
Ask HN: Is a team of work-at-home employees realistic? - abalashov
Hi everyone,<p>I was wondering what you think about the feasibility of building a team consisting of employees who work at home. I don't mean a completely remote team;  I am talking about local people, and certainly with some measure of face-to-face meetings and physical interaction when that level of collaboration is required.  I just mean people who work mostly at home on a day-to-day basis.<p>As far as I can tell, corporate America is mostly terrified of telecommuting.  Admittedly, it can be legitimately said to pose some very real management challenges.  But no matter how much I consider that, I just can't see a justification for paying for office space and forcing people to spend time there for 8+ hours a day.  I think I agree very strongly with what PG has had to say on the topic of corporate office space and its relationship to talented individuals and their productivity.<p>I agree that it's harder to manage remote people, and I've certainly taken stock of the allegedly widespread tendency for remote workers to take advantage of their independence and lack of direct oversight.  And lack of consistent and direct communication can certainly be an obstacle.  But I think there are technological solutions to these problems:  better backoffice tools, better collaboration and messaging tools, VoIP, instant messaging, presence, good ticketing and workflow management systems, etc.  I think the technology is there to make up for the shortfall.<p>Now, admittedly, the angle from which I am approaching this problem is a little bit orthogonal to the typical dilemmas of web startup entrepreneurs.  I am 23, and at the moment, I am trying to grow my VoIP / telecom systems integration and engineering consultancy beyond a one-man show so that I can get to the point where I can be a product company.  In other words, I suppose it's fair to say I am taking the "consulting route" that PG speaks of in his various essays on startup funding.  Good, bad, I have various reasons for that, but the goal in the end is to end up with actual "deliverables" - no mistake about it.<p>Still, the reason I mention that is because consulting is a business model that lends itself to measurement of individual productivity a bit better than, say, a software startup.  Product development and engineering - pure CAPEX, none of which is directly rebilled or amortised any way (especially in a short time to market) - is a little more murky.  And certainly, there are some business models where almost the entire risk can be shifted onto the employee, as one sees with commission-only work-at-home salespeople.  In my case I think I'm in a happy middle.<p>Regardless, I'm not going to go all Japanese quantitative management on people.  I want to build a progressive and humanity-affirming company where people are happy and proud to work on interesting problems in the telecommunications space.  I am just wondering if I am being too idealistic here about remote work;  are people just going to take advantage of me, in the main?  Or is it reasonable to suppose that I should be able to afford them the benefit of working wherever they want as long as they meet certain criteria as far as productivity, availability, and good communication? (All my prospective employees are excellent written and verbal communicators, and I would not have it any other way.)<p>I am in Atlanta, a city notorious for its vast, empty suburban sprawl, unconscienable freeway distances, and gridlock traffic.  I really, really don't want to compel anyone to trek through this disaster of urban planning and infrastructure design to my office if there is no real point.<p>Does anyone here have experience building a team like this?  If so, can you share tips on what strategies you used to make it work better?<p>Thanks a lot!
======
geoffc
Absolutely this can be done and in my opinion is the best way to build a great
software team. I am the CTO of Openair.com and this is how we have always
operated. We have a dozen developers, about half in the Boston area and the
other half spread across the US and we all work from home. Using this approach
we have built a successful startup that has steadily and profitably grown
every year for the last decade and we are now the dominant vendor in our
space.

I believe that this approach creates a work environment that allows us to
attract and retain great developers. The kind of developer that really likes
to write software and has the maturity and discipline to manage their own time
and decisions.

Some implementation notes:

1\. We release a new version every two months, the continual releases keep
everyone on track with constant customer feedback.

2\. We all see and read the check-in diff's, absolutely the best way to know
what someone is doing and how well they are doing it.

3\. There are great developers outside of the traditional Valley/Boston/Austin
areas and a telecommuting team lets you find them and hire them.

4\. After about 6 months it becomes very clear who can handle the
telecommuting setup and who can't.

------
quoderat
This is only tangentially related to your post, but why does corporate America
have such an aversion to telecommuting?

I was by far the most productive employee in my group at the large bank I
worked for previously. I outproduced others, even while taking the hardest
problems -- and we had a pretty good metrics systems, so I wasn't just gaming
it.

But when I asked if I could work from home when I'd decided to move, the
answer was an emphatic, "No."

So, they'd rather lose their most-productive employee who also would've been
far more productive at home and then have to hire a probably-inferior
replacement?

Makes no sense at all, yet so many companies are like this.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_why does corporate America have such an aversion to telecommuting?_

It's a limitation of the OS that is built into humans. This is what you get
when you try to build a global economic system out of bright, talkative
monkeys like me. It turns out that -- amazingly! -- this can be done, but we
find it much easier if we employ hacks that leverage the features of our
underlying monkey OS. And -- even more amazingly! -- it turns out that we can
go even farther: Using our most advanced mental and physical tools, we can do
a pretty good emulation of disembodied brains sitting in the _nth_ dimension.
But the abstraction leaks. Especially when we have to interact with other
people who haven't been fully schooled in the art of communicating with
ghosts.

If dolphins ran the world, corporate boardrooms would be full of water. But
monkeys run the world, so:

\- Businesses are run as hierarchies, because the monkey OS is designed to
manage bands of around ten or fifteen individuals. Beyond that, it operates in
terms of _alliances_ ("this platoon is allied with that platoon") and
_rivalries_ ("our platoon is doing its job, but that one isn't"; "our platoon
is falling behind and will be targeted for cutbacks, so work hard and watch
your back"; "let's all get together with Platoon Three to kick Platoon Four's
obnoxious butt").

\- Your status in the business world is judged based on the size of the
conference room that you need to hold a physical gathering of your team
members, and on the size of the contiguous physical territory that your team
occupies and patrols on a daily basis. If you sit alone at your desk with the
speakerphone on and claim to be conducting a meeting with fifteen colleagues,
people will subconsciously think of you as a psychotic, or (at best) as a
spooky witch doctor who channels the spirit world.

\- There's a tendency to defer to people with grey hair, and/or people with
lots of followers or lots of stuff that has taken time to accumulate, like
corner offices or expensive desks.

\- Talk is cheap. Many people will _say_ they're your ally, but when a fight
arrives they will not be there, or they'll discover some really interesting
thing going on atop a nearby tree, or they'll hang back and not really fight
very hard. You need to motivate them by _really_ befriending them -- talking
about their kids or their pets or their hobbies, bringing them little gifts.
And by physically surrounding them with other friendly allies, such that they
cannot easily flee without losing face. And by keeping them close enough to be
able to slap them upside the head when they seem to be shirking.

\- To really convince someone -- to really communicate at the highest level --
you need to be standing close enough that you could, in theory, pick fleas off
of them.

Unfortunately, though humans are becoming better and better at understanding
all this stuff and transcending it when necessary [1], we're never going to
completely eliminate these tendencies. Unless the lizards rise up, overthrow
us, and take back the planet. At which point they will have complaints of
their own. ("Dear Gator News: How come companies always insist on holding
meetings on rocks in the bright sunlight? I'm much more productive in my
moonlit office, where I can sit on my dual 27-inch space heaters.")

\---

[1] Such as: When trying to write software, which is an act so unnatural to us
monkeys that only some of us can do it at all, and many of us are doing it
wrong. And it requires all kinds of mental tricks and energy and focus just to
manage that much.

~~~
robotrout
Very well done! If you had a blog, I'd read it.

I think that getting to the psychology of the problem as you are attempting
(or succeeding) is a very worthy task that lots of people need to be working
on.

I'm no water vapor ignoring tree-hugger, but the inefficiency of our current
work system where people heat and maintain homes that are empty for 12 hours a
day, go to office buildings that are empty for 12 hours a day, using a car
that they use for two hours a day, to do work that could be done at home, is
insanity.

Why do we tolerate this as companies or as employees? We can seriously look
for solutions, or we can wax cynically about "the man". One path leads
forward, to a solution.

If your hypothesis is correct, there are compromises we can do, to satisfy the
inner-ape, while gaining some efficiency.

\- We can remove people's personal effects from their work areas, so multiple
people can work in that cube. On Monday and Tuesday, it a marketing guy. On
Wednesday and Thursday, it's an engineer. On Friday and Saturday, it's an
accountant. Let groups that never interact anyway, REALLY not interact, and as
a bonus, you reduce your necessary office space by 2/3rds while still
maintaining ape bonding time for two days a week. The other three days of
work, people work at home, freeing up our highways by 2/3rds as well.
Actually, we free up our highways by 3/5ths (math left as exercise for the
reader) because now we have staggered our weekends a bit. Nobody works on
Sundays still, but accountants work on Saturdays.

Would there be tons of coordination hassles, with accountants needing to talk
to engineers about their annual budgets? No, not really. Because our whole
premise here, is that none of this face time is actually needed from a
business standpoint. Internet and telephone would be just fine. It's needed at
a deeper level, among team-mates and up/down hierarchies, but it's not needed
from one tribe to another.

The accountant tribe and the engineer tribe will never form an alliance, they
are evolutionary enemies. Why force them to live in the same jungle?

~~~
abalashov
I have to disagree with you on the personalised work areas. As the sibling
poster pointed out, having those types of effects and environmental settings
in a space that is definitively yours is highly conducive to productivity, a
sense of organisational inclusion, and overall satisfaction and comfort.

No, I'm not saying that people that have personal effects in their cubes are
all eminently satisfied; the point is that they would be even less satisfied
if they were crammed into even smaller and yet _more_ generic spaces, or in
spaces of which they could not claim even a provisional kind of ownership and
which did not have any qualities of (semi)permanence.

I've had several jobs where the business owners didn't really want to spend
money or time setting up any kind of meaningful barriers, even something so
rudimentary and otherwise disheartening as a cube farm. Everybody basically
got to sit in a large, contended, noisy and alienating open space at some kind
of rickety, smallish plastic table. It was not feasible to define one's
"space" in such a setting. Everyone felt like a temp. I don't think it helped
anyone's morale, ability to concentrate, or productivity. It's a terrible
idea; "open spaces" do not mean "open companies," to paraphase Joel Spolsky's
biting criticism of open-area interior design thought in corporate circles.

In the jobs in which I and almost everyone I know has had, there is a clear
and identifiable positive correlation between the amount of privacy and
personal space in which they got to tailor their work environment to their
preferences and the overall investment they felt in the company, its culture,
and of course, the work. While, of course, environmental attributes cannot
smooth over a crappy place to work, they can make an enormous difference in
the level of psychological investment an employee has in a place that is -- by
all other metrics -- decent.

I think the one exception to this may be in that I definitely think there is a
market out there for creating workday "hubs" for freelancers and WFH employees
to get away from the house (and small children, if they have them) and other
environmental obstacles and show up with their laptop and set up shop. It
could be something as simple as a glorified coffee shop whose table
arrangements and interior design lends itself better to that than the average
one. Make data ports and power abundantly accessible and you've got a winner.
(Of course, you've somehow got to persuade these people to keep buying
something all day, which is the problem coffee shops typically run into with
students, freelancers and other people who spend all day there with their
laptops. Perhaps there is an opportunity to charge a decent membership fee for
a cool, happening freelancers' "club" of this sort. I'd pay $100/mo to be able
to go somewhere close-by and ambiently pleasant with my laptop and partake of
great bandwidth, numerous power and data ports (then I could bring a little
SIP phone), and coffee and other beverages on tap or heavily discounted.)

~~~
robotrout
Guys, my whole plan was getting you into your homes for three of your five day
work week. You are utterly bombarded with "artifacts", "personal effects",
etc. at home.

This is a compromise between the insanity of commuting, from a business
standpoint, and the necessity of commuting , from a tribal and social
standpoint. As is the case with compromises, it's not going to be up to your
idea of perfect, but what it allows, is, with the sacrifice of your personal
items for two days a week, you still get your tribal/social time with your
team, bosses, and subordinates while at the same time, freeing our society of
much of the inefficiency of the current system.

@fish, if you're uncomfortable with your explanation of why we insist on
driving to office buildings in an age when it's not necessary, than fine. But
it doesn't matter. The fact is, we are, and it's probably for reasons just as
mysterious and ingrained into our genes as your idea. So, that's all we need
to know. We apparently can't beat it, so we must adapt to it, rather than
bemoaning the state of things, which you were not doing, which is why I liked
your piece. Instead, we can implement a hack like this to allow us to have
some of our cake, and eat some of it too.

~~~
abalashov
That makes sense.

But I guess those two days you'd spend in the office would have to be largely
in meetings and other things that capitalise on the "social" opportunity, with
the idea that you'd be focusing purely on actual implementation (or whatever
the work you do is) the rest of the time. Is that realistic from a scheduling
perspective? Seems like corporate life always brings a steady composition of
both.

------
ralph
pg, please re-visit the decision to have the post's text in gray-on-gray. It's
awful for long initial posts like this one. No doubt I'm not the only one that
selects the text to get it the slightly better yellow-on-black. It makes me
less likely to bother reading the text through no fault of the writer.

~~~
joubert
It would also be nice if URLs in the body render as hyperlinks so I can just
click on them instead of tedious copy/paste + enter.

~~~
ralph
True. Although are you aware you can select the text of the URL and, in
Firefox 3, drag it up to the tab bar and either drop it on an existing tab,
e.g. the current one, or drop it slightly to the right of the right-most tab
to create a new one. If doing the latter, you should see a downward pointing
arrow when you're over the drop zone.

------
pjhyett
GitHub doesn't have an office, nor are we in any hurry to get one. We work out
of our apartments and 1-2 times a week we'll hang out at a cafe and get
dinner/drinks afterwards to discuss broader ideas. The company was built with
the sort of people that can work autonomously, so while we stay in constant
communication with Campfire, it's not a situation where you need to look over
the other guy's shoulder to make sure he's still doing a good job. Until
that's no longer a reality, I see no reason for an office; it's money better
spent elsewhere.

------
jjs
To make this work, you need frequently-measurable goals, even if the
measurement is subjective.

This isn't a matter of trust, it's a matter of motivation.

It can be something squishy like, "Let me take a look at what Bob's checked in
so far this week", or something more quantifiable, like, "Bob has closed _n_
tickets today".

[Even if you don't have a hard number of how many tickets someone should close
in a day or week, you can generally eyeball it and if there's a discrepancy,
look at the descriptions to see how hard the problems were].

It's best to make this as transparent as possible to all members of a given
team, and provide a system of rapid feedback and especially fast positive
feedback for all progress.

Try and keep communication focused on whatever channel everyone actually likes
using. If you're using a wiki, trac, and basecamp to keep track of overlapping
items, quickly ditch whichever ones nobody actually uses.

If you can keep everybody motivated, communicative, and measurably productive,
then you will actually be far better off than large traditional companies that
rely on the ass-in-chair visibility metric to determine whether "work" is
working.

------
scorpioxy
I don't have any experience building a team like that, but i recently moved
from a full time work-at-home freelancer to a part time work-at-home
freelancer when i took on a full time job.

I can honestly confirm that my productivity has decreased by more than 50%.
One part of it is because of the wasted time in getting to the office and
back. Another bigger part is because programmers work in an open space plan.
Some other parts would be office politics and so on...

Working in a home office was so much better than i often ended up working 16
hours a day prior to a project deadline and not mind(i used to enjoy what i
do).

We used to communicate all the time via IM, via email, and via skype. And of
course make full use of collaboration tools. Also, me being in a different
time zone helped the process a lot.

So yeah, some people will take advantage of this situation. But then again,
bad people will try to take advantage of any situation. It is up to you to
recognize those people and stay away from them.

------
gojomo
Teleworkers appreciate terseness.

~~~
abalashov
Hehe. Well, I guess that's one thing they won't appreciate about me, then.

Hopefully I'll find other ways to make up for the loss. :)

------
gordonguthrie
Yes, it can be but it depends on your circumstances. My shop has done it very
successfully for 16 months.

But there are a number of critical issues to consider.

The physical organisation of a workspace is a function of communication. Place
those people who communicate a lot physically together because informal
conversation is a lot cheaper than formal conversation.

When you are writing software you therefore have to have the specifier and the
coder co-located. Open Source projects work very well because (in the vast
majority of cases) they are copying existing software. So sitting at home
working on a clone of Microsoft Word - the specifier (a copy of Microsoft
Word) is sitting next to the coder.

When writing original software where the specification/product development is
the core task this will be much harder - it may be impossible unless your
specifier is an expert business architect, software architect and designer and
can produce build-able specs and your team are capable of reading and
implementing them on sight.

You must also choose your toolset correctly to generate a high volume of
informal communication, so: * central SVN * centralised mailing list (no
point-to-point e-mails) * continuous build with statuses

Essentially on the software development side the complete open source software
development stack is optimised for this stuff, so its a doddle - your work has
an observable daily heartbeat. For other sorts of work (say sales, order
fulfilment, HR, finance, etc, etc) it is much harder because the core stack
doesn't exist - you will have to create it.

The final thing you will have to do is be rigorous on formal comms. You will
need to have an all hands call every working day. Sometimes 5 minutes,
sometimes 35 minutes. You will need to organise face-to-face meetings
regularly, Xmas dinners, launch parties, drinks and stuff.

It can be very effective at reducing costs but it is a considerable management
challenge and you need to think of it as such. If you adopt a "hey we don't
need no steenkin management bullshit, we're way tool techies, hey!" you're
probably doomed anyway.

------
ctingom
Telecommuting can work well for established teams who have a history working
together. But if the team doesn't have any history together, you might
consider getting office space for 6 months to bond a bit and then do the work
at home thing.

~~~
abalashov
To overcome the lack of history together it seems like one has to substitute
other forms of bonding experiences; occasional lunches together, conference
calls, heavy use of messaging and email, and just making the effort to talk to
the people a lot and really get to know them.

My concern isn't so much whether these things are qualitatively equal to the
team-building experiences of being stuck in a room(s) together as whether it
can work, in practise as well as in principle.

------
jacquesm
My personal experience is that this can work great, but not if you're talking
'ordinary' employees, you'll have to do a good bit of screening to get people
with the right mindset. Some are stellar at it, others will not be able to
handle the freedom. For those individuals that can not handle the freedom it
is better to have a per-job style payment.

~~~
abalashov
Of course. That is presumed. I am confident I have found the right people; I
really believe they "get it."

What I wonder is whether this system will somehow fail to produce the results
I need despite that.

~~~
mtkd
It does work, I've been working from home for almost 2 years - leading a team
who partly work in an office and partly work at home.

Not everyone may want to work from home though.

Campfire + VOIP works well to manage everything.

We all run on a central network using VPN but we're slowly starting to use
more external services - and I hope we can ditch the VPN for most stuff in a
few months - using Google Apps, Github and some proprietary web apps.

It gives more time to work as you're not commuting and if you have a young
family it means you get to see the kids more.

~~~
abalashov
Not everyone may want to work from home? Really?

While, admittedly, I've met some people that consciously or unconsciously
value the social and possibly collaborative aspects of working in an office
with others, they tend to be the kind that just get their social needs
fulfilled at work without doing a whole lot of actual work. There are some
exceptions in passionate people who are also extroverted and aware of the
extrinsic dimensions of what they do, but they are not common enough to be
statistically meaningful in my experience.

Can you elaborate more on what kind of person you think wouldn't want to work
from home? I've hardly met anyone who wouldn't.

------
MoeDrippins
The company I work for was, until recently, completely WFH, with ~20 or so
people. (In the US. In Europe, its HQ, there was always an office, and in
other satellite offices.) One of our WFH US locations is, in fact, Atlanta.

It works fine, _IF_ you can find the right people. Not everyone can work from
home. Not everyone wants to.

Our biggest hurdle was training. We had nowhere really to meet to get the new
guys up to speed after they were hired. In Atlanta there are plenty of "remote
working" locations like ROAM, Jelly organizations, etc.

We have since leased a small office, mainly for this purpose. But it provides
a place to "land" when we need to, and for those of us with families, a place
to get OUT of the house once in awhile to get work done.

~~~
abalashov
Can you tell me more about these "remote working locations?" What is
ROAM/Jelly/etc?

~~~
MoeDrippins
Sorry, I missed your request.

<http://roamatlanta.com/> <http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyInAtlanta>
<http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyInRoswell>

------
iuguy
Yes it can be done. We have a setup like this, but we try to spend 2-3 days in
the office a week and a minimum of one (Thursday) for everyone.

The key thing has to be communication and the ability to maintain motivation.
We use Google Apps Premier to handle most of the comms, motivation is
maintained through electric shocks... ok, maybe it's more regular meet ups and
social events as well as making sure everyone has and gives feedback on
everything.

There's a golden rule of recruiting that becomes even more important for
telecommuters: Don't hire pricks. It doesn't matter if they're rock starts in
their given field or if they're able to do something you otherwise can't.
Don't hire 'em - they'll cause more problems than they solve.

------
swombat
That's how we're running our start-up (which, admittedly, is still quite
small). We (the "active shareholders") meet physically once a week, but have
no central office.

As for the development team (3 people), one of us actually lives in the States
most of the year, so we don't meet physically very often - instead, we have
iteration meetings 3 times a week on Skype. Tasks are broken down so that they
fit into 2-day chunks of time to make it easier to measure progress.

There are certainly challenges, but I think if you're in the same geographical
location they're not too hard to overcome. Good luck!

------
ojbyrne
I don't think it's harder to manage remote people. In fact a random Jim
Collins (ugh) quote applies - "If you have to actively manage someone, you've
made a hiring mistake" - people who have a history of working remotely are
much more likely to be self-driven and disciplined.

------
seed_funding
Hi,

I am trying to do the same thing. Does anyone have any good recommendations
for online collaboration solutions? For example I currently run a virtual
private server to serve my email, wiki, website, git etc. I think it's still
good for these things, but I might switch to say, Google Apps for email + the
collaboration. Basecamp seems like an option but they don't provide email. I
have also found hyperoffice. They provide email + collaboration. I haven't had
the time to evaluate any of these yet. Do you have other recommendations? What
do you think of VPNs?

Thanks!

------
Harkins
Check out the book "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It" about the "Results-Only
Work Environment". It's mostly a case study of how Best Buy implemented a
workplace culture that made office hours optional.

Maybe also the books of Ricardo Semler, a business owner who did similar
things.

------
abalashov
Is there some particular reason a lot of you recommend Campfire over, say,
running an internal Jabber server?

~~~
jgalvez
Yes, not having to install or maintain an internal Jabber server, plus a
number of convenience features an internal Jabber server would not have out of
the box. Filed under "I've more important things to do other than bitching
about spending a few bucks a month with a Campfire account" :)

~~~
abalashov
I wasn't saying it was the right thing to do.

Just wondering.

