
Distributed teams are rewriting the rules of office politics - haasted
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/18/distributed-teams-are-rewriting-the-rules-of-officeless-politics/
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onion2k
I worked remotely for four years and liked it a lot. The only problem was as
the company grew more people came onboard who didn't really understand how to
work well in a remote environment, which eventually ruined it. If you're on a
remote team with people who don't like video conferencing, asynchronous text
chat, etc then it's very hard to work effectively.

This is going to be a bigger problem as remote work gets more common - at the
moment companies that work remotely attract developers who want to work
remotely, so it works. As time goes on more developers who _don '_ want to
work remotely are going to be pushed in to remote environments as a cost
saving measure, and that's going to make it much harder for everyone. How to
deal with that problem is going to be a challenge.

~~~
Rotdhizon
You hear about remote jobs all the time, with more and more people wanting
them because of the leisure and convenience. Along with that, you hear about
people with on site jobs that want to go remote. You never really hear about
people who prefer on site over remote. I'd be interested to hear some stories
about on site workers who were forced(or pushed towards) remote work and
denied it.

~~~
CPLX
I hate remote work. I want to go to an office and do work there and then when
I leave I'm living the rest of my life.

I even rented myself an office when I was working solo for almost a year
before hiring someone, just so I could have a desk, a file cabinet, a printer,
and a real office environment to get work done. I lived alone. I still got up
in the morning and went to the office, it was good for my productivity and
mental health.

I feel that it's important to set up boundaries, or tasks and work will
contaminate your personal spaces. I also think that it's just 100x better for
communication to have everyone in the same room working together. Nothing
beats verbal interpersonal communication.

With that said, I recognize that my opinion on this is 1) entirely subjective
and 2) maybe because I'm old.

~~~
brailsafe
Don't sell yourself short. Everyone works differently and not everyone keeps
the same interest in how they work forever. I personally don't mind an office
or the clear delineation between work and life __if __the office and company
are set up in such a way as to not crush my spirit and allow flexibility.
Otherwise I like being to work however I want. Usually this ends up being
coffee shops. Right now this is coffee shops while I 'm road tripping and
living out of my car. It works for me kind of, certainly wouldn't for
everyone. But, I can't work at home. Even if I have a home, I go to a coffee
shop or park, partly for the reasons you mention.

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hosh
I have had the same mentality. Being married for the past few years and with a
step-daughter, I've been thinking of having better boundaries like that.

If it were just me, I think I like remote work, living alone, just fine.

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brailsafe
It's also much more supportive of different levels of productivity throughout
a day. I have incredibly poor consistency when it comes to focus. So sometimes
I'll sit down and not be abke to get anything done, so maybe I'll go exercise
and pick it up at a time where I'll be abke to concentrate.

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maxxxxx
Purely distributed teams are great if all processes are designed for that. But
most companies don't do it right. In my company we augment the US team with
Indian devs and it really sucks royally. Most decisions are still made in
meetings so the Indians don't know what's going on. The 12 hour time
difference requires either that the Indians stay up late or come in early or
the US workers have to do it which sucks if you have a life outside of work.
Resolving even little issues takes too long because round trip time between
question and answer is often several days. We also never travel to India so we
don't know the people personally and don't know how they are set up.

The way a lot of companies go about with distributed teams is the same they do
with agile. Management picks a few artifacts (daily standups, detailed
backlog) but most other structures stay in place so the result is highly
dysfunctional.

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mr_tristan
I've worked full time remote for two companies now, and one was more like you
described, where most of the team was in one place with "augmented" remote
employees, and the other bit the bullet and treated everyone remotely, even
though there are large physical offices where some people like to work. And
the main issue is communication.

"Augmenting" your team with remote workers leads to horrible communication.
First, meeting rooms require very good audio setup, and very few people will
spend the time, hire a sound engineer, and operate the meeting such that
everyone in the room is clearly audible. As a end result, the remote workers
often sit there with the sound up trying to figure out what's being said most
of the time. Thus, people can never really act normally - everything has to be
this composed, staged, response.

Additionally, the mostly local team will frequently have offhand conversations
the remote workers are never a part of. Thus, you get siloing. Add time zone
shifts, and the amount of siloing increases.

The place I work for now has teams that rarely meet in a physical room
together - even though several members sit near each other, everyone's got a
headset. It is amazing how decent audio changes communication. We also
frequently have chats online.

Additionally, all major meetings at my current company are held as if people
are remote. And events or other informal affairs are kept organized and
isolated. I don' t have to sit through notifications about the coffee machine
on the 3rd floor of a building 1300 miles away being broken.

I believe this has led to senior management feeling comfortable working
remotely as well, so some VPs work from cities where there is no significant
office or company presence.

Now, I _do_ wish this company relied on writing, but not everyone is a good
writer. It takes a lot of time to build up that kind of confidence. If I could
make one change, it would be to improve writing.

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s73v3r_
As someone who has to sit next to a team that does that, it's annoying as fuck
to listen to people have a meeting like that.

EDIT: I don't know why this is downvoted. It's incredibly rude to have
meetings at your desk like that in an open plan office.

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motohagiography
Most ambiguous thing I have found about remote work is how a decision gets
made in a group, and then who directs the action on it.

It's too easy to talk past one another on conferences. Add flat organizations
where you are supposed to be able to read the dynamic between the lines, then
local culture differences, and you can end up in passive aggression hell.

Without physical presence, you need clear, logical rules in place.

The article splits the main challenges of "loneliness," and "collaboration,"
almost evenly. I don't get loneliness, but collaboration and distance are
almost definitely conflicting needs.

I would be surprised if the rules for managing distance being a constraint on
the dynamic aspect of collaboration was not a hard zero sum trade off.

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aero142
Is it just me, or did the article completely fail to answer it's premise? I
really wanted to hear about how office politics works in a full time remote
workplace. The closest thing to an answer for this is "we write stuff down so
it's permanent."

~~~
SlightRespect
People talk shit about each other over Slack, and hope it never comes back to
bite them.

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tspike
It is important to differentiate between distributed and remote, as well. I
work for a very large company that has offices scattered all over the country.
We are distributed, and remote exists but is not the norm.

It is unusual to have a meeting that doesn't make use of videoconferencing,
even when everyone involved works primarily from an office.

For employees who _are_ remote, this setup is wonderful. It means that there's
little difference between being remote and working from a different office.

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growlist
I'm remote but part of a team where some people are office based, and it can
be nightmarish at times - I'm cut out of the loop time and time again, and the
excuse that 'oh we just had a quick conversation about it and you didn't
happen to be there' has now worn thin to the point of transparency. It's
definitely the case with remote working that failure to prepare (on a
company's part) is preparing for failure.

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eeZah7Ux
This happened to me in companies with teams scattered across different
rooms/buildings/countries.

That's bad communication and insularity. Remote working only makes it more
obvious.

~~~
growlist
> That's bad communication and insularity

Suspect it's more than that, unfortunately. Thankfully though my circumstances
are changing soon and I'll hopefully be out the door to somewhere better.
Life's too short etc.

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ryanmarsh
_Sarah Cooper’s “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings,” which includes…_

I took the bait and read the 10 tricks. These are all natural tendencies for
me. This must explain why clients think I'm smart because I'm really not as
smart as everyone treats me.

~~~
wadkar
I would very much like to have a small discussion on this if you don’t mind
sharing your thoughts on the following:

What would be the ground truth for some notion of smartness level? It could
certainly be subjective, sure, but could you please tell me what you think
being smart means? Do you think people around you have different scale/notion
of smartness than you? Would it be possible that you’re being hard on
yourself? If not, how would you rate/think about your coworkers smartness?

I am really interested in knowing your thought process because a part of me
certainly identifies with your statement. And I am very much interested in
discussing “appearing to be smart” vs “being smart”. Something tells me
there’s not much difference between the two or perhaps only the former exists
and latter is too abstract to be useful for any comparison.

~~~
ryanmarsh
I do a lot of consulting so that might have something to do with it. Basically
I get paid to appear to be the smartest person in the room (which I personally
think is utter and total horse shit but that's another rant). I've been told
my whole life that I'm "smart" but the problem is there are lots and lots of
people out there who seem (I've tried to read their papers on ML) like they're
an order of magnitude smarter. I write like a 13 year old, but maybe I speak
better? IDK.

For most people I think it's totally subjective. If you surprise someone with
a bit of knowledge they don't have (either memorized or figured out for
yourself) people think you're "smart". People who share what they know or help
others come to a novel solution appear "smart".

I do believe in a general concept of intelligence (q). I'm willing to bet mine
is only slightly above average if even that, only because I keep meeting
programmers who cannot think as clearly as I can so I have to assume I'm
smarter than some of them.

I'm sorry I don't have a better answer. It's a total mystery to me. I feel
like a total dumb fuck most of the time.

You said you identify with my first comment. How so?

~~~
wadkar
Thank you very much for your answer. It gave me a lot to think about.

To answer your question - I have been told by my peers and teachers that I
have “potential”, some pointed out that I am exceptionally good at grasping
new concepts. From my point of view I “sort of” accept whatever new
information is presented to me as truth and my mind goes into a kind of
overdrive. It constrcts all the possible realities and finds inconsistencies
or irregularities. It just doesn’t know when to stop. Over time, I believe I
have improved the way I communicate these imaginations of my mind which I
suspect makes people think I am smart. However, this doesn’t say anything
about whether I actually understand the concept or if I have deep knowledge of
the presented subject. This, in my opinion, is an appearance of being smart
rather than actually being smart.

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hashkb
All no-brainers as usual. I've been working remotely full time for three years
now. There is no downside for me. Offices (and open floorplans) exist out of
inertia only, and, because of the politics they encourage, are havens for the
incompetent.

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lifeisstillgood
1\. Remote is not "from your house". Rent an office near home, walk there.

2\. Use video conferencing every day without fail. Something very monkey brain
makes a human face you are talking to real, and prevents you flipping the
doofus bit on people (and they you)

3\. Everyone and everything must be remote-first - business and IT. There is
_real_ advantage to walking over and saying hello, shaking peoples hands.

4\. Meet up in person and work together (pairing, meetings, clarifications) at
least once a week. This basically limits the distance you can all be from each
other (roughly two major metro areas apart - London and Paris, NY and
Washington)

Ultimately this all costs money. it's cheaper to hire crap people and
expensive office space.

YMMV

~~~
s73v3r_
"Rent an office near home, walk there."

Why should I have to be the one to pay extra?

~~~
umurkontaci
Some companies compensate you for colocated offices.

In certain areas you can deduct your expenses from your taxes.

But yeah, you should certainly take this into account when you are discussing
your salary.

