
We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams - stockkid
https://remotebase.io/blog/we-dont-get-remote-jobs-we-join-remote-teams/
======
bad_user
I work remotely. I'm from Romania and we have a team that's distributed across
the country, with some members from other European countries as well. We do
have a small office where I live, but it is provided just as a place to come
to in case you don't like working from home and I do go to our office almost
daily, but most of the team is on the other end of a Gmail/Skype/Slack
connection.

Today I got tired at 1 PM, got up from my desk, got my bike and went for a
ride in the park nearby. Once in a while I would take the phone out of my
pocket and give quick answers on Slack, but most of my time I enjoyed what is
the beginning of autumn. You can feel it in the air, it's more chilly, the
light gets warmer and the color of the trees start changing. It's by far the
most beautiful time of the year for walking in parks. And it felt great. Now
I'm back home and I'm thinking of finishing my work, but after I eat
something.

And I do this all the time, while managing to get shit done. Many times I work
late to finish this or that. But I'm a responsible software developer, I care
about the project and I can work without somebody watching over my shoulder.

And surely there are those times where you need to do design sessions with the
rest of the team. But we do those over Skype and every once in a while we
travel in order to meet face to face. There are challenges in communication of
course, but we make it work.

~~~
vertex-four
That is generally not compatible with the American way of working - especially
in the startup scene - where ever second you're not working is considered a
second that your competitor companies have over you.

~~~
legitster
I would not say this is an accurate view of most US jobs. I have yet to have a
job that was not flexible with working hours or working location.

~~~
mordocai
Every single job across industries that I have ever worked at (and i've only
worked in the US) has been inflexible on hours and location.

~~~
komali2
It's almost as if... different people have different experiences at different
companies... as if, dare I say it, not all people and companies are the same?

~~~
mordocai
Yep, that was my point.

~~~
rconti
Right, but the person you replied to was giving the counterfactual that _not
all jobs_ are like that. It didn't need to be rebutted; they were not instead
stating that ALL jobs are flexible, just pointing out not all AREN'T.

~~~
vertex-four
Actually, the argument was that "most" jobs in the US are flexible on hours. I
really doubt that's true, given that there's a good many minimum-wage or
close-to-minimum-wage jobs out there, and a lot of traditional 9-5 office
jobs, and the US still has factories and lots of other companies which need to
run to a schedule. And the idea that a single person could state that "most"
jobs are anything based on personal experience is probably incorrect.

~~~
rconti
Thank you.

------
FuNe
I'm partially remote working (RW) at an organization that is slowly rolling
back its RW culture(1). The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if
they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to
feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW
away). "Culture" is used as a smoke screen for more sinister incentives. (I
can say that with confidence because I can see that RW is working fine while
what hinders productivity is mammoth bureaucracy and politics put forward by
the same people that keep blabbing about "culture".

To me it's clear that remote working is (should be) the way to go (why on
earth tech jobs and consequently tech workers should cluster in small
geographic areas, spend hours in commuting and feed our salaries to landlord
rentiers is beyond my understanding). Then again other things in the past were
a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but
the world spinned to a different direction.

PS: Of course RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore which makes the
whole thing more of a mixed bag of blessings and curses - like everything else
in life :) .

(1) I think the trend started off by M.Mayer's move to roll back RW in yahoo
(<cynic>leading to the spectacular yahoo growth we all know of</cynic>) but
I'm not sure.

~~~
ryandrake
> The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated,
> yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus
> they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away).

Sorry, but I've got to be the party pooper in this thread. I have worked with
teams over the years that indeed DO work better co-located, and who ARE more
productive when forced to communicate in an open office environment, etc.
Night and day difference. When not in that environment they reverted back to
the ol' "do something in isolation, throw it over the fence, wait days for
feedback, then iterate" mode. I will stress that not all teams needed co-
location, but many absolutely did.

This whole thread needs to be filed under the category "different people/teams
thrive in different environments", because right now it's a "remote Work is
best for everyone" echo chamber.

~~~
resmote
> who ARE more productive when forced

The key word there is "forced".

~~~
ryandrake
Yep. Some people default-to-productive, and others need guidance, coaching,
"forcing", whatever you want to call it. It's almost as if different people
have different motivations, work habits and communication styles!

------
NumberCruncher
It is somehow ironic that not so long ago we could send ships on a 4 month
trip around the word, could manage the construction of amazing buildings or
sent armies to fight wars on the end of the word without being able to
communicate with the people doing their job/duty. Nowdays we can barely let
change the font size of a button on a webpage without having a stand up
meeting or a conference call.

~~~
StavrosK
I'm pretty sure that, if Queen Izabella could have daily standups with Chris
Columbus, she would.

~~~
bad_user
That's not the point. The question is if Columbus would have done his job
better if he had the ability to do daily stand-ups with the Queen?

I don't think so, because the Queen probably didn't have the skills of an
explorer. Great leaders have always delegated ;-)

~~~
dcole2929
In all fairness Columbus was pretty terrible at his job. The only reason he
was even working for the queen in the first place is because pretty much no
one else would hire him because of his track record of being terrible at his
job. He tried sailing to India the long way around, almost ran out of supplies
and got lucky that the Americas happened to exist.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Its possible he had a Chinese map showing that the Americas _did_ exist. Which
he could barely read, and concluded that India was over there. He got the
distance right; just not the place.

So he had enough supplies for the journey he made, that part was actually
planned. No luck involved.

------
matt_wulfeck
> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form.
> There is no catered lunch or a hip office with table tennis table.
> Everything artificial is stripped away.

I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and
IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many
emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem.

Working remotely is awesome. All power to remote workers, but no amount of
collaborative tools replaces the value of face-to-face communication.

~~~
collyw
Not in every case. It was often an excuse for my last manager to not do
anything like write down requirements. "I thought we talked about that." "Yes
you changed your mind three times and I can't remember what the final outcome
was."

Personally I like having things done in writing as you have something solid to
refer to afterwards.

~~~
MyNameIsFred
Sure, instead he'd just change his mind three times distributed across
hundreds of Slack messages, and you'd still have no tracked resolution.

When you have a decision born of a conversation, the only useful thing to do
is to write that distilled, focused result on some median other than the
discussion itself.

This problem ultimately has little to do with remote vs colocated; The same
applies whether the discussion happened in verbal discussion, a meeting, an
email chain, messaging, etc.

~~~
collyw
That problem is easily solved, look at the most recent message. Though a lot
of the problem was caused by incredibly incompetent management.

------
cephaslr
I love this topic. On one hand, many tech giants spent an exorbitant amount of
money hiring and bringing their technical talent to one location. Easy
examples such as Google and especially Amazon come to mind. On the other hand,
any studies on the subject strongly imply anyone farther than 50 feet rarely
speaks anyway so you are better off with remote teams as they are setup with
better tooling (slack, et tal).

[https://goo.gl/bvNXHQ](https://goo.gl/bvNXHQ)

As a single data point my experience as a hiring manager and allowing remote
candidates allowed for a much higher level of talent to draw upon.
Furthermore, I have had remote teams develop a great culture merely by turning
on their cameras during the daily standup.

Finally, I also question the productivity of team building 'dinners' and other
one-off activities. Having been part of teams with lots of corporate dinners
and teams without its hard for me to really call out any specific value.

I truly do want to be convinced otherwise, but the strongest argument I have
seen here so far is a vague 'Face to face is superior' when I have had great
remote teams with cameras on. Anyone have a more data driven argument? Even if
its a few data points?

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
I'm all for being remote (been working from home for about 8 years now for 3
different companies). Two scenarios where face-to-face wins:

1\. "Onboarding + noob training". Sure, this can be done remotely but it's
vastly more effective face-to-face especially when the tech isn't limited to
the computer and there are "real life" gadgets involved in getting set up for
development.

2\. If the team isn't 100% remote it takes extra effort for those in the
office to be "inclusive" so that remote folks are 100% up to speed. Just like
with any extra effort in an already busy environment this doesn't always
happen. Can't really blame them either - if a decision is made on the fly
between two busy devs hacking their asses off and they rely on you seeing
their PR to derive what they decided on that's just how things go sometimes.

~~~
marcosdumay
For #1, it's enough to not make the team remote 100% of the time. If you get
everybody together for a week or so every few months, you'll get those
activities done.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Sure it's doable. Getting everyone together often can get pretty expensive
though (flights, hotels, less stuff gets done), flying the noob over to shadow
an experienced person 1-on-1 is probably a better way to go.

The point is there are cases where face to face is preferable.

------
alex-yo
_There is no shortage of remote job boards and job aggregators_

That's true, there is just a shortage of the job offers. I'm looking for a
remote job now. All the job boards have between 2 to 5 job offers per day. To
each of them answer thousands of people.

The aggregators are even worse. They are automated. That's why they contain an
ad even when it has _no remote allowed_.

~~~
prawn
If you're looking for a job, put a bit more info in your HN profile about what
sort of work you're looking for, and what you specialise in.

~~~
alex-yo
Good point, thank you.

~~~
hackits
Interested in your `conference talks about databases` is there any online
links to your talks? also your email address strikes me as being a bit odd. I
guess you don't want the bots finding your real email address.

cheers.

~~~
alex-yo
Yep, anonymity is funny. I'm not sure about the recordings, and presentations
are not in English, and are made as a background for talking, so reading them
would be useless.

------
jimmywanger
I think the main point of this article (which could have been half the length)
is that you can't just declare a job remote.

You have to have a culture and technology that supports it, or else if you
take that remote job, you're getting set up for failure.

If everybody else is having water cooler conversations, and making binding
decisions based on them without email or chat, any remote employee is going to
be constantly blindsided, and not rewarded by the organization.

I worked on one (and am currently working on another) highly distributed team,
and the amount of whip-cracking that my manager had to do to make sure
everything was documented and accessible to everybody on the team was
incredible.

~~~
elcct
Technology is there - Jira, Slack, Skype, GitHub, email...

There is absolutely no excuse to not have remote jobs.

~~~
jimmywanger
Did you not read most of my comment?

The technology is there, it wasn't ten years ago.

Now, it comes down to management setting strict guidelines and enforcing them.

What good is it to pay for Jira accounts when nobody uses them? Or what good
is it to have Github and everybody ends up hosting their own private repos?

That is definitely a management mandate, and logistically, it's a lot easier
to manage a group if they are all in the same place.

~~~
aardvark179
I'd say the tech has been there a lot longer than you think, I've known people
who've worked in distributed teams 20 years ago. Yes, the tech was a little
different, but it was still good enough.

I absolutely agree with you though that the culture of making sure everything
is done using those tools is the important part. You essentially have to give
up most of the benefits you might get from some members being colocated and do
everything as though you were all at separate sites.

~~~
wott
> I'd say the tech has been there a lot longer than you think, I've known
> people who've worked in distributed teams 20 years ago. Yes, the tech was a
> little different, but it was still good enough.

E-mail, chat system, telephone, version control system, remote access were
indeed there and are still enough for most use cases.

What was missing or not very good or reliable? Video chat and screen sharing,
perhaps? I dislike the first, I find it almost doesn't bring anything positive
compared to the phone but has drawbacks. And the latter makes me seasick.

------
agibsonccc
I've thought a lot about this. I am posting this in an attempt to give an
example of what's worked for 1 company, not as a "guide" or "best practices".
I post this in an attempt to give people ideas on what may work for them.

I operate an engineering team as a seed stage startup across 2 coasts of the
US, multiple parts of APAC, and europe.

We are around 13 full time with a few part timers. We started as 2 people. Our
first hire was co located with us. Our next one was remote.

From there we've made our hires only through referrals or our open source
channel.

We did YC W16 this year as ~6 people and most of us remote. We've more than
doubled the team after having raised nearly 3 million.

A few notes on what's worked for us:

Remote first office, no one (even if there is an office in your area) is
required to come in (at all). We use [https://gitter.im/](https://gitter.im/)
to interact with our open source community, partner companies, and team
members.

Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well.

Some of us choose to for a separation of work and home.

We don't have job postings either. We do this on purpose. We tell engineers
the same thing: Show up in our open source channel. This offends some people,
but has worked for us. I won't claim this scales long term, but there have
been fairly large companies (~800+) that have scaled this way just fine.

We've found productivity to be quite high overall. A lot less noise and very
efficient communication.

Part of it is self management. The hires we make tend to have that part down
pretty well. I've learned to spot bottlenecks. Part of that is just by keeping
an eye on a lot of channels. Proactive reaching out if there are problems
helps a lot. Periodic check ins are a must.

We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a
standup.

For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are
working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching.

Happy to answer questions or expand on anything that sounds interesting.

~~~
dasmoth
>>> We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a
standup.

>>> For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are
working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching.

This sounds like a pretty nice granularity -- glad to hear that it seems to be
working out.

Most of the trouble I have with standups is the "daily" part...

Are there any downsides you've found to this kind of rhythm?

~~~
agibsonccc
In the midst of this we communicate quite a bit throughout the week on what we
call our "dev channel".

We try to keep most communications there so other people see what's happening
too.

For business development we have "growth channel" that does the same thing,
but for cross functional marketing and sales.

The week long projects do 2 things or us - it gives us the ability to reassess
if someone needs help, and it forces people to plan a little bit.

Other than that, async communication throughout the week has helped a lot.
That usually replaces the "walk up to desk" thing people do.

The key here is you're not expected to reply right away.

Of note is we do the hangout on Tuesday of the week.

This means you can get your act together on monday and prepare, tuesday we
have the 1 meeting and

try to cluster other meetings around that (usually another hour at most) and
then the rest of the week is free to get work done.

------
Domenic_S
My team just started a large project; a few of us work remotely and a few are
in an office. For the project, we opened a Zoom video channel, and all sit
there with video chat running on our second monitors. It's working out
_great_. We very much have the be-able-to-pop-in-for-a-question thing going on
like you would in a project war room.

I'm thinking of making it a standing thing one day weekly to work this way.
There's certainly a distraction tradeoff, but the communication bandwidth is
just phenomenal.

~~~
k__
lol, this sounds even worse than working at the office.

I became remote worker to get rid of all that synchronous crap, to work at my
own times etc. none of these constant "pop-in-for-a-question thing"s

If something is really important call me, otherwise email/chat is enough.

~~~
forgetfullest
If youtube still had video replies, you could do something useful, with that I
guess. But, alas.

------
collyw
"Communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as
going up to their desk and starting a conversation."

Probably the main reason I want to get a remote job. Constant disruptions.

~~~
wccrawford
A recent high-priority project allowed me to tell people they couldn't bother
me for 6 of my 8 hours in the office. It's been awesome for my morale and my
productivity both.

I love helping others, but being interrupted constantly is incredibly
frustrating. It can wait until tomorrow.

~~~
dasmoth
Are you able to keep this going once $high_prio_project is over?

~~~
wccrawford
I have no idea, but I'm hoping so.

------
dasmoth
I get what this is saying, but there does seem to be a nearly-unspoken
assumption here that the "perfect" working environment involves high-frequency
communication, including regular synchronous communication -- i.e. replicating
the open-plan/daily standups/short iterations model of programming that seems
to be the current thing for in-office programming jobs. That's a perfectly
reasonable model, and clearly suits a lot of people well, but I do hope
there's still appetite for exploring coarser-grained "trust people to go off
on their own to solve problems" models as well.

~~~
ljf
It's hard - when that model (leave people to do the right thing) works well -
it is amazing. It needs skilled and engaged people.

The problem comes when you have people that don't work well under that model,
and who need continual check points to ensure they really are doing the right
thing, and that you haven't just wasted a bunch of time.

Getting these two groups to work together is hard, when sadly, getting great
people is hard.

~~~
dasmoth
Agreed. But there doesn't seem to even be much willingness to _try_ the
"autonomous people" model.

~~~
soundwave106
There is unfortunately a bias against introversion in many companies, which
explains why some don't bother to try. (Recent article:
[http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-
finance/21706490-...](http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-
finance/21706490-organisations-have-too-long-been-oriented-towards-extroverts-
companies-should-help))

Having said that I agree also that there are also trust issues. Forming trust
is a hard thing.

It's a shame, because programming (from at least my perspective) is one
discipline, where the quality of work is so much higher when you are "in the
zone" and can concentrate on a single task without interruptions.

------
fitzwatermellow
I believe the real dichotomy is "async/sync" rather than "remote/local". There
are individuals who require constant micro-coordination on every decision and
others who get the big picture immediately and can implement details without
specific instruction.

My best decision was probably offloading team coordination to a dedicated
"community manager". Even an undergrad working part-time and using mobile
Slack / GMail can be trained in an afternoon and be 110% effective. The amount
of bandwidth it frees up so you can focus on strategy and product is a Godsend
;)

------
robinhowlett
Does anyone work in a remote team with an always-on video conference?

I really, really prefer being able to shout out a quick question but the
friction costs (and fear of interrupting deep thought) about calling someone,
sometimes even a Slack message, prevents communication at times.

The times where I've been pairing or on a long call "in the background" have
been great I thought. Any downsides for those who do this regularly?

~~~
fernandotakai
we don't do always-on video conferencing where i work, but with slack + zoom,
you can really easily start a conference call on the DM chat (/zoom -> works)

------
vonnik
To follow up on what @agibsonccc has been saying: Remote, open-source hiring
is one of the best ways to match companies and candidates. I used to have to
recruit for a closed-source company, and it was really hard to get good
information - for the company and for the applicants.

Wrote about it here, if anyone's curious. Recruiting is a trail of tears:
[https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tX...](https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tXlm?trk=prof-
sm)

In open-source, you have nearly perfect information: the contributors see the
company's code and how they operate as a team; the company see the
contributor's code, persistence, reliability and friendliness. And anyway,
it's open-source, so everyone is solving their own problems for their own
reasons, so they get something out of it in the end no matter what.

------
ArtDev
I don't see any valid reason why anyone vaguely technical should commute to an
office.

I think this is really overvalued: "communicating with co-workers while
working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a
conversation".

Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working. This is why
Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next
to eachother.

Communicating by text is also better because you never have to say/type the
same thing twice. You never forget what a teammate told you because you can
look up the conversation.

Company "culture" must be something for people who don't have families or
friends. Personally, I don't get it.

I have worked remotely for 3+ years as a contractor. The last office I worked
at involved a long commute even though I mostly communicated by Hipchat.

I don't ever see going into an office again unless it my my own leased space.
Remote work is the future!

~~~
dasmoth
>>> Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working.

>>> This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when
sitting right next to eachother.

I probably fall into this category (actually, for a lot of "serious" things I
prefer e-mail to Slack/Hipchat/whatever), but I'm not at all sure this applies
to "anyone technical": there does seem to be another culture of technical
folks who genuinely do thrive on open offices or "team spaces" and lots of
discussion.

I don't think there's any environment that will keep everyone happy.

I wonder if we'll eventually see people sorting into distinct introvert-
oriented and extrovert-oriented organisations?

------
DrNuke
I would be very happy to join a remote team as a data analyst / scientist but,
whatever reason (skills, fit, pay, age, time zone), I am falling short. For
what I see, many still consider employing remotely as a way to assemble a
cheap sweatshop, preferably drones.

~~~
dexterdog
Those are mostly first-timers with remote. If they've tried that they know
that the only way for it to save money is to throw a boatload of management at
it and in the end it costs the same or more. People who can reliably work
remotely are worth attracting because there are many more of them than there
are good employees in your local commute range.

~~~
DrNuke
Main problem is micromanaging time instead of targets and milestones. No
trust, remotely? Fine, just don't fake it.

------
MarkMc
I love working remotely because it has allowed me to run my business while
travelling around India. But I still feel my work would be more efficient if I
was sitting next to my co-workers. There's some intangible quality involving
instant feedback, body language and social interaction that would make our
communication more direct and engaging.

Despite all the advances in technology for working remotely, face-to-face
remains the best even for digital businesses. Facebook and Google are evidence
of this: working remotely for these companies is the exception rather than the
rule.

~~~
rdm42116
I do a mix. Some days I like working remotely. Others I will go into the
office.

I think more than anything I just want freedom. I don't want to be locked into
8-5. Some days I want to work late and do stuff during the day (yardwork,
appointments). I just want flexibility.

------
whamlastxmas
If only applying to a remote job didn't feel like putting my resume into a
digital paper shredder.

------
Randgalt
This is great. The Digital Nomad future is upon us. I've been doing it for 3
years and it's wonderful. Live where you want. Get out of the Silicon Valley
rat race.

------
sakopov
I am the only employee in a company of about 60/70 who is completely remote. I
was actually working from the headquarters and then ended up relocating to a
new city. While I enjoy the peace and quite and get 3 times more stuff done, I
cannot shake the feeling of isolation. Some days I feel like i'm going fucking
insane not having somebody to just walk up and talk to or go to lunch with.

Yeah there are coffee shops. But really how much time are you going to spend
working out of a busy coffee shop? Maybe 3 or 4 hours before you realize that
you can't hear anybody on a conference call or you're irritating someone next
to you who's studying for an exam.

There are also co-working spaces, which cost on average about 25% of what I
pay for my apartment. Seriously, if you're thinking about working remote
REALLY consider what you're getting into. Being stuck in 4 walls 8 hours a day
does amazing things to productivity but is ultimately a fucking mental
torture.

------
aioprisan
It really depends on the type of work that you're doing. If the work requires
a lot of communication and details that need to be hashes out with people from
various disciplines (i.e. PM, UX, Eng), you need to be colocated to get the
job done quickly. Doing this part remote will only lead to frustrations and
missed deadlines. But if everything is fully spec'd out and split into bite-
size pieces for engineers to simply fill in the wholes with code and follow
the spec, then a remote team can work really well. I've seen this many times
at past consulting companies and now a product company where we do have some
remote workers.

------
archon810
If some of the site owners see this. I clicked on a random job by Gitlab. Two
of the links at the end looked interesting. Both are dead.

[https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/](https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/)

[https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-
manifesto/](https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/)

Whose fail? Gitlab's or RemoteBase's?

~~~
whatusername
Looks like the job text/urls is scraped. These two URL's have the same text:

[https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/](https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/)

[https://remotebase.io/company/gitlab/jobs/developer](https://remotebase.io/company/gitlab/jobs/developer)

So I suspect thats a remotebase.io issue. The links you're after are:

[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/)

[https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-
manifesto/](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/)

------
oxide
I have almost no marketable skills to speak of, how can I work remotely?

I'll take phone calls, answer questions from a script, whatever I have to do.

Also, what marketable skills should I focus on developing if I want to work
remotely in an actual, skill-required job?

I'm not incompetent: I'm proficient in plenty of basic office software, I can
troubleshoot/fix a computer, and I can type 90wpm. You know, the fundamentals.

Thank you in advance.

------
abysmallyideal
At this one trench of a large corp where I had a minor contract, they had an
office in multiple locations. The idea was, to avoid traffic jams people would
work from the satellite offices until the traffic cleared. They opened these
up in areas where a large number of their employees commuted from. It was
pretty slick, with private sound proof rooms, open spaces for team meetups
where they would work then carpool to the main offices, cubicles, lounges,
super nice kitchens, etc... In fact it was a shitton nicer than the places
they called their main office.

They ended up selling some of it, or downgrading because teams just stayed at
the nicer satellites and some ended up getting poached by cunning recruiters
and other internal teams.

Edit: The floorplan was pretty far out there and I think they were emulating
some European layout. It was super dynamic, so people and teams could migrate
between conference rooms, private enclosures, private shared offices, lounges,
etc... as they needed or desired and remote conference to the main office.
Though after some super important team that had the floor above us lost
several key developers and admins to a local company , and people from the
main offices were commuting to the satellite offices instead, they started
selling off floors or closing off access.

------
jkot
In my experience it is best to create your own remote job.

You can start consulting / freelancing.

Or existing job can be made remote. Employer must trust you.

~~~
xufi
Actually, This is a smart approach. A friend of mien made his own team and
he's doing quite well v.s the old way where he was paired with people he did
not get along with

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JohnnyConatus
Clearly getting rid of RW fixed Yahoo /s

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JoeAltmaier
I recommend SococoRS for this issue (making remote work seem more like
teamwork). It allows you to actually go up to a coworker's desk and say Hi.
Unless their door is closed of course. Does screen share/vid conferencing and
chat rooms, all in a simulation of a virtual office.

{ I own stock in Sococo }

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blubb-fish
Remote work is going to be the future - aided by VR technology collaboration
in teams will become much easier.

I already look forward to living in a little house on cheap ground somewhere
in the nowhere and do my fork from there :)

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cwyers
Okay, look. This is easy. I can't pay rent or a mortgage with a team. When my
kid asks me what's for dinner, I can't feed her some groceries I got with all
the team spirit and esprit de corps that I've picked up. When I need to go to
the doctor and he says I need something expensive, all my fellow teammembers
aren't going to immediately offer to pitch in and help with those. The author
says "I think that we mistakenly put jobs ahead of teams because we choose to
ignore the obvious, and sometimes nuanced complications of remote work." No,
it's because I've got bills to pay and people to provide for.

~~~
scrollaway
I'm surprised you made it all the way to the third paragraph if you just
weren't going to read the article.

The point the article is making (a point I understand really well, as a remote
worker and a non-24 sleeper) is that a remote job isn't simply "do your exact
same job, except do it at home". To actually have it work, you need to fully
account for your remote employees. This affects your company, it affects work
management, planning, execution, everything. It affects how the work is
assigned, how it's prioritized, how the meetings are held. It completely
changes the social aspect of the job, so that needs to be accounted for both
from the employees' and employers' perspective.

Or you can just ignore all this, interpret the article's title however you
feel like, and talk about salary. Whatever.

~~~
stephengillie
At my employer, it takes 8 dedicated Slack channels, numerous daily, weekly,
and monthly meetings, and a dedicated conference room. And continual reminding
from the boss - "Call a random team member, and BS for 5 minutes, you have my
permission." But my remote coworkers are definitely part of the team.

It does help that the office parts of the team are scattered between 2 offices
in widely different time zones - people in the other office may as well be
working from home. This is for a 24/7/365 support organization.

