
Remote work: 6 months later - couac
https://tailordev.fr/blog/2016/11/18/remote-work-6-months-later/
======
lr4444lr
_it is definitely great to meet in person, to shake hands, grab a coffee
together, etc. but what is the value, professionally speaking?_

Years of socialization training stemming from childhood to gauge whether it's
really worth interrupting people. I do enjoy the opportunity to do remote
work, but even in the office, I'm finding an unstated expectation that I
should always have a second pair of eyes on my slack notifications. It's not
really consistent to praise the elusive "in the zone" state where developers
get their most productive work done, and simultaneously expect that they
should break what they're doing to bucket the importance of every little IM.
The need to walk over to another person when you have something important to
say, and use your human senses to determine whether this person should really
be distracted for what you think is important at the moment puts the onus and
effort of distraction on the asker where I think it best belongs.

~~~
codingdave
I work at a 100% remote office. We don't use Slack, or really anything other
than Google hangouts. It is pretty easy to just say "Got a sec?", as you would
in person. Then type, call, share screens, whatever, when you both have a
moment.

It may seem different on the surface, but it really is the exact same
communication as you would have in person... you just need to ask. And much of
the time, real-time responses aren't truly necessary... so you can just IM
someone a question, and know they'll get back to you when they can.

~~~
Can_Not
Google Hangouts is the worst. You can't open a named room with the same people
as another room (it auto-merges) and the window constantly resizes itself. Not
to mention the complete lack of useful (and wasteful) addons and bots.

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k__
I switched to working remote professionally 1 1/2 year ago and worked 1 1/2
year remote on private projects (Firefox committer, university projects)
before that.

I make about 20% more money (before tax) than on my last job.

I save 1h every day on commuting, which I had to do on my last job.

I buy my food in my local store, which is much cheaper than buying food in the
city.

I have my "own" office, without any people talking, getting sick, etc.

I probably could improve things a bit, by moving into a cheaper city, but
overall I'd say, remote work has made my life much better.

~~~
michalstanko
I've been working remotely for 7 years now. Do you ever miss contact with
other people? Fun in the office, interesting conversations, etc.

~~~
pryelluw
Ive been working remotely for almost the same time as you. I do miss some of
the interactions but I've replaced them with connecting with other tech folk
through social media and going to local meetups. Almost as good.

~~~
couac
There is one thing we did not mention, and I'll likely blog on it later this
year: being remote does not mean (for us) working at home or even working
completely "alone".

For instance, I work in a co-working space where other co-workers are either
remote or freelance. I chose a co-working space that is not IT-specific, which
is even better. So I have sort of colleagues there, we discuss about many
things, sometimes about our respective jobs/works, but most of the time about
life in general.

~~~
k__
Yes.

I work 70% of my time at home and 30% where I just happened to be :)

But I got the best equipment (table, PC, chair) at home, so I prefer to work
from there.

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kriro
It's mentioned in the "myths about remote work" article that's linked but I
think for startup-y kind of things social/power norms kind of force you to not
work remotely for at least a decent stretch of the time.

o/~ Move to SV, move to SV, move to SV sure there's some poo on the streets
but...move to SV. o/~

~~~
agibsonccc
I run a 16 person 5 timezone startup cofounded in the valley. I moved to asia
from SF. The best thing about this is lack of "startup-y things". All of those
things are huge distractions to getting things done.

Many companies run remote fine. Schedules allow people to be home with their
kids when needed, no commute over head for most. Emphasis is on self
management. Communication is async. We have 1 stand up a week.

~~~
pryelluw
Wow 5 timezones. That's gotta be pretty tough. Can you tell more about it?

~~~
couac
Yes I'd be interested to hear more about that setup too!

~~~
agibsonccc
Basically all of us are async. A few of us in the bay area,a few on the east
coast, 1 in australia, 1 in eastern europe, and a few in japan/korea.

We have 1 weekly standup at 3:00 PM PST which is ~8am Japan Time (where I
live). All of our messaging is async. Most people manage themselves. Tasks
tend to be longer sprints.

Half of our team has kids. Work is more independently scheduled. We all
collaborate asynchronously.

We use gitter for all of our communications. The reason for this is customer
support, user support, team chat, all in 1 place. It works fairly nicely.

All of our communication is remote first. This means most things happen via
text or hangout.

Our business development is split in 2 main time zones. "Asian timezone" and
"US timezone". Many of us fly.

Marketing material gets cross pollinated across language and time zone via 1
shared folder. (Language is important due to selling in japan,korea,china, and
parts of the US).

I usually come back to the US every few months for conferences to try to keep
touch.

I also get on a call every other day or so with my cofounder during his
afternoon and my morning to make sure things stay in sync across time zones.

We started as 2 people in San Francisco.

~~~
couac
Thanks for the reply and all the details!

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amyfransz
Yeah working with people in different timezones definitely comes with even
more challenges. I've been working with a 13-hour time difference with my co-
founder on our startup called "The Remote Trip" for three months now (I'm
working from Thailand while she's working from Costa Rica). The best tool
we've used so far has definitely been Trello, it's so easy to keep track of
each others work activities and to ask/answer any questions (that's a benefit
from working with such a time difference: you leave a question late at night
and its answered the next morning!). Next to that, we use Skype for elaborate
weekly calls and Google Drive as it is so useful for working in docs
simultaneously (plus I love the autosave function). We now also have two
additional team members, one from the USA and one from Germany, and although
time differences are a challenge - with the right tools and a commitment to
written communication it's definitely manageable. We've written an overview of
all the tools we find helpful when working remotely in this blog post:
[http://www.theremotetrip.com/2016/10/21/7-tools-will-
boost-r...](http://www.theremotetrip.com/2016/10/21/7-tools-will-boost-remote-
workers-productivity-road-every-day/)

Does anybody else have any other tool that they would really recommend for a
remote team?

~~~
couac
We love iDoneThis here at TailorDev.

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dep_b
Working with mixed French / German teams seems to be a more interesting
problem than having everybody working remote ;)

~~~
chunkiestbacon
I can imagine difficulties that happen regularly in those teams not appearing,
since remote work probably attracts more internationally minded people with
fluent english.

I've had to work with a french dev that only wanted to write emails in english
and refused to speak it on the phone, maybe because his office mates could
listen.

A francophone boss that was so overconfident in his english ability, that he
considered using "yeah" instead of "yes" as rude.

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draw_down
How's the pay?

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weatherstorme
Wish I enjoyed working remotely, but it drove me insane when I did it for 8
months. I was ignored, time zone differences sucked, actually need human
interaction, and I needed guidance as a junior. It's 100% a culture thing, and
if I ever do it again, then I'll make sure to choose a company which embraces
remote work.

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huhtenberg
> _Our only office is Slack._

You mistyped Mattermost :)

Seriously, no reason to share all your company inner workings with a random
3rd party when it takes literally 5 minutes to set up a completely private
(and also free!) clone of the same.

~~~
briandear
I might argue that Slack has no interest in anyone's inner workings. I've been
at companies building relatively uninteresting products that treated Github
like it was the same as emailing source code and server logins to the
competition. I could be wrong, but I have never heard of a single instance of
a company on Github having code stolen because it was on Github. I have heard
of many companies who have had their internal systems hacked.

I might trust Github more simply because their entire product and value
proposition is built around the use case of storing code while some company
that builds a restaurant app -- their primary business isn't building code
storage infrastructure. So why add operational overhead because of unfounded
paranoia?

Unless you're running your own metal in your own data center, there's always
'risk.' Even then, if your system is connected to the internet there's still
risk.

Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the
degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that
hazard occurring. Then mitigating that risk in a way that is commensurate with
those variables.

~~~
shanemhansen
GitHub delivered the wrong source code to people for a while.
[https://github.com/blog/2273-incident-report-inadvertent-
pri...](https://github.com/blog/2273-incident-report-inadvertent-private-
repository-disclosure)

I'm not bashing GitHub, but some people find more value and less risk in using
git in its "native" _distributed_ mode.

~~~
taylorfausak
I think it's a little misleading to call that "a while". The post says "156
private repositories" were affected during a "ten-minute window" representing
"0.0013% of the total operations at the time".

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k__
That page only shows white text on white background for me.

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rekoros
"Our only office is Slack"

But they're also doing consulting. What if one client adds them to HipChat and
another to Skype? Three offices this way?

~~~
couac
Ha ha. If they use HipChat and Skype, then it is a bit like we are "outside of
the office" ;-)

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nommm-nommm
Is there an expectation that you're available during non-work hours? Or does
work time and personal time blend together?

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ComodoHacker
Their fonts are broken in my Firefox 43.0.1. (I know it's old but still.)

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bbcbasic
Good on ya!

