I work from home as much as I can, but nothing trumps seeing your colleagues face to face. Text can also cause misunderstandings, and apparently no one likes video, at least in my company. I don't like video much either, though.
We could still work from home and have time where we meet our coworkers? I read somewhere that gitlab is trying out something like this. I'd love to learn wrist they conclude from this experience.
I find it psychologically very different knowing that anyone can talk to you (and you can't ignore like if you were online) and see you. It forces me into a "work mode" psychology.
If you're highly creative, self-discipline is often at odds with the way you work/think. Unfortunately, many office drones are not creative and have no concept of this. Some expect developers and IT people to punch a clock and start typing code until close of business day.
At one company I worked for (that was mostly remote workers), people who lived within an hour of each other would periodically meet up for social or work reasons.
We had one guy who had a nice house with a big dining room, and once a month we'd work from there in one room. Less work got done, but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled. Plus it was "kind of" fun.
So unless you're geographically too far from colleagues, there's no reason why you can't have meetups (and I would advocate for them... occasionally).
It may be fallacy to you because you haven't experienced it, but it has happened in my experience.
Sometimes on person describes an annoyance they have, and one of the other people in the room feels motivated to resolve that issue. Or a couple of people start talking about something, and a third person has a new idea that improves thing. There are endless scenarios that can result in something happening that otherwise might never have happened without the meeting.
The writing part isn't really the main benefit of whiteboarding. Standing there, pointing at things and chatting about it is a really big part. Then there's the physical size. Quite often I find it much nicer to stand in front of a board and draw on a large scale. The current attempts at remote whiteboards are really not suitable replacements.
VR would a giant help as body language, gesturing and physical size all become much easier to see. Of course, that would require quite a leap forward in VR to accomplish that level of avatar.
One really weird thing about video conferencing is that you're constantly exposed to a slightly delayed, pixelated, and poorly lit picture of your own face.
That's a deeply abnormal situation. It's like talking to someone while sitting in front of a fun house mirror. Who would subject themselves to such a metaphysical nightmare?
And that's just one of the little uncanny distortions that video conferencing brings.
You might enjoy this excerpt from a novel, which predicts a bad future for video chat:
> It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.
And:
> This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.
I find reduced body language and the lack of shared focal point a real problem with video. If I need to point at something on my notepad on my desk, or a whiteboard, or an object in the room, the other party can't see it. All they see is my face, and I may be looking elsewhere on the screen while they talk to me.
It also means you have to stop what you're doing, sit down and talk to your screen. I like being able to stand up, or go grab something more than a meter away, take a walk or make coffee while I talk to someone. If I vanish from sight, the other parties on the video call don't know if I'm still listening. Heck, even if you can see the person, you don't know if their sound is still working properly, so there's more "can you still hear me?" and "sorry, you cut out for a moment there, can you repeat yourself" sorts of interactions as well.
Video's a pretty bad substitute for real world face-to-face.
You can have misunderstandings face to face. This is a matter of communication skills. Having entire conversation in text form also means you can easily make references and go back to it even weeks later, whereas with face to face conversation you don't have that luxury.
I like remote work, but the benefits of searchable text barely materialized for us. There were a few times we needed to find some piece of information, especially from colleagues who had moved on. However, any moderately discussed topic just generated too much text to be quickly search able. Wed usually get thousands of results for any search term and whoever was looking for the necessary information had to not just look at those results, but the context they were in, to get the info they wanted. One time it took the course of a day
Face to face means seeing the other person's face. You have instantaneous feedback when their face shows signs of confusion, excitement, boredom, maybe unhappiness at your words. Misunderstandings can be cleared up immediately.
Searchable conversation history is certainly extremely useful. But today, that's at the cost of needing to regularly go back and redo text discussions from 5 or 15 minutes ago because it becomes clear that we initially hadn't understood each other at all.
So I dream of a Black Mirror style future with an indexed video archive of what my eyes had seen.
> Face to face means seeing the other person's face. You have instantaneous feedback when their face shows signs of confusion, excitement, boredom, maybe unhappiness at your words. Misunderstandings can be cleared up immediately.
In theory. But when you are dealing with a lot of "anti-social" people who have a hard time communicating verbally, or integrating socially, it usually has the opposite affect, ime.
Remember those requirement we talked about last month? Writing it down or having a log of conversation helps so much. When in person it is harder to take notes and be part of the converdation.
Just the past 2 weeks I've had multiple face to face meetings to decide on a plan of action for a project. Everyone left the meeting thinking something has been decided.
Turns out there were 2 or 3 separate ideas on how we were proceeding with handling things!
Can't help but think that if this conversation was held in text, proposed approaches would have been more clear to everyone, and the problem of whether a conclusion was reached or not would be easily solved by revisiting the conversation.
1) Control from above in the hierarchy (the general wants to see the army)
2) Control from below especially in competitive setups (the troop wants to know what's going to happen)
Then there is little like seeing people face to face to remind them you exists. This is good for business. I'm a freelancer now (about half of my career) and work mostly from home but I go meet customers in person almost every week or every month, depending on how much we work together (directly proportional.)
Furthemore, face to face collaboration is very effective when in hurry.
One needs to remember that there are many more factors at play. Sometimes the only place you can afford a decent size family home will be in an area with lower wages. Hence it can make economical sense to have to take a higher paying job that requires travel in order to afford to provide for your family.
There are many factors at play in such decisions. "Having a choice" is something you do not always have depending on personal circumstances.
Agreed! .. perhaps they need to remain close to an elderly relative. Perhaps the schools in the work location are terrible. Perhaps you have a house that you aren't able to easily sell. Perhaps .... and on and on.
We would be well served by demonstrating compassion for others -- it's not like a majority of people can simply jump on their fixie with their Manhattan Portage bag and just enjoy a 5 minute ride to a DUMBO loft office.
Because 'we' prefer it? I like going into the office. The morning walk to the office with its clear demarcation between work and not work, the ritual of grabbing a coffee in the morning with some colleagues and catching up on what's happening in their projects even if they're not directly related to anything I'm working on, having a dedicated space and a dedicated computer that's just for work, all those little things and more makes working at the office far more productive for me.
I live in the city centre as well as work in the city centre. One of the benefits of living in a small capital city like Tallinn. I walk to and from work for about 20 minutes (total 40 minutes each day). The thing is, I would prefer this to be a bit longer because often times it's the only time I don't actually sit behind a screen. When I worked in Barcelona and lived there, I walked about 40 minutes to work and back, which was perfect.
> The thing is, I would prefer this to be a bit longer because often times it's the only time I don't actually sit behind a screen.
I lived 10 mins away on foot from my job. It was all fine and dandy for some time, but then things got seriously tense in the workplace and it meant the super short commute gave me no time to unwind. It ended up being mentally taxing to live so close to my workplace, even when I was not working since I ended up being near or walking in front basically anytime I got out. Nasty. Too long a commute and you're wasting so much time and energy in our life, but too close and it can have deleterious effects too.
I've been to Tallinn for the first time last week. When leaving, I walked from the historical center to the airport. It's great that this is feasible, and it was interesting to see how the character of the city changes as one moves outwards.
Well, working remotely doesn't mean you can't commute!
I used to walk with my wife to her office and back when I started full remote work (it's been 6 years, in a fully remote company).
Also, you're free to rent coworking space or shared office space if you like to. Working remote means you have a choice - not that you have to work from home :)
I don't believe your "commute" constitutes a commute in the sense of what this article is about. Your commute is just a walk.
People traveling for 30-90 (or more!) minutes to and from work, particularly the ones driving in traffic, are the commuters. And the ones I know that fall into that category hate it.
Good for you that you have such a nice situation, though!
I commute 60 minutes each way (give or take depending on traffic). I wish the commute was shorter but I personally wouldn't work from home regularly even though I technically could.
Between a chatty wife, active kids, and unfinished projects around the house, I don't have the willpower or ability to avoid distractions at home. I'm more productive going into work even if you factor in the time spent driving.
Plus, my drive gives me some down time to listen to audiobooks or podcasts. I do look forward to self-driving cars though (adaptive cruise control helps a lot in the meantime...)
Ah that is a point I forgot to mention on my other post of CONs with remote work - when friends/family in close proximity don't respect your need for space and quiet. But really, it's not much different from co-workers who do the same (except that with your children it's expected behavior, but with colleagues you would think they could learn after a while!)
Commutes are not all bad. But the bad ones can be miserable. Self driving cars (for all drivers!) would make it so much better...
You have options here. You can set aside a room as your quiet office, you can find a cafe or rent a coworking space to work in...it doesn't necessitate commuting 45 minutes into an office to solve.
I actually commute by public transport. The 30 minute walk is something I do because I find it a nice way to start the day. Instead of changing busses, I just walk the last 2-3 km.
That sounds like a good situation (and apparently your weather is tolerable). Unfortunately, this just wouldn't work in Texas, for example, because even 10 minutes of walking when it's 100+ leaves you very uncomfortable and not very presentable when you arrive in the office.
When it's 100f+ I prefer to wear shorts and change when I arrive, but aside from that, my ~10min bike ride in great. (Austin TX)
Generally it's not bad in the morning, and it's going home that's worse, but at that point, it matters less if I get sweaty.
I used to bike 30-45 minutes each way to work, and, yeah, I got very sweaty. I always wished there were a shower I could use there. It's not ideal biking (or walking) weather, for sure.
One additional anecdote I'd like to share: my coworker just moved to be under a mile from the office. His first time biking to the office from his new place was under five minutes. The other day he had to drive home. He messages me afterwards: "Took me 31 minutes to drive 9 blocks". (5:30pm and raining.)
I'd fall into that category. While I dislike the amount of time I spend travelling, I'd much rather do that than sit at home all day by myself. Honestly, I'm far more productive in the office where I can communicate face to face, explain things on whiteboards, ask quick questions and get some social interaction.
Any commute is a commute. And if the only possible commute is driving 60+ minutes, citizens should seriously consider changing their city (in both meanings of the verb), rather than pretending a virtual workspace is as good as real one.
This is an extremely naive view of living situations and how "easy" it is to just move somewhere.
I worked for a company in NYC for years and lived 8 miles from work. It took me a minimum of 90 minutes to get to work.
You seem to think I can either just uproot my family and move to some sort of utopia city with short commutes, good public schools, and well-paying jobs; OR I can just change New York City itself.
The fact is that most people in the US have commutes of 25+ minutes. Folks who walk to work are not the norm, and city schools across the US are a complete failure and joke. Don't assume your situation applies to everyone.
Indeed. I have also come to like it for the same reasons you describe. I like getting home, taking off my work clothes and doing what I like. I also get to see people other than my wife every day. But, like you, I walk to the office. If I was travelling a long way on congested roads or public transport I don't think I would prefer it.
A majority of people don't have to prefer something for it to become standard. It's possible for only a minority of influential or vocal people to prefer commuting for it to be widespread.
For many of us, the preference isn't down to liking the commute itself but because we choose to work in a different town to where we live. In my case I like living in a rural village even if it means a 1.5 hour commute into London each morning. It's still worth it for the tranquility I get on evenings and weekends. Plus the commute still works out significantly cheaper than buying a comparable place closer to the city.
So while I don't like the commute, I do still prefer it to living closer to London.
That's a remnant from days past when I lived within walking distance of my office. These days I take public transport, but I still get off a few stops early so I can walk ~30 minutes before reaching the office. Even a short while when was driving to work I'd park ~2.5 km from the office. Mainly because I could park for free, but also again so I wouldn't miss out on my morning walk.
I'm so relieved to see I'm not the only person here who likes work to remain at work! Unless you live more than an hour away, or REALLY love your job, I just don't see the attraction to working from home.
When I'm at home I'm specifically not at work, which means I don't do any work, I don't think about work, I don't talk to anyone from work (unless there's an emergency that someone else can't fix).
What I think would be an awesome balance between this, is very small regional shared offices. Just shared office spaces that offer usage of their space as a 'subscription' to businesses, and as part of that subscription you get 24/7 access, a desk, internet, a kitchen etc. That way you don't have to have dirty dirty work things in your house, AND you only have to "commute" to a potentially very local office.
I think working from home works perfectly if you know exactly what to fill your workday with or if you're in a position where you can make decisions smoothly. If you're not sure what's expected of you or your team has poor communication, remote work seems to lead to some issues, such as being unsure if you're doing enough, feeling more guilty about slacking (even if a break is needed) and an increased amount of blockers if you can't get a hold of someone you need to talk to since you're not at the office.
I think that the 'importance of face-to-face interaction' argument is a helplessly contrived one, an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room.
There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well.
What's markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like:
- a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office politics
- an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'
- adapting to different forms of communication
When people say that they can't communicate as well with someone who isn't in the same room that doesn't necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn't work. It could simply mean they're just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.
Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.
Another huge problem is the transition path from "everyone in the same office" to "everyone working remote". If you have 60% of your team sitting in the office, and 40% remote, you can be absolutely certain that those 40% will be out of touch on all those important decisions that just emerge during a watercooler conversation. (The watercooler also provides a way for different teams to get to know each other, even if they do not work with each other directly, thus forging bonds that might later turn out helpful.)
With all that (plus what you said), most individual employees will prefer the office over remote access. So remote would only work if you moved everyone from the office to remote access at a single point in time.
I try those watercooler conversations: the rare occasion the bosses aren't avoiding the proles on purpose, they just quickly make their drink then make excuses to disappear. If you touch on an important topic, it's not taken seriously because you're not in a meeting room.
Colleagues on the same level that hang out and discuss the latest new TV series seems that's good, but I don't think the bonds that builds are always strong.
I would say that is not professional. If there is anything work related, you book a meeting and then discuss. For this reason I know few people are on the look out when to go get the water without stumbling upon a boss or a manager, because they take it as a harassment. This adds huge amount of stress and knocks the productivity. Workplaces with "we are big family" approach are the worse. This should be illegal.
This seems like a very restrictive and unproductive way to do things. Does no work-related discussion take place without someone booking a formal meeting?
Requiring a formal meeting - booking a room (of course the only available room ends up far away from everyone's offices), negotiating a time with everyone, etc. - is sometimes unavoidable but certainly adds a lot of friction. And worst of all, it must be planned beforehand. Not spontaneous. Some of the most useful work discussions I had were during short, unplanned encounters in the corridor.
I suspect that a workplace where work discussions happen only in form of formal meetings would be rather unproductive.
That is bizzare. Here is how it works where I am at. You are in the kitchen getting a snack, drink, or eating or whatnot and a conversation strikes up. You mention a problem you are facing, they offer a solution or idea. Boom. Progress. On harder problems, these organically grow to brainstorm sessions. This can be with anyone in the org from new developer to someone who used to work on that system to ops to c-level exec to founder of the company. After all is said and done, it is up to the individuals to be mature and communicate discoveries or insights to the rest of the team. This will happen at scrum or via email. Sometimes a real meeting gets set up when there are others who need to be in the discussion and an email thread won't cut it. The only times it is a pain for us is when those in a different office forget to communicate outward which is not very often. I can only think of two times that it was apparent that water cooler conversations did not bubble up but still led critical designs at an inter-team level. And we are open enough to call out the lapse and work towards it not happening more often. I would not like working at a place where I had to stop communication in the kitchen and book a meeting for work related talk.
If you have that many employees working remotely, you should have already transitioned to an independent, accessible source-of-truth for all your discussed changes and plans. Slack convos, Confluence, a wiki, a Google doc, something.
I've worked on distributed teams that had an always-on video conference that everyone joined all day, every day. This facilitated much of the communication you are describing. The team still used instant message and email, but if someone needed to have a conversation, it was just a matter of looking at them to see if they looked they were busy and just saying "Hey!" If other people were interested they would listen in. If they had something to add, it was just a matter of speaking up.
The watercooler / hallway discussions are the signs of a culture lacking documentation processes. If requirements or changes are communicated in this way what happens when someone leaves or tries to QA the latest changes? What if there is a disagreement where one person assumed something else during the hallway discussion? Without documentation a company starts to fall apart after the team grows bigger than 6-12 people.
These are points that I have found to be true as well. In many organisations where remote work is not allowed I found there to be generally worse communication, masked by meetings that achieve very little other than giving people a false sense of "work being done".
There also seems to be a lack of properly planning tasks and as such this lack of planning is papered over with the sort of serendipitous spontaneous communication that happens when you have to walk over to someone and ask them what on earth is going on.
A focused remote worker can be orders of magnitude more productive than the typical office worker who is simply doing "busy work".
And working remote can give better focus. Sure, there's always the risk of distractions by home events. I personally have slacked off while working remote -- when my workload was nil (ie, tasks are waiting on other people now). But at the same time you can be there to respond, so there's less stress about things happening at home, no matter what they are. You're not worried about the HVAC tech fixing your AC and making sure it's done right while you're in the office. You're not worried about your sick spouse or sick kid, since you're there.
Right, except the elephant in the room isn't laziness or the value of face to face interaction, it's trust.
The driver of this lack of trust is the rise of managers (e.g. MBAs) who have limited expertise in the fields which they manage.
For jobs where there are measures of performance that are accurate and not gameable (e.g. certain call center workers) and/or it is a job executives probably reckon that they could do themselves, they are generally happy to let employees work from home.
IMO this is why Github and Mozilla are remote-first - by and large they're managed by developers.
I don't understand why you are being downvoted. I just started working as a software developer 10 months ago and my supervisor had told me the work culture has changed so much since upper management has transitioned to MBAs and previous military over promoting workers from within who have worked on projects.
I doubt that the government will allow any remote work any time soon because most of the people here have never heard of a VPN or even know what a secure password is.
I doubt it's just "Stupid MBA's and military 'intelligence'"...
We live in a post Snowden world. It only takes one mistake to have all your data out in the wild.
I think attributing changes away from trusting employees to simply "bad management" and ignoring issues like employee malfeasance... is overly simplistic and dilutes complicated issue conversations.
There needs to be a balance between trust and security. It's easy to take it too far in either direction.
The best managers are the ones who know they don't know how to do your job so they get out of your way. The worst are those who don't know how to do your job and get in the way. Those who know how to do your job at least don't get in the way when they help.
It doesn't matter. What matters is success. A good developer will be more successful in the marginal projects, and cheaper in the very worthwhile projects, but that is just a matter of dollars on the bottom line. The best developer in the world cannot save a stupid idea. The worst developers just ups how insanely profitable, and how long he need to wait a project must be before it is successful.
The above assumes a single developer. If you have a team of developers it quickly becomes obvious. In fact a boss who knows nothing about programming is probably better able to judge if someone is doing a poor job in these cases: those who know the new guy see him trying to get up to speed, while the boss sees a bigger picture by comparing to others. (a good developer will be making useful contributions on the second day, while a bad one will flounder for a couple weeks before the others will give up on teaching him the project)
>If you have a team of developers it quickly becomes obvious. In fact a boss who knows nothing about programming is probably better able to judge if someone is doing a poor job in these cases
I've been on such teams and that isn't what happens. This is:
* Team mates do not like badmouthing their coworkers unless they do not like them. Hence, if a coworker complains about another coworkers' performance its as likely to be due to a personal problem as it is performance. Most coworkers also won't know each others' wages so they are in an even poorer position to judge relative performance.
* Managers without technical chops are incapable of distinguishing hard tasks from tasks that are being done badly or easy tasks and tasks that are being done well. They are incapable of distinguishing quality engineering from hackjobs that will blow up in 6 months. They will either default to just assuming every developer is more or less equally productive or use terrible proxies for productivity (like how late each developer stays at work or their scrum 'velocity').
* Good performers who do not have their achievements recognized will leave for better paid positions, leaving mediocre and poor developers. The quality of the product takes a dive. Profitability may also take a dive as a result if the industry is competitive and the quality of the software matters.
Hm, not sure. My first boss 'managed' by assigning tasks to people and recording start/finish date in an Excel sheet. Multiple week projects were the same as one-day fixes of they made it on to the sheet. I was 'managed' by having my task completion times compared to 15yr developers, and given no feedback other than to work faster.
We also had a lot of slowdown because we were stuck on a shitty off-the-shelf program he bought. He went for this one instead of the more usable competitor because it was cheaper. If he could get developers to build a working tool in the cheap product by holding them 'accountable' in his Excel sheet, he could push for the product to replace the more expensive competitor and gain some reputation in the corporation.
In the end, most of the project was a horrific failure. His best employees left, and control of the project was transferred to another manager inside of a year or two.
I think a lot of this could have been avoided if my boss had any idea about what he was managing.
Just like you forgot to list the counter-argument examples of remote teams being better.
But seriously... I would expect there to be examples of both - Good remote teams. Good office teams. Bad remote teams. Bad office teams.
And every shade in between.
I'd, personally, prefer a mix? Couple days in the office... couple days remote. Time to "schmooze" with the team. Time to be in a quiet place to concentrate.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Anyone that claims one extreme is better or worse generally misses the truth: The best option is generally somewhere in the middle of the extremes.
When I did consult and visited a lot of workplaces (>95% open plan) in the IT sector, the typical 'collocated teams' reality was something like 2 to 3 socialites with apparently non too busy schedules behaving like the place was basically a bar without alcohol, free banter, jokes and non-work related conversations filled the room. Then 10 others wearing heavy headphones, always the one guy wearing explicit building site type noise protectors, and a preppy semi tech function junior type oblivious to the subliminal messages tapping people on the shoulders to get some basic info that is on the first page of the intranet or easily to google in 10 seconds. Did I already mention the 2 people that were just sitting there all day staring, waiting for the others to go home to finally find the peace to get some work done?
I personally wouldn’t want to work somewhere where I hardly ever saw my coworkers. I’m pseudo-remote as a consultant and wish I got to have more face time with my peers.
Sure! I like people. People make work fun. People that disagree with you (or that you disagree with) make life fun. Most of us spend the majority of our working hours working, and that work makes it easy to spark conversations with others that would otherwise not be had. Not having that for 8+ hours would make me feel incredibly lonely after a while.
(I love working at the cafe and shared work spaces, but that isn’t the same.)
"Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen. "
Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time. If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a response out of someone - then they are not participating correctly on a remote team. The team should work in a way they can all be online at the same time so communication can flow freely. If someone is interrupting you and you need concentration just explain it to them - like you would in the office.
Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.
I'm going to disagree here. It's entirely possible to work effectively with others via mostly-asynchronous communication. Open source projects, as you point out, can be a pretty good example of this. I'd further argue that for some (I suspect many...) people work much better when they can have long stints of focus without fear of interruptions.
Two-minute responses on Slack absolutely is a model that can work, and perhaps it's the easiest transition for people who've been working in a "teamy"/open-plan on-site setup. But I'm also convinced that it's not the only viable setup.
Open source projects work that way because we have to, not because we want to. Large projects have semi-regular meetups/sprints where they can all get together face to face. Small one muddle through and try to prevent the problems not meeting face to face causes.
Large open source projects may meet other members at conferences but rarely do you find a situation where everyone can be in the same location/country at the same time.
I think the main takeaway is that it all comes down to expectations. If the expectation of the team and the communication medium is rapid response (minutes vs. hours/days), and that expectation is not clearly communicated and agreed upon, you're going to have trouble.
Likewise, if everyone knows that due to people's different time zones, schedules, etc. that 24hrs is a typical response window via email, there should be no complaints if responses aren't received more immediately.
Now if only people would stop using `@here` for every little thing, it'd be easier to separate "blue" notifications from "red" and Slack would actually be the perfect model of async communication. I could prioritize whether to pull myself from my current task to look or not.
Doesn't work when people just write "@here, making nachoes" all day.
`@here` should really be yellow. Only direct communications red. Or something other than the current system.
> If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office
While this can work for some people, such "interruptible anytime" mentality may not be good for many workers. For example, when I am most productive I need to minimize, and ideally eliminate, disruptions. Such periods are short (2 hours at most for me), but I could do 90% of day's technical work in those 2 hours. If someone wants something, unless it is a blocker for a large team, I will put it away and get back to it later.
This has nothing to do with being remote or local, this is just the mode at which I am productive. I try to treat folks who work for me the same way: we can still meet daily in the morning I try to give them enough structure so I do not need to preempt them every hour. Things happen, there are failed systems that need to be fixed now and other fire drills, but I find most people in technology development more productive when on an async comm channel. I am.
Maybe I am just old and you youngsters do not need to do it this way :)
This is exactly what I am talking about: a set of infrequent, mandatory meetings with most/all other comms on a high latency async channel.
It takes significantly more discipline for a PM to run things this way, but the reward is often better productivity and happier, less frazzled developers.
I've had only bad experiences where a 2 minute reply time is mandatory.
I found that's the case with large-amorphous projects where nobody knows anything for certain, there's piss poor planning and that's why they need to keep "chatting" all the time.
You're basically reduced to a message switch.
>Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time. If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a response out of someone - then they are not participating correctly on a remote team.
This is pretty much why I don' want to work remotely.
At the office, when busy, I can turn my email and IM off. If people need something, they are welcome to come to me and I'll engage with them. I do not want to deal with urgent issues over any kind of IM. If you are not physically present, then call me and we'll have a voice chat.
My frustration is that IM is used for both urgent requests, as well as non-urgent ones. It's used as an alternative both to phones (immediate need - synchronous) and to email (no rush - asynchronous).
My fear in working remote is that I'll get too many non-urgent interrupts using IM. I cannot see a good reason to use textual IM over a voice chat. If it's not urgent, just use email.
So while I agree that response time can be important, there should be clear policies on the medium used for it. If the team mostly had policies that match my preferences, I could do remote work. But I suspect most teams will disagree with them. Hence I get my way in the office.
Taking 2 hours for a response is often fine at the office, BTW. It all depends on the context.
>Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.
There are very few jobs that really fit this categorization. At my work (in the office), we often respond to things the same day. On the flip side, today I plan to respond to something that had been requested a week ago. I don't work in OS or for the government.
If someone wants a quick response, they have to explain the need for it in the email. If it's open ended, it goes to the bottom of the queue. I'm willing to bet that since they haven't bugged me about it, they either no longer need the information, or it is low priority for them.
I think you're on to one of the major points. It would be great if companies could run entirely on asynchronous communication. Companies who do this well, and job functions that jive with asynchronous communication, can more easily support remote work. At some companies and with some jobs though, it's totally impossible.
When Mr. Exec wants a status update, and he wants it RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I'm not going to E-mail you and hope that your inbox doesn't have 10,000 other unread messages, or text you and hope you respond. I have to physically hoof it over to where you sit, apologize for interrupting, and get the info Mr. Exec needs. That's hard to do remotely.
If I know in advance I need a response about some topic, sure, try async first. If the deadline's a day out, E-mail, if it's an hour out, text or IM. But, after that if you don't respond, I've got to be the bad guy, break your concentration, and call you. And, if you don't pick up, I'm headed to where you are physically.
If your company culture embraces remote work it also must embrace responsiveness and a communication style that clearly conveys when responses are needed.
I would not consider working for a company that required a 2 minute slack response time, especially for a role that required uninterrupted focus. Different story if you are in a "put out fires" role
Is it more important to actually get stuff done or to be available for every distracting slack message that comes through?
If you need people to respond within 2 minutes to every message, that is lack of organization imo unless it is an emergency.
Good remote teams are very organized, prioritize documentation, have weekly and sometimes daily kick off meetings and then for the most part get out of the way for their team to get stuff done.
> When people say that they can't communicate as well with someone who isn't in the same room that doesn't necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn't work. It could simply mean they're just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.
Let's say you're right and people are to blame for being lazy. How would you address this?
Mainly by advocating a different style of work and communication. By teaching and coaching people how to communicate in a more organised rather than haphazard manner.
This isn't all that different from what in larger organisations is nowadays called agile transformation. How often do we hear "Yeah, that whole agile thing is nice but it doesn't work for us."?
The reason why 'agile' (or any other new approach for that matter) doesn't work in these cases often is that people are only used to doing things a certain way and are too lazy or otherwise unwilling to let go of that way and try a different approach.
Bringing about change on that scale is a long and often painful process. It's not that people are inherently lazy or stupid. It just can take considerable effort to unlearn habits you've gotten used to over a long time.
The crucial difference - at least so far - between the adoption of remote work and that of agile methods is that the latter for better or for worse nowadays seem to be largely accepted as the common approach for organising work (in the software industry at least).
As for remote work on the other hand there's no large-scale buy-in by (middle-)managers. I think this points to a larger issue at play here: Implementing remote work can surface shortcomings and waste.
If remote work requires workers to proactively communicate amongst themselves anyway what do you need traditional facilitators like middle-management for? With agile software development methods there are at least still roles like Scrum master or product owner that to some extent still resemble those traditional roles.
With remote work implemented properly we could very well arrive at a point where those roles aren't needed at all anymore.
> There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well.
There are extensive sets of studies that show all of that it generally doesn't, where it especially doesn't, and why it doesn't (which the article mentions.)
When people say that they can't communicate as well with someone who isn't in the same room that doesn't necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn't work. It could simply mean they're just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.
It could also mean they actually have sufficient social skills that they're able to make full use of the higher bandwidth available face-to-face, and aren't willing to suffer thru the markedly inferior communications that are all that's possible over the 'net.
And that they probably are also not afraid to use that 'full bandwidth', disrupting everyone workflow, repeatedly, like calling an hour long team status update meeting for a communication that could have perfectly occurred in a 2 line email message. Which you'll also receive. Oh yeah, who's taking the minutes by the way?
>And that they probably are also not afraid to use that 'full bandwidth', disrupting everyone workflow, repeatedly, like calling an hour long team status update meeting for a communication that could have perfectly occurred in a 2 line email message.
To be frank, people using IM to communicate with me disrupt my flow a lot more. They start a thread/conversation/request, and then are slow to respond, or disappear. You can't do that face to face.
Face to face (or even telephone) forces people to prepare. Rarely do I see people work that way with IM. People tend to realize that they are interrupting someone if it's a face to face. In my experience, many (most?) workers don't view IM as a significant interruption to the other party. So they feel much more free in using it.
>They start a thread/conversation/request, and then are slow to respond, or disappear.
That's the primary benefit of qorking remotely IMO. Not having to immediately stop everything im doing allows me to stay in flow state. It also improves the quality of my responses and solutions since i can let the request percolate in my head. Usually, I come up better answers when Im not actively thinking
So what's the benefit over just sending an email? If I do not need to respond immediately, why do I need an immediate notification (sound + popup/flashing window) that you've sent me an IM? Let it go to my email and I'll think about it after reading the email.
>Not having to immediately stop everything im doing allows me to stay in flow state.
So is it OK in remote work for me to turn off IM for 2-4 hours to remain in flow state? If not, then there will be no flow state for me.
That does not strike me as a quality of remote work. That seems to me to be more a cultural issue with the team in question. I have seen plenty of teams have a “heads down” mode where they are effectively on Do Not Disturb despite being in the office.
Conversely, I’ve seen plenty of “mandatory meetings” in remote work as well. Neither paradigm seems particularly advantageous.
And that's exactly why managers aren't interested in people working remotely.
Good managers ask when they actually need something and they expect those working for them to accommodate such requests immediately. That is why, after all, they are managers.
No, the work of the manager is to do whatever is needed to deliver the result on the task assigned to them, including if necessary decisions to scrap, mothball, reassign, adjust, ignore whatever is happening in the company based on current/future state of the group they manage or based on the situation of the company.
That's why they are managers and not low level developers. Developer does not like it? Well, a developer can migrate to writing less code and caring more about business related stuff. It is not like those who can write serializer cannot figure if a certain fire drill is required based on the amount of $$ coming in from a customer who is affected by a bug/wants something.
>No, the work of the manager is to do whatever is needed to deliver the result on the task assigned to them
You missed the part where the manager has to evaluate and push back if needed. If their primary role is merely to do what their bosses tell them to, then they are not doing any managing.
99% of the companies can replace 75% of the managers with supervisors ( foreman in constructions/manufacturing ) and get a better result. Most of the "teams" inside organizations dont need managers - they need supervisors as organization does not need to have mini fiefdoms.
That just shows your lack of information on how to manage knowledge workers.
Good managers know how to ship products by knowing how to manage knowledge workers and removing friction in the communication inside and outside the team.
1. Bad managers are a lot more common than good ones.
2. Good managers set direction and exist to acquire resources for the team and eliminate barriers out of the way of the team when they are headed in that direction. Their role is not to interrupt the team so that they can answer a question from upper management.
3. Most of half of urgent manager requests are due to lack of planning either on their part or on their manager's part. They knew they needed this information a few days ago, but felt "it's OK to interrupt the team when I really need it".
4. Most of the other half are due to their inability to push back.
5. There will be times when the managers do need information urgently. It is then their responsibility to accept the hit in productivity that it incurs.
I've worked with both good and bad managers. The good ones have these qualities.
Working remotely you can minimize these interruptions by turning off notifications. Which in my experience is common. And bad etiquette to interrupt (buzzing channels) unless it’s urgent.
The article has links to studies that say face to face is important for complex problems. What is your counter aside from saying there are examples supporting your view? Source? (I would link the links here but am on mobile and running late)
I don't find your links to counter the links in the article. Yours say that remote work increases productivity (for a call center specifically) and increases employee happiness. The article's links call out that collaborative and complex tasks along with spontaneous new ideas benefit from face to face.
I think these are both true and would advocate for a work solution that allows amble work from home but encourages common face to face time especially if a team is tackling a complex issue. Maybe two or three days per week remote?
In the article, a linked study of some IT folks doing complex infrastructure tasks and set up benefited from face to face interaction as compared to collaborating over email. Complex tasks does not mean pushing the needle on human advancement in science. Those in the study did not try to invent tcp/ip. They were just working on complex tasks.
Remote vs face to face debate is about the interplay of folks trying to earn a living, providing value to an organization, living life, and companies making profits. In this regard, it looks like a balance of remote to face to face could increase productivity, happiness, and ability to work on complex tasks.
What you ignore is that the amount of work a person can do is finite.
I can either put a lot of time and effort into remote communication, or I can work closely with people in a space that supports direct communication, putting that time and effort into whatever we're actually trying to do.
I freely grant that most office setups are shitty, so that for many people they waste time commuting and then waste plenty of time dealing with a bad office space and bad office culture. But that doesn't mean that offices can't be great places to work.
If I have my choice, it will always be working in close physical proximity with a team, just as long as we have a good space for that and a culture that supports actually getting things done. I like writing and am good at remote communication, but I'd rather save that energy for actual productive work.
Offices are great places, some of the best times were drinking, goofing off after work or dating a co-worker or pulling pranks.
But regardless you need to put in the same effort documenting in person. Being able to talk over a solution doesn't help anyone when you've left the company.
> - a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office politics
Speaking as someone who has worked in three different remote companies of varying sizes, I have not found any evidence that remote teams achieve this any more frequently than conventional ones do.
> - an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'
Again, I have not seen that remote teams make this any easier than conventional ones. Moreover, I think proponents of remote work in general are unaware of, or vastly underestimate, how many remote coworkers fudge their productive time because they can get away with it.
You can just as easily establish a culture of trust in a conventional office environment.
> - adapting to different forms of communication
Sure, but it’s unrealistic you’ll appeal to everyone’s favorite mode of communication, and many people don’t really care to adapt because they don’t need to. It is just as unreasonable to expect in-office coworkers to adapt to remote workers as it is to expect remote workers to come into an office for face-to-face communication.
I agree with you that remote teams can be effective in communication and productivity; however, I think your comment does more to support the position you’re arguing against than it does to negate it. Listen to what you’re saying here:
> Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.
This is fundamentally why most companies do not have remote teams. It’s attractive to remote workers and to teams that are entirely remote, but most people don’t really want to work remotely most or all of the time. What you are stating evidences this friction, because you keep reiterating that remote teams can be just as good if they put in the work, but that’s precisely the point - most people and teams really don’t want to put in the work because it’s an extra hassle.
You started your comment by attacking the idea that face-to-face interaction is important, but it quite demonstrably is important. By your own comment (and my experience, as well), remote teams need to invest a significant amount of “cooperative machinery” to make communication and productivity as seamless as it is in face-to-face interaction. That’s obviously not to say it cannot happen, or that it shouldn’t be a goal, but my point here is that this is an additional hurdle that companies considering remote teams need to be work on, which is frankly unattractive.
Some people are disciplined and motivated enough to work productively in any environment, and that’s fantastic. Some people are not intrinsically so, but they become that way in the environment of an office. And some people are simply never optimally productive! Also consider that while a very vocal minority of people want to work remotely, this does not typically jive with people who are in-office and who then have to deal with an additional friction to communicate with some subset of coworkers.
I guess to put my point more succinctly: yes, of course remote work can be wonderful and properly engaging for optimal productivity if the majority of your coworkers are intrinsically motivated and really want to work remotely. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s not reasonable to put the effort of achieving that ideal on companies that have already established a culture that works for them through face-to-face interaction in the office.
I think if companies want the best employees they will need to change established culture or risk losing them to a more modern company with an open mindset
Calling the argument contrived is really rather immature. It's not contrived, it's very real and important. Please stop being so quick to dismiss those that you disagree with as it's childish at best.
You speak of cargo cult, but your entire comment reeks of it. Ok, we understand, you like being able to isolate yourself. That's nice, and I'm glad you found a niche, but it's not the same for the vast majority of jobs and people. You call other people lazy, but I think perhaps that's just you. Social interaction and moving above an intermediate level where you can isolate yourself is hard work. Don't be so dismissive of others that strive for more.
Working remotely is great for the unambitious and the antisocial. Please stop trying to put those who do more down though.
Working remotely doesn't mean someone is unambitious or antisocial. The ability to focus without interruptions while still communicating/documenting clearly is easier done with remote work (in my experience).
I think you touched on a sad aspect of tech. For anyone to be "ambitious" or to "move above an intermediate level" they essentially have to become managers, which means less technical work. The likelihood of you joining the VP/higher ranks and still working on low level issues, as a respected technical fellow, are low to nill (Google, FB, MS have some positions but otherwise you're filtered into a manager to "move up.").
Your comment about "striving for more" is disrespectful to most developers/engineers.
How are people who spend their entire work days talking to others, but not actually working, "doing more?" I've seen more talkative/social people not getting work done than
"antisocial" workers being "unambitious" or stagnant.
At the moment, I work 60% from home and 40% from the office, and this perfectly suits for me.
However, more and more I hate 9 to 5 working hours, but that is another topic.
Has anyone studied if people outside of cushy tech jobs want to commute? particularly people with lower wages and things at home they would rather escape for 9 hours a day. Most people can't afford a home office too.
A few of my friends(working in non-IT fields) have coworkers who do everything to stay as long as they can in the office because their home life is hell.
Aside from them most of the people I asked about this would either want to have a very short(20 minutes max.) commute, or work from home, since it's usually the most comfortable environment for them.
Nearly everybody I know who spends at least two hours daily in traffic would love to change that in any way possible - including switching to remote work.
> to stay as long as they can in the office because their home life is hell.
This is pathetic. They have hell at home and instead of fixing it, they bring it to the office. My home life is awesome and I'd rather spend more time at home than in office full of miserable people. Sadly they are the loudest one and their moans are music to the ears of managers who are control freaks. Thankfully I decided never again work for a company that doesn't allow remote.
But regarding people who might want to avoid being home, that is a whole different problem that needs solving. Wanting escape should not be an argument for commuting.
Probably a job that is extremely well paid for knowledge work in technology and where workers are highly sought after so employers provide lots of perks.
Ahh. Cushy to me means you get paid for doing little or nothing, and usually with extra perks that make being there pleasant. (So I took cushy to mean not-doing-demanding-work.)
Nope. Nope. We have open offices because some genius did the simple math and realized that you can cram more people into a smaller space if you remove the walls.
Then somewhere along the way, some marketing guy came up with the spin, "It fosters communication!". Open office does indeed make people close in proximity, but it's not a necessity.
I think the open office started with Chiat/Day (ad/design firm). It was back when laptops were first introduced and it was seen as a cool way to work. People would get to be mobile, sit anywhere they want, etc.
Who's to say that we aren't living in such a world? :)
And as with anything else in life, we must weigh the options. Face to face can indeed be better than remote. It can also be worse, because some people just irritate others by their presence and little behaviors. But more significantly, some of us do work which requires a good amount of thought - uninterrupted, quiet thought. Shared offices make this more difficult (compared to a quiet home office).
We commute because of our growth dependency. This is just another example of simple solutions that cannot be truly implemented because it does not make money/jobs.
We need to reflect what are the objectives of our acts. Right now we are consuming way to much resources in the name of progress! But progress to what? Soon enough we will face environmental changes that could be avoided if we such do less things, not more.
Because people have kids and working while your >1 to 2 years kid is playing is unbearable? /jk
All jokes aside, as someone who loves remote and work from home to avoid Bangalore traffic, sometimes, not always it is good to meet some face to face.
Sure this can be taken to an extreme too. My last job we had a manager who insisted on doing everything face to face which meant we were stuck in office beyond 8 hours. Then people started adjusting their schedule to accommodate those meetings, then there was barely 3 hours of actual work, 2 hours of prep and 3 hours of "face to face" meetings.
I work from home 1 or 2 days a week, and the rest of the time commute 55 miles each way (~1h10m).
True, I probably get more done on the days I work from home as I don't have a commute, and there are fewer distractions, however, I find I can collaborate far more effectively when I'm in the office - instant messenger, email and video calls just don't cut it.
Plus I have an amazing commute, mostly along British A roads through the countryside.
This is what some of the comments are missing. Telecommuting doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. There are obvious advantages to being in the office; but I'd wager those advantages aren't quite as severe by cutting office time by 1-2 days a week. Plus, it allows workers to feel refreshed from dealing less with of the negative stresses of commuting.
It's not a work commitment. You're not working for your employer when you're commuting (unless you commute by train/bus and choose to do so).
It's like a side gig where your compensation is you don't get bent over for rent, get the freedom that comes with owning a home and no longer have to put up with the downsides of living in an apartment.
2 hours a day. You spend about 9 hours at the office, you sleep 8 hours (hopefully), household chores, including shopping food etc will take you an hour (probably more, but let's say). So this leaves you with 4 hours a day 'free'. Wokring from home would net you a massive 50% increase in 'free' time. Talk about QoL improbvement.
While working from home can be nice and more productive if you have some well defined task that needs to be done, I still feel I need the daily social interaction with my coworkers. Slack and Skype is just not enough. I would get depressed if I worked alone from home every day.
Or maybe if people didn't have to spend all that time in the commute and being depressed because of it they would actually have time and energy for a life outside of work and get your social fix their
I am on my 10th year of working from home, and I still love it. Here's my personal list of pros and cons:
PRO
Work from anywhere with internet: In the last 45 days, I have worked from the Caribbean, from Spain, and from Ireland. Granted, these travel experiences aren't full vacations (and in fact sometimes were stressful when internet quality was not tops), but they sure beat my previous "open office" bullpen.
Work when inspiration strikes: Sometimes my brain won't shut up the useless stuff, and other times it wants to really drive a useful project. When it's a good time, I usually can choose to work uninterrupted and make great progress. When it's not a good time, I can just go do chores around the house or go enjoy the weather.
Answer fewer tech questions for other employees: If you're within earshot, less technical people will ask for help the instant they think they need it. But if it takes more effort for them to reach you, they will work a little harder to solve their own problem. Most of the time, they solve the problem (or realize there was no problem -- just a moment of confusion). This saves me SO much time and occasional frustration.
Not commute: This one is kind of obvious, but not having to commute saves 1-2 hours a day. That's time for gym, coffee, reading news, etc. It's also so much less stress. When I drove in traffic to and from work, I would often arrive very frustrated. When I moved to Europe and had the luxury of riding a train(s) to work, life was better... except when trains would break or a surge of travelers would result in no seats available.
CON
Communication can be more difficult: I have found voice calls to be essential, at least compared to just txt and email. Text messages were the worst and most likely to result in annoyance or confusion. Emails are a bit better, but reply-hell is real. You definitely have to work a bit to find the right tools and methods for each of the people you need to work with; but once found, it works almost as good as face to face.
Work is _always_ there: This has been the hardest for me. I always have more work to do than I can do, and now I can work any minute that someone else (partner) doesn't need me. This can get out of control if you're not careful. Some people are strict and disciplined about home working, but I like to stay flexible. Still, one must set some limits or reminders of reasonable behavior/expectations.
Fewer jobs: Since most companies don't go for remote work, you have to decide what's more important - freedom, or a particular job. I choose freedom, and at this point I don't think I'll ever go back. Once you've tasted freedom, and once you've proven to yourself that you can work (well) alone and unsupervised, the thought of being back in a noisy office with people passing by behind you, potentially judging you if they don't see you with a code window open 99% of the time, is just untenable.
I think it's connected with the rise of bullshit jobs.
If your job is well defined, e.g. make an app or a website design, you can do it anywhere in the world. The app/design is your deliverable that anyone can see and judge.
If your job is a poorly defined "management" or "product ownership", with no real deliverable, how can your work be judged? Your job turns into convincing other people that your job is useful. Work long hours, seem busy, attend meetings, leave the office late. An epitome of the corporate environment.
I think it's kind of a leap to assume the value is low just because it's hard to measure.
This is in general a common, elusive mistake: "We can't measure it, so it must be zero." Better to be ridiculous and say it's worth between $100 and $10,000.
It's subtler than that. Because it is hard to measure, one has to make explicit effort to demonstrate value. This wastes time and energy that could have been used to increase the very value that needs to be demonstrated.
Value is lower because of the consequences of being hard to measure.
Then there are actual bullshit jobs, whose value is difficult to measure because they have no value to begin with.
Or at the very least, if there are people producing measurable value, figure out how much less those people would produce if they had to do the other jobs themselves.
If your job is well defined it can be contracted out to a non-employee, which means another member of the gig economy, rather than a full time job with benefits. This is where the future is going. Anything that has a very strict definition of the work that can be done will be subject to automation or outsourcing. All the 'bullshit' that is left is what defines the full time job. Welcome to the future.
We'll finally be able to stop tying health insurance to employment in the ridiculous way that we currently do.
Skilled professionals will more often be able to make their own hours and find more variety/novelty in their work by taking jobs for a variety of customers.
And there will be so many freelancers that a solid industry for helping them connect with consumers of their services so that the hardest part of freelancing (finding work) starts to become a non-issue.
Somewhat true, but the kind of work my team does is complex coding around business requirements and it ends up taking two or three of us putting our collective heads together to work out solutions to problems. Looking at previous coding jobs I had, none were quite as complex, so YMMV.
My job is well defined and "delivery" is physical devices, but it's problematic to work remotely as I work with an actual hardware and it's not feasible to have my own, dedicated, expensive equipment at home. "Well defined" in your context mostly means web/app development, which already have high level of remote working positions, and you left a wide gap between such jobs and "bullshit" jobs.
My other half works in Singapore inspecting and certifying and maintaining ship hulls, and she pretty much has to go to the ship to do it. It seems kind of harsh to call that a bullshit job because she can't do it in the living room.
I can think of an awful lot more jobs that are pretty well defined but nonetheless can't be done in someone's living room.
"If your job is well defined, e.g. make an app or a website design, you can do it anywhere in the world."
That's the OP's exact words. Inspecting a ship hull is clearly defined, yet I cannot do it in my living room. Likewise mopping the floors at MacDonald's. Very clearly defined, yet cannot be done anywhere in the world; I have to go to the actual floor that needs mopping.
You are right. In my original post I implicitly meant office jobs (software in particular). I kept that assumption implicit because I understood that the article was concerned with jobs that had the potential to be done remotely and thus save you the commute time. Mopping floors does not have the remote potential in the first place, while some (most?) office jobs do.
I thank you for your clear and helpful amplifying remarks, delivered without snark or otherwise unhelpful edge. I must confess that over time here on HN, I have become aware that many posters seem to consider only a very small section of the economy (and indeed, a very small part of technology) when making general statements, and I do find myself erring on the side of assuming people have not considered the ninety-something percent of jobs that do not involve making web pages and web apps. Mea culpa.
Managers. People working from home scare them. They might be slacking. They might be leaking. Heaven's sake, man, they might even be organizing a union!
If it weren't for the evil managers, we would all adopt to a 21st century lifestyle overnight, throwing out the stale routines of the backwards generation that raised us.
This makes me wonder, is it truly so? Every organization starts without managers and they are added later once the organization grows but if they are not really needed, why is every organization adding them?
That is a realy good question. I don't know whether there is a clear answer. How come efficient passionate startups eventually end up as rent-seeking slothful bureaucratic mega-corporations. When does that 'start' to happen?
It is not just 'cargo-cult' or 'enterprise-envy'. I think it goes deeper. My current feeling is that middle management is something that is naturally lurking in the wings, and expresses itself the moment the overhead can be carried. Caricatured: Bottom up there's people looking for a way to escape 'working at the coalface', and start the innate pecking order/ hierarchy battles. Top down there is the desire of the owner to create some distance, and in many cases also the latent idea that if some proficiencies could be isolated into a single specialist, the remaining 'resources' could be sourced cheaper. It self reinforces since as 'overhead' the middle management layer crates make-work to assert its existence. Furthermore, it asserts the 'company as a value funnel', since it is a model that disemancipates each individual making sure they can't easily venture out on their own.
So the middle management pattern could be an expression waiting to happen as a result of natural forces, not as a result of direct 'needs' or 'efficiency' in value creation in its own right, but just for the sake of 'enterprise creation' itself.
Conversations around whiteboards between stakeholders creates value. Pair programming makes for lower defects and more reliable scheduling. Software is a design delivery operation. There was recent article on MS office space redesign to create more value. We are never typing approximations to futures like the proverbial monkeys. Productivity is not per-keystroke. I have been paid extra to kill projects that never should have started. Personal productivity is almost a misnomer.
While I have nothing against MBAs, this is a typical example of what people call MBAish / corporate BS and why managerial profiles have gained a bad reputation here. It looks smart on the surface but scrutiny exposes non-sense.
>Conversations around whiteboards between stakeholders creates value.
Why ? Are whiteboards magic ?
>Pair programming makes for lower defects and more reliable scheduling
Putting aside the fact that the benefits of pair programming as less consensual than what you seem to suggest, it can be done much more conveniently in a remote setup with a screenshare and a headset than by sharing a desk.
>Software is a design delivery operation.
So ?
>There was recent article on MS office space redesign to create more value.
Here we have the business case reference, always good to include one. The substantial remark is that once again this doesn't prove anything, the first reason being that "value" is extremely vague.
>Productivity is not per-keystroke
The art of looking like you are siding with the people you want to control while it is actually the opposite. If we go the bottom of the reasoning : value is not per keystroke, we therefore need to put employees in a room because their true value must be monitored to be appreciated. "Please understand, I really want to be able to appreciate your true value". Sounds a bit hypocrite to me.
>Personal productivity is almost a misnomer
One more slogan.
>I have been paid extra to kill projects that never should have started.
While I am the first to advocate careful planning and writing code last, as an entrepreneur, I consider it a crime to sabotage projects, because anyone who has ever created something, or started a project or a venture understands that creativity is almost Holy. Beyond the technical deliverables, projects trigger group (and market) dynamics and institutional learning that may be hard to reproduce later in time. For this reason, doers do not sabotage or kill projects, they rectify them. Sure there can be pure follies that need to be stopped ASAP to stop diverting valuable resources of the company, but my overall impression is that you have a more liberal approach to assessing what must be killed.
I respect arguments from both sides, but this comment is really representative of the crap filling most companies.
Anecdotally, for the amount of problems I have seen them solve in short order. Yes. They force an idea in the mind to become concrete and logically digestible to other members of the party. If you can't draw it in a manner that other people understand, you don't understand the idea well enough yourself. It is also free flowing. Ideas can be added to and removed quickly with an interface that almost all humans have been taught to use since a young age. It only contains 3 parts. The pen, the board, and the eraser. No software with far too many options to understand. No weird bugs that crash in the middle of a presentation. Pictographs can transcend language barriers. Software sellers will never create such a simple product, there is little value added reason to.
So yea, if not magical, far better than its competition in portraying ideas.
> They force an idea in the mind to become concrete and logically digestible to other members of the party.
You make a very valid point, what I was highlighting is that good communication can be achieved without whiteboards too.
I understand your underlying argument that whiteboards may constitute the best technology, but I also think there is a tacit convention at play here. People tacitly agree to communicate in a way that make whiteboards work. For there are many effective and fluid ways to iterate on ideas that do not involve live drawings or complex tech.
I know it for a fact as drawing my thoughts on a whiteboard has always been counter-natural to me. I can do it but I wouldn't say that it is necessary for good communication. It is just a communication choice that people make.
Everything that can be drawn clearly can also be written clearly (analogies, bullet point lists for flows, etc...). Not to say that diagrams are never helpful, but it may be a stretch to assume that drawings and whiteboards have an almost essential role.
FWIW, spreadsheets are another remarkable group planning tool with an HDMI big screen. Many projects work forward against backwards constraint logic not always clear from day 1. Bugs made shallow with enough eyes applies early in projects. Even editing text documents of tables and lists around consensus concerning values of features and costs of risks is very useful. I have never had much need for any developer just typing against personal request. I always force stakeholders across roles and departments to sign their names to schedules and sign their names to ongoing weekly schedule adjustments. Every slip is caught ASAP including eyes on features bigger than schedule budget stomachs.
Why don't you ask a question? I am not an MBA. I wrote Harvard's Ultrix manual, C on SunOS, Windows and Linux. I sat at whiteboards with Steve Crocker, Sunil Paul, Mark Pincus and Brad Cox across telecomms, finance, early Net and XML protocols and even early bioinformatics. Do you imagine we channel future visions from God out fingertips?
Let's eliminate some cases. I know some people work on entertainment software or short term content. Others work in departments "against management" for take home pay. I never care about those projects or those people working on them. My words do not apply there.
Interesting hardware is not virtual but involves complex supply chains. The same goes for productivity software interacting with the world already in motion. New training often costs more than new tools. DC folks making NASD broker registration reality are essential personnel in tight supply chain relationships. Any error on a Congressional Report can tumble decision makers into felonies or disrupt global commodity markets. Same goes for folks writing device drivers or porting libraries to new hardware. None of this is any app buried in app stores or Office Space TPS reports.
In such greenfield or release cycle projects the right team size and composition will get there first, avoid mistakes, clean up markets later cheapest or occupy profitable niches longest.
Software projects concern progress and reach and thus "pass the bus test." Nature is not kind to the shy. Individual problem are just problems. Anybody can consult from anywhere if they can make a living that way. Otherwise, nobody cares about homebodies. Never project socials problems or commute logistics as values or virtues. Skunkworks remains the model for focus and shared responsibility. Software is not the deliverable. Tools and answers are the deliverables.
It's the employer's call, and short term there are no obvious downsides there as all the effects are longer term (burnout, depression, quitting) and business is mostly blind to anything beyond 4 quarters. The 'productivity' thing is intangible as long as the business doesn't switch to a performance based model as opposed to a sociopolitical hierarchy. And their lies the rub, because a performance based system doesn't mesh very well with middle-management, which is the 'backbone' of our archetypal company model.
I don't speak for anyone but myself, but I wouldn't give up the extra time that I get to spend with my young kids for all the productivity boosts in the world. No commute and being home for lunch is time that would be stolen by any company that doesn't allow remote work.
Why do we still commute? Because outside of the tech bubble, most jobs still require face to face communication and living close-by to the office in many cities is cost-prohibitive to many.
Most jobs don't require face to face outside of physical services such as the trades or cutting hair. And the jobs that do require face-to-face -- many of them definitely don't require an office. (i.e. insurance claims adjusting -- that's a field job, so there isn't really a "commute.")
Selling insurance: not required.
Customer service for the electrical company: nope. Most of that is on the phone.
Logistics for a trucking company: also phone/computer based, no face to face (or rarely.)
Medical claims processing -- never face to face
Coordinating cable TV installation appointments: all phone or online based
If you think about it almost ALL jobs can be done remotely. I agree that most jobs still require it, but that isn't because of the nature of the job, but the lack of vision from those particular industries. Most businesses seem to operate under 19th century ideals.
I realize not everyone wants or can work from home; but I would advocate for a decentralized workplace -- remote working with perhaps small satellite offices scattered around the world -- offices that can simply pop-up at WeWork/etc. As employees in the area need/want.
Obviously a hardware company like Apple actually needs a physical space for people to build things. Same for Boeing, Tesla, etc.
But Facebook? Farmers Insurance? They don't sell anything physical.
Almost all these jobs you've listed are on the list of things in the near future that won't require people (or at least as many). I called my electrical company with an outage, an automated system answered and I gave my customer number. They told me my meter could not be contacted. It then said other local meters could be contacted and it was likely a issue that just affected me, so they would send a truck. 20 minutes later the lineman/repair person gave me a call from their cell and asked a quick question about what my was going on. 10 minutes later they were there replacing the meter.
If your job can be done remotely, your job can be done by a computer in 90% of the cases. Good luck fighting for those jobs in the future (especially when they get sent overseas for 1/5th the cost).
399 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadGranted, I'm pretty bad at self-discipline
We had one guy who had a nice house with a big dining room, and once a month we'd work from there in one room. Less work got done, but some things that otherwise might never have been done/resolved got handled. Plus it was "kind of" fun.
So unless you're geographically too far from colleagues, there's no reason why you can't have meetups (and I would advocate for them... occasionally).
This is a fallacy. If something really needs resolving, the setting is not relevant.
Sometimes on person describes an annoyance they have, and one of the other people in the room feels motivated to resolve that issue. Or a couple of people start talking about something, and a third person has a new idea that improves thing. There are endless scenarios that can result in something happening that otherwise might never have happened without the meeting.
Search for: "collaborating writing tool", "virtual whiteboard" etc.
The latter are usually part of teleconference tools. Here's from an open source one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNqiMEblgo
They let you write stuff (even with a pen, on a touch capable display) and have others see what you write (and even write/erase themselves).
What else is missing?
Standing in person before an actual whiteboard? Smelling the marker's ink? Maybe with the advent of cheap VR and smell-o-vision we'll get that too.
VR would a giant help as body language, gesturing and physical size all become much easier to see. Of course, that would require quite a leap forward in VR to accomplish that level of avatar.
You can draw things in different sizes through remote whiteboard, you can add helpful icons and your voice can get louder or quieter for effect.
And you can't effectively draw some things on a tiny monitor screen.
That's a deeply abnormal situation. It's like talking to someone while sitting in front of a fun house mirror. Who would subject themselves to such a metaphysical nightmare?
And that's just one of the little uncanny distortions that video conferencing brings.
You might enjoy this excerpt from a novel, which predicts a bad future for video chat:
http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527
Sample:
> It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.
And:
> This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.
It also means you have to stop what you're doing, sit down and talk to your screen. I like being able to stand up, or go grab something more than a meter away, take a walk or make coffee while I talk to someone. If I vanish from sight, the other parties on the video call don't know if I'm still listening. Heck, even if you can see the person, you don't know if their sound is still working properly, so there's more "can you still hear me?" and "sorry, you cut out for a moment there, can you repeat yourself" sorts of interactions as well.
Video's a pretty bad substitute for real world face-to-face.
Searchable conversation history is certainly extremely useful. But today, that's at the cost of needing to regularly go back and redo text discussions from 5 or 15 minutes ago because it becomes clear that we initially hadn't understood each other at all.
So I dream of a Black Mirror style future with an indexed video archive of what my eyes had seen.
In theory. But when you are dealing with a lot of "anti-social" people who have a hard time communicating verbally, or integrating socially, it usually has the opposite affect, ime.
Just the past 2 weeks I've had multiple face to face meetings to decide on a plan of action for a project. Everyone left the meeting thinking something has been decided.
Turns out there were 2 or 3 separate ideas on how we were proceeding with handling things!
Can't help but think that if this conversation was held in text, proposed approaches would have been more clear to everyone, and the problem of whether a conclusion was reached or not would be easily solved by revisiting the conversation.
1) Control from above in the hierarchy (the general wants to see the army)
2) Control from below especially in competitive setups (the troop wants to know what's going to happen)
Then there is little like seeing people face to face to remind them you exists. This is good for business. I'm a freelancer now (about half of my career) and work mostly from home but I go meet customers in person almost every week or every month, depending on how much we work together (directly proportional.)
Furthemore, face to face collaboration is very effective when in hurry.
A Dev I work with has to commute through 50% of Germany every week. He only sees his kids on the weekend.
There are many factors at play in such decisions. "Having a choice" is something you do not always have depending on personal circumstances.
We would be well served by demonstrating compassion for others -- it's not like a majority of people can simply jump on their fixie with their Manhattan Portage bag and just enjoy a 5 minute ride to a DUMBO loft office.
I lived 10 mins away on foot from my job. It was all fine and dandy for some time, but then things got seriously tense in the workplace and it meant the super short commute gave me no time to unwind. It ended up being mentally taxing to live so close to my workplace, even when I was not working since I ended up being near or walking in front basically anytime I got out. Nasty. Too long a commute and you're wasting so much time and energy in our life, but too close and it can have deleterious effects too.
(took some photos... https://gallery.tasuki.org/2017/10-few-hours-in-tallinn)
I used to walk with my wife to her office and back when I started full remote work (it's been 6 years, in a fully remote company).
Also, you're free to rent coworking space or shared office space if you like to. Working remote means you have a choice - not that you have to work from home :)
People traveling for 30-90 (or more!) minutes to and from work, particularly the ones driving in traffic, are the commuters. And the ones I know that fall into that category hate it.
Good for you that you have such a nice situation, though!
Between a chatty wife, active kids, and unfinished projects around the house, I don't have the willpower or ability to avoid distractions at home. I'm more productive going into work even if you factor in the time spent driving.
Plus, my drive gives me some down time to listen to audiobooks or podcasts. I do look forward to self-driving cars though (adaptive cruise control helps a lot in the meantime...)
Commutes are not all bad. But the bad ones can be miserable. Self driving cars (for all drivers!) would make it so much better...
Generally it's not bad in the morning, and it's going home that's worse, but at that point, it matters less if I get sweaty.
I used to bike 30-45 minutes each way to work, and, yeah, I got very sweaty. I always wished there were a shower I could use there. It's not ideal biking (or walking) weather, for sure.
One additional anecdote I'd like to share: my coworker just moved to be under a mile from the office. His first time biking to the office from his new place was under five minutes. The other day he had to drive home. He messages me afterwards: "Took me 31 minutes to drive 9 blocks". (5:30pm and raining.)
So I love my bike, even in the Texas summer. :-)
I worked for a company in NYC for years and lived 8 miles from work. It took me a minimum of 90 minutes to get to work.
You seem to think I can either just uproot my family and move to some sort of utopia city with short commutes, good public schools, and well-paying jobs; OR I can just change New York City itself.
The fact is that most people in the US have commutes of 25+ minutes. Folks who walk to work are not the norm, and city schools across the US are a complete failure and joke. Don't assume your situation applies to everyone.
* According to the US Cencus Bureau: https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/embed.html
A majority of people don't have to prefer something for it to become standard. It's possible for only a minority of influential or vocal people to prefer commuting for it to be widespread.
In that case, 'they' prefer it, not 'us'.
So while I don't like the commute, I do still prefer it to living closer to London.
This is not quite a commute.
Still, sounds more like a daily walk that happens to be to the job than a commute.
When I'm at home I'm specifically not at work, which means I don't do any work, I don't think about work, I don't talk to anyone from work (unless there's an emergency that someone else can't fix).
What I think would be an awesome balance between this, is very small regional shared offices. Just shared office spaces that offer usage of their space as a 'subscription' to businesses, and as part of that subscription you get 24/7 access, a desk, internet, a kitchen etc. That way you don't have to have dirty dirty work things in your house, AND you only have to "commute" to a potentially very local office.
There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well.
What's markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like:
- a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office politics
- an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'
- adapting to different forms of communication
When people say that they can't communicate as well with someone who isn't in the same room that doesn't necessarily mean that a remote setup doesn't work. It could simply mean they're just lazy and not willing to adjust to a different kind of work environment.
Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.
With all that (plus what you said), most individual employees will prefer the office over remote access. So remote would only work if you moved everyone from the office to remote access at a single point in time.
Colleagues on the same level that hang out and discuss the latest new TV series seems that's good, but I don't think the bonds that builds are always strong.
1. All work-related discussion should take place in formal meetings.
and
2. No non-work-related discussions should ever happen in the workplace.
?
If you are having a discussion with your boss don't bother him when he is on a break, book a meeting.
I agree with parent poster in large orgs but in orgs where the founder eats lunch with you that level of formalness is awkward
"I'll grab a donut from the store across the street. Does anyone else want something?" - "No, we don't because YOU'RE FIRED."
I suspect that a workplace where work discussions happen only in form of formal meetings would be rather unproductive.
There also seems to be a lack of properly planning tasks and as such this lack of planning is papered over with the sort of serendipitous spontaneous communication that happens when you have to walk over to someone and ask them what on earth is going on.
A focused remote worker can be orders of magnitude more productive than the typical office worker who is simply doing "busy work".
The driver of this lack of trust is the rise of managers (e.g. MBAs) who have limited expertise in the fields which they manage.
For jobs where there are measures of performance that are accurate and not gameable (e.g. certain call center workers) and/or it is a job executives probably reckon that they could do themselves, they are generally happy to let employees work from home.
IMO this is why Github and Mozilla are remote-first - by and large they're managed by developers.
I doubt that the government will allow any remote work any time soon because most of the people here have never heard of a VPN or even know what a secure password is.
We live in a post Snowden world. It only takes one mistake to have all your data out in the wild.
I think attributing changes away from trusting employees to simply "bad management" and ignoring issues like employee malfeasance... is overly simplistic and dilutes complicated issue conversations.
There needs to be a balance between trust and security. It's easy to take it too far in either direction.
Your boss doens't need to know how to do your job.
Without intimate knowledge of the tasks you do they have no idea of what you are asked to do is intrinsically hard or you are simply doing it badly.
The above assumes a single developer. If you have a team of developers it quickly becomes obvious. In fact a boss who knows nothing about programming is probably better able to judge if someone is doing a poor job in these cases: those who know the new guy see him trying to get up to speed, while the boss sees a bigger picture by comparing to others. (a good developer will be making useful contributions on the second day, while a bad one will flounder for a couple weeks before the others will give up on teaching him the project)
I've been on such teams and that isn't what happens. This is:
* Team mates do not like badmouthing their coworkers unless they do not like them. Hence, if a coworker complains about another coworkers' performance its as likely to be due to a personal problem as it is performance. Most coworkers also won't know each others' wages so they are in an even poorer position to judge relative performance.
* Managers without technical chops are incapable of distinguishing hard tasks from tasks that are being done badly or easy tasks and tasks that are being done well. They are incapable of distinguishing quality engineering from hackjobs that will blow up in 6 months. They will either default to just assuming every developer is more or less equally productive or use terrible proxies for productivity (like how late each developer stays at work or their scrum 'velocity').
* Good performers who do not have their achievements recognized will leave for better paid positions, leaving mediocre and poor developers. The quality of the product takes a dive. Profitability may also take a dive as a result if the industry is competitive and the quality of the software matters.
We also had a lot of slowdown because we were stuck on a shitty off-the-shelf program he bought. He went for this one instead of the more usable competitor because it was cheaper. If he could get developers to build a working tool in the cheap product by holding them 'accountable' in his Excel sheet, he could push for the product to replace the more expensive competitor and gain some reputation in the corporation.
In the end, most of the project was a horrific failure. His best employees left, and control of the project was transferred to another manager inside of a year or two.
I think a lot of this could have been avoided if my boss had any idea about what he was managing.
Do not allow your experience with a bad boss to clutter your thinking about how a good boss would handle things.
But seriously... I would expect there to be examples of both - Good remote teams. Good office teams. Bad remote teams. Bad office teams.
And every shade in between.
I'd, personally, prefer a mix? Couple days in the office... couple days remote. Time to "schmooze" with the team. Time to be in a quiet place to concentrate.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Anyone that claims one extreme is better or worse generally misses the truth: The best option is generally somewhere in the middle of the extremes.
(I love working at the cafe and shared work spaces, but that isn’t the same.)
Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time. If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a response out of someone - then they are not participating correctly on a remote team. The team should work in a way they can all be online at the same time so communication can flow freely. If someone is interrupting you and you need concentration just explain it to them - like you would in the office.
Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.
Two-minute responses on Slack absolutely is a model that can work, and perhaps it's the easiest transition for people who've been working in a "teamy"/open-plan on-site setup. But I'm also convinced that it's not the only viable setup.
Likewise, if everyone knows that due to people's different time zones, schedules, etc. that 24hrs is a typical response window via email, there should be no complaints if responses aren't received more immediately.
Doesn't work when people just write "@here, making nachoes" all day.
`@here` should really be yellow. Only direct communications red. Or something other than the current system.
While this can work for some people, such "interruptible anytime" mentality may not be good for many workers. For example, when I am most productive I need to minimize, and ideally eliminate, disruptions. Such periods are short (2 hours at most for me), but I could do 90% of day's technical work in those 2 hours. If someone wants something, unless it is a blocker for a large team, I will put it away and get back to it later.
This has nothing to do with being remote or local, this is just the mode at which I am productive. I try to treat folks who work for me the same way: we can still meet daily in the morning I try to give them enough structure so I do not need to preempt them every hour. Things happen, there are failed systems that need to be fixed now and other fire drills, but I find most people in technology development more productive when on an async comm channel. I am.
Maybe I am just old and you youngsters do not need to do it this way :)
It takes significantly more discipline for a PM to run things this way, but the reward is often better productivity and happier, less frazzled developers.
This is pretty much why I don' want to work remotely.
At the office, when busy, I can turn my email and IM off. If people need something, they are welcome to come to me and I'll engage with them. I do not want to deal with urgent issues over any kind of IM. If you are not physically present, then call me and we'll have a voice chat.
My frustration is that IM is used for both urgent requests, as well as non-urgent ones. It's used as an alternative both to phones (immediate need - synchronous) and to email (no rush - asynchronous).
My fear in working remote is that I'll get too many non-urgent interrupts using IM. I cannot see a good reason to use textual IM over a voice chat. If it's not urgent, just use email.
So while I agree that response time can be important, there should be clear policies on the medium used for it. If the team mostly had policies that match my preferences, I could do remote work. But I suspect most teams will disagree with them. Hence I get my way in the office.
Taking 2 hours for a response is often fine at the office, BTW. It all depends on the context.
>Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.
There are very few jobs that really fit this categorization. At my work (in the office), we often respond to things the same day. On the flip side, today I plan to respond to something that had been requested a week ago. I don't work in OS or for the government.
If someone wants a quick response, they have to explain the need for it in the email. If it's open ended, it goes to the bottom of the queue. I'm willing to bet that since they haven't bugged me about it, they either no longer need the information, or it is low priority for them.
When Mr. Exec wants a status update, and he wants it RIGHT FUCKING NOW. I'm not going to E-mail you and hope that your inbox doesn't have 10,000 other unread messages, or text you and hope you respond. I have to physically hoof it over to where you sit, apologize for interrupting, and get the info Mr. Exec needs. That's hard to do remotely.
If I know in advance I need a response about some topic, sure, try async first. If the deadline's a day out, E-mail, if it's an hour out, text or IM. But, after that if you don't respond, I've got to be the bad guy, break your concentration, and call you. And, if you don't pick up, I'm headed to where you are physically.
If your company culture embraces remote work it also must embrace responsiveness and a communication style that clearly conveys when responses are needed.
It's droll that Slack is the name of the service chaining you to notifications. I wonder if that was deliberate.
Is it more important to actually get stuff done or to be available for every distracting slack message that comes through?
If you need people to respond within 2 minutes to every message, that is lack of organization imo unless it is an emergency.
Good remote teams are very organized, prioritize documentation, have weekly and sometimes daily kick off meetings and then for the most part get out of the way for their team to get stuff done.
Let's say you're right and people are to blame for being lazy. How would you address this?
This isn't all that different from what in larger organisations is nowadays called agile transformation. How often do we hear "Yeah, that whole agile thing is nice but it doesn't work for us."?
The reason why 'agile' (or any other new approach for that matter) doesn't work in these cases often is that people are only used to doing things a certain way and are too lazy or otherwise unwilling to let go of that way and try a different approach.
Bringing about change on that scale is a long and often painful process. It's not that people are inherently lazy or stupid. It just can take considerable effort to unlearn habits you've gotten used to over a long time.
The crucial difference - at least so far - between the adoption of remote work and that of agile methods is that the latter for better or for worse nowadays seem to be largely accepted as the common approach for organising work (in the software industry at least).
As for remote work on the other hand there's no large-scale buy-in by (middle-)managers. I think this points to a larger issue at play here: Implementing remote work can surface shortcomings and waste.
If remote work requires workers to proactively communicate amongst themselves anyway what do you need traditional facilitators like middle-management for? With agile software development methods there are at least still roles like Scrum master or product owner that to some extent still resemble those traditional roles.
With remote work implemented properly we could very well arrive at a point where those roles aren't needed at all anymore.
There are extensive sets of studies that show all of that it generally doesn't, where it especially doesn't, and why it doesn't (which the article mentions.)
Data > anecdote.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...
http://www.cosocloud.com/press-release/connectsolutions-surv...
https://www.zenefits.com/blog/remote-employees-happier-and-m...
It could also mean they actually have sufficient social skills that they're able to make full use of the higher bandwidth available face-to-face, and aren't willing to suffer thru the markedly inferior communications that are all that's possible over the 'net.
To be frank, people using IM to communicate with me disrupt my flow a lot more. They start a thread/conversation/request, and then are slow to respond, or disappear. You can't do that face to face.
Face to face (or even telephone) forces people to prepare. Rarely do I see people work that way with IM. People tend to realize that they are interrupting someone if it's a face to face. In my experience, many (most?) workers don't view IM as a significant interruption to the other party. So they feel much more free in using it.
That's the primary benefit of qorking remotely IMO. Not having to immediately stop everything im doing allows me to stay in flow state. It also improves the quality of my responses and solutions since i can let the request percolate in my head. Usually, I come up better answers when Im not actively thinking
>Not having to immediately stop everything im doing allows me to stay in flow state.
So is it OK in remote work for me to turn off IM for 2-4 hours to remain in flow state? If not, then there will be no flow state for me.
Conversely, I’ve seen plenty of “mandatory meetings” in remote work as well. Neither paradigm seems particularly advantageous.
Good managers ask when they actually need something and they expect those working for them to accommodate such requests immediately. That is why, after all, they are managers.
That's why they are managers and not low level developers. Developer does not like it? Well, a developer can migrate to writing less code and caring more about business related stuff. It is not like those who can write serializer cannot figure if a certain fire drill is required based on the amount of $$ coming in from a customer who is affected by a bug/wants something.
You missed the part where the manager has to evaluate and push back if needed. If their primary role is merely to do what their bosses tell them to, then they are not doing any managing.
99% of the companies can replace 75% of the managers with supervisors ( foreman in constructions/manufacturing ) and get a better result. Most of the "teams" inside organizations dont need managers - they need supervisors as organization does not need to have mini fiefdoms.
You are missing the point of what a manager is.
Good managers know how to ship products by knowing how to manage knowledge workers and removing friction in the communication inside and outside the team.
2. Good managers set direction and exist to acquire resources for the team and eliminate barriers out of the way of the team when they are headed in that direction. Their role is not to interrupt the team so that they can answer a question from upper management.
3. Most of half of urgent manager requests are due to lack of planning either on their part or on their manager's part. They knew they needed this information a few days ago, but felt "it's OK to interrupt the team when I really need it".
4. Most of the other half are due to their inability to push back.
5. There will be times when the managers do need information urgently. It is then their responsibility to accept the hit in productivity that it incurs.
I've worked with both good and bad managers. The good ones have these qualities.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...
http://www.cosocloud.com/press-release/connectsolutions-surv...
https://www.zenefits.com/blog/remote-employees-happier-and-m...
I think these are both true and would advocate for a work solution that allows amble work from home but encourages common face to face time especially if a team is tackling a complex issue. Maybe two or three days per week remote?
Remote vs face to face debate is about the interplay of folks trying to earn a living, providing value to an organization, living life, and companies making profits. In this regard, it looks like a balance of remote to face to face could increase productivity, happiness, and ability to work on complex tasks.
I can either put a lot of time and effort into remote communication, or I can work closely with people in a space that supports direct communication, putting that time and effort into whatever we're actually trying to do.
I freely grant that most office setups are shitty, so that for many people they waste time commuting and then waste plenty of time dealing with a bad office space and bad office culture. But that doesn't mean that offices can't be great places to work.
If I have my choice, it will always be working in close physical proximity with a team, just as long as we have a good space for that and a culture that supports actually getting things done. I like writing and am good at remote communication, but I'd rather save that energy for actual productive work.
But regardless you need to put in the same effort documenting in person. Being able to talk over a solution doesn't help anyone when you've left the company.
Speaking as someone who has worked in three different remote companies of varying sizes, I have not found any evidence that remote teams achieve this any more frequently than conventional ones do.
> - an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'
Again, I have not seen that remote teams make this any easier than conventional ones. Moreover, I think proponents of remote work in general are unaware of, or vastly underestimate, how many remote coworkers fudge their productive time because they can get away with it.
You can just as easily establish a culture of trust in a conventional office environment.
> - adapting to different forms of communication
Sure, but it’s unrealistic you’ll appeal to everyone’s favorite mode of communication, and many people don’t really care to adapt because they don’t need to. It is just as unreasonable to expect in-office coworkers to adapt to remote workers as it is to expect remote workers to come into an office for face-to-face communication.
I agree with you that remote teams can be effective in communication and productivity; however, I think your comment does more to support the position you’re arguing against than it does to negate it. Listen to what you’re saying here:
> Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.
This is fundamentally why most companies do not have remote teams. It’s attractive to remote workers and to teams that are entirely remote, but most people don’t really want to work remotely most or all of the time. What you are stating evidences this friction, because you keep reiterating that remote teams can be just as good if they put in the work, but that’s precisely the point - most people and teams really don’t want to put in the work because it’s an extra hassle.
You started your comment by attacking the idea that face-to-face interaction is important, but it quite demonstrably is important. By your own comment (and my experience, as well), remote teams need to invest a significant amount of “cooperative machinery” to make communication and productivity as seamless as it is in face-to-face interaction. That’s obviously not to say it cannot happen, or that it shouldn’t be a goal, but my point here is that this is an additional hurdle that companies considering remote teams need to be work on, which is frankly unattractive.
Some people are disciplined and motivated enough to work productively in any environment, and that’s fantastic. Some people are not intrinsically so, but they become that way in the environment of an office. And some people are simply never optimally productive! Also consider that while a very vocal minority of people want to work remotely, this does not typically jive with people who are in-office and who then have to deal with an additional friction to communicate with some subset of coworkers.
I guess to put my point more succinctly: yes, of course remote work can be wonderful and properly engaging for optimal productivity if the majority of your coworkers are intrinsically motivated and really want to work remotely. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s not reasonable to put the effort of achieving that ideal on companies that have already established a culture that works for them through face-to-face interaction in the office.
You speak of cargo cult, but your entire comment reeks of it. Ok, we understand, you like being able to isolate yourself. That's nice, and I'm glad you found a niche, but it's not the same for the vast majority of jobs and people. You call other people lazy, but I think perhaps that's just you. Social interaction and moving above an intermediate level where you can isolate yourself is hard work. Don't be so dismissive of others that strive for more.
Working remotely is great for the unambitious and the antisocial. Please stop trying to put those who do more down though.
I think you touched on a sad aspect of tech. For anyone to be "ambitious" or to "move above an intermediate level" they essentially have to become managers, which means less technical work. The likelihood of you joining the VP/higher ranks and still working on low level issues, as a respected technical fellow, are low to nill (Google, FB, MS have some positions but otherwise you're filtered into a manager to "move up.").
Your comment about "striving for more" is disrespectful to most developers/engineers.
How are people who spend their entire work days talking to others, but not actually working, "doing more?" I've seen more talkative/social people not getting work done than "antisocial" workers being "unambitious" or stagnant.
Aside from them most of the people I asked about this would either want to have a very short(20 minutes max.) commute, or work from home, since it's usually the most comfortable environment for them.
Nearly everybody I know who spends at least two hours daily in traffic would love to change that in any way possible - including switching to remote work.
This is pathetic. They have hell at home and instead of fixing it, they bring it to the office. My home life is awesome and I'd rather spend more time at home than in office full of miserable people. Sadly they are the loudest one and their moans are music to the ears of managers who are control freaks. Thankfully I decided never again work for a company that doesn't allow remote.
But regarding people who might want to avoid being home, that is a whole different problem that needs solving. Wanting escape should not be an argument for commuting.
Probably a job that is extremely well paid for knowledge work in technology and where workers are highly sought after so employers provide lots of perks.
Then somewhere along the way, some marketing guy came up with the spin, "It fosters communication!". Open office does indeed make people close in proximity, but it's not a necessity.
Found this: https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3
And as with anything else in life, we must weigh the options. Face to face can indeed be better than remote. It can also be worse, because some people just irritate others by their presence and little behaviors. But more significantly, some of us do work which requires a good amount of thought - uninterrupted, quiet thought. Shared offices make this more difficult (compared to a quiet home office).
All jokes aside, as someone who loves remote and work from home to avoid Bangalore traffic, sometimes, not always it is good to meet some face to face.
Sure this can be taken to an extreme too. My last job we had a manager who insisted on doing everything face to face which meant we were stuck in office beyond 8 hours. Then people started adjusting their schedule to accommodate those meetings, then there was barely 3 hours of actual work, 2 hours of prep and 3 hours of "face to face" meetings.
True, I probably get more done on the days I work from home as I don't have a commute, and there are fewer distractions, however, I find I can collaborate far more effectively when I'm in the office - instant messenger, email and video calls just don't cut it.
Plus I have an amazing commute, mostly along British A roads through the countryside.
It's like a side gig where your compensation is you don't get bent over for rent, get the freedom that comes with owning a home and no longer have to put up with the downsides of living in an apartment.
PRO
Work from anywhere with internet: In the last 45 days, I have worked from the Caribbean, from Spain, and from Ireland. Granted, these travel experiences aren't full vacations (and in fact sometimes were stressful when internet quality was not tops), but they sure beat my previous "open office" bullpen.
Work when inspiration strikes: Sometimes my brain won't shut up the useless stuff, and other times it wants to really drive a useful project. When it's a good time, I usually can choose to work uninterrupted and make great progress. When it's not a good time, I can just go do chores around the house or go enjoy the weather.
Answer fewer tech questions for other employees: If you're within earshot, less technical people will ask for help the instant they think they need it. But if it takes more effort for them to reach you, they will work a little harder to solve their own problem. Most of the time, they solve the problem (or realize there was no problem -- just a moment of confusion). This saves me SO much time and occasional frustration.
Not commute: This one is kind of obvious, but not having to commute saves 1-2 hours a day. That's time for gym, coffee, reading news, etc. It's also so much less stress. When I drove in traffic to and from work, I would often arrive very frustrated. When I moved to Europe and had the luxury of riding a train(s) to work, life was better... except when trains would break or a surge of travelers would result in no seats available.
CON
Communication can be more difficult: I have found voice calls to be essential, at least compared to just txt and email. Text messages were the worst and most likely to result in annoyance or confusion. Emails are a bit better, but reply-hell is real. You definitely have to work a bit to find the right tools and methods for each of the people you need to work with; but once found, it works almost as good as face to face.
Work is _always_ there: This has been the hardest for me. I always have more work to do than I can do, and now I can work any minute that someone else (partner) doesn't need me. This can get out of control if you're not careful. Some people are strict and disciplined about home working, but I like to stay flexible. Still, one must set some limits or reminders of reasonable behavior/expectations.
Fewer jobs: Since most companies don't go for remote work, you have to decide what's more important - freedom, or a particular job. I choose freedom, and at this point I don't think I'll ever go back. Once you've tasted freedom, and once you've proven to yourself that you can work (well) alone and unsupervised, the thought of being back in a noisy office with people passing by behind you, potentially judging you if they don't see you with a code window open 99% of the time, is just untenable.
If your job is well defined, e.g. make an app or a website design, you can do it anywhere in the world. The app/design is your deliverable that anyone can see and judge.
If your job is a poorly defined "management" or "product ownership", with no real deliverable, how can your work be judged? Your job turns into convincing other people that your job is useful. Work long hours, seem busy, attend meetings, leave the office late. An epitome of the corporate environment.
This is in general a common, elusive mistake: "We can't measure it, so it must be zero." Better to be ridiculous and say it's worth between $100 and $10,000.
Value is lower because of the consequences of being hard to measure.
Then there are actual bullshit jobs, whose value is difficult to measure because they have no value to begin with.
How do we know the value has been increased at all?
We'll finally be able to stop tying health insurance to employment in the ridiculous way that we currently do.
Skilled professionals will more often be able to make their own hours and find more variety/novelty in their work by taking jobs for a variety of customers.
And there will be so many freelancers that a solid industry for helping them connect with consumers of their services so that the hardest part of freelancing (finding work) starts to become a non-issue.
Transitions are messy, of course.
I can think of an awful lot more jobs that are pretty well defined but nonetheless can't be done in someone's living room.
The person you're responding to didn't say what you think they said.
That's the OP's exact words. Inspecting a ship hull is clearly defined, yet I cannot do it in my living room. Likewise mopping the floors at MacDonald's. Very clearly defined, yet cannot be done anywhere in the world; I have to go to the actual floor that needs mopping.
It is not just 'cargo-cult' or 'enterprise-envy'. I think it goes deeper. My current feeling is that middle management is something that is naturally lurking in the wings, and expresses itself the moment the overhead can be carried. Caricatured: Bottom up there's people looking for a way to escape 'working at the coalface', and start the innate pecking order/ hierarchy battles. Top down there is the desire of the owner to create some distance, and in many cases also the latent idea that if some proficiencies could be isolated into a single specialist, the remaining 'resources' could be sourced cheaper. It self reinforces since as 'overhead' the middle management layer crates make-work to assert its existence. Furthermore, it asserts the 'company as a value funnel', since it is a model that disemancipates each individual making sure they can't easily venture out on their own.
So the middle management pattern could be an expression waiting to happen as a result of natural forces, not as a result of direct 'needs' or 'efficiency' in value creation in its own right, but just for the sake of 'enterprise creation' itself.
>Conversations around whiteboards between stakeholders creates value.
Why ? Are whiteboards magic ?
>Pair programming makes for lower defects and more reliable scheduling
Putting aside the fact that the benefits of pair programming as less consensual than what you seem to suggest, it can be done much more conveniently in a remote setup with a screenshare and a headset than by sharing a desk.
>Software is a design delivery operation.
So ?
>There was recent article on MS office space redesign to create more value.
Here we have the business case reference, always good to include one. The substantial remark is that once again this doesn't prove anything, the first reason being that "value" is extremely vague.
>Productivity is not per-keystroke
The art of looking like you are siding with the people you want to control while it is actually the opposite. If we go the bottom of the reasoning : value is not per keystroke, we therefore need to put employees in a room because their true value must be monitored to be appreciated. "Please understand, I really want to be able to appreciate your true value". Sounds a bit hypocrite to me.
>Personal productivity is almost a misnomer
One more slogan.
>I have been paid extra to kill projects that never should have started.
While I am the first to advocate careful planning and writing code last, as an entrepreneur, I consider it a crime to sabotage projects, because anyone who has ever created something, or started a project or a venture understands that creativity is almost Holy. Beyond the technical deliverables, projects trigger group (and market) dynamics and institutional learning that may be hard to reproduce later in time. For this reason, doers do not sabotage or kill projects, they rectify them. Sure there can be pure follies that need to be stopped ASAP to stop diverting valuable resources of the company, but my overall impression is that you have a more liberal approach to assessing what must be killed.
I respect arguments from both sides, but this comment is really representative of the crap filling most companies.
Anecdotally, for the amount of problems I have seen them solve in short order. Yes. They force an idea in the mind to become concrete and logically digestible to other members of the party. If you can't draw it in a manner that other people understand, you don't understand the idea well enough yourself. It is also free flowing. Ideas can be added to and removed quickly with an interface that almost all humans have been taught to use since a young age. It only contains 3 parts. The pen, the board, and the eraser. No software with far too many options to understand. No weird bugs that crash in the middle of a presentation. Pictographs can transcend language barriers. Software sellers will never create such a simple product, there is little value added reason to.
So yea, if not magical, far better than its competition in portraying ideas.
You make a very valid point, what I was highlighting is that good communication can be achieved without whiteboards too.
I understand your underlying argument that whiteboards may constitute the best technology, but I also think there is a tacit convention at play here. People tacitly agree to communicate in a way that make whiteboards work. For there are many effective and fluid ways to iterate on ideas that do not involve live drawings or complex tech.
I know it for a fact as drawing my thoughts on a whiteboard has always been counter-natural to me. I can do it but I wouldn't say that it is necessary for good communication. It is just a communication choice that people make.
Everything that can be drawn clearly can also be written clearly (analogies, bullet point lists for flows, etc...). Not to say that diagrams are never helpful, but it may be a stretch to assume that drawings and whiteboards have an almost essential role.
Let's eliminate some cases. I know some people work on entertainment software or short term content. Others work in departments "against management" for take home pay. I never care about those projects or those people working on them. My words do not apply there.
Interesting hardware is not virtual but involves complex supply chains. The same goes for productivity software interacting with the world already in motion. New training often costs more than new tools. DC folks making NASD broker registration reality are essential personnel in tight supply chain relationships. Any error on a Congressional Report can tumble decision makers into felonies or disrupt global commodity markets. Same goes for folks writing device drivers or porting libraries to new hardware. None of this is any app buried in app stores or Office Space TPS reports.
In such greenfield or release cycle projects the right team size and composition will get there first, avoid mistakes, clean up markets later cheapest or occupy profitable niches longest.
Software projects concern progress and reach and thus "pass the bus test." Nature is not kind to the shy. Individual problem are just problems. Anybody can consult from anywhere if they can make a living that way. Otherwise, nobody cares about homebodies. Never project socials problems or commute logistics as values or virtues. Skunkworks remains the model for focus and shared responsibility. Software is not the deliverable. Tools and answers are the deliverables.
Selling insurance: not required. Customer service for the electrical company: nope. Most of that is on the phone. Logistics for a trucking company: also phone/computer based, no face to face (or rarely.) Medical claims processing -- never face to face Coordinating cable TV installation appointments: all phone or online based
If you think about it almost ALL jobs can be done remotely. I agree that most jobs still require it, but that isn't because of the nature of the job, but the lack of vision from those particular industries. Most businesses seem to operate under 19th century ideals.
I realize not everyone wants or can work from home; but I would advocate for a decentralized workplace -- remote working with perhaps small satellite offices scattered around the world -- offices that can simply pop-up at WeWork/etc. As employees in the area need/want.
Obviously a hardware company like Apple actually needs a physical space for people to build things. Same for Boeing, Tesla, etc.
But Facebook? Farmers Insurance? They don't sell anything physical.
If your job can be done remotely, your job can be done by a computer in 90% of the cases. Good luck fighting for those jobs in the future (especially when they get sent overseas for 1/5th the cost).