
The Remote Work Report by Zapier - amursft
https://zapier.com/blog/remote-work-report-by-zapier/
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ThrowMeAwayOkay
Working 100% remote (software dev) for about a year and a half. 15 years in
various offices before that. I can’t imagine having to get up extra early, get
ready, drive across town, park, walk into the office, settle into my open
office air space, finally get working...then reverse the process at the end of
the day.

A recruiter cold called me recently on a local full time dev position at a big
bank. He asked “...how do you feel about wearing a tie to work?”

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austhrow743
Not only is that all dead time but since starting to work for myself I've
found that the hours right after I've just woken up, assuming no alarm clock
was involved, are the most productive I have.

I wake up, put on pants and a shirt, walk over to my office, and just dive
right in. I'm not historically a person that does that. I waffle about and
waste a tremendous amount of time. But now it just sets the tone for my whole
day as productive. By the time I'm eating breakfast or dealing with another
person, I've knocked out a few hours of work. It's just a really good position
to be approaching the day from, like no matter whatever happens to it now it
at least wasn't a waste.

Turns out my problem isn't so much that I'm just generally not that productive
so much as once I start faffing about I struggle to stop.

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paggle
Has anyone here had good luck with junior engineers working remotely? (I'm
sure companies like Zapier have solved this). I've found that with senior
engineers (defined not by the job title but the ability to take a coarsely
defined problem like "figure out what is causing the I/O performance issues on
this service and fix it") it's very easy to have them remote. Junior engineers
with a senior engineer leading/managing them on-site, also fine. But I have
not been able to successfully work with junior engineers who need mentoring
and learning remotely.

What processes/practices/tools have people succeeded with here?

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ben_jones
Many software companies lack formal training programs and documentation
processes that juniors need to grow. They come to depend on informal
training/documentation like tapping a senior on the shoulder to ask about a
legacy piece of code.

The solution is to invest heavily in regimented training programs with clear
KPIs (key performance indicators), better documentation, and a certain level
of redundancy so that remote stakeholders can hold eachother accountable.

Obviously this isn't super attractive to C levels so they are trying to hire
"Senior" developers who "don't need training". It's not working out great for
them (IMO).

\---

Realize how I don't mention remote once because failures by remote worker are
symptoms of problems that still exist even if everyone is in the same broom
closet all day.

~~~
pts_
If you can't read the code, you drag those who can down with you.

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longcommonname
I remote work because I don't want to commute.

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amursft
I was pretty surprised by some of these numbers about remote work in the U.S.
For example, 31 percent of Millenial knowledge workers surveyed work remotely
full time. 27 percent for Gen X.

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fibbery
Wonder how they sourced their survey respondants.

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amursft
Good question. They did it through Harris Poll, which should make it
relatively balanced. Sometimes you see these surveys and the population is
sourced from customers/audience of the company, which obviously tilts the kind
of responses you're going to get a bit.

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pts_
Offices are gonna be as dead as brick n mortars and theaters.

