
Letting Employees Work Remotely Pays Off - czue
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201210/adam-bluestein/letting-employees-work-remotely-pays-off.html
======
nancyhua
This article's title should specify that by "work remotely," it means "live
together with your coworkers in an exotic location remote from company
headquarters."

------
crazygringo
Wait a minute, they went to Brazil and chose... São Paulo?

They chose a crowded traffic-clogged endless concrete jungle, over the airy,
green, lush beachside tropical paradise of Rio?

At least it says they went to Rio on long weekends.

~~~
czue
We had a free place to stay and connections in São Paulo, which was a huge
reason. Also, after visiting Rio we all collectively agreed that if we had
been there the whole time we wouldn't have been able to get any actual work
done. Although we did have a great time while there.

------
thmzlt
I have only worked remotely in my career (as in by myself inside a home
office), and I have worked in full remote as well as in mixed local/remote
teams.

If you are in a position to choose/offer to work remotely, make sure that
everyone you have to interact with is communicating in the same way, at least
for work stuff. If half of your team is in an office and they aren't making an
effort to communicate equally with the both local and remote team members, it
will not work well. Having a remote team means an overhead in the
communication for the local team.

Anyways, here is a great collection of resources on working remotely:
<http://www.wideteams.com/>

------
moocow01
Can we please not make programming with your shirt off in the workplace a
trend? I've heard of brogrammers but this takes it to another level.

~~~
crazygringo
It's pretty hot in Brazil, and not common to have A/C in homes, outside of
bedrooms. Men often don't wear shirts at home, or at friends' homes, and this
is just someone's apartment.

When in Rome...

------
bruce511
Sounds like a cool idea. But frankly, for me, I hate programming on a laptop
(which I have to do when I travel.) I much prefer the 3 * 22" monitor setup I
have in the office. Not to mention the comfy chair, office-with-a-door and so
on.

I can see how it kinda makes sense, a bit of fun, and a bit of holiday, good
team building and so on, but its not something that appeals to me. Maybe,
probably, I'm just too old....

Edit - it also probably helps that I live in a town with good weather all year
round.

~~~
pault
Working remotely doesn't have to mean traveling while you work. You can live
wherever you want and have an office at home. Being able to choose where you
want to live based on factors other than your ability to find employment there
greatly increases quality of life (and a happy programmer is a productive
programmer).

------
Aloisius
Wow. I mean wow. Somehow they convinced a bunch of smart people that working
remotely is like a vacation. And to brag to their friends about it! That's
amazing.

For me, visiting foreign lands does not mean staying with my coworkers in an
apartment all day long working and then maybe having a drink after work in a
different climate. Call me crazy, but _living_ with my coworkers for upwards
of six weeks in paradise that I can't really spend real time in sounds kind of
awful.

~~~
jacalata
I'm in Australia right now, working remotely 3 days a week from Seattle. My
family lives here, and working remotely means I can see my friends and family
in the evenings and on weekends, and not use up my vacation time while they're
at work anyway. A month is long enough that I can work around other people's
schedules to catch up, go away for a weekend with someone, etc instead of
being all 'drop everything, I'm visiting!'. It's inconvenient being 18 hours
off the home timezone, but it's not that bad and I would (will) do it again.
The restrictions on communication have caused some trouble but mostly exposed
holes where people aren't using expected status tools to keep records up to
date, which is good to know anyway. Some of my coworkers I have gone away with
on real vacations, so sharing an apartment with them for a bit doesn't sound
that bad at all.

For me, visiting foreign lands for a week of sightseeing is lame anyway - I'd
much rather go live there for a month in a regular rhythm, going grocery
shopping and maybe for a drink after work. Different strokes.

------
rogerbinns
Expensify sends the whole company somewhere remote for one month each year.
Last year they did Vietname - initial discussion at
[http://blog.expensify.com/2011/10/25/expensify-
offshore-2011...](http://blog.expensify.com/2011/10/25/expensify-
offshore-2011-vietnam/) and full details at
<http://blog.expensify.com/tag/vietnam/>

Thailand this year: [http://blog.expensify.com/2012/09/28/expensify-
offshore-2012...](http://blog.expensify.com/2012/09/28/expensify-
offshore-2012-thailand/)

I have no connection to Expensify other than reading their blog which I
originally saw posted on HN. This adds a second datapoint showing the
principle working for more than one company.

Another interesting approach is on Rand Fishkin's blog where Seomoz will
reimburse employees up to $3,000 each in vacaction expenses.

The message is consistent - a change of scenery either as a group or
individuals is benefical to the company.

------
tibbon
Too bad while so many people think working remotely is cool- the majority of
startups demand on-location presence.

------
atomical
What kind of hours do these guys work? If it's 60 hour weeks it sounds like a
hellish lifestyle to have to deal with culture shock and long work weeks at
the same time.

~~~
jljackson
Most of the dev team works a very flexible 40 hrs. Some of the more senior
folks work a bit more but its all because we want to. It would likely have
been too much if we were pulling 60 hr work weeks.

------
jacalata
What kind of visas did they need? Does a tourist visa cover this activity?

~~~
mrgriscom
Working remote is always a grey area. We reasoned that since we were not
taking up employment in Brazil or being paid by a Brazilian entity, we didn't
need work visas. The primary purpose of our trip arguably was tourism, so we
all got tourist visas. I would probably not broach the subject with the
embassy, though.

------
mmastrac
Whatever script inc.com uses for its bizarre mobile frame doesn't work well on
Chrome Mobile. I can't get more than halfway through the story.

~~~
rhizome
My experience with the contemporary mobile web leads me to believe that 90%
(100% of mass-market sites) of front-end coders are doing their work on quad-
core CPUs and calling it a day.

~~~
just2n
I can't contradict your claim (since I don't work on mass-market sites), but I
test my work on a VM with 1 CPU and 1GB ram; if the site doesn't run well in
that, it's not good enough. I wish more people tested their software that way.
I often find myself performing optimizations that are generally best-practices
under V8 (and also work well in Firefox) that most in this community would
consider "premature optimizations," at least until you point out that the
difference between the two are 20-50x, and something that once cost 40ms now
costs under 1ms, meaning your UI is just that much more responsive. For some
reason, "it works, I'm done" seems to be a pervasive mental model. How
unfortunate.

~~~
damncabbage
_I often find myself performing optimizations that are generally best-
practices under V8 (and also work well in Firefox) that most in this community
would consider "premature optimizations," ..._

Do you have any references you could point to? I'm really curious as to
whether or not I'm doing something stupidly inefficient. :)

~~~
just2n
Just as an example: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJPdhx5zTaw>

------
mikaelcho
Our startup is thinking of doing this in a few months to get away from the
Canadian winter for a few weeks. It also helps that our designer lives in
Mexico, so that would be our first location choice. Any affordable location
recommendations for a travelling startup?

~~~
donw
Germany (read: Berlin) is surprisingly affordable, but hold off until the
springtime, unless you're looking to better understand how your laptops
perform in sub-zero temperatures. Berliners also pretty universally speak
English, and there's a decent-sized startup community there as well.

You could come to Tokyo, where I live. Don't. It's ruinously expensive. But
you could go to a lesser-visited part of Japan for a not-unreasonable amount
of money, and while people's English skills are lacking here, the public
infrastructure is fantastic.

Taiwan is like Japan, but with better food and cheaper living costs, but
without as much infrastructure. Still one of my favorite countries in Asia,
though. If you decide on Asia, avoid the summer at all costs, because the
entire region turns into a gigantic sauna.

------
antoinevg
We did something similar in Barcelona earlier this year:
[http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-
blo...](http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-
blog/2012/06/06/working-away-consider-it-for-your-startup/)

Money well spent!

~~~
jljackson
Dimagi didn't pay for anything in this case, it was all self funded by the
individuals on the trip. But I think they would all agree it was money very
well spent.

