
An Evangelist for Remote Work Sees the Rest of the World Catch On - ingve
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/business/matt-mullenweg-automattic-corner-office.html
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pixelmonkey
This is an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the founder/CEO of Automattic,
which, according to the article, has 1,000+ fully distributed employees now,
15 years after its founding. This was a fun insight from him to close out the
"Corner Office" column:

"This column is called Corner Office, and most people who choose to have
offices are usually the bosses. And I’ve been to the offices of billionaire
C.E.O.s that have their own private bathroom, beautiful art and couches. But
these are all things that you can have in your house. What I love about
distributed organizations is every single employee can have a corner office."

Of course, the assumption here is that you live/work somewhere in which you
can have a separate, closed-door, home office. This is true for most people
who did distributed work pre-Covid (for example, 100% of my fully distributed
team of ~25 engineers/PMs/designers has this setup or something close to it)
but this may not be true for those who had to adapt quickly in small urban
apartments, as is common in NYC or SF, post-Covid. That said, given how
software engineers are usually comp'ed and given how much a software career
relies on autodidacticism and flow, I think every software engineer should
strive to have a serene home office from which to work. It's a good investment
in your career and your sanity.

~~~
irrational
We are looking at selling our house and moving precisely because I do not have
anywhere to have an office. I’ve been working from a chair in the corner of
the living room (not even a table, laptop earning its name) for the past 3
months.

~~~
ta17711771
Kitchen table, and everyone else fucks off somewhere else unless they're
bringing in more.

~~~
irrational
Nah, my kids use the kitchen table for their school work. That is more
important to me than my own comfort.

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cgrealy
He doesn't really address the biggest issue I (and many of my colleagues) have
faced with remote work.

If you're head down on a coding task or writing a document or doing some piece
of design... having your own space is amazing. I love that I can work at home
(put music on _speakers_ , not headphones) and just go for it.

But it sucks for collaborative meetings. There is really no substitute for
getting people in a room with a whiteboard.

Yeah, there are online whiteboards and video conferencing and whatever, but
they still aren't as good and likely never will be (at least until we get some
kind of amazing VR/AR workspace).

I'm curious as to how other people have solved this.

~~~
artpi
I work for Automattic and done fair bit of these collaborative meetings.

We settled on something like this: \- Write a memo asking for obvious
requirements \- Get feedback \- Ask more questions \- Get feedback \- Schedule
a call, launch into chatting in detail \- Write a memo \- Get feedback \-
Prototype \- Schedule a call...

There is nothing really you can do live that you cannot do online. You don't
get progress thanks to some fantastic insight while "brainstorming". You get
progress by chipping away at the idea and having space to think. Having a
weekly cycle of memos and Zoom Calls will handle this.

Face-to-face really shines when you have to sync up on priorities and goals.
It's a great way to get everybody feeling they communicated and are part of
the same group. I don't mean this in a derogatory way - people need this
feelings to work and overlooking that part of communication is causing the
breakdowns. But after you get all your human rapport building out of the way,
async is really effective.

Communicating online is not a natural skill and should be deliberately
practiced.

I packaged all my learnings into a free mini-course:

[https://deliber.at/chat/](https://deliber.at/chat/)

------
omosubi
The guy interviewed here (Matt Mullenweg) has a good podcast with Sam Harris
from right after the lockdowns started occurring. One of the biggest takeaways
and something that my team is doing now is to use a shared document that
everyone can edit in real-time during meetings. Basically anything that people
think is relevant gets recorded. It's been really helpful for developing test
case plans. The whole podcast is fascinating though - iirc it's 2.5 hours
about how to do remote work.

~~~
ghaff
We tended to do this anyway; Etherpad was used by a lot of teams for agendas.
But we mostly use GSuite these days and the even more widespread switch to
video calls--we were already pretty distributed--has led to a shared agenda
doc being a standard practice for all but small meetings. Shared docs are an
under-rated "secret weapon" for remote collaboration.

