as partners. But we also have been recommended and introduced to some big corporations in various industries. And while we don't like the bureaucratic hassle that comes with it, it does give us quite some stability. For example, a big medical company just switched to use as their main supplier for web development, which immediately gave us 30 new long-term projects.
Overall we always try to give a lot, be involved and pro-active and help where we can. In the end you always get something in return. This has been my personal philosophy since ever and always and we've also established this as one of the cornerstones in our company culture.
I guess the takeaway here is that repeat business from the same client is rather nice!
1) Everyone at MJ can choose how much they work. The the salary is depended on how much you actually want to work. And that can change monthly and in extreme cases even weekly.
2) We share the company profits with all employees. We basically pay out quarterly bonuses, which are depending on the time worked, but multiplied with a "subjective" of how much you've contributed to the overall success and growth of Mobile Jazz.
Even though I can not give you a specific number, I can say that we pay very high for Spanish standards and slightly above average for Germany. But still below what a top engineering in SF would earn. But we might get there at some point. That said, it all depends on where you live.
For MobileJazz or others that operate completely remotely, how often do you meet face-to-face? We assemble the team twice a year. It's definitely possible to run a company completely remotely, but I've still seen no remote substitute for the interpersonal bonding that happens in meatspace.
* We don't invoice, so no Harvest.
It also means you get a broader view of what everyone else is doing. It's easy to have a very narrow view of just the project you're working on, so you lose some of the cross-pollination of ideas between projects.
Also we pair people from different projects to work together for a couple of hours per week, two different people every week. This helped a lot in learning from other team members but also in general helping each other more often, because we now know better who to ask when a certain question appears.
From my experience, an all remote team works especially well if either:
1. The employees are also the customers. This means you can trust everyone's judgement about decisions to a large extent and you can afford to skimp on user research and not have it overly impact the product. If you're making a SAAS tool for developers, then a lot of hard design stuff becomes easy.
2. The metrics for success are very clear. If everyone has agreed on a common goal and it's easy to evaluate yourself based on that goal, then everyone can work productively with a minimum of discussion. Backend services tend to work this way. Once the API is defined, you're judged on performance, uptime, usage and other fairly objective metrics.
3. The business can be split into fairly modular components with strong contracts between each component. If you only need to communicate at the boundary, then you have enough bandwidth to do it remotely. A lot of ad tech is this way where certain business functions become easy to abstract away from others. If you're building a consumer facing product though, the line between sales and marketing say, is never rigidly defined and there's fluid, complicated feedback loops between the two and ideally they should be co-located so they can collaborate in unpredictable ways.
Where interpersonal bonding becomes the most important is building consensus over risky decisions. If Bill proposes a wild and crazy idea that needs everyone's buy-in but nobody thinks will work, if you don't trust Bill, then you're going to push back because you think it'll be harmful for the company/team. However, if you've spent a lot of time with Bill and understand the way he thinks and believe he might be crazy like a fox, then you might jump on board even if you don't think it'll work because Bill is awesome.
But additionally we do things together, like going a month to Thailand, going for a skiing trip to Austria, then hiking in the Pyrenees and soon we'll go for a kitesurfing trip to Mauritius. So the meatspace bonding is actually very, very strong in our team.
Interesting.
In Thailand you can get anything from 7/1 to 1000/100 mbit down/up, using a variety of adsl, docsis and fibre.
Add to that good 3G coverage and reasonable 4G coverage in popular areas.
I moved from Australia and have more options here (in a province capital but not Bangkok) than I did in suburban Melbourne.
We try to have a minimum amount of overlap where we all work together every day. If you realize our offices are only in one half of the globe approximately, so this is usually possible. The trip to Thailand was a special case, for example, where we had to shift a bit the regular working hours in order to make it work. But the important part is that we could make it work :)
Also we try to have a lot of communication asynchronously via Asana tasks or Google groups for things that don't need urgent attention.
One thing that makes Slack better for a company like us is the possibility to be in several teams at the same time. This is something HipChat should definitely look into!