My somewhat reductive conclusion about remote work is that it boils down to the ability to be an effective writer.
If you're not good at written communication, or you work with people who are not good at it, remote work will be miserable.
People who are not highly fluent in the company's written language or those with some level of dyslexia will struggle. Also some people get frustrated with the more analytic approach required by text, relying instead on spoken rhetoric.
I think even if you're colocated, there are huge benefits to following the remote work practices and improving your written communication. Documenting your work in an issue manager and using chat primarily for communication means no one will miss out, even if someone is sick, a new starter, or on a different team. All these things can make a dev organisation much more effective and break down silos.
This does ring true. Years ago when I was running a remote-primary shop we hired this one guy that just struggled. I spent the next year trying to get him on track and one of the big issues was his writing was terrible; both internally and with our customers.
Right before we finally gave up, I went back and looked at all his interview communications. As part of the interview we would exchange several e-mails to see how their communication was, because we lived and died by e-mail with clients. All those communications were totally on point.
So I asked him: Why were your e-mails before we hired you so good? "Oh, my wife wrote those for me." So I'm sitting there thinking "We should have hired your wife."
All of the jobs I have ever interviewed for casually listed "great oral and written communication" as a skill in the job reqs. I have felt that I had a problem in this area.
I have worked as a remote contractor off and on for most of my life and have never run into an issue.
For the past year and a half I have been on a remote team.
It wasn't until my team lead, who did all of the oral and written communication, left, this past month, that I was placed in the position to pick where he left off.
It became immediately evident how poor my skills are in this area. I know that I am a poor communicator, but I didn't realize just how insufficient I was. Not only grammar and spelling, but conveying complex subject matter in a succinct way for folks lacking detailed domain knowledge. This is a problem!
Regardless, there is hope. How do you get better at writing? Write more. At least that is what I am told. I am now chomping at the bit for long-form writing opportunities to get experiencing it putting thoughts and plans on paper, as well as, using a new SaaS app to commit/tracking writing 5 minutes a day.
If your spelling is poor, make an effort to improve. But don't wait for that to happen. Start composing your email in Google Docs or the word processor of your choice with spellcheck turned on. It is worth the extra step of copy pasting your emails in order to get spelling and grammar right.
I was never that good at writing but just putting some effort and caring about what you write down makes a huge difference. After you write an email or a document, read through the whole thing and edit. Is it obvious what I want to happen? Do I sound like a dick?
The biggest improvement for me was to give more concrete answers. Like when someone asks you for a meeting, don't just say "yeah any time's fine", actually give a few dates and times that work for you. It also cuts down on the annoying back and forth of scheduling via email.
I'm mildly confused. Your post here seems fine and quit readable. How do you arrive at the conclusion, that you're lacking in written communication skills?
"conveying complex subject matter in a succinct way for folks lacking detailed domain knowledge."
FWIW, I didn't have the same confusion about the post, so I don't know how lacking the author is in this specific setting.
But I have had the same general struggle.
I have an MA in English/rhetoric and am a software dev, and even with that nexus of training it has been a lot of work to get better at communicating... the struggle to communicate technical issues to non technical people is a lifelong journey with a complex path. It's just hard.
So here's my tip:
smaller sentences. More paragraphs. Simpler language.
And IME we do best when we develop a continual awareness that although communication is difficult, it is possible.
> So here's my tip:
>
> smaller sentences. More paragraphs. Simpler language.
I've also found thinking about sensual clues to be helpful, e.g. what would the user/customer/whatever see (or hear or feel) at this point? What (exact) text would they reasonably anchor on based on everything they might see? I also try to visually distinguish different types of info, e.g. exact text of some kind of UI element, code.
Another really helpful tip is to confirm that the user/customer/whatever sees/hears/feels some (exact) specific thing at a specific { step / point in space-time }. If they don't provide the (near) exact response I expect, I try to notice my confusion and debug right then and there until my confusion is resolved.
If you abstract it, the general form is something like "work with concepts that your audience is already familiar with", which is good advice for any communication. And, similarly, be on the look out for any data that says your communication has started to go awry.
Sample size is one, and they might've discussed this before. Someone with good written communication skills can write effectively, without too much details, quickly on the fly. The same holds true for verbal.
I believe there's two important key points: confidence (but not overconfidence) and empathy/sympathy. Putting yourself in the other person's shoe and figuring what they need to hear ie. not what you want to express. The latter is secondary!
Sure, you can practice it, but only so much. I have autism, and I'm utter shit at this (even in my native language). I've been practicing it pretty much all my life (I remember having issues with it at elementary school). I'm terrible with being to the point and keeping communication short. And if it is short, its usually too rude.
May be evidence that the additional training/work s/he's put in is paying off. I agree that the post does not show a lack of written communication skills.
One good to practice is to think of something that really bothers you: traffic, politics, your in-laws, whatever. Then write a blog post explaining why it makes you angry, and giving ways to fix it.
People say that, yet in my experience it's not actually true. We just need to communicate enough to coordinate. I'm not a great communicator, I don't think most people at my work are great communicators, yet we work just fine as a remote company. I feel people exaggerate this belief.
Regular chatter in public chat channels seems sufficient. What really seems to matter is work ethics.
Maybe the bar is lower than you think. As your comment demonstrates, you are able to form complete sentences that are either correct in terms of spelling and grammar, or so close that I can't tell the difference.
I don't know where exactly the bar is, but a sentence is certainly below it if I can't figure out whether someone told me they did X or they are asking me to do X.
I think it also makes a difference if you work with people across different timezones or not.
Regular chatter might be good enough to communicate between people in roughly the same timezone. However, If I send an unclear chat (or email) to a colleague who's starting her day when mine has already ended, she can't act on my message and we'll have to waste another day clearing up that miscommunication.
I’m on my second remote job, and I find all HN threads on the subject contain this bizarre exaggeration about how different it is, and how you need to be a certain kind of person, and have stellar communication skills. I feel like it’s the same as people warning others off living in Seattle - i.e. gate keeping.
And how are these hypothetical poor communicators performing at non-remote jobs, anyway?
I don't think you have to be an experienced essayist or something. If you can read HN and make comments I think you've probably met the bar. I've worked with people who really struggle to convey or understand technical discussions in text, such that I usually had to talk with them face to face to communicate anything non trivial.
I don't work remotely as such, but usually with distributed teams. Personally I find skype chats or similar the best way. Writing emails is quite a long winded way to get to where you want and takes me a while. Chats are more two way so you can judge where the other person is with understanding the problem, and has the benefit of being written down for future reference.
Yeah, I find Skype or Slack or some other form of IM to be absolutely invaluable in making remote work effective. But it's also semi-synchronous and interruptive, relative to email.
> Regular chatter in public chat channels seems sufficient.
That means your teammates' communication skills are sufficient! Congratulations.
> What really seems to matter is work ethics.
I disagree. Work ethics mean nothing if you don't understand the work that needs to be done, because the problem or the approach is not communicated clearly.
> it boils down to the ability to be an effective writer.
effective reader too. One should be able to quickly make sense out of several hunbdreds of email messages, otherwise it will end up in "synchronous mode" -- dozen of messaging windows opened at every moment.
I have a business partner that I can talk to very effective in person. I had to relocate, and now we have to deal mostly via email. I have been working remotely for ten years now and saw no problem with the change. But it has become disastrous. I figured out that he is just not an "email type". Only picking up the phone works with him, but this does not fit into my workflow. I'm undoing our business partnership currently.
For many, a ringing phone is much more disruptive than an email notification.
Picking up a phone for voice calls is synchronous.
Responding to an email is asynchronous.
(The asynchronous advantage is probably why SMS texting & WhatsApp/FB messaging has overtaken voice calls.)
I had a friend that didn't use email and always called my phone. Whenever I shut off the ringer, he'd eventually send me an email. But the content of that email was always, "Hey I got no answer on your phone. Give me a call."
Argh!!! Why can't you just put your question directly into the email?!? My behavior of not answering his phone calls failed to "train" him to switch to the email mode of communication. It drove me crazy. I finally realized that some people in this world have brains that work better with voice calls. Unfortunately, that's incompatible with the way I like to work.
Phrasing a question in a way that ensure it will be understood by the reader is non-trivial. For tricky problems that might require several steps of back and forth, the ability to ask clarifying questions and access tone of voice that you get on a voice call is valuable.
I'm not saying that this guy was thinking this through that extensively, but IMO there are times when a voice call is more effective.
Did you attempt to explain to him why you didn't answer the phone as opposed to trying to "train" him? i.e. engage in open communication and have a conversation about what works and what doesn't for each of you about various modes of communication.
His request for you to "give him a call" moves thing for you back into the realm of the asynchronous.
I wonder whether maybe you have some other issue with voice calls?
>, the ability to ask clarifying questions and access tone of voice that you get on a voice call is valuable. [...], but IMO there are times when a voice call is more effective.
I agree that voice calls can sometimes be more effective. Some types of tech support debugging are much easier with the interaction of live phone calls.
Those weren't the type of calls my friend was making. His calls were banal questions like, "I'm looking at these cameras the Canon 10D and Nikon D70. Which do you think is better?" He could have just typed that question into an email for me to reply whenever it was convenient. Instead, I hold the phone to my ear while I'm googling "Canon 10D vs Nikon D70".
>Did you attempt to explain to him why you didn't answer the phone as opposed to trying to "train" him?
No, I never told him in blunt terms, "don't call me anymore unless it's a complex question that requires the advantages of voice communication." I was hoping that dropping a ton of hints would do it but it didn't work. In any case, I changed my number so it's no longer a problem.
>His request for you to "give him a call" moves thing for you back into the realm of the asynchronous.
Not really because what ends up happening is after I call back, his brain says, "jasode is available now" and he'll call 5 or 15 minutes later with a new question. His threshold for initiating phone calls was very low which put me back in synchronous hell.
>I wonder whether maybe you have some other issue with voice calls?
Well yes, as I mentioned earlier: it's not my preferred form of communication. I do acknowledge and respect the fact that others default to voice but that doesn't change the fact that it's incompatible with how my brain works.
There is clearly a disconnect between people who prefer different modes of communication since the gp poster (throwawaymath) seemed truly confused and therefore asked, "Why doesn't picking up a phone fit into your workflow?"
_Always_ picking up the phone doesn't fit into my workflow. Some things are better discussed via email or chat. I think it is very difficult to work remotely if you only have direct verbal communication available.
sort of tangental, but i wonder how a drop in/drop out system like teamspeak/vent/discord/etc. would work in a professional setting. you have direct calls still, but if you just want to be available to coordinate through voice you could. similar to leaving your door open and letting people stop by.
> If you're not good at written communication, or you work with people who are not good at it, remote work will be miserable.
I had a pretty poor team leader a few years ago with a bums in seat type job. He would never write anything down and teh result was quite frustrating. The spec used to change frequenty and he would come and verbally tell me it. then he would change it again, then again. A week or two later when I actually got around to implementing teh said feature I would ask him what he wanted done,
"I thought we talked about that."
"Yes we did but you changed your mind 4 times and I can't remember what the conclusion was."
I used to regularly ask him to put things in writing, but he was usually to lazy to deliver on that.
So I don't think these problems are unique to remote teams.
One species of gatekeeper (control freak) won't write things down.
Another insists that if it's not documented, it didn't happen.
These challenges have confounded me all my working life.
My few truly positive working experiences happened when there was mutual trust, regard, esteem. First time it happened, I was gobsmacked. I'd read about trust, but had never seen it IRL. It was a never ending warm fuzzy bath of shared awesomeness.
I still have few ideas how to find, nurture, create trust (especially in a chaotic env). But I now know it when I see it. And when I'm not feeling it, I mostly just go thru the 9-5 motions, keeping my expectations and investments lower.
TBH, I think was somehow your fault. Before writing even a single line of code I make sure that "I" understood what is needed.
Then, if nothing is written down anywhere, I'd just sum up what I am going to implement (email, wiki, internal docs, readme whatever) and send it to anyone involved.
Check mate for for control-freak-undecided-colleagues. :)
I agree that writing well is important, but I would characterize this as beyond writing alone. Assuming that "remote work" isn't confined only to teams in time zones where working hours don't overlap, it's quite easy to start a chat or an audio call/conference. "Talking" directly is more important, and many a times yields quicker results than exchanging long emails or documents, whether it's with text (chat) or voice or even video calls. But it does come at the cost of trying to setup a mutually convenient time and being available (synchronous vs. asynchronous).
If you're working in a largely co-located company, where video conferences are an uncommon occurrence then this probably fits.
In the context of this conversation around remote only companies though, everyone is going to be set up to be able to properly participate in a video call - that means making sure everyone has a decent internet connection, microphone, and camera at home. When people aren't at home tools like Zoom have the ability for them to dial in to conferences on a regular phone which deals with the remaining problems.
> In the context of this conversation around remote only companies though
I've worked mostly remote for many years and please trust me - it's almost exactly the same, with every weekly meeting starting with "is everyone here", "do you hear me?" etc etc.
This is especially when working from home - typical residential connections are having less nicer SLA and may get flaky from time to time. And someone may leave their phone near mic cable. Or someone's machine may need rebooting. Or conferencing service may be experiencing problems.
Glad if it's not like this for some, but I believe it's not exactly uncommon.
I worked with a team remotely for 3 years, solely relying on Google Hangouts for video and an occasional Zoom meeting. The video/mic/hardware problems are _incredibly_ rare.
Being late or grabbing coffee instead of starting a meeting are culture problems at a company, not problems with the medium.
> The video/mic/hardware problems are _incredibly_ rare.
You've had better luck than I have. Our New York team is still dealing with the problem of the Boston office being virtually inaudible, while Dublin sounds like they're speaking through a megaphone directly into my ear.
That is, assuming we didn't lose a room, or the Hangouts equipment isn't broken - then Boston uses our manager's laptop, which actually sometimes has better sound quality.
I covered part of this under "being available" at the end of my comment. But I completely get what you're driving at. Apart from people's availability, some of the technology is still horrible and quite unreliable (I'm looking at you, Skype for Business). But my main point was that writing emails and documentation cannot be a substitute for instant communication (chat) or voice communication.
I think the thing a lot of people struggle with are applying soft skills in their written words. Many devs in my experience come across as very analytical, almost emotionless in their written communication. It's precise, but not great for developing social bonds. It's something I'm very guilty of myself, especially in code reviews. I think we could all benefit by considering the human element in our writing.
It's such a different skill set though compared to in-person communication, where much of this happens non-verbally. I think it's a lot easier for people who grew up with it. I spent a lot of time on MUDs and BBSs when I was younger, where this kind of communication was prevalent.
I like this idea of a "company's written language", I have known many people who are great communicators who nonetheless didn't write using the correct corporate cultural terms and were viewed as "poor communicators".
Basically this boils down to how strictly you cling to new buzzwords.
I agree completely, and to build on that idea, it is extremely valuable to be able to take an idea from your head and write it down in a way that fully explains the idea, but is as concise as possible. I see this go wrong a lot in Slack. Some people will not take the time to completely form a thought and will instead just type everything that is in there head as quickly as they can. Then others react because they have misunderstood the original point. If you have a few people trying to communicate with this method it quickly becomes chaos. The process of untangling some of those types of conversations can take far longer than the original conversation did.
Even though I'm much better at expressing myself with writing than through speaking, I get some anxiety about bothering people or keeping their attention that makes it difficult to "work through" a problem remotely. When I know exactly what I'm doing and just need to communicate it, everything's great. When there's an issue that two or more people need to look at and discuss at the same time, it gets much more difficult. I'd be the perfect remote worker for a company without tight deadlines where there are never any "fires" that need to be put out. But there aren't very many of those.
100% agree. I think this would even apply to non-remote jobs too.
I used to work remotely as a freelancer and I miss it so much. I now work in-house at an agency and everyone here fails so miserably at writing. Almost all discussion is verbal, nothing is documented and so much double-work happens it's not even funny.
To make matters worse, the agency doesn't use any project management software. So all projects have seemingly imminent deadlines. It's miserable.
If our team was more apt to learn, adapt and document more, we'd probably be a lot happier.
This is the main reason I want to try and learn Emacs, OrgMode, and Babel. The stuff that Howard Abrahams discusses on the below video is something I think would be highly successful in a remote environment. Documenting your workflow as you go, including commands and output, then emailing it to your team that day or uploading it to a document store/gitbook:
You can grasp org.mode pretty quickly, is all tab-tab-tab and a lot of asterisks here and there.
Emacs needs more effort but it is an achievable goal. Very customisable so you could even ask somebody to create your own comands and circumnavigate the hairy parts for a lot of time until building enough confidence. Finding a good tutor or having somebody interested in the program in your company would help a lot, obviously.
>If you're not good at written communication, or you work with people who are not good at it, remote work will be miserable.
not just remote - any and all work will be miserable. I work remote and in person with lots of people who will not write things down. When I call them on it, they say "I'm not your secretary" - but they are happy to have everyone be their secretary.
We had the same problem even in person to be fair: one of the guy didn't speak english properly, we had a lot of troubles understanding him. And he also talked a lot, which made things worse (listen to a lot of things you don't understand).
In the end, communication must be great, no matter what.
No amount of writing in my life prepared me for the amount of writing I do as a remote developer. I probably write 20+ "pages" a day if you count all of the documentation, emails, chat messages and GitHub discussions I write. Luckily for me, I love writing.
> Disadvantages
> Scares investors - Scares some partners - Scares some customers - Scares some potential employees, mostly senior non-technical hires - Onboarding is harder, first month feels lonely
We do a full remote policy at SerpApi.com, however I found this disadvantages list a bit dishonest, they are more way numerous and important, the most obvious are missing real human contacts (and it doesn't get easier with time), and harder life and work separation.
For me, personally, working from home has amplified the good parts of working with people and human contact and removed the bad parts.
When we do meet in person (4-5 times a year) we have a blast.
When we communicate via video the communication is a lot of fun and very purposeful at the same time. Sometimes it feels like I speak to remote co-workers by video more than family and people in real life! So, lot's of human interaction there.
At the same time, there is now no interruptions when someone gets bored and wanders over for a chat.
There is no need to instantly answer questions when overly eager bosses have a brain... idea.
There is no need to watch the clock and make it look like I'm staying late just cos everyone else is.
And I can work on stuff anytime I like, like if I wake up at 5am by accident I can knock out the current sprint board and have a break during the day.
So, in my case at least, saying "the most obvious are missing real human contacts" is simply not true.
I do think that remote working is a bit difficult to pull off well and I've found the key is to really get to know people well when in person and on video chat.
Yeah, "missing real human contacts" doesn't reflect my experience with remote work either. I'd characterize it as giving me much more control over my real human contact: I get to spend time with who I want on my own schedule to a much greater degree than I could in office jobs. Day to day that's mostly people who have nothing to do with my current work: girlfriend, friends, family, people at my krav maga classes, etc. and as a (sociable) introvert I don't burn through so much of my "social energy" just having to be around people in an office all day.
I'm sitting at my desk with my noise-cancelling headphones doing a mediocre job of blocking the 20-minute "standup" happening next to me in our open office. I'm going to be transitioning to a remote position soon, and can't wait. I already have two unsolicited offers from friends with office space to let me work in their spaces occasionally, so I have options for getting human contact—when I want it.
My need for human contact is not only verbal communication: it's cleaning the coffee machine, taking a walk, playing around, throwing a duck, being randomly head-butted by a scrum master, going for an afterwork beer... Lot of interaction with people
Yes, I don't think it's one size fits all by any means. It sounds like any company you work for needs to have real world team interaction as part of the day to day. Nothing wrong with that!
I agree here. The extra time I get to spend with my young kids, my wife, and my friends instead of commuting is the polar opposite of a drawback with regards to human contact.
I don't share your pessimism about the list of downsides, and am honestly surprised, as while normally I chuckle at the "HN is always negative" sentiment, this post being the top reply is a real head scratcher, as someone who is both 1. on a >75% remote team, and 2. who has been advocating/watching HN advocate for remote for quite some time.
I'd say "missing real human contacts" is summarized well under a combination of harder rampup/scares some potential employees; as the lack of "Real contacts" seems more of a personal/subjective or team-process-and-tooling-rooted feeling than anything I've observed to be inherent and unsolvable; it's trivial for me to get a face to face with anyone on my multi-national team. Now, to try and read this charitably, if you meant something like "increased difficulty networking" I'd actually agree, but again, if you're at a place in your career where you accept that, it's significantly less of a downside.
Mostly, that's the gist of a lot of the things people list as hard negatives to my ears, including your second point of harder life/work separation. I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." (Edit: see my clarification in child post re: this wording, I came off more accusatory than I'd have liked, but didn't want to rewrite history) With the broad slew of coworking spaces, home offices, coffee shops, and other ways to partition one's time and mental spaces, I don't accept that that's something that can't be solved in the same proactive fashion as a professional would approach any assorted social frictions one might run into in _any_ office environment.
If you read any frustration in this, it comes from a place of, "a lot of the complaints I read are solvable problems or isomorphisms of in-office problems", and a hope that we'd be self-interested enough as a field to be more proactive in seeking solutions, given the benefits that can come from a more distributed workforce. I want to encourage and productively improve sites that try to support this, and part of that is avoiding a re-encroachment of remote work stigma/fear in many people's eyes.
Edit: yes, I'm going to break the HN rules, but christ people, at least _respond_ before blindly downvoting. This was not a glib response, and this topic (remote work) is something we should be able to discuss in good faith without accruing negative score before I even finish grammar-checking my own writing.
>I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem."
This is incredibly dismissive. Almost all the "advantages for employees" are personal. How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit? The advantages for remote work are almost entirely being sold that they are better for people. If someone has a personal problem with an aspect of it, then it should be taken seriously.
Imagine if you told an employer that the commute to work was rough so you would like to work remote and he told you "that sounds like a personal problem, why don't you move closer to work?"
> How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit?
My commute is a 20 minute walk through a very nice park, and my partner walks the same route in the morning. It’s one of my favourite parts of the day, and it would be a hard push to get me to give that up right now.
Where do we draw the line though? Do we draw the line? At what point do my personal preferences/issues (and trust me I have plenty of my own) become my team's/workplace's problem? I certainly fall closer to the side of "it's my job as a professional to find a situation that doesn't drive me nuts", which is probably where our disagreement might arise. (Candidly, and unfortunately, it's probably born out of the pragmatic "a job don't owe you nothing" upbringing)
You aptly point out that "no commuting or stress" is a personal benefit; to play devils advocate with that, wouldn't having a "typical job" then be "dismissive" in not catering to someone who might be incredibly sensitive to the commute? I bring up this contrast since I think a lot of the friction with remote is that it's a change from the status quo, not necessarily that the status quo doesn't incur its own comparable (if inverted) costs.
Let me try and rephrase my point better, regardless. I don't think there's a one size fits all, period. Some people simply want/like/work better in some environments than others, and to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.
You asked the question at the end re: a boss telling me that about my commute. Honestly, yes, this has happened to me. And I switched teams, to the one I'm currently on, which is extremely remote friendly. I don't mean to whitewash remote work for any given person or say that everyone has such a lucky opportunity, I see it as two sides to the same coin, in which we shouldn't assume highly-granular personal choices to be a global downside to remote work, and we should enable as many opportunities for that choice to be present as possible.
Edit: After rereading my posts, I'll concede that "personal problem" may not have been the best way to put it, and comes off as far too accusatory. I want to delineate between problems I expect a professional adult to be able to understand their own exposure to and handle via their own autonomy, vs problems that are only in the purview of the workplace to solve/that we can't expect individuals to navigate feasibly.
> to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.
I'm not sure that listing pros/cons paints them as anything (or vice-versa), though maybe I haven't quite gotten your point (and I've read all your edits).
I've never had an opportunity to work anywhere all-remote, remote-first, or even truly remote-friendly, and I harbor an interest in the discussions, including anecdata, primarily because so many of these things are personal. I, as a reader, am pretty capable of figuring out which personal preferences don't actually match up to my own and which pros/cons may not actually apply to my situation or profession. The water isn't muddied for me by more information.
As such, I very much would prefer to hear a more complete [1] and expansive list of both advantages and disadvantages to a remote-only culture. I find it's even important to include what you describe as "isomorphisms of in-office problems" if only to point how they're easier/harder to deal with when working remote.
[1] I think a grandparent comment used the adjective "honest", but I think that's only relevant as maybe a jab at the article itself, which is clearly promoting an agenda.
The advantages are not all personal. The environmental benefits that come from reduced travel and reduced need for office space (which sits empty much of the time) is no joke. Neither is the economic / environmental benefit of freeing people up to live anywhere, not just where the corporate offices / factories happen to have located. That means people can go where the housing is available and affordable. We can repopulate areas -- like many midwestern small towns and medium towns -- that have emptied out as jobs have moved away.
These are very significant societal benefits, not personal ones.
That said, remote working isn't going to work for everyone. Extroverts, especially, I think tend to struggle with it a little bit.
I actually do agree 100%, both issues that I've posted are personal issues, however, remote work is also meant to solve personal issues in the first place, so I don't think it's disconnected.
I do have made my company fully remote so I do believe remote work is way of the future, but we can't be disingenuous about its downsides.
I think a lot of it has to do with HN being frequented by people in SF who do like their workplaces, and are being overwhelmingly incentivized monetarily to like them. People outside US seem to be a lot more sympathetic to the idea.
If the downside is "lack of separate workspace / human contact", then it is blown way out of proportion imho. It's easily solved by using a coworking space, and it's not reason enough to dismiss remote work.
You might want to try using a writing style less similar to coding. I don't know if I'm noticing a trend between an influx of new users from reddit after their BS UI redesign, but your text can get quite dense (it's not lacking in information that makes sense). Did upvote you because I feel you made some very experienced and work-aware points.
Meta-comment: You're right, and it's a weakness I've observed in my own posts for years now. There are other commentators that often come into HN threads I post in, and make my point better+more succinctly than I could have. I wish I could replicate/learn from those examples better. I think it's less of a redditism and my own overly-loquatious style/attempting to avoid misunderstanding through verboseness. The feedback is really appreciated.
It's a life long habit to unlearn, because you have to balance the skill set.
When you are intending to speak to an audience, I think it matters to know your audience, which gets complicated, when the audience is constantly shifting.
This assumes that the only place a remote worker can work from is their home. There is nothing more detrimental to a person's psyche. Cafes and coworking spaces are the most obvious and effective solution to this problem.
I made countless friends while working remotely and a good 90% of them I met in a coworking space (and the so called "digital nomad" community is made of some really awesome people). Plus you have the option to change coworking space if you don't like the people, the coffee, the wallpapers or whatever. You can't do that with a traditional office (or it would be reaaally hard to justify).
> This assumes that the only place a remote worker can work from is their home. There is nothing more detrimental to a person's psyche.
That is rather hyperbolic. Many remote workers do fine working from home. Others do not. Not all people are the same. Any of us can think of things that are "more detrimental to a person's psyche" for nearly all individuals.
What does it have to do people using the bathroom and not washing their hands with my junk?
I can only suppose you mean everyone can just rinse his hands after using the urinal because his genitals are clean. They aren't, unless your sweat is both antiseptic and insecticide. Anyway, I meant using toilets too, not just urinals.
But, see, the way to get it "clean" is by washing ones hands regularly with soap and warm water (ideally before touching it [1]).
Really, though, you're making the (likely false) assumption that ones "junk" is the only thing touched in the restroom. You're also ignoring the potential for aeresolized bits of feces sprayed by commercial flush mechanisms.
None of this adds up to "filthy" per se, but hand washing is one of the best disease spreading preventions we know of.
Personally, if they're not going to wash I'd rather someone not go anywhere near the sink after using the restroom instead of also touching the fixtures and giving the bacteria on their hands a drink of water.
[1] I once worked in a building with a dentist who washed both before and after.
I always do both and it feels extremely weird to see people not actually do it.
In between bathroom breaks at work I've touched my desk, keyboard, smartphone screen, perhaps adjusted my shoes, perhaps shook someones hand. By that time, hands already feel filthy enough to not want to touch myself anywhere before washing.
I suspect that's where you may be crossing over into an irrational fear of dirt and/or germs, which can lead to, at the very least, people being dismissive of concerns.
After all, your desk, keyboard, smartphone screen, and even shoes aren't likely to be places other people have touched, so not much potential for spreading anything.
Your keyboard is filthy, but your fingers aren't really the best bet for germs to infect you, unless you put them in an orifice or touch some skinless area probably. I'll avoid further details.
But yes, I'm not suggesting that not washing your hands all the time greatly increase your likelihood of getting infected with something. Just slightly. I just have slight OCD and it's still weird to me how people don't feel anywhere close to the same way I do about these things.
I guess I don't see the risk? It's been close to 20 years since I last had a stomach flu, and never got salmonella yet. I believe total avoidance of all bacteria is just going to make my immune system more lax.
Don't worry though, I do wash my hands after a bathroom visit. I just don't care that much if someone else doesn't.
That's the point, though. Once you "see" it, it's way too late.
> It's been close to 20 years since
That's just anecdata, but, as you point out, you do wash your hands.
> total avoidance of all bacteria
That's not exactly possible (and essentially deadly, unless there are archea that can take the place of all our gut bacteria.. I'm not sure).
> I just don't care that much if someone else doesn't.
I'd agree it's unreasonable to care more than just slightly, since they'd be increasing the risk more for themselves than for you. However, increased risk for everyone (including you) is non-zero.
> That's the point, though. Once you "see" it, it's way too late.
I see your point, but it simply falls to things I rather not care about. Adding a mental/habitual burden on something that is either unlikely or not that serious isn't just worth it; a life is more relaxed if it can be disregarded.
I also acknowledge that it's not something that can be simply chosen though. I do I know about certain things way more than some of my friends, even if I didn't want to.
Everybody is different, which is something that I think HNers seem to forget sometimes.
Some people thrive working from home. Some people thrive working with a colocated team in a private office. Some people would thrive on a remote team, but working in a coworking space (I'm in this boat).
Personally, I'd go stir crazy if I worked from home on a regular basis, not just from social isolation, but from working where I live. I try to keep my life compartmentalised; my gym, my work, my home, and the bar I drink at are all different places and I like it that way.
I work alone from home and love it. I can have quiet/nap time when I need it, make my own food, and spend time with my dog.
I'm very social and love spending time with people, but work isn't my outlet for that. I find that friends in an office end up decreasing my productivity and causing me to have less free time for friends, family, and relaxation.
Agree completely. The power of remote work is not just avoiding your commute and working in pyjamas, but being free to choose your environment. You could work for a company based in a big, expensive city, but live hours away in a smaller town.
Or perhaps your partner works in a regional area, but you can take a tech job from afar rather than be limited by the local market.
That surely helps but at the end of the day it depends on your personality. Some people can go a lot longer working completely alone (e.g. if you have a family), others prefer working in a more social environment (e.g. solo travellers), at least occasionally. I definitely prefer the latter.
I've worked exclusively remotely for a number of years, and while I tend to prefer it, there are times where I miss the hustle and bustle of an office place.
For those occasions, I've always just relocated to either a coffee shop (or similar) or a co-working space with drop-in rates. If you're extremely rural, or those aren't options, I don't know what to tell you.
I got a 3 monitor setup at home, which basically quadrupled my productivity. I now work from coffee shops only if I’m doing “shallow work” - lots of small tasks, none of which requires deep thinking. For example if I need to answer a bunch of emails I’ll do that from a coffee shop.
I think this is a great balance and something I'm interested in trying more. I have three displays at home and four displays at my co-working space desk, but I'm interested in periodically using a local pub for sessions of 2-3 hours to do single-screen work over a beer. e.g., dealing with emails, invoicing, etc.
But seriously, how would it be a problem? In the afternoons, we often have a beer at our desks while working. I often work at night after having a drink at dinner or in the afternoon after lunch at the pub. Having a pint beside the laptop while answering emails or working on a side project or making content changes for a client wouldn't be especially difficult or problematic.
I've worked for myself for 20 years (http://www.isaacforman.com.au/) so there are rarely issues with time and place of work either. I'm mostly anchored to my desk because I like the room to move of four displays.
It never occurred to me to be desirable to mix alcohol and working. I don't drink much but if i choose to have a pint it is as a reward after finishing work. It's like a ritual that delineates clearly that work has finished and it's time to unwind. That feeling is practically the best thing about the pint.
This hasn't been my experience. I have worked remotely for years and I don't miss the open-office environments in the least. For me, nothing is more detrimental to my psyche and health than an open-office environment. I guess we all have different needs.
I really hate "real human contacts", when absolutely everybody can interrupt you, when you need to listen somebody's else "interesting" stories just because saying "stop trash talking" is not polite.
Working remote is not for everyone. I was in a 100% remote position for 3 - 4 months and really missed the human contact. We had numerous calls, great tools for sharing, but for me personally I need to be around people.
Perhaps it would be better to remove "remote" from the title completely. You may have several locations where people can come together, don't call them headquarters and those not there remote, but instead everyone is team member who sits in various sites. Some of those sites have 1 person, others have 4 or 5 or 10. And those with more than an individual
I'll start by saying that pushing to normalize remote-work is a noble endeavor. But that being said, as you said, glossing over the disadvantages leaves this site/post feeling very one-sided. I say this as someone worked fully remote for 2 years. It was a fantastic job but the main reason I left was the disadvantages of being remote. To say that the advantages are far more numerous, and far outweigh the disadvantages is subjective and myopic. It works for some people and some types of work but to say it's the Best Solution sadly seems to be to just be being disingenuous.
Another disadvantage of global employees is the overhead of understanding employment law, taxes, etc for each of your employees' countries and/or provinces.
Having clusters of remote workers, perhaps there is a sweet spot.
This seems more like an opportunity for a company to come in and handle those details for you. I believe those exist already but they seem mostly targeted at larger multinationals rather than scrappy remote-only startups.
I think the HN population is strongly skewed towards people who prefer to sit alone and work.
I just changed job from an open office to remote work, and while everybody thought my new job sounded like a great opportunity, no one was jealous of the remote part - "So, now you have rent a shared office, huh?" (and yes, that is what I did)
I've been working remote for 3 years now in software and I agree completely.
The biggest downsides are: loneliness, feeling like a shut in, and working all the time because you're only two steps from your "office". These are NP-hard problems to solve, especially for an introverted 4-eyes like me.
> the most obvious are missing real human contacts
Human contact for me is more about friends and out of work activity. Colleagues are colleagues, if you want "real human" interaction, you'd need to get out of the office anyway.
They don't pay us to socialise, and I can count the number of times on my middle finger of how many people who at the offices I've worked at I'd want to spend my free time with.
Strangely, now that I'm working remotely, I actually do socialise with my colleagues when we meet every 3 months, and enjoy it.
Apart from that, I'm around people who I enjoy being with instead of staring the clock or the rear of a car. And I have more social energy to do so.
I worked for a company that was mostly a remote workplace for almost a year, and there were a lot of problems i found while trying to manage a team.
Time zones, were a huge issue and pain point when trying to get a large number of people on the same page. I found my self often having to give the same meeting twice, which put more pressure on me. Even worse was when i would have to go over points only for someone who wasn't available for the first meeting, to raise issues that we didn't notice, and so on.
After 6 months the team basically felt like it dissolved into the European team, and the North American Team. With me trying to ferry information from one team to another.
So many times regardless of how amazing the latest tools we tried were, it still pales in comparison to a whiteboard. The company bought me a high end digital whiteboard, that allowed me to pass control to other people, it was a buggy POS. On top of that since i was the only one unfortunately with the white board, it meant i was the one who was always doing the drawing and trying to extrapolate a diagram from what someone says.
Sometimes some team members would spend hours drawing up a digital mock up of what they were going to push for only for it to become completely useless within a very short time.
I also found some people no matter how hard i tried, some people seemed to interpret working remote meant, they got to work in their own silo, and would ignore 99% of everything going on around them. This lead to numerous conflicts, and other issues.
Also one other thing i found, was that 1 on 1's became super impersonal, and frankly felt extremely uncomfortable.
The website appears to emphasize communicating via the written word and other asynchronous forms of communication. I'm curious whether you found communicating asynchronously didn't work or wasn't as effective or if it was the team members specifically that were the issue?
I'm not the parent poster, but I think the document glossed over the biggest perceived disadvantage:
Despite technological advances, I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information and come to conclusions on difficult decisions. It's also the least susceptible to misinterpretation.
> I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information ...
Why do people think this. For one thing, and I think it is most important, face to face communication does not give either parties time to think. It ends up with awkward, unproductive pauses.
Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought...
I’ve found face to face communication effective for resolving contentious disagreements and, as the parent said, difficult conclusions. I’ve seen things get a bit out of hand over email that then get resolved quite efficiently after a face to face.
Live video chat is a good alternative, but I think more natural human empthay comes out in face to face experiences. People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved quickly before they fester. Live video chat gets you much of this but isn’t quite as effective in my experience.
To me this observation just means that on remote teams you need to be observant of such issues and spend a little more time to resolve them, which can be a fine trade off for remote teams. (Or ideally avoid overly contentious debates in the first place)
In my experience face to face communication is great for resolving contentious technical disagreements because whoever is doing the most thinking and the least talking falls behind, thinks "fuck this" and capitulates instantly; usually resulting in the wrong decision being made.
If the metric is "time to decision" then face to face will do very well.
>I’ve found face to face communication effective for resolving contentious disagreements...
I have observed the same. But 9 out of 10 times, it was because the losing party couldn't spend much time thinking about counter arguments.
So again, it cures the symptom, but it benefits only the person with the loudest voice in the room, and not the one with sound reason.
>People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved...
Don't buy this either. As I said before, the "seem to understand" bit might come from the fact that people often does not express disagreement in face to face communication that often, because they didn't have time to think it through.
EDIT: This is assuming that the both parties in the discussion are more or less on the same level of competence. If the communication is going to be mostly one sided, then face to face communication (Like a teacher in a class room) is fine.
> So again, it cures the symptom, but it benefits only the person with the loudest voice in the room, and not the one with sound reason.
..or even just the facts. I have, on (fortunately rare) occasions, refused to heed a manager's encouragement to speak with someone directly, because my disagreement isn't even about reasoning, but about facts.
It can be remarkably frustrating to have to repeat the same thing to someone who believes in something that is demonstrably false. At least over e-mail one can copy-and-paste.
It's as if (some) people can't tell the difference between matters of fact and matters of opinion (or judgment).
It may be true that face-to-face is best at resolving contentious disagreements on matters of opinion. However, I'd think it could only be true if those disagreements are based on everyone reaching their opinions from the same facts, and even determining if that's the case could easily be short-circuited by a premature opinion (e.g. loudest voice in the room).
You know, face to face communication is good if you are repeating stuff you heard from somewhere or stuff like "Hi there, how was your weekend" type of talk.
When you want productive communication, you want thought backing content and framing of every one of your sentences...
There are ways to alleviate these problems though. By "disadvantages" in this respect I understand "inherent problems that can't easily be solved or at least alleviated".
You can establish policies that ensure life and work separation (as in: "No calls outside of designated work hours") but you can't easily allay an instinctive as well as indistinct fear that everything will go the dogs if people don't work in the same office anymore.
Doesn't seem to be much discussion about the environmental impact of remote work.
Lately I have been feeling how ridiculous it is for me to drive everyday to a office and sit at a computer then drive home. So inefficient from an energy usage perspective.
I see so many jobs that could easily be remote if people could deal with the issues outlined here.
Imagine the difference in traffic and office space if every job that could be remote was. I would think the environmental impact would be huge.
In a utopian view I could see us returning to small villages as there is no need to move to the city. You could live in smaller communities wherever you like with others you get along with in person.
High speed internet has made this possible, but it seem like we have just scratched the surface of how it could change society and the planet.
There is a company in Switzerland that is trying to get companies stop having their own offices, instead offer to employees the possibility to work in their local town / village in coworking spaces that they connect to the network.
To work at home is not for everyone, it can be lonely, you might not have an extra rooms to use as an office. So with their still the employer paying for your office and for all the infrastructure you need.
I did some reading on the impact of remote work on the environment last year, unfortunately it seems I may have been too aggressive with my bookmark pruning and can no longer find the material I managed to dig up. Between just the pure numbers of cars being removed from the road and the improved efficiency of those that remain (less stop & go traffic, etc), the impact seems to be fairly substantial.
Plus then companies can have smaller offices, saving money and energy. People save themselves an hour or two every day by avoiding the commute. You have to wonder how much the butts-in-seats philosophy is actually costing the world.
Co-working spaces could be a big deal if they catch up (i.e. if real estate prices drop enough so they can be affordable to everyone). They would create small "commercial" regions around them with a small scale economy around them, and that could be transformative for neighborhoods.
I wonder if the claim of environmental friendliness actually works out in practise. Friends of mine who do remote jobs occasionally have the need to meet in person requiring international flights (which while being infrequent, are far more impactful than a local commute by car). You could say this isn't true remote work, but it seems to be the common manifestation. Conversely you can live closely enough to a workplace to walk or cycle.
It seems to me nearly all white collar office/desk jobs could be remote as they basically involve sitting at a desk with a computer and phone. I believe more than half of all jobs in the US are considered white collar.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic about what could be done remote, but modern cities seem to be basically a bunch of tall buildings with offices that have a desk and computer to sit at.
It seems to me nearly all white collar office/desk jobs could be remote as they basically involve sitting at a desk with a computer and phone. I believe more than half of all jobs in the US are considered white collar.
You are cheating! Not all white collar workers can work remotely. Everything healthcare, legal, teachers, everybody with a public-facing work, computer technicians, sales... Actually, could anybody make the reverse list? Better than dismiss the discussion with another downvote.
But the decrease in traffic and used office space translates to significantly less commuting time and more space at work for people who can't work remotely. It benefits everyone.
Cities are essential for social life since an abundance of social events, potential friends and sexual partners means that you'll be able to choose ones that you like more (or even have some as opposed to none).
The effect of remote work is instead that it no longer matters as much in which city you live, as long as it is large enough.
I've worked mostly remote for over 20 years, both as an engineer and a business owner. I wouldn't give it up for the world.
However, simple fact: not all people are cut out for it. Some perfectly fine engineers are better in an office environment with other people. Sometimes an office environment is LESS distracting for those people, not more.
It also depends on where they are in life: A person with toddlers is going to have a better work life if they can get away occasionally. I had my own struggles with this and had to work through the new environment.
So, both are good and can work depending on when and where your life is at, and neither is perfect.
+1. I'm the exact opposite. I've been offered remote jobs a couple of times, but there's just something about going to an office, talking with people in real life, even getting interrupted during work is something i tend to like. Working from home, or even from a co-working space doesn't make me happy.
A lot of the things mentioned in this manifesto are perfectly valid for non-remote work as well. Making sure knowledge is written down, shorter and fewer meetings, 'results of work over the hours put in' seem useful in any work setting.
I tend to lean more towards the classic introvert where too much interaction will tire me out after a while, but I make sure to spend time with people I care about on the weekends to balance things out and that's usually the right balance. My week is devoted to work and taking care of the kids, which I love too.
I still go through peaks and valleys of how much outside interaction I'm craving though.
I completely agree with this. Probably due to being much earlier in my career, I haven't yet learnt how to separate my personal life from my work life well. I use the office and my commute to form a boundary, which works very well so I have a good work life balance, but as soon as I work from home I either get much less done, or I get much more done and have no free time. I hope to improve at this, in 10 years time (when I hope to own a house/have a family/etc) I'd hope that I'm working from home 1-2 days a week _every week_, but I'm not there yet.
I've been working remotely for the past half year (same job and same place, I just started doing it remotely) and I was a little afraid of that: mixing my personal and professional time.
For me at least it turns out that the fear was completely unfounded, before I always got in at roughly the same time and always left at the same time, leaving the laptop and phone on the office. Now while technically the laptop and phone are always accessible I've found that I've no problem in keeping my working time within a very strict schedule, normally I start at ~8.00 and usually at 16.00 almost exactly I'm logging out, plus the phone goes automatically into do not disturb mode until the following morning, effectively recreating my office working routine. Your mileage may vary of course but I was surprised at how easy it was to completely separate my activities and preventing them blending together.
The struggle never really goes away and you have to accept that. You will have peaks where you're excited about something and super productive working late and then valleys where you go weeks feeling way less productive.
Life will find ways to make you have to change your strategy over and over, but I think that's more about being human than anything to do with where you decide to work.
Yo, you gotta tell me when you’re working. You must. You’re on a team that is depending on you and somebody has to know where the fuck your are and when you’re going to fix whatever is broken today.
“Where’s will?”
“I don’t know, our manifesto says nobody gets to know when he’s working.”
“Well he broke the site.”
“That’s his right as a sovereign citizen.”
The end.
If Kevin broke the site, it's a process problem. Kevin didn't break the site, he introduced code that might have broken the site, and the lack of tests to have detected the it broke the site. Jane then peer reviewed the code that might have broken the site and approved it. Bob then failed to notice that the site was broken during QA. The QA environment was apparently configured differently enough by Taylor that the site could appear working in dev and QA, and pass unit and functional tests without exploding until it hit production.
As true as this is, unexpected problems happen. Kevin may be the only one that can fix it, or at least be able to fix it a lot more effectively than others. The issue might not be Kevin's fault (i.e it's really a process problem), but being able to talk to him immediately (or at least know his schedule) will go a long ways in getting the issue resolved in an acceptable time frame.
Nothing against remote work, but knowing everyone's typical working hours makes things run a lot more smoothly.
And when it's the build server itself that's broken? No process can account for every possible edge case, and you need to have flexibility to handle the unexpected.
At some point problems reach the "Call Kevin now, I don't care what time it is" level. Your processes should enable anyone to handle problems that are not at this level.
if the build system is broken, then no new code gets built to roll to production. Your build system has no resiliency in terms of having more than one, or ability to roll back? Do you even have version control implemented along with a mature change control process, with automation and monitoring in place?
Kevin's available hours should be common knowledge, or easily findable in a system of some sort, ranging from text file to excel sheet to Exchange to massively overpriced time-tracking software.
Doesn't really help to know peoples hours. If they're not overlapping with yours then you have a potentially crazy overhead on time it takes to get responses to issues that could hold up your work completely.
That's a fundamental problem of teamwork. This also happens when the coworker sitting right next to you, working the same hours, has a higher-priority task than the one you're waiting for.
It absolutely does, although in my personal experience far, far more rarely. And even if that person was sitting remotely at their own hours you’ld then have to wait for them to get ”to work” and then do that higher-priority task and then get to your request so the overhead is still waaaaay bigger.
This was in response to Practical Tip #1: "People don't have to say when they are working."
I'm arguing that this tip is harmful. I should know he was on vacation, and thus have a plan in place to handle anything that might come up while he's on vacation. If I'm completely in the dark about when he's working, things are going to be a lot more difficult.
Vacation / Sick time is a bit different than needing to run errands till 10am, either shifting the working day round a bit or spreading the time out over the next days or week etc.
Doesn't hurt to check in when you're available again as a courtesy but the benefit is NOT having to get permission to do something like this up front.
If you're remote as an employee then presumably the company has process around holidays and stuff that would be followed. If you're a freelancer then part of what stops you, and your client, from being fined by HMRC (in Britain) is setting your own working hours and days.
The main bit of process missing here seems to be the requirement that the developer of a given feature is at work (or at least on call) when it's deployed and has it's first full day of usage (or whatever makes sense for the particular type of application). Don't deploy on Friday afternoon, it's better for everyone to wait until Monday morning. Certainly don't deploy major feature work just before going on holiday, etc.
Additionally, if Jim had configured the backups properly the site could be reverted to a stable build. A lot of measures could prevent these situations.
There's nothing more annoying than asking a question, and not knowing if you're going to get a response in 5 minutes, in which case you stretch your legs and grab a water; or a couple of hours, in which case you move onto another task while you wait for a response.
"Oh, but if you ask in a public Slack channel, someone else will answer!", is the inevitable response from someone here on HN. Unfortunately, that is not always the case for a multitude of reasons.
Whenever I've worked remotely, I've always clocked in and out on slack, either through posting in a channel or sending a DM, or by using statuses. That way people can know that I've gone for lunch and will be incommunicado for the next hour.
It's the same as working in a physical office, if you're out of office, your colleagues should know how long for.
That point is a little bit bad worded. It is more pointed to old school managers who think that by controlling working hours they are controlling productivity.
After all in remote work productivity is measured about communication, issues , commits and pull requests done.
The corollary here is that if nobody knows when you're working, people will always expect you to work. That whole work/life balance thing depends on having clearly denoted "working time" and "not working time".
Also full-time remote worker. We solve the problem by letting people know when you will and won't be available. It can be super informal (e.g. "Hey guys, gonna be out of pocket this afternoon") or entered into a shared calendar.
I agree with you (and OP) that there has to be some visibility into what work is going to be done when, and there are lots of ways to solve it, that said, I'm sympathetic to the notion that "I don't care how or when you work, as long as the work gets done." I'm a big fan of measuring developers more by the velocity of their Jira queues and commit history than how often they're available to be bothered with non-coding stuff.
If I know someone won't be "at" work for the next 20 hours (part time, different timezone) I can factor that into how the teamwork will... Work.
Is something on fire, and only a single person can put it out? A) that's sad B) sometimes happens anyway (and then you can try and fix A after the fire is out) C) depending on what's on fire, contracts etc - you can always call and wake someone up.
But mostly it's just nice to know people's schedules - so one can plan work.
Maybe there's some pair programming to be done (via shared screen session or whatever) - obviously try and schedule that when both parties are available...
It's really not that different to chasing after a manager that's busy with meetings or a co-worker who's part time out of the office doing on-site consulting work.
Even in a shared office, developers need to plan "deep" time when they have time to focus - or nothing will get done due interruptions.
Just because someone is sitting right there does not mean they're "free" for a chat. They could be deep in the debugger chasing a bug.
So you're saying that "Will" is your organization's single point of failure? So, when he goes on vacation or when he's sick or quits the whole thing comes crashing down?
If that's the case, I hope I don't own any stock of it, as you're a single injury away from disaster.
Having worked on a team that was responsible for uptime of some high traffic web apps, there's a difference between when you're working and when you're on call. We had an on call schedule for emergencies and down time, but we rarely had actual emergencies to respond to. The rest of our work was done in two week sprints. No one cared when we did the work, as long as we stayed on track with those two week sprints and got everything done most of the time.
I think this is a valid and important point, especially as this is aimed at #1 on their list of 'practical tips.' The item in question isn't even really a practical tip. You should submit an issue that suggests a real practical tip for how people can be both flexible with their time and available in urgent situations.
I have been working remotely for about 2 years and the last 5 months completely out of cycle with the rest of the company.
This comment hits the nail on the head [0]. Everyone's butt is on the line. It should never be one person's fault that the website was taken down. If one person has the power to damage your business and only they can repair the error, then you have a process problem.
Yo, why isn't the site monitored with alerting that tells Will the site is broken? Why isn't the site set up so that if a change is deployed and breaks it, the site can be rolled back to the last working state? Yo, why don't you have change control and a roll back process?
This "manifesto" really clarified for me something that I've often noticed about people who strongly believe in remote working but had trouble putting to words. For a lot of people remote work is less about the actual remote aspect of it and more about the kind of relationship the employee has with their employer. It is a relationship where I think the employee is more empowered and freer to find a work life balance that satisfies them.
Precisely. And I think this is why many employers are also highly hesitant about remote work (at times). They don't necessarily want to give their employees that much power, but they lack the courage to say that directly. And instead you hear the criticism that it's less productive.
I analyzed my commits at my last part-time-remote job, before I went full remote, and I was about 2x as productive during times when I was not at the office, even when accounting for the fact that I scheduled meetings during in-office days.
An an employer who allows people to work remotely. My experience has been that some employees cannot handle the responsibility and their output drops a lot if they're not behind their desk. Others are fine / better. (Because I found it hard to tell some people they're not allowed to work remotely, while others can, I ended up replacing the ones who performed poorly when working remote.)
My point is that you cannot really argue for or against remote work without taking into account that your employees might not all be suitable for that work style. (But if you're building a new organisation then you can pick the right people from the start)
If you give people more explicit feedback about their performance and hold them accountable only for their performance regardless of where they get the work done, the problem disappears. I get the sense that you're holding yourself responsible for the performance of your employees, but for remote work to be successful, you need to hold the employees responsible. If you find that some employees aren't responsible enough to handle that, don't you want more responsible employees anyway?
Yes, I came to the same conclusion: I need employees that don't need to be micro-managed. Changing their behaviour (if that is even possible) seemed to require more effort than I was prepared to put in, so I ended up replacing them.
However, I haven't found a good way to assess whether potential hires are good at this. Everyone claims to be an independent self-starter who is great at remote work whilst in the hiring process...
This is the kind of thing you can suss out of personal references. Of course, many people will provide the best / most reliable (for them) references they possibly can, but you can still get a good signal with the right question. Ex. "Can you tell me about any times ____ pulled through without oversight", or "delivered something both useful and unexpected", etc. Anything that isn't a fast, resounding "yes" with details is probably a "no".
Potentially filter for people who have a demonstrated history of successfully freelancing. They've likely learned how they work most efficiently already.
You're asserting a kind of direct malicious intent that I don't think is fair. Certainly, remote work puts some demands on the manager that a bad manager won't be able to handle. If anything, it's an unwillingness to confront this inability.
But remote work also puts very high demand on the workers: they have to be very conscientious, self-motivated and proactive and effective communicators. Everybody know slackers who are not pulling their weights, and who would slack even harder if given the "power". The idea that "working from home" could be a euphemism for a half day+ off did not gestate out of the blue in a mean-spirited managers head. A classically managed working environment can mitigate a lot of this in a way remote environments can't.
A successful remote working environment requires a particular non-average grade of manager and employee.
Honestly, I find it a bit weird so much of this blog post focus on making all information visible and documenting everything (which I agree with) and then there is:
> People don't have to say when they are working.
That just seems a bit at odds with the rest of the post and I don't really agree with it.
Sometimes there are questions that only one person (let's say Nick) can answer or situations where Nick is more valuable than other employees. Let's say I've got a moderately time sensitive issue and I'm pretty sure Kevin knows the answer as he's an expert in the subject, alternatively, I could pull aside Bob, Joe, and Linda and we could probably figure it out after a little while.
Knowing when Nick will be back online plays a big factor in what I chose to do next. If Nick is offline for lunch and will be back in an hour, I'll wait for Nick. If Nick started work early and is now offline for a long weekend, well then I need to pull Bob, Joe, and Linda away from their work to help me.
Having at least a general idea of when people will be available seems like it'd be even more important in a situation where I can't ask the people around me, "Has anyone seen Nick today?"
If all information is visible and everything is well documented, it should be rare to have the situation where one person is the only one that can answer that question. This will totally still happen for remote teams, but I think it happens more in other organizations that rely on face time and verbal information exchange.
I still generally agree that knowing when folks are online can be helpful and don’t see a big issue with that as long as you don’t have a culture that starts measuring people by how many hours they put in. Rather than an upfront “I will be working today from X to Y” something passive like a Slack recent activity indicator could be enough.
> If all information is visible and everything is well documented, it should be rare to have the situation where one person is the only one that can answer that question. This will totally still happen for remote teams, but I think it happens more in other organizations that rely on face time and verbal information exchange.
I worked at my last job for just over 2 1/2 years and, while we had an actual office, for the first two years I was there, we also had a true "unlimited vacation/remote work" policy. It wasn't unheard of that some people would take 4-6 week vacations and others would work remote for multiple months.
Documentation was great, but you can't document everything you know, so there will always be gaps. I'm a developer, so these will be dev focused, but some scenarios I can remember where one specific person was needed are:
- Legacy code. Bob was the only one around when this code was written and it hasn't been touched in years, now it's breaking and no one understands why. (In an ideal world, there wouldn't be knowledge silos like this, but there always are)
- Specialties. Most developers know this tool, but Bob is an expert. We need to do something that requires an expert. We need Bob.
- Bob left an ominous, yet vague comment on my PR. I don't want to merge until I get clarification. (something like "This looks hacky. I guess it works, but we should probably change this ASAP." or "Eww")
> Legacy code. Bob was the only one around when this code was written and it hasn't been touched in years, now it's breaking and no one understands why. (In an ideal world, there wouldn't be knowledge silos like this, but there always are)
Not sure how well/different that works in a remote-first company, but at previous workplaces I was, we tried to have one day a week dedicated to refactoring, which might reduce that problem.
> - Legacy code. Bob was the only one around when this code was written and it hasn't been touched in years, now it's breaking and no one understands why. (In an ideal world, there wouldn't be knowledge silos like this, but there always are)
Not sure if valid, if some legacy code was written a few years before, probably even author will have no clue what's wrong.
The author might have a higher chance of figuring it out. This is playing the likelihood game though. In perfect world, the code would be tight and small enough that you wouldn't take long to understand it, and then the complex components (there are always a bunch of these) are well tested and documented. Especially rationale for design decisions or implementation quirks.
Are we talking about generally existing as a human being? Yeah, until they invent food replicators you're gonna have to prepare your own food. Get used to it.
I'd say getting to use your own kitchen to prepare your own delicious and nutritious meals is one of the prime advantages of remote work. It saves you way more money over going out to eat, and it's a much more healthy alternative to blindly trusting a restaurant or some food service company like Sysco.
Then again, I am a bit of a maverick in that I make all of my lunches at home, even when I have an office I must travel to for work. You can do your entire week in advance on a Sunday evening, spending less than $30. Not. A. Hardship.
We really should push back against the catered meals and supposed "perks." That's money the company could have spent on increasing your salary or paying a higher dividend to shareholders. Instead of doing that, they've decided they're going to spend your money on an army of chefs to keep you at the office 24/7.
I'll take the higher pay, greater freedom and autonomy, and my own home cooked meals, thank you much.
I'm wondering if that one came from the perspective of those big campuses like Google who have free cafeterias for their employees? Fairly weak point either way.
At GitLab we work async by default. But we also learned that video calls are great for bonding and solving complex problems. We don't use video calls for presentations or status updates. The exception is functional group updates that are recorded for the people the can't attend and that spend a lot of time on questions.
Asynchronous communication is like eventual consistency.
It seems pragmatic until you actually struggle to get everyone to be on the same page at the same time, then you spend a lot of time figuring out how to be consistent.
I agree the video calls are probably over the top - but asynchronous communication != synchronous communication.
Recently I had a bad experience at a fully remote company that decided to fix its remote communication issues with, wait for it...meetings! I went from short daily in person meetings with a longer retro to hour long (or longer) video calls every day during my lunch break hours, since they were on Pacific Time. The last standup I joined was two hours long and involved yelling.
Needless to say, I became a lot more fond of Amazon's pre-meeting written notes after that.
Same goes for getting rid of most meetings, period. Realtime audio/video synchrony is just not that useful many times, whether remote or in-person. Asynchrony is just generally better by default in a wide range of common situations.
It’s particularly bad when you combine it with timewasting predetermined Agile meetings and distraction-oriented open plan offices.
Employers who want happy, productive, collaborative workers: Stop disrupting people with useless meetings and denying them large chunks of private, quiet time to work however they see fit. Stop embedding them in open plan spaces.
You know, treat them like an adult, with basic human dignity, who wants to be respected and trusted that they will succeed with their own judgment for how to effectively communicate and manage their work schedule.
I completely agree that the most effective way for remote teams to communicate is via asynchronous video messaging instead of real-time video conferencing. Some of the difficulties I've experienced coordinating meetings with remote colleagues include:
- Difficulty scheduling a time that fits for all participants. Some team-members are inevitably stuck with a non-ideal timeframe. Often times it's the same employee suffering each meeting, which leads to resentment.
- Interruptions during productive hours. See the Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html) - reacting to interruptions can be disastrous.
- Frustration from choppy/laggy video that results in loss of important parts of updates and valuable information.
I'm actually building an app called Tape to address these kinds of issues and to improve communication and collaboration across teams by integrating into existing workflows not against them. If any of you guys are interested in learning more or trying out our product, I'd love to connect: https://trytape.typeform.com/to/pKe6X5
> For the love of all that is sane, please top trying to push nonstop video calls onto remote employees.
Nonstop video calls are dumb, but people should try to be on video when there are scheduled meetings. It really helps to see other people when having a discussion.
Timezones make scheduling team meetings hard, and if your organization ever becomes big enough to warrant a physical office people far away will start working late hours to keep up with the main office.
YMMV, but it's 3 AM here in Berlin and until 10 minutes ago I was still actively working.
I've been full-time remote for just shy of 5 years and timezones is definitely an issue. Up to 4 hour difference is sustainable indefinitely, 8 hours can be with the right people (doing split days is great for this), but beyond 8 hours and the amount of effort required for synchronous communication (video calls) causes it to not happen and the team loses cohesion.
You need the synchronous communication to have non-work conversations, and you need those non-work conversations to develop and maintain the relationships required (trust, rapport, etc.) for remote work.
> if your organization ever becomes big enough to warrant a physical office
...then you probably don't have enough buy-in to be a fully remote company and that is far harder to work around than timezones.
> Save on compensation due to hiring in lower cost regions
Pay people what they're worth regardless of where they live. If you have a developer in Nigeria or Ukraine or Vietnam that is as equally capable as a developer in the Bay Area, they should be paid the same.
Doing otherwise, at best, perpetuates Western hegemony, and at worst is simply racism.
This is a bit ridiculous. It's not hegemony or racism. It's how markets work. People in those markets have fewer opportunities for highly paid employment. As a result, employers have more leverage in negotiations. It's as simple as that.
Markets work by paying for value created. I’ve tested extensively, and found that I’m equally capable of writing code on a beach in Thailand as in a felt cube in California.
I’ll grant that there is a Cost of Living difference between those places, but I would prefer that difference to be captured by me rather than somebody else’s company. It’s me doing the work and creating the value, so that seems reasonable. If you want to purchase my services, you get to pay my market rate. End of story.
Never drop your rate when working remote. That should probably be written in the article we’re discussing.
That is not completely true. Market pay also depends on demand and supply. When I was 19 I got 20 Euro an hour (tax free!) doing some CAD work not because of my skills (they were pathetic), but because a large project of a small company depended on some CAD work being done and he (the boss) couldn't find anyone to do it (part-time, for half a year only, very simple work on a shitty laptop were some reasons why I can imagine he had problems). As a test I was asked to draw a line and give it a specific colour in AutoCAD, that was it!
Unfortunately, you will get outpriced by people doing "the same" work for less. Since you cannot know the global prices, you cannot even meet them, much less compete.
Lowest bidder often wins.
I know, right? I've lost track of all the money I've lost from clients going with the lowest bidder over the years. I must be literally hundreds of dollars by now.
A bit of advice: Those cheap guys are not your competition, and those bargain hunter clients are not the ones you're trying to land. Let them all race to the bottom all they want. Maybe one of them will find a dev who doesn't know his value yet, but the rest will get their money's worth. It doesn't concern you.
There is only one of you, and your rate is the same whether you're onsite in the Bay Area or working remote from anywhere else you choose to be.
That mindset has served me well over the years. I'd recommend taking it on board.
People in those markets usually aren't comparing their offer with local competition, the job market for remote workers is worldwide. Many companies do pay remote employees based on the value they bring to the company regardless of where they live so they are the competition.
The problem with this is that a remote worker will have problems finding opportunities or getting found, especially because the competition is so huge.
It is like the problems contractors face taken to some non small power.
"If a company has the leverage in any capacity to exercise its dominance over a potential employee—to extract as much value from them at the lowest possible financial liability—it should in any case attempt to do so. It would be absurd to do otherwise."
Personally, I can't abide by that—especially when the only basis is locale—and no matter if they bring the same value to the company as a local six-figure-salary employee.
That's pretty much a company's MO no matter where you go. It's always about leverage and market forces. If an employer could pay you 75% less to do the same work they'd do it in a heartbeat.
It's better to know the rules of the game otherwise you'll just end up being played.
Yes and no, I think. Like some other commenters implied, I think it's short sighted. The outcome of working employees like that can end up being of lower quality, so the product suffers, and loses market traction.
I've been witness to this first-hand. Of course, it's only anecdotal, but just the same it's informed my opinions.
Though you're right about your last point absolutely— it's often pretty safe to assume they're (especially larger companies) operating under the pretense we're both referring to.
The "labor market" is a pretty good example of how markets don't work. Workers are pretty much forced to participate in the "market" because they have to eat. This alone is a ridiculous distortion of market mechanisms. There are also huge information asymmetries regarding salary levels.
What if you are a nomad, changing locations month after month? What is your employment market? Is getting hired while in a high income place then moving to a low income place immediately after regarded as a good move in this game?
A remote only company playing the local income game is a major red flag for me. It's basically an employee caste system at that point, with second class employees based solely on their physical location.
I guess we'll have to throw purchasing power out the window to discuss this one. So pay the developer $20k per year or pay them $100k? If the former, I guess those US developers are just screwed and will probably make more money flipping burgers. If the latter, or anywhere between, then we'll just see developers move to the cheapest, lowest tax countries to arbitrage the artificial market inefficiency. Or are you suggesting we force developers to stay where they are too?
> So pay the developer $20k per year or pay them $100k?
If they bring you $20k worth of value, pay them $20k. If they bring you $100k worth of value, pay them $100k.
Would it suck to be a developer in San Francisco on the same salary as your colleague in India? Sure, but nobody forces you to live in San Francisco.
> If the latter, or anywhere between, then we'll just see developers move to the cheapest, lowest tax countries to arbitrage the artificial market inefficiency.
So? What does that have to do with your company? Does it have a moral obligation to contribute to global inequality?
Wouldn't it be better for the world if good hard money for taxes and locally sourced goods and services were flowing into less developed countries?
Spoken like a person without a family or property who is fine with moving to India in a heartbeat.
Do you even know Indian culture? Languages?
How to actually acquire a decent living place in there?
It is an existential risk. A pretty big one. You could end up on street or worse. Alleviating this risk takes negligible resources and quite a lot of time.
Sigh. Just because I mentioned San Francisco and India in the same post, that doesn't mean that I believe that those are the only two places on Earth. Get out a map, find a place you like, figure out if there is one that is not San Francisco but might still be acceptable to you. There isn't? Not even elsewhere in the southern US? OK, stay in San Francisco. You have my permission, which apparently you need.
But if you're interested, I do have experience migrating to new places where I had to learn new languages.
Maybe, depending on what you mean. Do you mean it's hard to measure individual developers' contributions in monetary terms? I agree. But they average out. If you can afford to pay two people sitting in your office equal amounts on the assumption that they contribute equally, you can also afford the same if one of them sits elsewhere instead.
Nothing wrong with it per se. As a developer, I would love to move somewhere cheap and still be paid a Bay Area salary, so I could come back to the US and buy several houses after saving up a truckload of money. But I don't think that was the OP's goal.
Personally, if a company uses remote work as an excuse to pay less, that's a red flag for me. Pay should represent the value you offer to the company, period.
Because otherwise, after COL, you might only save $10k per year in a developed country, and $30k per year in a developing country.
That would be just as lopsided and unfair to your remote workers as paying them all market rate, so that your employees in developed countries get paid $80k per year and your employees in India get paid $8k per year.
Or do you expect your developers in America to relocate to India?
If you've identified the "best" candidate for a position and want to hire or retain that person, you're now competing with the other offers available to that candidate (which include CoL-adjusted offers), not with the salaries you're paying other employees.
Well, I think the idea is meant to be that you get the best developers possible, regardless of where they are, while still trying to keep expenses minimal.
It's not racism, it's simple market forces. Supply and demand and the local cost of living. Someone living in Ukraine will do just fine on 10% of what a Bay Area dev gets paid.
My biggest problem is this: While there is a surplus of remote only positions, this surplus always wants the same thing: very senior developers with tons of wide experience sets.
Seems like there's a lot of talent being left on the floor by only looking for senior developers. There's a lot of goodwill that can be earned by trusting in potential and helping candidates grow into a position. Even an experienced developer in one set of languages and frameworks is junior to others -- and they can't get the foot in the door anywhere remotely.
The "years of experience" drought is real, but I feel like it's an eternal desert for remote work.
That is something bad at our industry. Managers or whoever do that decision believes that being senior automagically makes you a genious, when it can be the other way around, the more senior you are, the more averse to change you are. I doubt that senior could easily change to remote lifestyle after years of onsite.
People must learn that anyone can be remote, the thing is that everyone must agree to communicate better instead of more.
> the more senior you are, the more averse to change you are. I doubt that senior could easily change to remote lifestyle after years of onsite.
Why not? Going from on-site to remote is strictly easier, as the only thing it needs is to stop leaving home every morning.
I don't get this "the more senior you are, the more averse to change you are" - the only thing I've seen is older people having higher expectations and less tolerance for abuse and working for pie-in-the-sky promises of future wealth. But maybe my bias is showing, I'm nearing 30, so pretty old by software industry standards.
LOL. What makes someone senior? What are the advantages that being senior brings to the job at hand? Should we all be non-senior instead so that we have no experience or skills formed? Change is a part of life. You are going to get older and then die. Too often, technology firms worship youth at the expense of experience. In any case, youth ages and then it is your turn in the box, being lectured by the next generation about how averse to change YOU are. sigh.
> Fast internet everywhere - 100Mb/s+ cable, 5GHz Wifi, 4G cellular
I used to say that. Now I live in a rural area, and the fastest speed that's even available is 5Mbps (and the uptime isn't great). My house also has zero cell service from any provider.
It's also a bit presumptive that everyone can afford a 100Mbps connection. The last place I lived, it was like $120/month for 100Mbps. Not everybody can afford that.
That being said, has anyone out there come up with creative solutions for working remotely on a crappy connection?
It may not fit your use case, but I found Speedify to be a great boon when dealing with working remotely over crappy wifi with 3g cellular. It's a VPN type app than can split your packets between two connections (e.g WiFi and my phone tethered via Bluetooth) for increased bandwidth or can send all packets over both connections to assist with lost packets or inconsistent latency.
1. A lot of places that are remote will cover or subsidize internet costs for employees
2. I think the the poor access to Internet in rural areas is more of a US thing. In LDCs we have often wider availability for low cost 4g and/or more equal distribution of telecom infrastructure in general.
You have misunderstood. The grandparent is not saying that fast internet is expensive. He’s saying that there is simply no way of attaining it at his house for any price.
That describes a lot of places in the developed world. My little farming town in rural France, as well as the medium sized City in England where I lived previously.
>no way of attaining it at his house for any price
I bet Amazon jungle doesn't have gbit internet either.
The question is whether OP chose a location without internet knowingly or he was cut off and left stranded.
Yeah and poor access to Internet in metro areas is a thing here in Australia. There's plenty of people here (myself included) in the middle of the city with 5/0.5 connections.
The sad part is that in many developing countries 100mbps is now quite common. Meanwhile, even in LA it’s not very consistent when you have this speed advertised on your contract.
Only place where I reliably saw 100mbps down was in SFO on tmobile LTE by one very specific window. Go figure...
EDIT: consumer grade connections - if you have a business, gigabit is easy to get in the office.
The article has the arrow causality backwards on this one, and it describes the biggest pitfall with remote work: you absolutely need to seek out and only hire people who will find things to do and work around problems on their own, rather than waiting for instruction from above.
That describes a surprisingly small subset of employees. School trains you for the age of four to take instructions from the person in charge, act, then wait for more instructions. You can make it all the way to retirement on many career tracks without ever deviating from that pattern.
People should not have to work all on the same schedule, but having some shared understanding of when people work or take time off is certainly a good thing.
If you mean announcing every time you walk the dog, or run a quick errand, then sure, of course.
I work remotely and keep regular hours. I communicate any major deviation from those hours.
I’ve worked with people that keep super random hours. That is fine too, but they have to communicate some kind of expectations to the team. It’s super frustrating when they don’t. It becomes hard to manage if you’re directly depending on them for any reason.
having some shared understanding of when people work or take time off is certainly a good thing
Could make a web page that is like an In/Out board[1], but looks at the person's git commits (plus Slack, etc.) to map out when they tend to be active.
I think it shouldn't be necessary, but people should do it as a courtesy. It's like a PTO calendar. It's just nice to know when people will be around, especially if your environment requires some collaboration.
A calendar or wth peoples preferred schedule under a specific time zone is would do wonders. If they ever need to deviate they can change it ahead of time and / or let everyone know through Slack. We do this at my job where we are in an office but we do have two or more remote only employees. Its easier for me to look in there and figure out why xyz is not in the office or Slack for the last 4 hours.
I'd be interested to know some long term remote workers experiences with regards to interruptions. It's one of the things that I believe would be better. In many places I've worked I tend to become a "go to" person which results in many many interruptions, it doesn't make too much difference how much you write down, it's usually always quicker to just ask someone who you know knows the answer to whatever question you have. Remote working seems like it would put up just enough of a barrier that written information / async communication would be an easier go to?
I've long been that "go-to" guy. I'm friendly, I like to help, and I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. That's fine, it's my natural fit and I enjoy it.
I've been working remotely (from home) for about 2 months now and my productivity is through the roof. It's astonishing. When I work 8 hours, I get ~6.5 hours productive work done. That feels like a theoretical maximum. In the office, 8 hours "at work" – read "in the building" – often felt like 2 or 3 hours of actual work, on a good day.
You spend so much time in the office chatting to people, getting coffee, overhearing interesting conversations, waiting in a meeting room for people to turn up, waiting at the door for people to come to lunch, getting there in the first place, setting up, packing up. It's madness, really. (I'm in Melbourne, Australia. I think our work ethic is different to you Americans.)
I'm lucky, my partner is also a freelancer. We wake up – often at 5am – and make a cup of tea and a slice of toast. "First breakfast." Half an hour later we're awake and we wander upstairs to the office. We put some ambient music on, or not. We knuckle down and work. Two hours later, sun's up, we make a coffee and have "second breakfast". :-)
It's transformed how I live and work. I'm lucky in that my boss is an old friend and he trusts me absolutely. The work I'm doing is exclusively for him, so it's not a problem that I'm not around colleagues. We just use the phone or iMessage to communicate.
We set a weekly rhythm so I don't have to tell him when I'm working; but, because he's a friend, if he calls and I'm not at my desk that's cool.
I am in love with this situation. I can never go back.
My experience is that it's a lot better but that Slack can be the biggest remaining source of interruptions. I still struggle to find the balance between being sufficiently available on Slack and getting focused uninterrupted work done.
My approach has been to encourage email communication and then I just periodically check my email. This allows me the ability to get in the zone without constant distractions, while still providing the ability to assist when needed. If it’s an absolute emergency then I can be reached via mobile. There are also times though that I will sign into our internal instant messaging system or Slack and will respond there as well. My current tasks tend to dictate how “available” I am.
If I may play devil's advocate for a minute, I would say that just because you felt like were not productive doesn't mean that you weren't being productive for your team/company. Those people interrupting you with questions are often stuck or could use the extra input to do their own work better.
I think the key (and very appealing thing to me and a lot of people) is:
The results of work over the hours put in.
It also relates to the the idea of saying whether you're working or not. If you're producing great results, it shouldn't matter when/how/how much time it takes you to do it (provided maybe people can get ahold of you in an emergency). But I also seems like the key to this working is being willing to get rid of people that aren't meeting that high bar (whether weren't up to snuff or weren't because they weren't putting in enough time).
I think most organizations are unwilling/uncomfortable holding people to this high of standard on outputs, and so measure inputs (40 hours, at least not looking like you're slacking off) instead.
Charlie Munger tells a story about Fedex and how they needed to move all their packages around different planes every night in one central location. They had a team of workers to do it, but they were having trouble getting the work finished on time and keeping people motivated.
Eventually they decided -- instead of paying people by the hour -- to just pay them the same thing no matter how long it took (per shift), and let everyone go home when they were done. Lo and behold the night teams got their packages moved around much faster and and made just as much money and Fedex was able to deliver better and quicker everyone was happy.
"Eventually they decided -- instead of paying people by the hour -- to just pay them per shift, and let everyone go home when they were done. Lo and behold that worked and the night teams got their packages moved around much faster and made just as much money and everyone was happy."
The problem is that such a situation is often not stable. The next boss will come in and think "these guys work only 5 hours so I either hire less people or give them more work".
The usual skepticism from HN comes up whenever telecommuting is brought up. However, it was tech's promise. I think people should be asking how to fix its problems rather than nagging that it "doesn't work for me". But maybe i'm biased as an indie dev.
Nitpicking, but it's something I've seen in many other places: Why is the emphasis on the word "over" instead of the alternatives, which seem to be the focus here?
The details notwithstanding; I work for a F50 and my wife works for Gitlab. I was a tad bit skeptical at first (and I'm the one that encouraged her to apply). But watching her go through it, remote only is quickly becoming much more appealing - at least the way Gitlab does it.
We are a remote only company and don't agree with this at all. People should have flexible working hours but others must know when they are working. It removes confusion and sets clear expectations.
I was thinking the same thing, he must not live in Australia where the government has absolutely shattered most people's chances of getting 100MB/s+ cable in the next 10-20 years.
Most of the comments on here relate to aspects of remote work and its limitations, but I haven’t seen anyone say what seems obvious to me - Having an office is nice! It’s good for me to have a place that my brain associates exclusively with work. It’s nice to interact with teammates in person. If I need quiet time or even if the weather is nice and I don’t feel like going into the office, I can go work from a cafe somewhere. I certainly see the appeal of remote work, but to me, having an office with the option of working from home is preferable.
This is good but impractical. Many workplaces are full of jackasses who don't care about the rules, and are not going to take the extra effort of saving a screenshot to meeting notes to help out the remote guy/people. Instead this person will happily subtly disadvantage the remote people just because it makes him/her look one shade better. There are lots of these types out there, i.e. those that think middle school politics is the name of the game. So manifestos like this are of little practical value.
Observation: This almost completely conflicts with the agile manifesto.
Opinion: As an architect I feel that f2f whiteboard and brainstorming sessions are invaluable. But for a dev working on a feature, it might be better to seclude. This is just an example to say that we will never find a policy that works for everyone company-wide and world-wide. The company should do it's best to accommodate it's employees' work style, for them to be productive and happy.
As for remote, I think it should be embraced, not enforced.
Oddly enough, I've worked with people who are agile/scrum fanatics and remote work fanatics at the same time. Good times... no, I seriously take that back, it was terrible.
> Working long hours or weekends is not encouraged nor celebrated.
What does this have to do with building a remote-only company?
Different companies have different cultures, and that's okay. Would Uber be nearly as successful if they were fully remote? Maybe. Would Uber be nearly as successful without a long hours culture? I'm highly skeptical.
The list of disadvantages is missing perhaps the biggest one from a founder's perspective: The conventional wisdom is that remote companies don't get acquired.
If a founder is even considering a big exit due to acquisition then a remote-only workforce is a non-starter. Same goes for investors with the same ambitions.
This is not just 'remote only' but has other good practices as writing down requirements and processes. This is exceptionally healthy approach, even if you have local employees. It prevents silos and people undermining other people's work.
IMO first and foremost remote teams require good management (it helps all teams, but in remote teams it is critical): someone who will enable remote work, weed out people who spend most of their time non-productively and translate his management demands into requests that fit the workflow and schedule of his remote team.
This is a rare (and often underappreciated) skill. But until more people have it, remote work will be limited (statistically) to non-critical components and small parts of teams. My 2c.
I work for a remote team and we have a huge advantage in that what we build is a video communication app, much like video texting. So while we do spend some time in Slack, we also can easily communicate with video, which conveys nuance and allows us to feel more connected, plus see things like bugs very easily. It's not really designed for business use, but it's definitely handy for any remote team.
Not sure if it's just my perception, but it seems the pendulum has swung back around and remote work is looked at unfavorably.
I've worked remotely the last 3+ years and I'm currently looking for a new gig. Seems like there aren't a lot of companies who are ok with full-time remote.
For the few that are, there is really stiff competition for those few jobs.
Check out German software-related companies. Small ones are usually flexible to be persuaded to hire you, if you can get through to them, that is. A good application should work, and as usual, don't give up too soon.
They don't even know they can handle it. Maybe do some research as to how they'd have to do payroll, to reduce the scariness of someone overseas.
Look at the HRB and GnR "Type of Register" on the advanced search of [0], and add keywords such as "IT", "net", "net" and similar. I'm not that well-versed in these matters, so while I think there is some source you could find a list of these names and just run a regex on, I don't know where to get that list. Also consider mining the CN fields of server certificates on German IP ranges/all IPv4 addresses (it's just 2^32), and check their Impressum. There you can look for a string ending in " GmbH" and " AG" in a footer, to get the company name to use your regex on. The benefit there is that it should yield all companies that have a German website with HTTPS, and I'd take a lack of HTTPS for the company website or a website not reachable via a second level domain under the .de TLD as a red flag. Assume to require a small German introduction telling the recipient to forward the English part to an English speaking colleague, preferably in the IT department, because the risk of hitting someone who can't understand your English application is quite large.
It ebbs and flows. I recently interviewed for a remote position (found on HN 1st of the month job posting) and they couldn't stop gushing about how many candidates they had. At another company, they realized they weren't getting quality candidates and recently became open to the idea.
All in all it does take longer, but with prior remote experience it makes it easier.
what do you look for in a candidate when hiring for a remote position ? I am 3 years experienced dev and cant even get my resume filtered for first round. I do have 3 months of remote Gsoc experience if that counts. But i am curious, is there some particular factor that gives an edge over other candidates ?
One of the benefits listed in the manifesto (and often touted elsewhere) is that you are not limited to a specific region when hiring.
Unfortunately, what this means for candidates is they may have to compete with a LOT more people.
Another challenge you're likely facing is that a lot of companies are only willing to hire senior developers to work remotely because hesitant upper management thinks they will be more trustworthy (completely ignoring the level of trust inherent in having someone write code for them when they themselves can't even verify it).
That negativity aside, here's some advice: As much as there is some backlash around the idea of a GitHub profile being mandatory, one VERY practical use of an open source portfolio of some kind is that almost all open source project work is done remotely using the very same skills required for successful remote employment. This applies even more so to non-programming contributions, in my opinion, which means you don't even need to contribute code to demonstrate these skills.
Gitlab, thank you for posting your handbook that can be reviewed transparently ahead of time by prospective hires.
The complexity of hiring in various countries and jurisdictions is often completely under appreciated by anybody who hasn't had to set up or wind down an entity. GitLab's page[1] gives a flavour of the machinations required to for a legal entity that represents your company to process payroll and adhere to local and regional labour, tax and medical insurance regulations and practices.
I'm very appreciate of companies committed to remote work, especially more so when they are receptive to hiring international staff due to the extra non-trivial administrative overhead required.
Question for remote workers: how do you deal with the innate need for managers to know that you are busy?: i.e. that you're not just more or less slacking off for a salary.
Managers should just be concerned that the tasks and goals assigned to their staff are being worked on, that they will be delivered on time based on a mutually agreed upon schedule. Communication (verbal, written, predictive based on data analysis) is key. Being "busy" should never be the point, getting things done should be.
It was explained to me when starting my current remote position that they didn't care how I got things done as long as they got done, and that I was expected to reasonably be available during normal local working hours and respond to communications in a timely manner. It might seem a bit vague, but it has worked well. Basically if someone emails me from my team I respond as quickly as I can. Also, Levels of Effort don't change because I am remote, so there is already a common understanding how long things take. Not having a jerk for a boos helps too.
Managers need to monitor output rather than time worked. Even if my colleague is able to get the same work done in half the time as me, we should still be treated the same.
Peer review also goes a long way. Your colleagues—onsite or remote—have a pretty good sense of both the quantity and quality of your output.
When joining any company, I recommend understanding the values, culture, and work environment. It is not one size fits all. You should ensure that you would enjoy working with the people, values, and environment you are joining. Remote work may not be for everyone, and doesn't need to be, however it can be wonderful! It has been life-changing for me and my family. My son's math scores have gone up 30% since joining GitLab, because I now have time in the afternoon to dedicate to helping with his homework, before he's exhausted after his latest sports game/practice. That is just one example of how it has impacted my life, but there are many more. I'm home for dinner. I have more time for my friends, but I also have more time for work (I had a 3 hour commute before GitLab). My health has improved. I am happier. At GitLab, we take steps to make remote work successful. In addition to our daily "social" call together, we also enable our team members to rent space at a co-working facility (we work, for example), or work from anywhere with an internet connection if that is preferable for them. It is not unusual for my teammates to see me taking Video conferencing calls from the beach. It has been proven that humans do their best thinking surrounded by nature, and I try to take advantage of that. I love the freedom that remote work gives me and my fellow team members. But I agree that we must always be thinking about how to maximize the benefits of this arrangement and decrease the downsides. If you are willing to put in the effort, which includes changing the way you work and communicate, as asynchronous communication is required to make remote work successful, it can be very rewarding. I don't feel that I have less human contact, I feel that I have more but different contact. I definitely get more direct time with my friends and family, but I also get to know more people at work. In an office building, I tended to only spend time with those who sat near me or interacted regularly with me. Occasionally it ventured out passed that if I joined the SCUBA group, or something similar. At GitLab, our team calls, our meetings, and our summits allow me to get to know people from around the world that I would have never had the opportunity to learn from before. We have different experiences and perspectives and it is fascinating! If you know that remote work isn't for you, that you love decisions being made in hallways vs. organized communication, for example, then it is great that you know that. The wonderful thing is that there are many companies conducting their business in different ways, that we should all be able to find the one that matches our needs and values. I'm thrilled to have found a company that matches my needs, to balance wellness, work, family, and friends, while making an impact in our industry. If you are at a remote company and feel that things could be done better, I hope that they are willing to hear your recommendations. I wouldn't give up on the model without trying to make it work. If you work at GitLab and have recommendations, I'm happy to hear them!
I just started working remotely, after a year plus of a three-hour commute.
My quality-of-life improvements have been very similar to yours. I cannot believe how much happier I am now, on a daily basis.
I have written some of the best code of my life while sitting on a picnic table in a park. I see my friends more. I see my family more. I have more energy to put into my work, which results in better work satisfaction.
Does anyone know of any open source/free + preferably self-hosted applications for remote technical support on residential networks.
(Users not on LAN)
I work with junior developers that are fully remote without any issues. We communicate via IM, Slack, email, and Skype as needed. Not sure how to do something, let’s have a quick screen share and we’ll work through it. Finished with your assigned feature, submit a pull request and I’ll leave comments accordingly or we’ll review it via a screen share. It’s not impossible to do but may require some to change their collaboration approach.
Not a developer but a product manager in a previous life. Comms channels have changed a lot. But it's still really hard for me to imagine coming out of school into a remote position. Today, I'm great with being 90% remote (from home). But I can't really imagine starting out that way.
We are a remote-only company (Innolitics.com), and have hired several junior developers. I think it is harder for them to get up to speed, but definitely still quite possible. Pair programming, video calls, and detailed PR reviews all help.
I've loved it, in the past when circumstances dictated it; I would love to make it the normal mode. I get so much more done.
I think the optimal distribution in one day in office, allocated to organizational work and planning and meetings, and four off-site to actually do the work.
Being "in the office" is mostly a waste of time for deep work that actually produces results.
The only thing being in the office I've found is better is feather-smoothing, and honestly, that actually works better async, if you have people that can work async.
Wow it really seems like I should be doing remote work. This is the exactly how I'd like work to be, in particular the emphasis on written communication. I've been trying to make the company I work at more like this but it's proving a losing battle. It turns out that what I really want is simply a remote job.
Sounds very naive to be really honest.. working random hours without any info for your peers when you are avilable to consult is counter productive, I've witnessed project holdups too many times because someone decided to come late or really early. I also see no real way for manager/sup to know when someone is slacking off and maintain discipline. Cant really see any compamy thriving on such model.
If you're not good at written communication, or you work with people who are not good at it, remote work will be miserable.
People who are not highly fluent in the company's written language or those with some level of dyslexia will struggle. Also some people get frustrated with the more analytic approach required by text, relying instead on spoken rhetoric.
I think even if you're colocated, there are huge benefits to following the remote work practices and improving your written communication. Documenting your work in an issue manager and using chat primarily for communication means no one will miss out, even if someone is sick, a new starter, or on a different team. All these things can make a dev organisation much more effective and break down silos.