
We're all remote: how we deal with a 100% remote dev team - kemayo
http://dt.deviantart.com/blog/39183993/
======
ChuckMcM
I would like you to think about the question "Why is talking on your cell
phone when you drive 'bad', but talking to the person in the passenger seat
'ok'?"

I submit that because the person on your cell phone doesn't have the same
physical context as you, they don't know they need to shut up for a moment
while you try to avoid a three-way with an overly aggressive BMW trying to
split lanes. There is a certain amount of 'shared context' that isn't part of
the discussion.

Now programming isn't the same of course, and working at home when your single
is different than working at home when your married which is much different
than working at home when you have kids. Ever data driven, Google documented
that people who had kids and worked from home had their productivity plummet
between 2PM and 8PM. Is that bad? probably not, can you plan for it? sure.

If you're managing a team, you can get a sense for how overloaded someone is
at work, when they are working at home it is hard to keep your employees from
burning themselves out. (Some people literally don't know when to stop
working)

By the same token a group meeting can be a great place to rapidly resolve a
bunch of problems and to air a bunch of issues. On the phone you can't tell
that someone is wincing when another team member is estimating 6 weeks for
some effort, you can't know if they think that is aggressive or weak and why
they think that, the conversation never comes up.

Finally, if the overall percentage of your conversations are in email, rather
than speaking, you add to the distraction issues facing people rather than
letting them work smoothly.

Bottom line, working from home has its place, but the value of being in the
same space has its benefits too.

~~~
travisp
>Ever data driven, Google documented that people who had kids and worked from
home had their productivity plummet between 2PM and 8PM.

Interesting. Do you have a link to any of this information that Google
collected?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sadly no. Sometimes they will publish a paper or make a blog entry about some
learning they have developed but unless they do it stays buried inside their
data collection containment vessel.

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city41
I work at home at my current job about 95% of the time. I don't mind it, and
it does have some serious advantages. But I still feel having your team in one
building is the better way to go. It can also get a little lonely, and
spending so much time in your own home does get old.

The trend of the "virtual company" where everyone works remotely will only
increase, and I think it might even become the norm. So I'm getting used to it
and looking to ways to make it truly ideal for me. Recently I've been
contacted by companies about potentially working with them and when I tell
them I really can't move, every one of them has said working remotely would be
fine. Even just a year ago that wouldn't have been the case.

~~~
wladimir
I do hope this becomes the trend. I'd love to work mostly from home, or at
least from where ever I want. I don't like offices much.

~~~
warrenwilkinson
If it did become the norm, imagine how much less downtown office space we
would need.

~~~
wladimir
Indeed, and how much fuel and pollution it would save from people not having
to commute every day.

~~~
samtp
Also think how much person-to-person social interaction would be wiped out.
Not very pleasant from my point of view

~~~
Homunculiheaded
I live in a part of the country that has pretty mediocre tech options, which
means that anyone doing any interesting dev work telecommutes. The result of
this? There's a growing community telecommuters that all hang out with each
other, meet monthly, do hacknights, drop by co-working spaces etc. It's
actually pretty awesome because rather than just your coworkers you have this
"other office" of people you get to learn from. As telecommuting/remote
working grows I think we'll see much better social interaction start to form,
communities that are more based on what your passionate about rather than that
you happen to share an office space. Additionally with remote work comes a lot
more flexibility, which means a lot more social flexibility, it's easier than
ever to grab lunch with a friend an in entirely different industry. I think
basing social interaction around a 9-6 schedule and being locked in a building
is much more damaging than the alternative.

~~~
samtp
Thats really cool how all you you have found each other and are able to get
together regularly. I'm in Columbia, SC (not exactly the hot-bed of tech) and
we have a similar situation.

But from a long-term sustainability stand-point, we want to grow local tech
companies that contribute to our own economy and give us control over our
city's well-being. It would be interesting if a bunch of you who telecommute
could band together to start a company. Seems like you already get along well
outside of work

------
brndnhy
I've been working in a home office for the past five years for two companies:
one large, one small. WFH can be and has been a great privilege. It doesn't
work for every personality or organization type, but I've seen far more
benefits than disadvantages.

Merits aside, there are a few things almost everyone faces at one point or
another:

You are likely to gain weight.

You may be surprised by how often work overlaps your personal or family life.

You will probably end up developing a good amount of your own communication
tools rather than license third party collaboration software.

You may be surprised how soon you miss working in an office environment.

~~~
haploid
This is a good post, but I would take issue with the following:

"You are likely to gain weight."

It is fairly trivial to stock your cabinets and refrigerator at home with
healthy food options. Contrast this with an office environment. Between the
morning donuts, the snack bins, the beer kegs, the pizza delivered for
meetings, and the endless birthday cakes - sweet lord, the birthday cakes! -
it's far more likely that you'll gain weight there than at home.

~~~
brndnhy
Mmm. Office Food. Thankfully I avoided that anyway.

In a WFH situation, it's actually the lack of exercise or commute that I'm
talking about.

Walking or biking to work and walking with co-workers to and from lunch
several times a week is healthy.

One has to make up for these lost opportunities by exercising more simply for
the sake of exercising.

The social element of work has a lot of advantages.

WFH took me from riding/walking 20 miles per week to near zero.

It's taken a lot of discipline and time to duplicate that.

~~~
shasta
Why do you associate commuting to work with exercise? Not commuting means
extra time for exercise.

~~~
danvet
At least for me, commuting by bike is just routine. Now that my current gig is
within walking distance, these about 5 hours of biking per week just
disappeared. I think that's because I find biking, running, swimming, actually
anything stressing endurance an utter chore after a few weeks. Whereas while
commuting a can use the time to spin up my brain and preload the working
context. And in the evening it's a nice way to cool down and put everything
aside.

I'm trying to compensate by going for a longer walk after-office, but because
it's not a necessity I'll drop that far more often than not. I'm a lazy
bastard, after all ...

------
Goronmon
I sometimes I feel like a rare case when I say I really dislike working
remotely. I find it a pain having to call people, and I feel it's tough to
have meaningful discussions using text-based forms of chat.

I just feel like communication is much easier and more effective to
communicate face to face with people as the norm. And being able to just talk
over my cube to another member of the team is something I would have a hard
time giving up.

~~~
ericmoritz
I'm about two months into my first remote gig and I have to agree with you
that communication is the worse. Sometimes I feel like I'm pulling teeth to
get an answer out of anyone.

~~~
garagebander
I think this depends on your requirements... if you are a liaison between
departments, or the specs of what you are trying to do aren't well defined,
there's too much to communicate.

Some remote jobs are great: they lay out what you need and you provide it
without having to pester people for information.

------
elliottcarlson
As far as the final question of better communication tools. At our company
(even though we aren't all remote) we use OpenFire[1] as our communication
platform. By tieing it in with LDAP we can automatically add new employees to
everyones Roster quickly. It's worked out great over the course of the last 2
years. We do have gateways enabled to allow employees to use it as their all-
in-one IM system, and we were going to experiment with the video-chat features
but never got around to it. It's worth looking in to IMHO.

[1] OpenFire - GPL Real Time Collaboration Server:
<http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/>

------
garagebander
I don't think most business owners or bosses are mature enough for this yet...
they just assume the remote worker is sloughing off.

No use trying to convince them otherwise... they think their staff is
slackers. Period. (Not all business owners or bosses, just those that lack the
maturity to direct a remote workforce.)

But for the seasoned manager, it's no problem at all.

~~~
japherwocky
This drives me nuts; either I'm checking (timestamped no less!) code into the
repo, and delivering what I say I'll deliver by the appointed deadlines, or
I'm not.

It's not like you can fake productivity as a coder.

~~~
waqf
You can (or at least they'll assume you can) if you have input into your own
deadlines: they'll say you're padding your estimates.

~~~
getsat
I _love_ when non-coders tell me how long a coding task should take. This is
one reason why I decided to work for myself.

------
technomancy
> Pair programming or a scrum, for instance, just aren't the same without
> colocation.

This actually works great for us, but only because everyone uses Emacs.
Running over SSH and tmux is a huge win.

~~~
slackerIII
What do you guys do with tmux? (as opposed to screen)

~~~
technomancy
tmux's permissions model is a lot better, but the other huge win is that it
resizes to the smallest screen. With screen we would always have to shuffle
around so the person with the smallest screen was the first to join each
window; it was a huge drag. The better key bindings and config files are just
gravy.

------
mswen
I have been working from home for the past 12 years. Some was for a company
with about 1000 employees, with about 5% working from home. The second was
with a company of about 100 employees again with about 5% WFH. Now I am
working for a start-up where the founder has decided that for now everyone
will work from home. Although - I traveled frequently including back to HQ in
the previous jobs I always felt a bit out of the flow of the office
relationships. It is nice to be in a situation where the WFH is the norm. If
we succeed in some substantial way I expect that the founder will establish a
physical office in the greater Boston area - but I know from talking with my
co-workers who are in that area they will not be very willing to put a
significant commute back into their daily schedule. I suspect it will end up
being an office for the founder, a big conference room for group work and some
flexible open office workspace that people share on a rotating or as needed
basis.

------
oldpond
Payroll is the big thing stopping me from growing my team with work-from-
homers. What if a member of the team is from another country? Do members
submit their time each week, or are they all salaried? Trust is key in these
situations too. Do you monitor code commits? Numbers of lines submitted each
week? I worked from home when I was with IBM, and I always put in more hours
than they paid me for. I would like to see more articles on how to make this
work.

~~~
modoc
Trust is key no matter where they work. With a small company if you can't
trust someone to be as productive as you need them to be (regardless of if
you're looking over their shoulder or not) you probably shouldn't hire them.
The exception to that I guess is people who just don't work well remotely. But
the whole comment about monitoring code commits just seems nutty to me. My
company is remote, and it works because I trust everyone to do a good job. I
wouldn't hire someone I didn't trust.

------
trefn
Regarding group chat, I strongly recommend HipChat -
(<http://www.hipchat.com>). We're in there all day at Mixpanel.

It's like IRC but easier, with persistent chat storage, file sharing, etc.

------
mikey_p
On Skype: I've found that running our own IRC server and setting up ZNC* with
accounts for all employees/developers has made a huge difference. The bonus
for us is that since we do alot of open source work, it encourages developers
to connect with other open source developers over IRC which is a great way to
grow knowledge or get quick feedback for whatever framework/language/library
we're working with at the time.

* <http://en.znc.in/wiki/ZNC> is a IRC bouncer that allows each user to keep their choice of clients, but still have catchup if they're offline.

~~~
kemayo
I'd actually love to use IRC... but we're just not confident that it'd work
well for the non-technical people, and we need them to be able to get into the
project chats and demo chats.

Possibly we're selling them short here.

~~~
aristidb
There's a plethora of IRC clients available, many of them very easy to use.
No, you do not need to be a genius to be on IRC. Administrating channels
(/mode and such) is a bit harder, but not everybody needs to do that.

------
presidentender
Well, it looks like I'm applying for a position at DeviantArt, then.

------
flubble
Our company is distributed in a pretty similar way: 11 people in five
different countries and in eight different cities.

For us IRC is our life line, and we regularly use skype. We meet twice per
year with the whole team, each time at another location.

There are hardly any serious communication problems, nothing worst than I
experienced in a previous job where all were in the same building. You learn
to read between the lines when you are all day hanging out on IRC together,
potential problems are probably easier to spot this way than IRL. At least for
us it works :)

------
kin
At some of the big companies I've worked for in industry, there is such a
segregation between cubicles and closed office doors that I find my remote
side projects much more productive and efficient.

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spedsal
I am not sure of the costs/hardware involved in running this software, but I
am in a distance ed. computer science program, and we have had great success
(team software engineering projects) utilizing Adobe's Breeze meeting
software, hosted through my university:
<http://www.adobe.com/resources/breeze/>

~~~
spedsal
My apologies.. it's now called Adobe Connect:
<http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html>

------
kalleboo
tap tap tap also made a blog post on working as a distributed team, focusing
on the tools used to keep everyone in sync [http://taptaptap.com/blog/tools-
for-effective-iphone-app-dev...](http://taptaptap.com/blog/tools-for-
effective-iphone-app-development/)

(shameless plug disclaimer: I work for them. That said, it's on-topic and a
good overview)

------
whatusername
The Oatmeal's take on working from Home:
<http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home>

------
Stormbringer
Minor nitpick: Scrum pre-dates Agile.

If you want to go backwards in time and start adding in other methodologies
under the Agile umbrella, you need to add RAD and JAD, which VB programmers
(and others) were doing back in the mid 90s.

I secretly roll my eyes whenever I'm working with an organization that claims
to have developed their own custom Agile process, because 9 times out of 10 it
turns out to be just RAD, aka Agile without the silly/braindead/religious
bits.

------
lizzard
This description of process made me think this would be a nice place to work.
Really sensible!

------
rorrr
I'm also working remotely, and it's absolutely fantastic. When people don't
have to commute, and live where they want, happiness level is through the
roof.

We also use Skype mostly for communication (although it's pretty shitty when
it comes to searching chat logs).

~~~
technomancy
Skype chat is definitely the weakest link the chain for our remote team as
well; it's basically unusable beyond a handful of groups. We've been migrating
over to IRC for as much as we can. We also briefly toyed with using Mumble
(<http://mumble.sourceforge.net/>) for voip, and while it was pretty
compelling in terms of cross-platform stability it never really took off in
our organization.

The article mentions only moving off Skype if it's sufficiently advanced
beyond Skype. IRC by itself is not, but we've got our own IRC server that adds
some important features like indexing and catchup:
<http://writequit.org/blog/?p=444>

~~~
gregburek
Convore is pretty new, but have you tried it for private chats? When it was
announced, I immediately started to think how much easier it would be to set
up for my non-technical co-workers.

Link that explains basic functionality: [http://gigaom.com/collaboration/set-
up-real-time-conversatio...](http://gigaom.com/collaboration/set-up-real-time-
conversations-fast-with-convore/)

~~~
technomancy
Tying you to the browser is only slightly better than tying you to a single
client; textareas are not the kind of place you want to spend much time. I'd
be game if there were an Emacs client.

~~~
leahculver
It's true that there aren't a lot of clients out there for Convore yet. There
are quite a few Convore projects started on GitHub
([https://github.com/search?q=convore&type=Repositories](https://github.com/search?q=convore&type=Repositories))
and more clients are welcome!

------
MenaMena123
The advantages of working at home are great until something goes at work
like.... How long you were working? The company I worked for never realized
how much time it took me to do this design work and I'd get calls the next day
asking why out of 10 designs I only turned in 9 and why I was still working on
the last one? In reality each design should of taken a day for about 2 of
them.

Also, when it came time for layoffs it was easier for them to let the people
at home go. No face to look at of explain anything too. They told me a few
times I was about to be let go, but the never did and let others go. I ended
up quitting and still trying for my own big win. :)

~~~
tsotha
>Also, when it came time for layoffs it was easier for them to let the people
at home go.

I think this is the biggest drawback. If you start at the company as a wfh
person, or you transition to it and do it long enough, nobody in the office
can put a face to your name. Outside of your immediate group, they don't know
what you do. You're just a name on a chart. "Hey, look, without that box the
chart is a little more balanced!"

In every company I've worked where wfh was tried (starting about 15 years
ago), the wfh people were _always_ the first to go when there was layoffs.

------
togasystems
Only problem working from is the damn cat.

