
Connected But Isolated: The Real Problem with Working Remotely - jsherwani
http://blog.screenhero.com/post/60401526813/connected-but-isolated-the-real-problem-with-working?
======
bad_user
> _collaborating with a co-worker in the same office is a matter of going over
> to their desk or grabbing an open conference room_

Oh, how much I hate when this happens. Biggest problem is of course that
people don't even realize the ensuing context switching is a problem, because
it still feels like useful progress is being done, when in fact in most cases
no progress is made.

The most common case for interrupting a coworker is when you don't know how to
do something. As a general rule of thumb, all companies should have internal
wikis for all questions that can be answered with documentation. If the answer
is missing, then my answer is to write a wiki document for it. There are of
course technical questions on the technologies used, which are a Google search
away and I have a rule to not answer questions that can be easily searched
(teach a man to fish, yada, yada).

Other reasons for interrupting a coworker are for design decisions or for
discussing/prioritizing bugs, but those meetings need to be scheduled,
preferably in the morning, not whenever anybody feels being chatty.

The real downside of working remotely is the lack of interhuman relationships
that happen in a regular workplace, a problem that really can't be solved by
technology.

~~~
zimbatm
Do you hate it because it's inefficient or because it's cutting you from a
pleasure source ?

Some times I feel like the efficiency argument is a bit of an excuse that we
use because being in the zone feels so good. Especially if you're the geeky
type that doesn't derive much pleasure from social interaction it feels like
someone just pulled the plug from your morphine drops and put some Tabasco
instead. On the other side, working in the after-glow of the zone is
inefficient but nobody seems to mind too much about that.

~~~
chc
At least in my own experience, I'm pretty sure the efficiency argument is not
an excuse. There are some days when I really don't enjoy what I'm doing all
that much (e.g. "One customer says that form with the thing doesn't work — fix
that"), but I still hate getting pulled away multiple times when I'm being
productive because I can't just immediately go back to being productive, and
now I'm doing something tedious and taking even longer at it.

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imechura
At what point do we accept that HN has become little more than an advertising
channel dominated by thinly veiled sales pitches that pretend to be
informative or opinionated?

This particular blog post feels like a bait and switch because I clicked the
link hoping to learn something new about this real problem that we are facing
and it was not until that last few paragraphs until it was confirmed that I
was being sold too. Is this really the type of content that we want to promote
to the top page of HN, the very same place where so many critical and
important issues have been discussed over the last several years?

I hate to be "that guy" but the over last year, nearly every article or
opinion piece I think I am reading is someone's blog post promoting their new
product. I do realize that products and start-ups are THE culture here but
there used to be a lot more actual opinions posted and many less blatant sales
pitches.

Sorry for the rant, but I personally find myself visiting the site much less
frequently because of this.

~~~
sliverstorm
It's been that way for a while now. The ones that really get my goat are the
absolutely shameless plugs in the comments that have only a shadow of
relevancy to the article.

You know the ones.

Article: _Great mathematician has passed_

Comment: _This reminds me of the iPhone calculator app I 'm making, because it
does math. You should check it out_

------
wmat
In the immortal word of Steve Wozniak:

“Artists work best alone. Work alone.”

Here's the longer version:

"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live
in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them
are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate
environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot
of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t
believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m
going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work
alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

------
OldSchool
These articles, especially with such a loaded title, are starting to feel like
propaganda.

There are those who are miserable in an office, and those who would be
miserable working remotely. I don't think any article is going to change an
individual's preference though collectively enough of these could sway an
industry's management attitude. The fact that we see mostly articles opposing
remote work tells me that they aren't written objectively.

I'm with the Woz quote. My preference has always been to be completely async
other than perhaps one pre-scheduled meeting per day if necessary. It's not
always practical but it's an ideal.

~~~
MoosePlissken
Did you read to the end of the article? ScreenHero is a company that makes
software for remote collaboration. They started by acknowledging the downsides
of remote work, but ended by stating that they believe these disadvantages can
be overcome.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
They certainly can. the article presupposes an ignorance of all the advances
in virtual office software out there.

<shameless plug> I work at Sococo. Our users are evangelists and total
converts. In fact new 'local' workers prefer to attend meetings using
Teamspace - they can identify who's speaking, learn what they look like, and
come up to speed faster.

[http://www.sococo.com](http://www.sococo.com)

------
paulhodge
Somehow, and I don't know how this is still possible in 2013, but I don't
consider remote collaboration tools to be a "solved" problem. I say this
because at our shop, we have blocking issues with remote conferencing on a
pretty regular basis. The most common problem is when one person turns on
their speaker and creates feedback/echo, and then we have to spend an annoying
5 minutes just tracking it down. Maybe we're on the wrong tech (we use WebEx
and Lync), or maybe it's a training problem. But I suspect we're not alone..

If there actually was a seamless audio/video conferencing technology that
still worked perfectly even when subjected to the dumbness of office people,
then I think I would have a different opinion of remote work.

But as it is, I think the productivity tax is significant enough to be worth
worrying about. Especially since the tax is not just inflicted on the people
working remotely, but also on everyone in the office that interacts with them.

~~~
ams6110
Ugh. The conference call, web meeting, google hangout, whatever technology you
want to use, you spend 15 minutes on "can everybody see me" "can everybody
hear me" "I can't hear you" "can everyone please mute their phone" "I can't
see the slides" I mean it's almost always a fiasco. I can't stand it.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Again, there are integrated 'virtual office' products that attack exactly this
issue.

I do a daily standup with 10-15 people, all remote. Those issues are totally
absent. We get started within 60 seconds of the desired time. We finish on
time. The entire time is spent on issues.

The product we use is the one we build - Sococo Teamspace. We're a small
startup made up of mostly Engineers who felt the pain you mention. We're eat
our own dogfood, so issues like that are the top of our list.

[http://www.sococo.com](http://www.sococo.com)

------
seiji
_A conversation with a remote worker begins asynchronously (usually in an
email)_

That's your problem there.

With your team (and cooperating teams), you should be using real time chat for
group communication and IM for personal communication.

Now, HR and Finance and Marketing and Social Influence departments will
probably be in annoying "can barely write competent sentences" email
territory, but those aren't your immediate concerns.

If everybody is sitting in an open office plan, it's common to start talking
to someone over IM, then turn to them and continue the conversation in person,
then jump back to IM (especially if you're talking about design or
architectural decisions someone else nearby has a strong negative opinion
about and you don't want to get them "started").

These days everybody goes into work, jumps into chat, signs on to their local
presence system, then exists as "at work." It doesn't have to be at work
though. With our erratic work schedules, you don't even know if someone is in
the office when you're talking with them ("Oh, you're in China this week?
Guess we're not getting lunch then.").

~~~
ams6110
Except, when I'm working and want to focus, I sign out of IM (or turn off
notifications) and don't check email. Email is best because you can answer it
when you're ready to think about it, rather than giving some half-coherent
answer on IM while you desperately try to keep your mind focused on what you
were doing before the interruption.

~~~
seiji
Part of existing in a company is not always being able to shut out the world.
The power of the corporation is also its poison.

------
secstate
I think fog is a great metaphor for the communication disparities in a remote
work environment.

That said, I don't think screenhero is the answer.

I telecommute, and here's a story that I believe is a much better solution
than screensharing (how often in a real meeting do we grab each others
spreadsheets or open docs?):

I was working on a project with a PM and he wanted to just sit on a call and
work through a handful of smaller bugs to prioritize work and maybe knock some
things out quickly. We ended up sitting on a Skype call for 3 hours working
through things. That's a fair chunk of my day. Do you know what it was?
Awesome! As long as both parties don't feel compelled to say something, you
can just leave that channel open and it's surprisingly similar to sharing an
office.

So here's my proposed solution, but it's not really in my domain to create it:

Spatial VoiP. Everyone in the company dials in each morning and sits online
while they're working. Of course, you can drop out, or you could set yourself
to busy. But the crux of it is this, instead of a list of callers, you could
lay out a digital office complete with walls and doors where you can sequester
yourself or a handful of employees for a meeting. And the volume of a person
would be relative to how close you are to them in the "digital" office (I
know, I know, Skype's volume management wouldn't suffice for this project).

Again, the technical aspects are beyond my abilities, but I imagine you could
let the lines run really cold while there isn't a lot of communication so
you're not chewing up bandwidth. If you're closed in an office, it could
really just close your VoiP connection and poll the server as to the state of
your door and dial you back in when it opens.

Anyway, that's a start.

~~~
jsherwani
Sococo does exactly this — have you tried it out?

~~~
secstate
Oh my, that's fabulous! Thanks so much. I knew something like that must exist,
but didn't know how to search for it.

~~~
jsherwani
Glad to have helped :) Do try out Screenhero too, and if you have any feedback
on it, please let us know [I'm one of the founders of Screenhero]!

~~~
secstate
I sure will. I actually didn't mean to be so dismissive in original post.
ScreenHero seems like it was designed to solve a different problem than
something like Sococo, and I can't imagine trying to pair-program when your
screens are separated ;)

------
jtreminio
At my last job working for Kaplan Professional, the bulk of the team was
stationed in-office at La Crosse, WI, while the rest were scattered across USA
and Canada.

The solution we had to the problem of asynchronous communication was making
everyone log on to a TeamSpeak server. As soon as one person talks (you can
mute your mic) everyone hears and can respond immediately, as a team.

I thought it was a very good tool for bringing us closer together, regardless
of distance.

~~~
jc4p
This seems like a great idea, but only if you also enjoy working in shared co-
working spaces. I think doing the context switches of getting thrown out of
what I'm doing and hearing someone else talk constantly would drive me insane
(or force me to just mute the chat).

------
kayoone
I believe the biggest problem of working remotely is not solvable by
technology. Yes you can share you screens in multiple ways, communicate using
im, voice, email etc. but you still dont have real human interactions. You sit
alone at home behind your machine (probably in underwear) only connected to
the world through a wire. This can be dangerous in the long term so my advice
is to get into a co-working space or get your human interactions elsewhere.
For example by switching the places from where you work from time to time or
use your breaks for a bit more social activities (workouts!).

This oatmeal comic summed up the good and bad pretty good imo
[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home)

------
nilkn
The office I work in functions almost as if we were remote. We communicate
through real-time IM, a few IRC channels, our bug tracker, as well as email,
of course, and some custom tools for monitoring the git activity of each team
member. We also get daily email reports of all git activity, and there are
weekly status emails from the CEO and/or CTO wherein they effectively brag
about the accomplishments of the employees that week.

There are frequent days, in fact, when I have no communication at all with
other team members about development topics except over the computer. If we
need to talk in person about a design decision, it's frequent to schedule the
meeting even if it's just going to be 10 minutes.

------
jvh23
Coming from a 25-member tech team where all local members are very close (we
get along well), I think that a big part of what makes us operate well as a
team is our closeness. We get less stressed during crises, communicate better,
etc. because we are connected.

That type of connection is difficult to establish with our remote members.
Because they aren't sitting right next to us, we can't joke around or come
over to chat with them in order to get some mental relief from the daily
grind.

Essentially, our work environment is enhanced by personal contact with fellow
employees, something that isn't easily established with remote workers.

------
dools
The real issue here is the conflation of collaboration with communication.
Communication is not necessary between collaborators and collaborative
decision making destroys collaboration. I wrote about this recently so I won't
reproduce the article in full here but I would love to hear what others think:
[http://iaindooley.com/post/52425576154/collaborative-
decisio...](http://iaindooley.com/post/52425576154/collaborative-decision-
making-kills-collaboration)

------
ryanSrich
Speaking of remote work. Does anyone have good resources for researching
companies that offer remote positions? The only one I found to be relevant was
wfh.io and that doesn't seem to get many posts.

~~~
nooron
I just started working at Mobileworks. I know we are sometimes are in need of
remote developers to fulfill our client's needs. Drop me an email (it's in my
profile).

No guarantee doc, but I'll ask tomorrow!

------
rusabd
``This fog of work is exactly why, in her now famous memo...'' should it be
``infamous memo''?

