
A Short Rant About Working Remotely - speric
http://ericfarkas.com/posts/a-short-rant-about-working-remotely/
======
dewitt
Having worked in both environments before, one thing that I observed is that
working remotely can indeed be highly productive, but it's very difficult,
perhaps even impossible, to do it successfully if only a few employees are
working remotely.

Otherwise what happens is that the people who can see each other face to face
and in the hallway will of course do it, leaving the odd remote person out of
many conversations. So either the remote person won't be as in the loop as the
others (bad for them, and bad for the overall team dynamic because someone
needs to be treated specially), or else everyone on the team needs change
their otherwise perfectly normal and perfectly productive patterns of
communication (leading to frustration with the artificial constraint).

So there's nothing inherently wrong with remote workers, but it's probably
better to go "all in" like some companies are starting to do, or try to avoid
it at all, except in very special circumstances.

I bet many of the "99%" of companies the author was referring to that said
"no" to his working remotely simply fell into the category where the majority
of existing employees weren't remote, so they they chose not to introduce the
new and arguably difficult to manage dynamic.

~~~
chaz
This is a huge factor. When most people are in the office, the means of
communication becomes different, in tons of little ways.

For example, brainstorming sessions end with scribbles on whiteboards, and a
fleet of Post-Its that say "Do Not Erase!" It's perfectly adequate
documentation because the same team comes in the following afternoon and keeps
going. But the one or two people that work remotely are never going to see it.
And no matter how much Skype you do, it's just not the same as being in the
room as it happens.

------
Irregardless
Who are you to say they don't understand their own business process and
culture well enough to determine that remote employees aren't a fit for them?
I've worked with several remote team members, and it's always been
frustrating. _Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded
to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right
now? Hello???_

Communication is extremely important when working in teams, and you'd have to
be pretty ignorant to claim remote workers are able to communicate as well as
on-site workers. If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head
slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately. Sure, you can set
up some sort of always-on video or teleconferencing, but do all new, growing
companies have the know-how and resources to implement that for multiple
remote workers? Or are you just so special that you deserve all that extra
effort?

Small, early stage companies also seem to be focusing a lot on developing a
company culture these days. Remote workers don't fit into that strategy very
well, if at all.

I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a
constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at
any time.

~~~
hkarthik
> If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left
> and ask them. They respond immediately.

And then they stand the chance of losing anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour
of productivity thanks to your interruption.

Part of the reason remote work appeals to so many of us is because we don't
deal well with the constant stream of interruptions that occur in many office
environments.

I don't believe this is the case for everyone. There are some individuals
capable of working productively in a noisy environment all day while sleeping
only 3-4 hours per day. But I think such individuals are rare, and you're
doing yourself and your organization a disservice if you think all developers
can work this way effectively.

~~~
varjag
If you can't deal with interruptions, maybe teamwork is not for you.

I agree that it's distracting and irritating at times, but that's the nature
of working with other people.

~~~
moneypenny
Absolutely agree - anyone wandering into one of these opinion
articles/discussions would think that developers are a self-centred bunch of
arseholes whose productivity is the most important thing in the entire
universe, and isolation/concentration is critical. Even brain surgeons need to
collaborate and operate - literally - in conjunction with other people.

~~~
stephencanon
I'm a software engineer married to brain surgeon. She will be the first to
tell you that the actual procedures, while technical, are essentially arts and
crafts; they require care, but not extreme mental focus.

However, when she's reviewing patient charts and imaging to prepare for a
procedure, that requires absolute focus, and she will isolate herself
completely for hours and not talk to anyone no matter what. So, there is a
time for collaboration, but there is also a time for focusing on one task to
the exclusion of everything else.

------
zenocon
Another "me too". The past 8 years, about 80% of the projects I have done have
been remote. I get contacted often from recruiters, as well as HR in big name
companies, and they nearly _always_ indicate that telecommute is a deal-
breaker, so that ends the discussion right there. I live where I live, and I'm
not moving. Even if a client/company is local, a balance of local/remote is
the right way to go. Dealing with traffic / commute, ergonomics, distraction-
free are all important.

This is really pretty simple. If the local talent pool is exhausted, and you
want good people, the smart move is to hire good, remote people. Bring them in
periodically as needed.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
The really smart move is to have smart guys on retainer, ensuring they keep up
to date on your code base and deployment practises. Then they can be pulled in
periodically.

The really really smart move is to let them bid on some of the tasks - a sort
of granular level development contracting.

------
famousactress
The irony I keep seeing is that at a small startup, everyone's output is
severely visible.. regardless of where you're at. I was the first technical
hire at the startup I'm with now (details in profile), working remotely from
San Diego while the cofounders were based in SF. There's definitely never been
any question about what's getting done and by whom. In a lot of ways I
understand the challenge that being a larger shop who's grown locally and is
considering adding remote working might face much more than the "We're so
small we have to be in the same room" argument.

The benefits of hiring remote workers early on are numerous. The fact that it
leads to working more asynchronously, and makes you available to talent
anywhere are worth the price of admission alone, IMHO.

[EDIT: oh also: we're hiring]

~~~
rrhyne
Would you consider moving when the team gets larger? If you don't do you think
you'll get 'left behind' as the local culture develops?

We're also in SD, but trying to build a team here and not finding as many
local applicants as we'd like.

~~~
famousactress
We've considered moving, sure. For us though the cost of moving houses in this
market, and my wife's local reputation-based business (wedding photographer)
would make it an extremely expensive proposition in the short term. I think
getting left behind is definitely a risk. So far I'm the only employee outside
of the bay, but the culture has remained pretty asynchronous and conducive. If
we continue to find talent local to SF I imagine there's a solid chance
that'll change, if we happen upon more awesome remote talent it might not. I
think it'll just depend on who we end up hiring over time.

Early on though, getting big enough to have that issue sounded like a very
high class problem so we decided not to care much where people were and focus
on getting things built.

[Aside: That's awesome that you're in SD! Drop me a line and I'd be happy to
pass your details along to some of my SD developer friends]

------
MattRogish
In general, I totally agree. Being able to hire the best person, anywhere, and
allow them to work super-effectively is a strong moat. I share this opinion
and hire accordingly.

I think the "these companies are wrong" posts, though, are not attempting to
see it from the other side.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of these startups. In super-super early
startups (e.g. pre-profitability or definitely pre-revenue) one of the goals
(aside from staying afloat) is to build a sustainable _culture_ (company
etc.). It's very difficult to build a company culture AND product AND hit
profitability AND 1,000 other things from scratch before going out of
business.

When most are co-located and a few are distributed it just adds one more thing
to the pile. I've done it before, so I know how hard it is, even when we were
all 'on board' with it.

It's just harder; you need to start from scratch with the assumption that any
one can be remote at any time, and so you build your tools/processes
accordingly (if you have a physical kanban board then it'll be a real hard
thing to support remote devs).

For _just one_ non-top 1% of all software-developer persons? The overhead is
probably not worth it if you have a ready talent pool in your city (especially
if you now have nexus in another state, which is a very real risk as states
are looking to increase their revenue. ugh).

For Joe Average, or Jane Above Average, these companies would _prefer_ to hire
a local person than remote. That makes sense to me.

As a big part of getting from 'startup' to 'sustainable business' involves
managing risk. So, understand where most of these businesses are coming from.
Having one or two remote people in a company full of on-site people is a risk
(not from a technical perspective, but from a culture and focus one), and not
one they're willing to take.

It's a trade-off, and one that can make sense if viewed in context and done
for the right reasons (note: "We can't control them/see their work/trust
them/need to see their faces/need them from 9-5/etc." are WRONG REASONS).

Ranting about a system problem isn't very useful; I'd like to see more posts
about how to convert a primarily on-site team to support 'work anywhere'. What
processes and tools need to change to do this?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I have done and tried to do that very thing.

1\. Continuous Integration (and or delivery) This is the sine qua non.
Everyone should be able to check out and build a complete working eco system
and run all tests on their local laptop or Rackspace cluster you rent just for
them

2\. Really, get the continuous integration working. Stop now and do nothing
else till you have. Tell the dev's remote working is only possible after one
month of a CI process that is never broken itself (although build can break).
Spurred on, everyone will suddenly get that CI build working.

3\. The CEO must build a complete off site copy of the entire company on his
remote laptop. Is it getting boring yet.

4\. Agree on one place to store all documents, all meeting notes, everything.
Do not split comms over IRC and Skype and gmail and ... It will mean no one
can reliably contact anyone else because "oh I left you a message on Skype",
"but I live on IRC"

5\. Get different people to work together on different areas. Pair programming
is not ideal IMO, but having Fred write the code for task A and Bob
principlaly write the first tests, means they have to talk and decide a
solution, and Bob keeps a friendly competitive eye on progess. Move these
pairs around a bit.

6\. Stop trying to get updates for management - its either working code or
not.

7\. talk to people a lot. Watch thier checkin velocity - it will speak
volumes. Talk if it changes.

8\. Assume, perhaps commit visibly, to people as being safe in their jobs for
a long time (2 years minimum). This to me seems the biggest - people need to
feel safe. Maybve thats just me

~~~
fudged71
"4. Agree on one place to store all documents, all meeting notes, everything."

This can't be understated. When I ask the founder where the company logo is
and they say "it's on one of the external harddrives sitting around the office
somewhere", it's incredibly frustrating. The most well-oiled startup I worked
for had a perfectly organized central-storage of digital resources, which
greatly contributed to the smooth workings of the company.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
A scary amount of my life and all my business is now on private repos at
github.

That's getting scary.

~~~
csense
If you're looking for a self-hosted solution to keep you from becoming overly
dependent on Github, take a look at Gitlab [1].

Since you're using Git, all those repos are presumably backed up on individual
development machines. Or you could easily write a cron job to mirror them
every day or so.

The real problem is other content like issue tracking, wikis, and pull
requests. If keeping these is important, you may be locked into the platform,
at least as far as existing projects are concerned.

[1] <http://gitlab.org/>

------
NateDad
We switched from almost always in the office to a ROWE (Results Only Work
Evironment) and now 90%+ of the time we all work from home. According to a
company survey of the people in the ROWE, devs feel more productive, and
managers feel there has been no change in productivity. I think this is
because we are measuring productivity in different ways. Managers measure
productivity over a week or month, which has stayed static, whereas devs
measure productivity in amount of time they have to spend to get stuff done.
When you don't have to spend 1-2 hours commuting, you spend less time "at
work" and get the same amount done.

Personally, I like it, but we also already had a culture of doing a lot of
talking via IM. In this day and age, there's no excuse for not being able to
get ahold of people. But by the same token, you can't always assume someone is
going to respond in 30 seconds. I hope no one is so dependent on other people
that someone taking 20 minutes to respond is a complete blocker.

We use Google hangouts extensively for meetings and often open them up just to
chat and connect with fellow devs.

We have lost a little bit of a sense of belonging to the team. I think
extensive use of google hangouts helps a lot with this. With most laptops
having a camera, there's little excuse not to fire one up whenever anyone
wants to talk.

~~~
darkarmani
> We switched from almost always in the office to a ROWE (Results Only Work
> Evironment)

That's awesome terminology. I work from home now, but I had a test run in my
previous job that was almost always in the office. I ruptured my Achilles and
was unable to move about. I felt more pressure (in a good way) to get stuff
done, because I felt that i could delay my return to the office longer if it
was crystal clear that I was being productive.

I found the same odd productivity boost working a week out of 2 week vacation
on the beach in NC. Surprisingly, I was able to focus a lot better since i
wanted to have lunch with the family and go for a swim and also because I knew
I wanted to stop at 5PM for some beach time. I should clarify that I wanted to
stop and feel good about myself that I accomplished a day of work.

------
DanielBMarkham
"...But I don't see a reason why, in 2013, given the tools we have, a
developer has to be on-site at a desk every day, as the normal operating
procedure..."

I am struggling with this same question, but from the other side. I help teams
become more Agile, and I'm a startup junkie, so all I care about is
performance here. I want to know what works best in terms of product quality
and pivot ability.

And guess what? So far it's co-located teams that kick ass over distributed
teams. I wish it wasn't so, and I'd love to hang back in my home office and
work, but that's not the way the numbers are looking.

To be more precise, yes, you can become a "commodity" programmer, that is,
somebody that people slide a list under the door to and who delivers code on a
regular basis. In this case you are competing with commodity programmers
around the world who are willing to work for peanuts. If that's your thing,
hop on over to one of the programming job sites and have fun with it.

Now I can already hear the objections. With all these tools, why can't I be
just as plugged in as if I were in the office? Aren't you making a false
dichotomy, asking us to either be on-site or completely on our own?

Yes, I am generalizing. Look, I don't know why the tools don't work to do the
things they are supposed to do. Certainly we have chat, VOIP, and all kinds of
awesome communication tools. You'd think that would be enough. But it's not.
Instead of powerfully performing teams we get mediocrity.

I _suspect_ that software development has a powerful social and human aspect
that is not replaced by tools. Working in a team isn't just trading streams of
data across a wire. It's going out to lunch, having a beer while talking about
work, or making an oddball suggestion one Wednesday afternoon that turns out
to change how everybody thinks of the problem they're working on.

So sign me up for remote work too. Just show me how it's going to be as
effective as co-located teams. I see a lot of fluff from places like 37Signals
who make a marketing strategy out of being so aweseome, but I'm not seeing
results in the real world. I hope to learn more -- and I hope this problem
gets solved.

~~~
aantix
I'd contend that the tools just aren't there.

When I want to chat with someone, I want to do it instantly, like walking up
to someone in the office. The Skype concept of "dialing" someone is old,
antiquated and feels... laggy.

There was a video chat client promoted on Hacker News a while back that
allowed for instantly initiating a video chat session with a colleague.

Sococo, a distributed agile client (with video support) also claims to do the
same thing, allows for you to instantly create a video session with anyone in
your virtual office.

IM works because it's immediate. Video chatting must be the same in order for
a distributed team to work.

The tools aren't there yet.

~~~
markshead
Just leave the video conference software on. I'm working on an agile project
with a distributed team and it works well once people realize that working in
front of a live camera isn't any big deal.

------
scottshea
As someone with Aspergers remote work has been a godsend. I am not nearly as
agitated as before. My quirks do not annoy people. I am more productive and my
wife says I am happier.

When I worked in an office I used head phones (not buds... big ol' ear
covering things) to help and was criticized for wearing them (it made me seem
unapproachable). In reality it was to help keep me calm and focused.

At home I face neither the noise issue nor the unapproachable issue.

Remote work may not be for every team but in-office work is not for every
person either

------
ZiadHilal
I've been working remotely for 1 year and 3 months. The company I'm working
for checks in once a week for about 20 minutes, other than that all
communication is done through basecamp. I have to admit it's really hard for
me and I just handed in my two weeks notice. I feel so isolated working from
home and not being around other co-workers. I miss seing and interacting with
other people. I'll be looking for a new job in New York next month and I'm
really excited.

Why do you guys want to work from home? Isn't the isolation during the working
hours hard on you?

~~~
yock
_Why do you guys want to work from home? Isn't the isolation during the
working hours hard on you?_

I work from home to help keep my family life a priority. That extra 2 hours
not lost to a commute (and sometimes another hour for lunch) that is spent
with my family has immeasurable value.

~~~
speric
I feel the same way. Well stated.

------
rwhitman
A few notes from someone who's worked remotely roughly 60% of the last 10
years -

1) Most investors know that startups are generally at a disadvantage with a
remote team and give founders shit for hiring remote people. I've found thats
one of the reasons early stage folks don't hire more remote people. And there
is some truth to being more creative with a team around you... _if_ the team
is awesome. Also communication is infinitely easier when you can walk over to
someone and ask them a question rather than wait for them to respond to an
email

2) Working remotely when you are self-directed and not under tons of pressure,
really does lead to awful productivity. At home there are just so many ways to
procrastinate

3) However, you can be _more_ productive from home when on a tight deadline.
No coworkers bugging you and the music cranked however loud you want, working
whatever hours you want means laser-focus for some people.

4) A good checkin routine is key. I've been most productive and been in
productive remote teams when there is a routine like a morning "standup" call,
and maybe an afternoon call. A good ticket tracker is crucial. Working for
folks who use the phone a lot tends to have the most productive outcome

5) There are a lot more small companies who use all remote workers than you
think. But they hide in the shadows, and typically are very unsexy cashflow
oriented businesses, not venture backed startups. If you're willing to work
for consulting businesses that do boring backend for big corps you can find
good remote work. But if sexy startups are your thing, expect to get a lot of
hesitation until you really prove yourself...

6) Change environments. Sometimes the house can stagnate - spend part of your
day in a coffee shop, lease a desk in a cowork space etc and change up
workspace once in a while. It helps me at least

~~~
speric
Have any good contacts at these "boring consulting businesses"? I am not
averse to an unsexy (remote) job.

~~~
rwhitman
Saw that you connected on Linkedin if I hear of anything I'll let you know

------
jstalin
My IT shop tried working from home for a couple of years and the team
fragmented, we lost a sense of teamwork, and we started wondering what each
other are doing. A new CIO mandated working from the office and it has made
for a much better culture and collaboration environment. There's definitely
something you lose when you don't work in the office with your fellow team
members.

~~~
cracell
I think that depends on your process and team culture. My current team is
remote and we aren't fragmented. For most remote teams all it seems to take is
a daily status meeting and a chat room.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I am beginning to feel even a daily status meeting is too much - I would much
prefer to take on tasks of around a couple of days, and when done, demo.

Otherwise just skype and chat keeps one in touch

(I would be tempted to mandate a person to person chat for each team member to
each)

~~~
Scottopherson
_I am beginning to feel even a daily status meeting is too much - I would much
prefer to take on tasks of around a couple of days, and when done, demo._

I feel the same way. Often times I really have nothing meaningful or relevant
to share with the team on a daily basis.

"So yeah, that feature we all agreed would take about 3 days to complete?
Welp, it's day 2 and I'm still working on it. Progress is good."

Any other details further than that are not of any significant interest to
anyone else in the meeting because they all have their own tasks that they're
focused on that week. People argue that these daily status meetings help
identify problems early on but whenever I run into an issue, big or small, I
don't wait for tomorrow's status meeting to rectify it I just immediately
start a discussion in the chat room. Obviously this requires trusting your co-
workers to not hide potential issues/blockers but if you're not trusting your
team than there's bigger issues to deal with that daily status meetings aren't
going to help you with.

That said, the benefits of a daily status meeting is all very dependent on the
type of project and the amount of collaboration the tasks require.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I find status meetings become:

1\. The managers way of finding out what is going on instead of seeing git,
running latest code.

2\. A way of giving developers bi-polar disorder as they either happen to have
just checked in a working piece of code (up) or are still ploughing through on
what they said they would do yesterday (down).

It _can_ be good - but only when it requires execution not thought.

My solutions:

1\. A selenium / CLI recorder. We make changes to a piece of code - which is
covered by ten tests. You fill in the bug report and the recorder does video
grab of the selenium web broswer doing the ten tests. Then anyone who is non
technical can see what the actually results are - on Youtube!

I heard of some "developer lead development" in a job ad - I think it was Sky.
The idea was github like I suppose - devs think "what we really need is" and
go do it.

The boss effectively has a veto not a driver. The boss becomes a government.

------
VonGuard
You know, one more thing I've been thinking on this all day. A thought I had
years ago. I work from home.

Whenever someone says to me "coworking space" I just marvel. Boggle, really.
Why? I cannot imagine ever wanting to be in a room full of other people in
order to motivate me to get work done. I call that the tyranny of a room full
of people.

If I am done for the day, I'm done. If I want to crank through then night, I
crank. If you cannot motivate yourself to work hard when away from a crowd of
people, I just feel like yer some sort of pack animal. I agree, being near a
boss makes you work more, but mostly, it just makes you look busy. You spend
more time trying to find something stupid and mindless to do, during those
down hours when yer brain is dead, than you do doing actual work. Whereas,
when I'm home, I just hammer through everything I have to do immediately.

If my inbox is full, I don't leave the computer. But when it's empty, fuck
ya'll, I'm going to the park.

I'd much rather clean the house and cook a steak when I am log jammed than
feel like I have to sit quietly at my desk, looking busy. I think our
education system trains people to be too dependent on others for work ethic.

------
SoftwareMaven
An interesting thing is when your company truly is special, remote may be a
much better option. I work for Ksplice (which is now part of Oracle). Ksplice
needed people with Linux kernel knowledge, and there is no central tech pool
for that. The company had to build itself in a way that supported remote
workers.

I think many people use a crutch that it will be too hard to build a company
that way, but that is because they think in terms of "average" developers.
With average developers, it will be hard, but once you realize your talent
pool becomes much richer and will often include people who are already
familiar with working remotely, it becomes much, much easier.

------
andyjohnson0
I've been working at home (developer) two days a week for the past eight
years. This has helped keep me sane, as the round-trip commute time (foot and
train) is three hours.

It does require commitment and effort, especially if most employees are
office-based. I find I have to make more effort to make sure what I'm doing is
visible to the rest of the team, and to communicate. Its easy to think you're
communicating enough when others don't see it that way.

When I'm in the office I schedule tasks that need face-to-face time, and when
I'm at home my only interruption all day is usually the morning standup. I
consider myself really lucky to be able to work like this.

The practicalities are simple and inexpensive too. From home I can vpn onto
our office network via a cheap soho router and bundled vpn software. I can use
the office phone system with a cheap headset and sip application. Google apps
is £2/person/month. Google talk, G+ hangouts and trello are free.

------
adrianhoward
(lightly edited copy of my usual plea for evidence on this topic ;-)

Pretty much all the evidence (rather than anecdote) I can find shows that co-
located teams in a single team room environment are the most productive - all
other things being equal.

(And I'm saying this as somebody who spends a lot of their time working from
home, and talking to other folk over Skype, etc. There are reasons for
telecommuting - personal preference, getting access to people who cannot co-
locate, etc. But for business productivity I'm not seeing much, if any,
evidence).

I am not saying:

* That working alone in an office is bad / will cause projects to fail

* Telecommuting is bad (I do it - I like it)

* Telecommuting projects will fail (D'oh - of course not)

* You shouldn't telecommute (of course you should if you want to - but bear in mind that the business may have good reasons to disagree with that decision)

* That telecommuting makes you individually less productive (I'm personally unsure about this. I feel more productive when working by myself, but I know that personal perceptions of productivity can be false. Measuring personal vs team/company productivity becomes hard in anything less than the short term)

* That co-location is always the best solution (it isn't - other factors like team location and skills come into play)

What I am saying is that there is a lot of research showing that co-located
teams in team-room like settings are much more productive. This runs counter
to many developers preferences (mine too ;-) so it tends to get ignored.

So much more productive that solutions like 'Let's fly everybody to the same
place and pay their room and board for a month' can be cost effective.

Here are some references to the research (If anybody has any research that
contradicts this I'd love to hear about it. Especially if it talks about
actual measured metrics of productivity - rather that self-reported 'I felt
just as productive at home' ones.)

\----

"It doesn't take much distance before a team feels the negative effects of
distribution - the effectiveness of collaboration degrades rapidly with
physical distance. People located closer in a building are more likely to
collaborate (Kraut, Egido & Galegher 1990). Even at short distances, 3 feet
vs. 20 feet, there is an effect (Sensenig & Reed 1972). A distance of 100 feet
may be no better than several miles (Allen 1977). A field study of radically
collocated software development teams,[...], showed significantly higher
productivity and satisfaction than industry benchmarks and past projects
within the firm (Teasley et al., 2002). Another field study compared
interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling
software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were
greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino
2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." \--
<http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008>

"Based on the empirical evidence, we have constructed a model of how remote
communication and knowledge management, cultural diversity and time
differences negatively impact requirements gathering, negotiations and
specifications. Findings reveal that aspects such as a lack of a common
understanding of requirements, together with a reduced awareness of a working
local context, a trust level and an ability to share work artefacts
significantly challenge the effective collaboration of remote stakeholders in
negotiating a set of requirements that satisfies geographically distributed
customers" \-- <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00766-003-0173-1>

"Our results show that, compared to same-site work, cross-site work takes much
longer and requires more people for work of equal size and complexity. We also
report a strong relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree
to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy"
\--
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?reload=true&#...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=919083&isnumber=19875)

"Our findings reveal that: software developers have different types of
coordination needs; coordination across sites is more challenging than within
a site; team knowledge helps members coordinate, but more so when they are
separated by geographic distance; and the effect of different types of team
knowledge on coordination effectiveness differs between co-located and
geographically dispersed collaborators." \--
[http://kraut.hciresearch.org/sites/kraut.hciresearch.org/fil...](http://kraut.hciresearch.org/sites/kraut.hciresearch.org/files/articles/Espinosa07-CoordinationInGlobalSWDevelopment.pdf)

"One key finding is that distributed work items appear to take about two and
one-half times as long to complete as similar items where all the work is
colocated" --
[http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi?doc=doi/10.1109/...](http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi?doc=doi/10.1109/TSE.2003.1205177)

"Our study of six teams that experienced radical collocation showed that in
this setting they produced remarkable productivity improvements. Although the
teammates were not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time
they realized the benefits of having people at hand, both for coordination,
problem solving and learning.Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of
productivity" -- <http://possibility.com/Misc/p339-teasley.pdf>

"Despite the positive impact of emerging communication technologies on
scientific research, our results provide striking evidence for the role of
physical proximity as a predictor of the impact of collaborations." --
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014279)

"Groups with high common ground and loosely coupled work, with readiness both
for collaboration and collaboration technology, have a chance at succeeding
with remote work. Deviations from each of these create strain on the
relationships among teammates and require changes in the work or processes of
collaboration to succeed. Often they do not succeed because distance still
matters" -- <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1463019>

~~~
SoftwareMaven
_co-located teams in team-room like settings are much more productive_

Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave. I am a firm
believer that you can train yourself to hop in and out of a reasonable
facsimile to the "zone" in much less than 20-30 minutes (I do it all the
time)[1]; but the level of distraction of the warroom type environment
massively favors your more extroverted engineers. My experience has been the
engineers I _really_ want to keep, the ones who solve the really hard
problems, are much less likely to be in that group.

In short, you may double your productivity for building that CRUD application,
but when you have to solve that really hard problem, you may find you don't
even have an engineer who is capable.

1\. There is a level of concentration, the "real zone" below it that most
development doesn't require. However, when it does, the interruptions become
catastrophic.

~~~
pc86
Most importantly, not every project (nor startup, nor business) needs "the
very best" engineers. Not every startup is changing the world, and even among
the ones that are I'm sure you can pick out a few that aren't solving
massively complex technical challenges that will be discussed in lecture halls
for decades. The majority of _good_ startups are just making money (sometimes
not even that) until they get acquired.

Secondly, you're assuming that the best developers are going to be more
introverted than the developer culture/profession as a whole, which I don't
think is accurate.

~~~
calinet6
> Most importantly, not every project (nor startup, nor business) needs "the
> very best" engineers.

This is highly underrated wisdom.

If you focus on always hiring "Rockstar developers," you'll find yourself in a
miserable situation of competition and egotistical conflict. Hire your _team,_
not your developers. Get your team working like clockwork with good systems
and good relationships, and your company will be rockstar with whatever people
you throw at it. Look at github, stripe, twitter, facebook—you think they only
hire the absolute best developers? No, they have a top 2% just like you
will—your goal should be to increase the competence of your entire company,
not just ignorantly hire the best and fire the worst and hope for the best.

Spot on.

You're right about the other assumptions too (though the parent may not have
been that serious about them). IMHO stereotyping introverts or extroverts as
being better or worse at certain tasks is a huge --ism to avoid, especially in
our field. I see 'extrovertists' and 'introvertists' battle it out all the
time with their propaganda and ignorant beliefs about people, and no one wins.

It's far better and more productive to be a humanist and find a good balance.
Both extroverts and introverts can be valuable to your team; both extroverts
and introverts can be great programmers and workers. You should strive to hire
a mix, or stop using it as a metric and naturally _get_ a mix, since these
traits like many others generally fall on a normal distribution.

Don't trust your assumptions about yourself, and don't apply them to others.
They're probably wrong.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Totally agree - imagine you could hire Linux Torvalds. He is a great
programmer but his best work was sending emails to others for 12 years.

This leads to an interesting thought - if you hired Linus and he started
spending all his time emailing sarcastic notes to the other developers, how
quickly would he get fired for "not focusing on developing code"?

Perhaps the key for CEOs is not to grow culture but to hire people who will
grow it for you. You dont get to choose the culture, or even direct it. The
funny Finnish bloke will. You just pay him.

~~~
justincormack
And then he goes and creates a version control system when you just wanted a
kernel....

~~~
calinet6
... and also he created the kernel, and a way to manage its development
better.

I don't see the problem. People who make cool stuff and solve problems in
their spare time are the ones you _want_ working for you. Even if they waste
time sometimes going off on tangents, it's probably honing their skills and
improving something relevant to your company or their own work abilities. No
problem, you want that. Trust them to do the right thing.

------
etherael
If you're doing software development without an asynchronous work pipeline in
2013 then you have a problem. Regardless of remote or local work, long periods
of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast majority of productive
work is performed in any given software project. That being the case it makes
perfect sense to optimise the pipeline around this very basic fact.

Once that is out of the way, whether you're local or remote is basically
irrelevant. All the disadvantages to remote work have always centered around
an insufficiently asynchronous work pipeline. I say this as someone who
presently travels the world and works on a large array of projects and would
never even consider a role that attempts to change that part of my life,
simultaneously in the past having worked extensively in async and non async
environments both local only and remote.

~~~
crazygringo
> _long periods of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast
> majority of productive work is performed in any given software project._

That's only true in some projects, and perhaps not even the majority.

It seems like a very developer-centric perspective. But there are a lot of
projects where the real value comes not from the actual programming, but in
how everything is tied together, in the prioritizing, in consistency, in
common understanding, with continuous improvements that deliver what's
actually needed. The programming may be relatively trivial, but good
management and teamwork is highly complex, and you need smart employees who
are all able to see the big picture and keep on top of it.

This is a very common scenario (more common, in my experience), and whether
you're local or remote makes a huge difference.

------
npsimons
100% agree. I'm in a similar position. I _will_ _not_ move from where I live;
I like the friends and hobbies I have here way too much. There is _absolutely_
no reason in this day and age why the type of work we do has to be done
onsite. The hundreds (probably more) companies working this way are a
testament to this fact, and there would probably be even more companies doing
it this way if it wasn't for inertia, tradition or just plain old CYA ("but if
we do something different and fail, the shareholders will hold me
accountable!"). To add insult to injury, I am _easily_ measurably more
productive when telecommuting, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Conjure up any wishy-washy "reasons" or anecdotes why you have to be onsite,
but I've yet to see any facts to back up the position that onsite all the time
is better.

~~~
drawkbox
That is the best part of a remote team, your deliverables are the main way you
are reviewed. Superficial things are less emphasized such as if you went to
lunch with the right group, were in 8-6 on the dot or work on the right team,
have the right office for visibility etc etc. So many levels of extra unneeded
layers of fluff in an office when it should be on product development.

I do think it is good to work on site periodically and sometimes at least a
day or two per week if you can, not because it is needed to produce good work
and products, but because it helps kick off, complete + integration days and
earns some office points in the not so fun office game.

Many places that have offices and require 8-6, their engineers end up getting
interrupted all day and then do all their work at night. So in that case
telecommuting would be a huge benefit to the individual but maybe not as much
the company since they get so much extra time out. Maybe it is more a salary
thing, getting lots of work out of you. I'd argue it looks like more work is
being done at an office but remote teams HAVE to get actual work done, there
is no other metric to be measured on.

------
metalsahu
I have worked both on a hybrid team (colo + remote) & a completely remote team
(no office) and I can emphatically say that the hybrid team is one of the
worst experiences in my career. Decisions were made in some other parts of the
world, really really early morning calls and a general sense of frustration
for all.

In a completely remote team, you are forced to optimize for coordination and
communication. Obviously you suffer the downsides because there is no water
cooler, no joint information dissemination sessions, no war room
accountability though you can achieve some kind of co-creation using skype,
join.me, git and trello. However you gain some big advantages in terms of
finding the right resource at the best cost, undivided focus if remote team
members are given work packages and ability to exploit the timezone difference
for a 24hour work cycle. Not to mention the humongous personal flexibility
which it affords at an individual level.

A point to note is that this remote vs. colo experience really can come down
to the individual members and their personalities. There is no one size fits
all.

TL;DR Go completely colo or completely remote, half-colo + half-remote = half-
ass. Team personality is a very strong variable in this equation.

------
d0m
I don't agree. _Programming remotely_ is obviously possible. If your day to
day job is receiving programming tasks and hack them as quickly as possible,
sure, remote is a perfect alternative.

However, in early stage startups, first employees usually have a much wider
role. Like founders, they have a bigger say in where the company should move
forward, priorize what should be built, hell, even clean the office and make
coffee.

Also, never underestimate a good discussion over a coffee, beer or lunch to
talk about problems. There's a reason why most of the best ideas are written
on a napkin!

Lastly, I might add that when working on a very early stage startup, founders
and employees build such a strong relationship and it's hard to achieve that
level over remote working.

Again, I'm not saying it's impossible. For instance, founders who already know
each others before starting the company may feel comfortable working hard
remotely together. And I'm sure there are other cases when it totally makes
sense.

------
halfdeadcat
I work 90% remotely. When I started this job, I came into the office everyday,
a 40 minute commute. After about a month, my boss came up to me and said "Are
you meeting someone here today? If not, what are you doing here?"

I actually like to go into the office from time to time, but there isn't any
point when no one is there. I spend a lot of time at various clients' offices,
and I notice a correlation: the more opposed to remote work a company is, the
more meeting-driven it is. It is as if management feels like it needs to do
something with all these bodies taking up space in the office. I see small to
mid-size companies sucking up productivity with endless meetings.

That said, I think my company has lost a little bit of interactivity with the
remote work force. I'm putting together a Google+ Hangout I call "Engineers'
Office Hours". The idea is that if you aren't doing something billable, you
hop in and offer help to someone stuck on a problem.

~~~
Buzaga
That must be an awesome boss!

On the Google Hangout thing, I sometimes find myself thinking(for the day I
get a remote job again), why couldn't people be on a Hangout the whole day(In
my case almost all of the dev team were full-remote)? When I did there was a
techies chat always open on Skype and we used to chit-chat just like we would
IRL, commenting on the Hacker-News-like-stuff, talk about semi-work-related
stuff like the our most productive setup, crack jokes at each other and etc
and there was definitely a "camaraderie vibe" even though we never met...

Now take a virtual environment like this, add more virtual face-to-face,
Planetside 2 afterhours gaming sessions.. I don't see it lacking much, if
anything, compared to a in-place tight-knit startup team

------
BudVVeezer
I agree entirely -- I've been telecommuting for ten years now, and this is
easily the #1 reason the recruitment process fails with me (with small
companies as well as large).

~~~
ditojim
we love the fact that we can recruit folks from anywhere in the world and not
disrupt their lives, since we are completely remote. it opens up a much wider
talent pool and allows you to benefit from local economies as well, without
actually being there.

~~~
BudVVeezer
Companies seem to forget (or not put much emphasis on) another aspect of
having telecommuters: you don't get tunnel vision due to locality. I've worked
for offices around the globe, and one thing that's always struck me about
remote vs local is that remote can bring in a new way of thinking that you
don't always get locally due to local cultural thought processes.

------
maerek
I started to telecommute three days each week (office is ~ 2hrs from where I
live) right after Thanksgiving in 2012 and am still adjusting to the
lifestyle.

The biggest takeaway - so far - is that successful telecommuting is determined
just as much by the given _task_ as the _person_. I serve as a mixture of
business analyst/developer/test coordinator/project lead/cat herder for my
project team. Some tasks are easy to coordinate via e-mail/IM, screen sharing
and conference calls (like scheduling, status updates, walkthroughs of
protoypes). Being able to power through functional and technical
specifications is a tremendous bonus of working from home. When it comes to
gathering requirements, acquiring feedback and dealing with politics, however,
it's really much better (for me) to be in the office.

~~~
Nowyouknow
I meet a lot of people that work in "tech" that describe their jobs similarly
to the way you just did. Just as an aside, I think it's a disturbing trend.
It's very easy to reach the point where you're being underpaid and stretched
to your limits simultaneously.

------
adamesque
I think a big part of this boils down to communication style, and how
comfortable people are communicating via the written word.

I've worked places where remote working was discouraged, and the reason given
was along the usual lines of "well, it just works better to have everyone in
the same room". But these were also places where I noticed an aversion to and
an avoidance of writing in general.

~~~
bzudo
Totally agree. Where I work, the loudest person wins and gets promoted. It's
hard to be loud in email, not to mention, talk over a quiet persons ideas.

------
baalexander
I work in our office in Palo Alto and we have a small, 4 person office in
Argentina. While I've worked with remote persons and teams in the past, a few
changes to our office and their office has helped the working experience for
both sides.

1) Both offices have a TV in the main office area with a web cam. We can see
what they're up to, if someone is at their desk, etc. and they can do the
same. This has been great for quick questions that are harder to explain over
IRC and even for a simple waving good morning when I walk in.

2) We have a handful of "remote presence devices" in our office. This allows
them or anyone else working remotely to attend meetings without having to ask
someone to Skype in or conference call. Once again, it's the simple things
like being able to wave or gesture to someone as they're rolling by. (Full
disclosure, I work for a sister company of Suitable Technologies, who make the
Beam).

3) Like others have mentioned, centralized, collaborative document control
(Google Docs that are actually kept up and maintained), source control (GitHub
with pull requests), and chat (IRC) help a lot.

4) A trip every 3 - 6 months from some of the Argentina team to the Palo Alto
office. While technology has helped, there's still something to be said about
being physically present.

------
7402
Maybe the problem is that the VERY FIRST question you ask is, "Are you open to
remote workers?"

I've always found that to be kind of a turn-off when I've interviewed people
for software engineering positions. It's NOT that it's not an important
question - it's that it shows a bit of social cluelessness. It's the same if
the first question someone asks me is "How much vacation time do I get?" or
"How much money do you pay?" Of course those questions should be discussed
eventually! But I'd like to get to know the other person a little, first.

Ya, I know. It's a seller's market, you're busy, you don't want to waste your
time with unproductive job possibilities, etc.

BUT EVEN IF non-telecommuting is a deal-breaker, maybe you should start off
asking about the project, the company, the other people you'd be working with.
If the work looks promising at first glance, start off by selling yourself
first, rather than immediately focussing on the "OK, tell me what's in this
for me, before I waste any more time on you and your company" side of things.

Simply as a matter of strategy, you might do better to postpone that question
after a round or two. If they like you, then even if they don't have universal
telecommuting, they may want you enough to be happy to have you as a
telecommuter.

------
pknerd
I have got chance to work both in 9-5 environment as well as working in
isolation.

Working for home was my own choice so that I can give time to my infant kid
which is most important for me. Working from home gave me relaxation. I could
work on my chair or on my bed, nobody was going to ask me how I sit. Second
most important thing which helped me a lot was to have a feeling of
_helplessness_. When you work in an office, you often ask some of your peer to
write a part of your code or look into it. When you work alone you have to do
everything on your own, finding solution and implement it in your own code. In
the era of Stackoverflow finding a solution of your problem is not difficult
at all.

It's been a year I am working individually and I am enjoying it. Instead of
wasting time in gossips about Boss or management, I prefer to play with my
kid, his smile gives me enough oxygen to keep me motivated for rest of the
day.

~~~
unreal37
This is why most people don't get to work from home. Spending time with your
kid and being constantly relaxed, working from bed, is counter to the serious
business culture of most companies. Don't take this the wrong way, and it's
not a dig, but from the way that you wrote that, it sounds like you only work
a few hours a day casually.

I can see why Big Bank X would not allow their employees to do that.

~~~
jackalope
On the other hand, hourly-paid remote workers can be a tremendous value, since
their pay is limited to the time they actually work and they usually don't
receive many benefits.

------
bluesmoon
When we started LogNormal, my partner and I lived in the same geographic
region. We both worked out of our own apartments, and met at Red Rock or a
Thai/Vietnamese restaurant once a week or so. Then I moved to Cambridge, and
we continued working remotely as if nothing had changed. We'd still meet up
once a month to go over pen and paper stuff, but we still did all our work
remotely from our own apartments.

In all, I think it worked out well. We build a useful product and pulled in
several customers. Since we covered the East and West coasts of the US, we
were closer (geographically as well as time-zone wise) to many of our
customers than we would have been if we were both in the same office.

I don't think there was ever a time when we thought we'd be better off sitting
in the same room.

------
agotterer
I'm personally not a big fan of remote workers. Not because I don't think the
tools are adequate or that I trust they are actually working. I think there's
something special that can't be reproduced when a small team that's just
starting out is physically together. I've been at a few startups and I can't
count how many times a good idea or breakthrough came while we were out
getting lunch, a beer or playing pool in the office. Sure, your remote workers
are a phone call away, but it's just not the same as being able to turn to the
guy next to you and start talking or white boarding. It's definitely possible
to make remote teams work and the tools have come a long way. By there's
something special about working together in person.

~~~
pault
Is it really that difficult to type your question into skype or campfire group
chat? We're all remote and we have daily 20 minute video conferences, and
everyone is always logged into campfire. It's the most productive team I've
ever worked with, and if someone isn't pulling their weight, you can tell from
their git commits. Every argument I've heard against remote working boils down
to that "something special" you mention, which is pretty darn vague. We have
had a few new hires lose it and go AWOL, but those people wouldn't have been a
good fit in a co-located team either.

~~~
agotterer
It's not the day to day interactions. Hell, most of the companies I work with
that aren't remote chat over IM and group chat while we sit next to each
other. As I said, I don't think it's a breakdown of the tools. It's not that
people aren't productive either. It's the "other" stuff that doesn't fit into
those categories. There's no technology to replace sitting around with a group
of guys having a beer. While its vague, it's just a different experience that
Skype or group chat. It's a different setting and a different mindset. The
things that are special are the things that don't fit into the normal daily
workflow. For many companies remote teams might make sense and even strive,
this is just my personal opinion of what I think is missing. So much of it
depends on the company, the culture and the people.

~~~
pault
Point taken; in fact we recently rented a couple of houses in Belize just so
we could spend some time together. Funny thing is, I found the entire
experience to be extremely draining and couldn't wait for everyone to leave. I
had a really difficult time getting anything done in a house full of people,
but I think it's just one of those things that varies between individuals. I
think the great thing about the rise of distributed companies is they give an
opportunity for introverts to come together and thrive in an environment that
suits their working style, instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round
hole, so to speak.

------
hosh
I have on my LinkedIn profile, "100% Remote Required. Recruiters: do not
contact unless your job opportunity is 100% Remote."

I still get recruiters who contact me. It isn't as much as it used to, but it
is a fairly good way to screen whether a recruiter actually read my profile or
not.

If there is a vocal and loud number of engineers who demand 100% remote work,
then (eventually) it will get through to recruiters.

------
gesman
It all boils down to preferences of management who are calling the shots. Many
of them are addicted to worthless, frequent meetings. Others just don't trust
people. Third are control freaks.

I personally find a 50/50 balance between working on- and offsite. With 2 dogs
and 2 kids and stay-at-home wife - working from home for me is a challenge.

But working on-site 15 minutes away from home is a perfect arrangement.

~~~
alexkus
> I personally find a 50/50 balance between working on- and offsite. With 2
> dogs and 2 kids and stay-at-home wife - working from home for me is a
> challenge. But working on-site 15 minutes away from home is a perfect
> arrangement.

That's my plan.

3 days working from home as daughter is at nursery and wife at work.

1 day working at the house of one of the other founders 20 minutes away, wife
and daughter.

1 day looking after daughter whilst wife at work.

Weekend a mixture of family time and work (required since some events relating
to startup occur at the weekend.)

------
msluyter
"Think of how many times companies miss out on really good developers just
because they're not open to remote workers."

Assuming that this is a real problem and not a pseudoproblem[1], then one
would think that market forces would eventually resolve it. (Companies full of
remote working superstars should outperform the rest.) But if the equilibrium
is one in which remote workers are in low demand, well, that's how markets
work.

[1] By which I mean, the evidence here seems mostly anecdotal. It's easy to
claim that you're more productive when working remotely, but _on average_ ,
how productive are remote workers, when considering all relevant factors. I
would like to see some hard evidence on this point.

------
ditojim
we're 30 strong and 100% remote at dito. we don't have an office. it's pretty
great. we live on google apps and other collaborative tools that make this an
advantage, rather than a sacrifice. our employees are dedicated, work hard,
and for the most part, love their jobs. we enjoy seeing each other in person
at customer sites and during company events, but for the most part, we use
things like uber conference and google hangouts to meet and keep in sync. not
to mention google chat.

~~~
hnwh
you hiring?

~~~
ditojim
yup

------
asmosoinio
I think it's "No One Ever Got Fired for Recruiting On-site Employees". And I
think this is changing.

I work in a startup spread to three continents. Works very well when everyone
knows their role and makes sure information is spread properly.

~~~
drawkbox
At a certain point, getting access to enough good team members requires
remote. I.e. a game company starting in Idaho might find it hard to hire local
game developers but they could be a force to be reckoned with with a few
remote employees and a standard engine like Unity.

Remote work and offices create opportunity. They also focus on product, look
at 37signals and how they remote. Would that company even exist as they do
without remote work? Remote working is freeing and opens up all sorts of
competitive advantages.

------
seddona
We founded and developed <https://circuithub.com/> largely as a distributed
team (all members in different locations).

This is a complex topic that i intend to discuss more in long form, but in
short, with contemporary communication and collaboration infrastructure the
productivity of small highly skilled dev teams is unaffected by location.

I can prove this for our case at least (5 team members).

I am writing this from a coffee shop in Mexico, we currently have people in
South Africa and San Jose, if this lifestyle appeals, please do get in touch!

------
dobbsbob
Don't understand why startups would want to blow a bunch of money on
infrastructure when they can just tangle together a remote operation. We have
this thing called IRC, Jabber, Skype, VoIP, shared buffers and git.

Lot's of open source is designed over skype or even jabber using a common pad
to doodle on

------
ivankirigin
I have a new startup, two cofounders and a remote full time engineer. Things
are working splendidly, but the reason is in large part because of how well we
communicate. Yes, of course chat, video conferences, and email are important.

But I think our wiki pages and pull requests are what make it work. We also
have been making information dense screencasts for each other. I'm going to be
so bold as to say a remote engineer has forced us to work in a way every
engineering team should.

I'll have more to say about this soon enough :)

~~~
hnwh
Definitely want to know about your toolset.. would like to structure my new
startup this way. What are you using for making and hosting screencasts?

~~~
ivankirigin
<http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm>

------
dschiptsov
Take a manager's perspective - what is the value of him when everyone is doing
everything remotely, implying that each manager thinks of himself as a much
more valuable than any coder (if not, he probably will realize his _helper_
function, like being a secretary for a programmer) and demands much bigger
compensation and bonuses.

Without daily performing his show in an office it will probably much more
difficult for him to convince those who distribute money that he is _that
valuable_.)

------
Nursie
It works for some people and not for others.

Some people have experience with folks 'working from home' that are not 100%
positive. Some folks (like me) have experiences working remotely that are not
100% positive.

And yes, casual, face to face communication is an important dynamic, even for
tech workers.

~~~
paganel
> And yes, casual, face to face communication is an important dynamic, even
> for tech workers.

I guess this is even more important for small companies of up to 20 people
where there is no exact "you have to do exactly this and this and this and
then you're clear"-thingie. I gained lots of insights regarding customers or
how we should better build things in our tech dept. just by having daily
casual water-cooler chit-chats with the couple of people we employ in the
sales department. It's very, very difficult to emulate using modern
technology.

------
babuskov
It's all about trust. Can the employer trust the employee to work honestly and
be dedicated to the company without having another job or occasional project
on the side. When startup is small, every minute of focus counts.

Easiest way to make this work is to give developers enough equity, so they are
motivated for startup to succeed more or equally as getting the paycheck.
Eric's POV stands, but he's a co-founder, he has a significant stake in the
success of the company.

~~~
speric
Your point is taken, but it seems to me that if my employer can't trust me to
work remotely, then they shouldn't hire me at all. How can you employ (or work
for) someone you can't trust?

~~~
babuskov
I'm speaking from my own bad experience with some remote employees.
Accidentally learning from another founder that this guy ALSO works for them,
was a really bad experience with remote workers for both of us.

He was covering up his lack of productivity for some months with "personal
problems" on both sides, while not being focused in either company. If you
have many employees, such behavior can go unnoticed for a long time.

OTOH, after this event, I tried giving significant equity to some other guys
on the team, and their productivity went up. I guess some of them had side
projects as well before that.

Maybe one can work around this by requiring full-time Skype camera access
during work hours, or similar, but I hate to be "the police". I feel much
better giving away some equity in exchange for loyalty.

------
mark_l_watson
I have been working mostly remotely for about 14 years. In my experience, I am
less productive working remotely than when I am working on site. I give a 40%
discount when I am working remotely for this decrease in efficiency.

Other people's experiences are likely much different - I am just relating my
own experience.

Do I like working remotely? Yes! I also really like being able to mostly work
the hours I like, when it is most convenient for me.

------
artyom
Well, I mostly agree, but...

Remote working is ofter perceived as a dream job, which, in fact, isn't so
much. Besides performing your regular tasks, you have to deal with all the
self-support stuff yourself, including avoiding your work stepping over your
personal life, which is even worse if you work at home. It takes some practice
to do that properly, to say the least.

I think that's where most people trying to work remotely utterly fail. They
think they should be able to work anytime, when others will likely want to
talk to them in normal hours. They think they don't need an schedule, when the
only thing that would allow them to do their work is at least a self-imposed
one. You won't be able to cook your meal and do your work at the same time,
trust me. Lastly, if you lack self-discipline, remote working isn't for you.

The other side of the coin is even sadder: it's not that companies are not
"open" to remote work, is that they just don't know how to manage it. They
usually play their silly manager techniques by the book, which are for on-site
teams (and often don't work, anyway). They just can't handle remote work. A
clever manager capable of that is more scarce and expensive, also.

Hiring/Recruiters have the worst of both worlds, plus one thing that drives me
nuts: regular hiring doesn't work for science and technology. If your task is
looking for a "Python developer" and you think that it involves training some
snakes, you're out of your element. If you're not capable to understand at
least the basics of what you're looking for, you won't find it, and even
worse, you won't understand what "training snakes remotely" means.

In the end, combination of all those things hurt remote working for everyone:
people who doesn't (and doesn't want to) know how to do it, companies that
doesn't know how to handle it (and they try with their archaic means, failing
completely), and the guys in the middle that just want to score another
commission for a hire of dubious quality.

Sorry, it ended up being longer that the rant itself.

(Disclosure: I've been working remotely for a few years, and I wouldn't change
that for anything else. I agree completely about the current status of "remote
working", hiring and reasons for meetups. But please, if anyone thinks remote
working is a dream job, go get a regular one and stop making things more
difficult for the ones that actually want and know how to make it work)

------
destraynor
Jared Spool did a good study on how remote vs colocated affects design. His
conclustion is simple enough

The best set up, in order, for design work

* Best: Everyone in the same room * Good: Everyone remote but in the same time zone * Bad: Some people together, some people apart, in the same time zone * Worst: Some people together, some people apart, all in different time zones.

Now the one thing that his work, and indeed most discussion misses is they
"Why" of remote workers. No one has tested "Given the available talent in our
city, should we hire the best people around we can so that we're all together,
or should we set a higher bar for talent and deal with the whole remote
issue".

It all comes down to whether or not you can get the best people. Lots of
talent tends to flock to big cities (SF, NYC, etc), but that creates its own
problem, in that a start-up is now competing with the big spenders offering
impressive packages/options/etc.

In short, I guess, It depends...

(Edit, forgot the url: [http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2012/01/06/design-
teams-co-lo...](http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2012/01/06/design-teams-co-
location-trumps-remote/) )

~~~
adrianhoward
++ for linking to some actual research ;-)

------
justjimmy
When I get contacted for freelance/contract work, directly from the
company/startup, they're always open for remote work when I inquire about it
(and we communicate through mainly Basecamp)

I've had 0 remote work opportunities via recruiters.

------
dsr_
It depends.

There are workflows that don't need you to be in the office. There are
workflows that need you to be in the office almost every day. And there are
workflows in between.

Some people can't effectively work from home. After a while, they stop doing
what they're supposed to be doing. Some people have no problems with that.

Every job is different, every person is different, every company is different.
No one answer will fit every situation.

------
pinoceros
If a developer is need on-site because of "crunch time", the timelines were
clearly unrealistic. "Crunch time" is code for poor project management.

------
aclimatt
The ability to effectively work remotely is entirely determined on a person-
by-person basis. And it's clear, especially from the mixed feelings in these
comments.

People come in all breeds, and I know that some people absolutely cannot get
work done unless they are around others working, whereas others need quiet and
the comfort of their own home to be the most productive.

What it comes down to is if you want to hire remote, you need to make sure
that your talent is self-motivated enough to do their best work at home (or
wherever). If you require an office, make sure the culture fits, otherwise
you'll have employees constantly distracted and grudgingly coming into the
office every day.

You can have mixed teams, and it doesn't even matter the ratio. I've been on
extremely successful teams where only two of the 30+ engineers were remote,
and they did their best work remotely. For others, separating work from home
greatly improved their productivity.

Don't forget -- your empty house can be the most distracting environment you
have access to. It's all about personal culture and fit.

------
meangeme
A lot of this conversation seems to be focussed on an individual's
productivity - you might think you are more productive remotely or actually
may be more productive remotely, but what about the rest of the team? Looking
at the bigger picture - you're getting tons of work done, but are you
communicating well with your team/ is your team productive overall? And if you
are more concerned with your individual well-being than you are with your
team's well-being, it's worth noting that psychologically, one of the main
factors of simply liking someone is proximity. Obviously you shouldn't be
promoted because your boss likes you more, and obviously if you're the most
value adding team member remotely you should get credit for that, but it's
impossible to eliminate personal biases that stem from bonds created at the
office.

There are obviously arguments for both sides but I know (from working with a
remote supervisor for 6 months) that communicating in person is easier than
communicating remotely.

------
blowski
"I'm a developer. I like working from home. Therefore all companies should
allow all developers to work from home."

He who pays the piper, calls the tune.

If you're right, and developers want and should be able to work from home,
then economics suggests market rates for office-bound employees will go up,
and profitability at those companies will go down.

And there are wider issues here. So you allow the developers want to work from
home. What about your project managers? Your admin temps? What about that lazy
developer who you can't fire, but you know does nothing at home?

Also, how do you still have those serendipitous chats around the kettle, in
which you, the business development manager and the designer realise a huge
sales opportunity?

Having remote-working will make perfect for some businesses (be they startups,
agencies, or huge corporates), but it never comes without cost. In some cases,
those costs will make it worthwhile paying to have developers working inside
the office.

------
gavingmiller
Let me flip this over. If 99% of companies say they don't do remote, maybe the
issue is you and not them... Bear with me, because this isn't an attack on
you. :D Take someone that's been married and divorced 4 times. Who would you
say the problem lies with, the divorcer or the divorcees?

If you want to work remotely you're fighting an uphill battle. Most
managers/employers know how to manage face-to-face. Remote management is a
skill that many haven't learned yet. It is possible as you mention, however
both of those work places are VERY progressive.

If you want to work remotely, sell the benefits of remote working to your
employer. Make them confident that you're able and capable of doing remote
work. Sell it! I contracted a best friend this summer to work remotely. I had
confidence in the outcome because I trusted him. If you can sell that to an
employer - how much more likely are you to get what you want?

~~~
marknutter
In this market, companies are the ones that have to make concessions. There
simply aren't enough good developers to go around.

------
moconnor
I developed in a small team in a shared office for 6 years and have spent the
last 6 working remotely. Half the team at Allinea are remote now - we find it
easier to hire and retain great talent.

I haven't seen any evidence in our commit or bug history to suggest we were
more or less productive when all of our developers were in the same room.

------
31reasons
I think there is a primitive brain thinking going on here,something like "I
pay you to work, I want to SEE you working"

------
noonespecial
I generally approve of remote work hardily. But this rant called out early
stage startups in particular. In early stage startups you're building your
culture along with your product. You have a super limited amount of salary to
pay to do both. I can definitely see why you'd want to get double returns with
a local hire.

------
mcantelon
What we do at our company is we work together at the office a few days a week
and spend a couple days working remotely. We keep up communication and get to
have our meetings on office days and can tackle problems requiring undisturbed
concentration on our remote days.

------
OldSchool
Perhaps only the companies that aren't willing to hire remote developers need
to use recruiters...

------
kldavis4
I've been working remotely as a developer for a NYC startup for about 2.5
years now. There are a couple of other remote workers, with the rest of the
team working in the office. My team has weekly meetings using webex, skype,
etc and we mostly use IM and email for other communication. I make periodic
visits to the NY office (I live in NC). I find that working remotely really
agrees with my personality and work style. I am better able to focus for long
periods and I don't really suffer from the social need for regular face to
face contact with my co-workers. :) I also avoid a commute and I can spend
time with my kids by just walking downstairs.

------
wglb
In my career, I have seen and participated in both kinds of offices.

Strong factors for success in a distributed office are:

    
    
      + Fit with the company culture. High-ceremony or even medium-ceremony development patterns work less well or not at all with remotes.
      + Fit with the personalities and work habits of the staff. Not everyone is capable of working remotely.
      + Industry requirements. Some high-security situations require that work be done on premises.
    

I once ran a very successful remote project where everyone worked at home. All
had a separate office in the home that they could close the door.

------
lifeisstillgood
Almost always this is an inability to measure and monitor output.

Continuous Integration / Delivery is going to simply change all of that. If
you cannot measure a writers output by reading their writing daily, you cant
run the team anyhow

------
morgo
I've worked from home for maybe 5 of the past 8 years. I personally hate it,
but these were the better opportunities than what I could obtain locally.

I think what the original author has to see is that it's not about his
strengths/weaknesses, he might be a very good remote employee. What also
factors is the organizations 'warts' and whether or not they are able to make
use of the employee effectively. I know at my last workplace so many decisions
were made verbally on the spot in unscheduled meetings. It drives me crazy,
but this is how many businesses operate.

------
kjhughes
I agree with the OP and would go so far as to propose a generalization of
Joy's law ("No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for
someone else" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joys_Law_(management)>):

    
    
      "No matter where you are, most of the smartest people are somewhere else."
    

An employer or business partner insisting on full-time face-time will be at a
disadvantage compared with competitors who are more geographically flexible.

------
spartango
I think it really depends on what you are doing and how your company culture
has adapted to that.

For example, my company's work in the biomedical space often necessitates us
being in partner and customer labs to best understand workflows. While it's
possible for us to have some elements of our development be remote, we
strongly prefer keeping things local; we believe it's important for everyone
on the team to have exposure to the domain we work in. This is a cultural
choice we've made, but it does make remote work tricky.

------
releod
I get your rant, I've done remote and on-site work. I personally prefer a
healthy mix of both
(<http://bigbangtechnology.com/post/an_async_experiment/>).

I think having everyone in office in a small company is often more about
building a great office culture, and less about it being the only way to build
a company. Small teams tend to do more than just work together, they integrate
their socials lives. When that is the type of company you are trying to build,
remote workers don't fit into that picture right away.

Also you cannot forget the difference between good distractions and bad
distractions. Overhearing a conversation (between other developers), is less
of a distraction than overhearing a couple of suits on sales calls or talking
about the game last night. You can still be in the zone, have good
distractions, be an introvert, noise cancelling headphones, etc.

A small team on-site is going to rapidly move through ideas, faster than chat
rooms or even facetime/skype can truly allow, as natural as it appears it is
nothing compared to in person conversations. That moment when your team
discovers their Epiphany, in my opinion, is much more likely to happen in
person.

------
ilaksh
A lot of people don't know how to work remotely and there is a wide variance
in how that is set up.

I was just talking to a surgeon about a procedure and mentioned how I had seen
a study saying that a similar procedure had slightly more side effects or
complications. He pointed out that there is a big difference between the way
that different surgeons execute the procedure.

So I think that it is harder to make remote work effective for people who are
used to traditional work and don't study up on the best ways to create a good
remote working environment.

I personally believe the most effective tool for remote working is just a
shared chat room with a history like Campfire and then putting most of the
relevant conversations in there. Ideally I think that everyone should be in
that room including customer stakeholders if possible, (although I haven't
seen anyone really include the customers in that chat room very much).

The second most effective tool would be things like screen sharing and phone
or VOIP, which can help a lot, but you have to be careful not to do that too
much when it might be better to document things in a common chat room.

I may just be slow or lazy or something but as a more general comment on
software project management I feel like the issue/task tracker or Pivotal or
whatever is an extra distraction from the chat room or more direct
communications because I can only really focus on a few important things in a
day, I would like to deliver them immediately, and if I have a problem to
respond to or something to communicate I want to do it directly rather than
hoping or assuming that someone is going to see a notification email or
whatever.

------
j45
First, there is no one magical formula of totally being ok with remote working
vs not.

The world isn't that binary.

One main issue is that these decisions need to be made based on the discipline
of the developer to work well in their own time. It's not an issue with self-
directed and self-teaching developers, but the simply, just, aren't.

I've worked remotely for a good 5-6 years now. You really have to still be
reasonably available by phone, IM, and for meetings as reasonably needed. You
have to provide benefits only available by distance.

One that I share a lot is remote screen sharing. You have to cram in beside
each other on a computer, so pair programming actually works not bad if you
need to help someone, or do something together.

Sometimes I have to give up an afternoon to do a larger "state of the project"
meeting once a month, which is fine. Ultimately it's about a balance that all
projects need. You do get some benefits from being in the same room with the
right people that you won't distantly. With those right people, though, you
could probably be away. The problem comes in when you're dealing with a
productivity level that is average because of the people involved.

------
metatation
I've experienced both styles for extended periods. I've worked with some
really hard core engineering teams during my many colocation years and
remotely for the past 2.5 years.

Over the years of working with many great people, I had built a habit of
potentially over-collaborating with my peers. It was hard not to, considering
how much smarter two people are than one. And with the right mixture of
personalities and solving hard problems, it's almost always more enjoyable
(even delightful) to work things through together. You get the stronger sense
that together you are delivering a greatness that would be hard to achieve on
your own.

I've really missed that part since I've been remote for the past few years.
However I have had to learn to be way more self sufficient and resourceful. I
think initially the transition hurt my productivity somewhat, but it also
ended up making me much stronger and decisive because I couldn't fallback to
the whiteboard anymore.

I think I still prefer the colocation style to some degree because working
closely with great people is just so rewarding. Thankfully even while I'm
currently in my fortress of solitude, I still have great peers to work and
connect with through Skype. We have a team chat going all the time that is
similar to the war room arrangement where we can socialize and discuss random
(sometimes even relevant) topics.

All in all, working with great people is the key either colocated or remote.

EDIT: I should also mention that your ability to focus on your own dev work is
great for personal productivity, but often your full value to the team is only
realized when you shift your focus to helping the team. I've had many
situations where I could have used one of those ticket dispensers because the
line at my desk was out of control. I found that working from home for 1 or 2
days a week was a good balance in that situation. Time for some self focus and
time for giving to the team.

------
bjhoops1
You actually bother to ask whether they support remote work? You are more
patient than I.

And no, I'm not interested in a position in Albuquerque.

------
lborsato
I've worked remotely for about 7 years now, with startups and more established
companies. These companies have typically been distributed themselves,
realizing that it is easier to work with smart people where they are than to
try to get everyone to move to a specific place. We are constantly connected
with IM, IRC, phones, Skype, etc. And we can handle development and problem
solving around the clock easily.

I have no commute, nor does anyone else. And yet we have all seemed to
function efficiently, with now problem that I've seen. And we are as effective
as any team I have ever worked with, with none of the water cooler chat that
goes on in the office. In fact, any team situation I've worked in has easily
seen 50% of the day consumed by non-work-related conversation and meetings
with no agenda and no responsibilities given.

I'll stick with remote work thanks.

------
smurph
I find that the people who supposedly want everyone to work on site will
always make exceptions if it means getting an employee they really want. You
know that if <Insert your favorite programming blogger here> offered to work
for you, but only if they could work from home, you'd probably make an
exception. If the person who's been your rock star coder for the past couple
years needed to move away for family reasons, but would be willing to stay on
if they could work remotely, you would make an exception. The side effect is
that you are now telling all the regular people who show up to the office
every day that they are not as valuable as Mr. Works Remotely. How do you
justify having potential new hires relocate to work for you when they find out
some special people don't have to go through that?

------
deevus
I moved city a few months ago while still working for the same company. Prior
to moving I was a remote worker doing software development and client support
from my apartment.

It was a great set up for me - if I wasn't feeling productive at 9am I could
defer until later when I was in the zone. I tended to work at night when my
brain was buzzing, and got much more work done compared to now.

Post move, I am now required to work 9-5 at a desk in the company office. I
honestly feel like my productivity has plummeted. Work loves having me there
because I can play a more senior role to the more junior/less skilled
developers, but my pay hasn't changed and I don't really feel like I benefit
from it.

Perhaps I was just blessed for too long, and need to get used to what working
as a developer in this day and age is actually like for the majority.

------
hartzler
In my experience, a group chat like XMPP MUC or IRC is essential for a team
especially with remote developers to stay in the loop, feel connected, keep
moral up, and get most of the benefits of the war room while still remaining
async so you don't stress out your introverted developers.

------
Zarathust
I really liked to work remotely at my previous job because I could stretch the
flexible hours even a little more, working from 10 to 7 for example, which was
frowned upon when walking in the office.

My boss eventually asked me to stop working from home, because for everyone
else, "working from home" was a metaphor for slacking off. That was the
company culture that was so damaging to this whole concept. They didn't care
if I was on reddit for 8 hours, just that I was doing it in my office.

In my new job, we make heavy use of teleconferencing, instant messaging and
email. Even if we are in the same office, the fact that we are a few minutes
of walking distance from each another totally masks the fact that we "work in
the same location".

------
chrisennis
Of my five startups, two have been virtual. I am gearing up to start a virtual
team with my new startup. What I like about my virtual teams is that it makes
the best use of each employee's time, it forces employees to communicate in
ways they may not if they are in an office together everyday, and each
employee feels like they have some control, which leads to a less bureaucratic
environment.

All that said, you have to have an absolute level of trust in each employee,
because not having the team within arms reach can leave you feeling a bit
uneasy at times.

------
fleas
Right on ! I've often wondered the same. It's very annoying too. I can't stand
working in offices but if you employee me as a remote employee you get a
distraction free, self-motivated, 10+ years experience dedicated worker.. if
you want me to come to your office so you can see me do exactly what I can do
without coming to the office only with traveling and other distractions...
I'll just say, "no thanks!" and find a company that _gets it_ . (P.S. been
telecommuting for 8 years and wouldn't have it any other way).

------
KenE
100 employees and contractants, 60 full-time, we've all been working remotely
since we were only 3 people. It's hard to understand the debate... Some like
it, some don't.

This SEEMS to be about which is better, but it's actually about trying to win
a debate that can't be won (no one's going to change their minds).

At the end of the day, the founders/money men get final say. But so what?

The beauty of today's world is that you don't have to change anybody's mind,
just choose a place that fits with how YOU want to work.

------
azjeepxtreme
Good for you. I need assistance with web dev at times. I am the owner of a
tech co and just recently went to a site where I was the "cult phenom" as I
had not been onsite in a year and me actually walking in the door had people
swooning. I look forward to hiring some people that know their sh*t in the
remote assist web dev arena and are grown up enough to work for me remotely.
Well spoken Mr. Farkas.

------
bdunbar
"...But I don't see a reason why, in 2013, given the tools we have, a
developer has to be on-site at a desk every day, as the normal operating
procedure..."

Tools change.

People don't.

------
Claudus
I work remotely as a programmer / designer, it's the best job I've had, and
I'm far more productive than I've ever been, with a lost less time spent.

I'm sure collaborating in person is necessary for some people, but if you're
working with people who can visualize what you're talking about with words it
seems pretty great to me.

Not everyone is suited for working remotely, but for those who are, I think it
suits us very well.

------
ajsharp
Having a team of remote people require a company to have it's shit together,
mostly with respect to communication, and to a much less extent, "process".
Most companies (read: executives and founders) are not good at communication,
and are generally not interested in changing. Instead, especially with
startups, people fall back on "everything happens in front of the whiteboard".

------
account_taken
We ask telecommuters to work out of the office for the first two tweeks.
Trying to explain the code base and the many utilities we've built is too time
consuming and not easily explained over the phone or remote desktop. It's much
easier to look over someone's shoulder and have discussions as needed.
Moreover, we get a chance to see their personality, enthusiasm and such.

------
eurodance
I get more work done at home. For me, when I am at work, I don't feel guilty
to take a break and read a personal website, since I am "working" 100% of the
time. However, when I am at home, I feel guilty when I go off-topic, because I
know that I'm taking advantage of the situation.

Note: This may only be limited to "strict" corporate environments, like my
current one.

------
rdouble
The last project I worked on, the company insisted I be on site. When I got
there, nobody talked to me in real life for six months. If everyone is on IRC
and using a ticket tracker, bug tracker, github, status blogs, email, Skype,
iChat etc, I'm not sure what the point of being on-site is, other than
organizational inertia.

------
rowantrollope
Hi definition video conferencing provides the bridge for most of the
challenges employers and employees face with remote working. Being the leader
of Cisco's Telepresence and collaboration technology stack, I can say that
remote working is entirely feasible and in fact sometimes even better than
being there.

------
_k
It's not always about being productive. If problems start to surface and
you're not there talking to those you need to talk to or you're not there to
see it for yourself and you do half of all your work by email, then chances
are high you're putting everyone's job at risk.

------
kenkam
It's a simple case of the OP having an opinion -- remote working isn't
necessarily the be all/end all solution neither is working on site.

I see why the OP would want to complain about how most companies out there
don't encourage remoting but then again they are paying you to work.

------
samspot
I think part of the problem is that many companies are already incapable of
managing on-site employees effectively (we've all experienced this!). If you
can't effectively manage the people you see face to face, I imagine remote
workers would be a disaster.

------
dannylandau
Couldn't agree more. Companies of all scale need to be receptive to remote
work, otherwise they will never be able to fill in any of their job roles.

------
bonchibuji
I have a question here -

'Does biggies which acquire startups care whether the employees of the startup
work remotely or from a central (base) location?;

~~~
artyom
From my experience, they absolutely do care. "Biggies" with a tight corporate
mindset would consider remote work as a deal-breaker. Others may be able to
work something out, like insane compensation for relocation, and such.

------
suyogmody
i think most people dont do it not because they dont like it, but because they
dont trust others to be productively working at home.

------
MFaramawi
Sadly but true

------
paulhauggis
I've been working remotely for the past 3 years. I find that the same type of
discipline it takes to work remotely is the same as what it takes to run your
own company.

