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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>Companies that support remote workers and do it well seem to have a huge leg up on the competition.

I'm a remote worker and I'm definitely spoiled by not having to deal with open office plans and disruptions.

That said, I see no evidence that the article's statement is true. (I want it to be true, but that doesn't change the fact that so far, I see zero evidence that it is true.)

You can't convince people with just rhetoric.

Instead, show compelling examples of how Company-A-with-mostly-remote-workers is beating the pants off of the Company-B-with-onsite-workers.

Show that RemoteWorkerCompany is 10x more innovative, delivers 10x faster, has 10x profits, etc etc.

I suspect finding comparisons that control for other variables are hard to come up with. Nevertheless, that's what it's going to take to convince managers. A bunch of programmers writing a thousand essays on the "advantages" of remote workers is just preaching to people like me who happen to like working from home.

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There is evidence that working form home increases productivity. [0] But the problem is harder to solve than just convincing managers that remote work is productive. Many of the employers who believe in the productivity of remote work are more willing to offshore the work for $25 an hour than shell over a the cost of a fully loaded local dev of $80-90 an hour. So if you want remote work you need to convince your boss of two things. That remote work is productive, and that the benefits from timezone sharing and language fluency are worth an extra $40-50 an hour.

[0] https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo...

>There is evidence that working form home increases productivity. [0]

Those were call center workers answering the telephones.

For the HN crowd, I think a more relevant study would be "knowledge workers" like programmers and engineers collaborating to ship products.

Think of the type evidence that would convince Paul Graham and Sam Altman to yell at all YC2016 founders, "What? You haven't set your up your team as 100% remote?!?! Are you stupid?!?! Why did we give money to you?!? Put the whole team on Skype and VPN access immediately because that's The Competitive Edge you need to beat the competitor from NY-Incubators."

Before we can compare remote and local teams productivity we need to solve the problem of measuring developer productivity. Very smart people have been trying to solve that problem for a long time and it seems to me like they have made very little progress.

So then there really isn't evidence is there?

>Before we can compare remote and local teams productivity we need to solve the problem of measuring developer productivity.

In the blog post, there's the phrase "more productive"... note the qualifier of "more". In this thread are additional examples posters using the phrase "more productive".

More than what? It implies a mathematical relationship right?

If you want to argue the merits of remote workers, you can't have it both ways with the word "productive". On the one hand, everyone can just throw around the phrase "more productive" when it's convenient to the remote-work narrative but then also discount it as "unmeasurable" when we're looking for the type of concrete evidence to satisfy managers.

If that's the state of discussion, these mixed messages reduce to "Remote is good because it is MORE of This Unmeasurable Thing". The discourse on this topic needs to be higher quality than that.

I think the topic of measuring productivity is a little more nuanced than what you think.

Something could be unmeasurable (unquantifiable), but comparable. Consider a contrived example: Two cars start a race at an unknown time - you are allowed to watch the end of the race. Which ever car finishes first is faster (on average, more fast). However, since you don't know when they began, you cannot measure their average speed.

I think a great deal of the headaches concerning productivity is comparing it between people and trying to put an exact amount on it. It is quite possible to say that one would be more productive in one environment vs another. Sometimes it is quite clear (I am less productive if I have a broken hand) and sometimes not so clear (not being in an office makes me more productive,... maybe).

And there's not going to be evidence like that any time soon. Software Developer productivity is extremely difficult to measure. It has very little to do with how busy you manage to keep yourself.

What about retention? That's easily measurable. If you have 1/2 the turnover rate on developers would that convince people?

I don't know if this kind of data is available anywhere though.

That used to be true a long time ago but the game is changed. $25/hour will buy you a junior dev at best who barely speaks English and is 12 hours away. And this developer needs constant communication to be productive. More often than not, you can't get cheap rates like that unless you offshore 20 developers and get a group discount. Usually then there still is a point person you have to communicate with daily, and still you wind up getting a rectangle when you asked for an oval. This is from first hand experience.

For skeptical managers, start with 2 days a week. Standardize on a communication platform like Skype + Google Hangouts. Require the person to be constantly available via IM.

Bottom line, it may be more expensive up front but key advantage to a US remote worker is they are generally always available, highly independent, and it's easier for them to come onsite as needed.

I think translating that hourly salary to yearly salary makes it untrue. You can get some very reasonly english speaking devs for less than 1/4 bay area salaries in europe.

Sure, but for offshoring, a salaried position is a whole different ballgame than a contract you can not renew after 2 months

If you have contacts or know where to look you can get solid mid-level or even senior devs with excellent English skills at that rate. The timezone issue and whether they're suited to remote work are different questions altogether.

Agreed. And actually, there's plenty of case studies and efficiency research on this subject.

What it really comes down to is:

Get the right team of remote workers together, provide the right tools, and apply the right policies and you can give yourself a great market advantage.

But it's exceptionally hard to satisfy all those dependencies.

Many individuals aren't nearly as effective in remote positions, and many more might be effective with some practice but don't actually have the experience required to do it well yet. Paying for their inefficiency while they learn the ropes of remote work is a dangerous and competitiveness-risking bet, especially if they never even quite manage to figure it out.

Tools and policies are a whole other issue, as those not only need to be identified but they need to suit the team that you assemble and put constraints on who else can join that team. Not every toolset and not every policy is a good fit for every worker, remote or not -- and it's much more important that they are for remote workers.

So at the end of the day, you absolutely CAN have a great company that works remotely and there are many out there. But it's not reasonable to suggest that many or every company can see benefits from it any time soon.

Having worked in and managed a remote/distributed team for the last eight years I can agree with that. We have made really good progress, but as you grow it is a challenge and you don't always get it right. Often you don't have a good template to work from and you have to iterate your way towards a good process. Which sometimes can be hard work.

I worked for an insurance company with the whole cubical world, then switched to a 100% remote office. I can attest to the following being true from my experiences:

They prioritize communication and collaboration by necessity There is a lot less wasted communication You get a huge portion of your life back They tend to be more flexible in general

I see no evidence that there is any more or less posturing, or the caliber of workers being better, and it is pretty moot on reaching out for help, no real difference.

I have worked 100% remote for 3 years and love it.

On the quantitative side of things, remote workers are much less likely to have commute time to and from work, leaving an extra ~1 hour a day (assuming 30 min commute from home to being in office chair ready to work) being available. Assuming those numbers, thats an extra 5 hours per employee per week. Again, assuming that multiplied by 50 weeks, thats 250 additional hours per employee per year. No small sum which could lead to a sizable productivity advantage.

This is assuming that the employee would devote that extra hour a day to the company of course. By my point is that onsite employees would not even have that hour available since it is eaten up by transit time.

Also, consider the fact that hiring pool increases many folds once you allow remote work. So a company will be able to find better people at lower costs.

I find it odd that you would assume the employee would convert that transit time into work time.

I would lean to the opposite assumption -- that that's one more hour/day the employee would get to spend with life (family, hobbies, etc.).

I suppose it would depend on who he's trying to sell this to ;) workers are more inclined to like the version you present while employers would be more inclined to like his version.

It's really a mix.

The benefit is flex - when you need more time with family, you have it. When you need some extra time for a project, you have it too.

I agree with you but still see it as a net positive for the employer, even if none of those hours are spent on work. Perhaps it's a stretch, but I think that 250 hours of potentially stressful commute time being allotted to more fulfilling activities will result in a better employee (albeit only incrementally perhaps).

Totally agree, and that's the point I would have made, vs. one where the employer benefits by having me work from the time gained by not having transit. That's why I found it odd.

Yes, I'd also add that when you work without commuting, the time you start work is likely also the time you start working. Whereas if you have a long and possibly stressful journey, you might have a bit of warmup time before you are ready to start working.

There is a strong correlation between lower commute time and happiness: http://www.forbes.com/sites/amymorin/2014/12/07/want-to-be-h...

And what is the correlation between happiness and 'productiveness', or more to the point, profit? Ibankers and junior associates at white shoe firms are overwhelmingly miserable, and still a) people line up for their jobs; and b) they make their firms a multiple of most other jobs (maybe with software being an exception, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that tech companies are successful just because they have great engineers).

Correlation isn't causation in either direction in this case. Among the many reasons for long hours for finance, productivity and profit are quite low on the list. "Face time" is a phrase for a reason.

For worker value the important input isn't time, its focus. Does an extra hour on personal life, rather than commute create an extra of hour of focused, innovate, high productivity work? Answer depends on the person.

I've run a remote team for not quite a decade, but close. I've run an office. I have a lot of friends that work remotely, besides my own developers. There are big pros and cons to both. For an information worker there are huge health downsides to being inside at home all day, even with a full family around.

My conclusion based on these experiences is having both a physically active and healthy social life is what matters. Both working at an office or remotely from home can make these better or worse, dependent on the person and who they work for.

> For an information worker there are huge health downsides to being inside at home all day, even with a full family around.

This statement strikes me as odd. I can't really figure out what health downsides do you have in mind. Can you elaborate?

I would argue the opposite. Being an information worker in an office environment is deleterious to one's health. Humans are not designed to sit around in poorly ventilated rooms for a larger part of the day(light), where the only recourse from the unpleasantness of the situation is a fridge stocked with free sweetstuffs and soda. I've been there, eaten the Snickers, and am much happier now that I'm working from home, where I am able to take a short walk around the neighborhood, do a couple of yoga asanas or other exercise or even take a short nap almost anytime I want. There's also the fact that I can eat healthy food as per my liking, and not just one that is available in the cafeteria or nearby restaurants.

I am aware of the research and the reality of how important it is to not be alone all the time, but you really don't need the daily office-going grind to protect yourself from those particular dangers. In fact, at the end of my workday, I am eager to go out and socialize, whereas in my office-worker days, all I could think of was going home, cracking open a cold beer to decompress, and hoping that I don't have to talk to anyone for the rest of the day (not likely with family around).

For those of us who only drive out of necessity, it's effectively six weeks of vacation that the employer doesn't need to foot the bill for. I suppose people who enjoyed commuting would not view it that way.

I'm curious as to how companies that have many remote workers (developers, more specifically) achieve some of the benefits that come with in-person communication and co-working in the same space? For instance, in our experience, a lot of the times our developers will get together in a conference room and work together and we've had remarkable success with it. Problems get solved quicker, there is more coordination, and just good motivating camaraderie. It becomes sort of a war room, especially around critical projects.

How do you emulate this in a remote working scenario?

When I worked remotely, we would often do conference calls with someone sharing their screen, which reproduces a lot of the benefits of being in a conference room with one person's laptop hooked up to the projector.

You'd be surprised by what can be achieved by just having Slack. The best parts of IRC and email, put together. Searchable. Persistent communication changes companies. My current employer is only running part-remote, but we actively move important conversations to slack, because if nothing else, we can go back to them later.

When sharing actual screens is necessary, there's ScreenHero, which is very useful for pair programming and such.

Now, I think it's important to have at least some video chat every day, if just so that we can keep up with the emotional state of our coworkers. Over the years, I've preemptively fixed many team dynamics problems by paying attention to people's emotions. If Joe is sad today, maybe I can help with whatever the problem is, or I can at least make sure he isn't pressured too much. If you do most of your talk by text, it's far harder to pick up on those things. If there's some rotating pair programming going on, those things can be handled better.

We do use Slack and it certainly helps. However, we invariably find that there is a certain inertia to reach out via video among some devs or wait until the person is in office to hash out a problem. It may just be because we don't have anyone 100% remote on the team and hence expectations aren't set. Also, in an open office plan, talking over video at your desk can becoming annoying to the person sitting next to you, which means grabbing a conf room. I'm just saying it depends on the personality of the developer in how she/he handles working with a remote worker.

We literally have a slack channel #war_room

For serious issues, we all jump on a hangout to hash it out.

How about hiring? Instead of being restricted to talent in the 30 miles radius around your office building, you can effectively hire anywhere in the country, or the world. No need to displace someone and their family from their existing community and then cover their relocation costs, just so they can jockey an office chair in your building. And no more need to constantly belly ache on blogs and articles that there is a "talent shortage".

I'd say that's a substantial advantage.

Salary negotiations will be a bit different since you're also competing with all local jobs. So you can take on multiple devs and pay them differently if they have similar skills (hard to measure anyway), or you can pay everyone the same and limit what markets you pull from. The former could get ugly if anyone found out.

This is why I have a burner phone and an SF address for salary negotiations. Then my W2 goes to Austin, TX to avoid all state taxes. #winning

I hope you actually live in texas...

It is an advantage. But it isn't without disadvantages. Not everyone thrives in a distributed environment and it is hard to do certain type of work (brainstorming, very interactive requirements and design work, for example) in a remote only setting. It is also harder to build good team spirit, when you don't hang out together. It is possible, but it isn't a no-brainer even when you look at all the advantages. We have a hybrid model with a lot of us focused in hubs, but working remotely part of the time now.

> You can't convince people with just rhetoric.

Yes, yes you can. You can't convince all the people all the time, but you can certainly sway more than 50%. How do I know? The stupid shit that so many people do.

That's true, in fact, rhetoric is probably your best bet by far if you want to convince people.

For a great book about the power of rhetoric, check out Plato's Gorgias. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html

From Wikipedia: In this dialogue, Socrates seeks the true definition of rhetoric, attempting to pinpoint the essence of rhetoric and unveil the flaws of the sophistic oratory popular in Athens at this time.

Ayup, it seems like such a done relationship that I'm surprised more people don't understand. Arguing for understanding is hard, swaying with emotion easy.

The biggest problem with Remote culture is lack of exceedingly reliable communication. It's improved a little bit by things like Zoom lately, but we still need to work on integrated whiteboarding. Crazy, I know..

Also, mixing remote / onsite is hard because of politics. I think to be effective in remote, it has to be all remote and everyone has to be mature. Like netflix mature. You know, if you don't start producing at high velocity continuously and immediately, you get let go immediately. This is because unless you are mature, you generally goof off when you don't visibly see other people working hard.

I disagree with your requirement of immediately and continuously producing--least of all because, in all odds, the codebase of such a culture (optimizing for "throw code on the wall now now now don't waste time thinking") is going to result in a big pile of garbage that will take a little time to get up to speed on.

This is because unless you are mature, you generally goof off when you don't visibly see other people working hard.

So what? God forbid anybody in my super lean startup have fun in a non-company-mandated way. If I've got a dev who "goofs off" but when they're on point they're really on point, I'm fine with that--I just know not to put them on time-sensitive things, because I'm experienced enough to know how that'll work out.

Are you hiring? :)

I'm currently a remote employee, but recently my employer has started mandating what I call "micromanagement" techniques. Every 5 minutes of my day must be accounted for and logged. Project managers have started pinging me on the status of my tickets twice a day. The irony of the situation is, the harder they crack down, the less desire I have to work.

It didn't used to be like this. Slowly over the past year, somebody up the ladder has been mandating these changes. It seems like this is the standard MBA approach to increase company efficiency. I'll be paying close attention to whether they succeed or not.

I don't really see it being true yet but I think it's coming.

Right now if you're based in SV you can hire the best talent in the world, pay them a fortune and build something great. Investors are reluctant to touch anyone outside of that bubble.

With lack of housing (and no more construction virtually) alongside better tools for working remote, and more managers experienced in working remote, I can see remote teams leading the charge towards the end of this decade.

It takes time.

you can hire the best talent in the world of people willing to move to SV, the world is a lot bigger than SV and having worked with excellent developers plenty of times around the world I think if you are hiring only in SV you are definitely limiting yourself also in terms of the perspective individual developers bring to the company.

It is obviously difficult to have a pro-remote company if you hire executives or management that values "face time" above all else, and prefer phone to email/chat, this is why likely it's a lot simpler to start a company fully remote than to change an already existing one.

Given the advantages of cost of labor (you can be a lot more flexible in compensation terms if you don't have to compete with SV salaries), pool of talent and retention advantages (if you have a great remote environment I think it'd be a lot easier to have very low turnover) I am really surprised more companies are not being formed doing this.

But then again as you said a lot of VCs/investors won't touch companies not based in SV so that definitely can be a contributing factor in the low % of fully remote outfits.

couldn't be open source projects a good example? almost everybody contributes remotely. Why couldn't work the same way for private software ? I see that could be a confidence problem and effort mesure problem because it's hard to mesure effort in number of lines of code or commits, even user stories, right ?

It seems (correct me if I'm wrong) a lot of the contributors are from companies so it might not the best example.

Do you know of any blogging platform that beats Wordpress from 2005-2010? ;)

After 2010, Tumblr was pretty big but it was really a different project.

http://automattic.com/about/

There is also that.

True, maybe a good follow up to this would be some use case studies. It would be so easy to pick any given set of companies for my narrative though. I feel like that is just as dismissable.

37 Signals, Stack Exchange, Dell, IBM, I hear Microsoft has a few remote teams too. A lot of TC startups put "SF or remote" in their job ads. Go to Stack Exchange careers they place an emphasis on remote.

On the flip side, there are a lot of companies that only make exceptions to hire remote workers, as in my case. But a bunch of my onsite counterparts prefer being onsite.

Here is a list https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

Wow that's awesome thanks!

>It would be so easy to pick any given set of companies for my narrative though.

Yes, please try to come with convincing case studies. I would love to have ammunition to show benefits of remote work.

Remember though, when citing companies's with remote workers that are successful, that you must control for other variables unrelated to remote workers. The other replies citing Automattic Wordpress and 37Signals did not do that.

> I feel like that is just as dismissable.

I feel the opposite. Companies and managers have a herd mentality. You show them any management technique that demonstrates superior results and they will copy it. Look at Six Sigma, or JIT Just In Time manufacturing, or Henry Ford's assembly line regrouping of manufacturing, etc etc.

Show some evidence that reorganizing your onsite workers as remote workers is The Killer Management Technique (trademark applied patent pending) to blow everyone else out of the water and every company will be doing it.

I am pretty sure those numbers doesn't exist and even if they did they would be meaningless. Company culture is very unique and based on specific people being involved. One person can literally make or break the companies productivity and success.

I think the real point to be made anyway is that there isn't any numbers showing that remote work is in itself making productivity worse.

Sometimes you need to reboot (ex. Yahoo) but mostly if you have good people with good ethics it's just as good as any other setup.

I don't think the article claiming 10x benefit from remote. That's really not true. 1.25x, possibly, but definitely not 10x.

> Instead, show compelling examples of how Company-A-with-mostly-remote-workers is beating the pants off of the Company-B-with-onsite-workers.

Meh, I'm not sure throwing out anecdotal evidence would help.

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