Asynchronous communication is like eventual consistency.
It seems pragmatic until you actually struggle to get everyone to be on the same page at the same time, then you spend a lot of time figuring out how to be consistent.
I agree the video calls are probably over the top - but asynchronous communication != synchronous communication.
At GitLab we work async by default. But we also learned that video calls are great for bonding and solving complex problems. We don't use video calls for presentations or status updates. The exception is functional group updates that are recorded for the people the can't attend and that spend a lot of time on questions.
Same goes for getting rid of most meetings, period. Realtime audio/video synchrony is just not that useful many times, whether remote or in-person. Asynchrony is just generally better by default in a wide range of common situations.
It’s particularly bad when you combine it with timewasting predetermined Agile meetings and distraction-oriented open plan offices.
Employers who want happy, productive, collaborative workers: Stop disrupting people with useless meetings and denying them large chunks of private, quiet time to work however they see fit. Stop embedding them in open plan spaces.
You know, treat them like an adult, with basic human dignity, who wants to be respected and trusted that they will succeed with their own judgment for how to effectively communicate and manage their work schedule.
Recently I had a bad experience at a fully remote company that decided to fix its remote communication issues with, wait for it...meetings! I went from short daily in person meetings with a longer retro to hour long (or longer) video calls every day during my lunch break hours, since they were on Pacific Time. The last standup I joined was two hours long and involved yelling.
Needless to say, I became a lot more fond of Amazon's pre-meeting written notes after that.
> For the love of all that is sane, please top trying to push nonstop video calls onto remote employees.
Nonstop video calls are dumb, but people should try to be on video when there are scheduled meetings. It really helps to see other people when having a discussion.
I completely agree that the most effective way for remote teams to communicate is via asynchronous video messaging instead of real-time video conferencing. Some of the difficulties I've experienced coordinating meetings with remote colleagues include:
- Difficulty scheduling a time that fits for all participants. Some team-members are inevitably stuck with a non-ideal timeframe. Often times it's the same employee suffering each meeting, which leads to resentment.
- Interruptions during productive hours. See the Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html) - reacting to interruptions can be disastrous.
- Frustration from choppy/laggy video that results in loss of important parts of updates and valuable information.
I'm actually building an app called Tape to address these kinds of issues and to improve communication and collaboration across teams by integrating into existing workflows not against them. If any of you guys are interested in learning more or trying out our product, I'd love to connect: https://trytape.typeform.com/to/pKe6X5
> Disadvantages
> Scares investors - Scares some partners - Scares some customers - Scares some potential employees, mostly senior non-technical hires - Onboarding is harder, first month feels lonely
We do a full remote policy at SerpApi.com, however I found this disadvantages list a bit dishonest, they are more way numerous and important, the most obvious are missing real human contacts (and it doesn't get easier with time), and harder life and work separation.
I'll start by saying that pushing to normalize remote-work is a noble endeavor. But that being said, as you said, glossing over the disadvantages leaves this site/post feeling very one-sided. I say this as someone worked fully remote for 2 years. It was a fantastic job but the main reason I left was the disadvantages of being remote. To say that the advantages are far more numerous, and far outweigh the disadvantages is subjective and myopic. It works for some people and some types of work but to say it's the Best Solution sadly seems to be to just be being disingenuous.
I'm not the parent poster, but I think the document glossed over the biggest perceived disadvantage:
Despite technological advances, I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information and come to conclusions on difficult decisions. It's also the least susceptible to misinterpretation.
> I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information ...
Why do people think this. For one thing, and I think it is most important, face to face communication does not give either parties time to think. It ends up with awkward, unproductive pauses.
Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought...
You know, face to face communication is good if you are repeating stuff you heard from somewhere or stuff like "Hi there, how was your weekend" type of talk.
When you want productive communication, you want thought backing content and framing of every one of your sentences...
I’ve found face to face communication effective for resolving contentious disagreements and, as the parent said, difficult conclusions. I’ve seen things get a bit out of hand over email that then get resolved quite efficiently after a face to face.
Live video chat is a good alternative, but I think more natural human empthay comes out in face to face experiences. People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved quickly before they fester. Live video chat gets you much of this but isn’t quite as effective in my experience.
To me this observation just means that on remote teams you need to be observant of such issues and spend a little more time to resolve them, which can be a fine trade off for remote teams. (Or ideally avoid overly contentious debates in the first place)
In my experience face to face communication is great for resolving contentious technical disagreements because whoever is doing the most thinking and the least talking falls behind, thinks "fuck this" and capitulates instantly; usually resulting in the wrong decision being made.
If the metric is "time to decision" then face to face will do very well.
>I’ve found face to face communication effective for resolving contentious disagreements...
I have observed the same. But 9 out of 10 times, it was because the losing party couldn't spend much time thinking about counter arguments.
So again, it cures the symptom, but it benefits only the person with the loudest voice in the room, and not the one with sound reason.
>People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved...
Don't buy this either. As I said before, the "seem to understand" bit might come from the fact that people often does not express disagreement in face to face communication that often, because they didn't have time to think it through.
EDIT: This is assuming that the both parties in the discussion are more or less on the same level of competence. If the communication is going to be mostly one sided, then face to face communication (Like a teacher in a class room) is fine.
> So again, it cures the symptom, but it benefits only the person with the loudest voice in the room, and not the one with sound reason.
..or even just the facts. I have, on (fortunately rare) occasions, refused to heed a manager's encouragement to speak with someone directly, because my disagreement isn't even about reasoning, but about facts.
It can be remarkably frustrating to have to repeat the same thing to someone who believes in something that is demonstrably false. At least over e-mail one can copy-and-paste.
It's as if (some) people can't tell the difference between matters of fact and matters of opinion (or judgment).
It may be true that face-to-face is best at resolving contentious disagreements on matters of opinion. However, I'd think it could only be true if those disagreements are based on everyone reaching their opinions from the same facts, and even determining if that's the case could easily be short-circuited by a premature opinion (e.g. loudest voice in the room).
I worked for a company that was mostly a remote workplace for almost a year, and there were a lot of problems i found while trying to manage a team.
Time zones, were a huge issue and pain point when trying to get a large number of people on the same page. I found my self often having to give the same meeting twice, which put more pressure on me. Even worse was when i would have to go over points only for someone who wasn't available for the first meeting, to raise issues that we didn't notice, and so on.
After 6 months the team basically felt like it dissolved into the European team, and the North American Team. With me trying to ferry information from one team to another.
So many times regardless of how amazing the latest tools we tried were, it still pales in comparison to a whiteboard. The company bought me a high end digital whiteboard, that allowed me to pass control to other people, it was a buggy POS. On top of that since i was the only one unfortunately with the white board, it meant i was the one who was always doing the drawing and trying to extrapolate a diagram from what someone says.
Sometimes some team members would spend hours drawing up a digital mock up of what they were going to push for only for it to become completely useless within a very short time.
I also found some people no matter how hard i tried, some people seemed to interpret working remote meant, they got to work in their own silo, and would ignore 99% of everything going on around them. This lead to numerous conflicts, and other issues.
Also one other thing i found, was that 1 on 1's became super impersonal, and frankly felt extremely uncomfortable.
The website appears to emphasize communicating via the written word and other asynchronous forms of communication. I'm curious whether you found communicating asynchronously didn't work or wasn't as effective or if it was the team members specifically that were the issue?
I don't share your pessimism about the list of downsides, and am honestly surprised, as while normally I chuckle at the "HN is always negative" sentiment, this post being the top reply is a real head scratcher, as someone who is both 1. on a >75% remote team, and 2. who has been advocating/watching HN advocate for remote for quite some time.
I'd say "missing real human contacts" is summarized well under a combination of harder rampup/scares some potential employees; as the lack of "Real contacts" seems more of a personal/subjective or team-process-and-tooling-rooted feeling than anything I've observed to be inherent and unsolvable; it's trivial for me to get a face to face with anyone on my multi-national team. Now, to try and read this charitably, if you meant something like "increased difficulty networking" I'd actually agree, but again, if you're at a place in your career where you accept that, it's significantly less of a downside.
Mostly, that's the gist of a lot of the things people list as hard negatives to my ears, including your second point of harder life/work separation. I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." (Edit: see my clarification in child post re: this wording, I came off more accusatory than I'd have liked, but didn't want to rewrite history) With the broad slew of coworking spaces, home offices, coffee shops, and other ways to partition one's time and mental spaces, I don't accept that that's something that can't be solved in the same proactive fashion as a professional would approach any assorted social frictions one might run into in _any_ office environment.
If you read any frustration in this, it comes from a place of, "a lot of the complaints I read are solvable problems or isomorphisms of in-office problems", and a hope that we'd be self-interested enough as a field to be more proactive in seeking solutions, given the benefits that can come from a more distributed workforce. I want to encourage and productively improve sites that try to support this, and part of that is avoiding a re-encroachment of remote work stigma/fear in many people's eyes.
Edit: yes, I'm going to break the HN rules, but christ people, at least _respond_ before blindly downvoting. This was not a glib response, and this topic (remote work) is something we should be able to discuss in good faith without accruing negative score before I even finish grammar-checking my own writing.
I actually do agree 100%, both issues that I've posted are personal issues, however, remote work is also meant to solve personal issues in the first place, so I don't think it's disconnected.
I do have made my company fully remote so I do believe remote work is way of the future, but we can't be disingenuous about its downsides.
You might want to try using a writing style less similar to coding. I don't know if I'm noticing a trend between an influx of new users from reddit after their BS UI redesign, but your text can get quite dense (it's not lacking in information that makes sense). Did upvote you because I feel you made some very experienced and work-aware points.
Meta-comment: You're right, and it's a weakness I've observed in my own posts for years now. There are other commentators that often come into HN threads I post in, and make my point better+more succinctly than I could have. I wish I could replicate/learn from those examples better. I think it's less of a redditism and my own overly-loquatious style/attempting to avoid misunderstanding through verboseness. The feedback is really appreciated.
It's a life long habit to unlearn, because you have to balance the skill set.
When you are intending to speak to an audience, I think it matters to know your audience, which gets complicated, when the audience is constantly shifting.
>I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem."
This is incredibly dismissive. Almost all the "advantages for employees" are personal. How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit? The advantages for remote work are almost entirely being sold that they are better for people. If someone has a personal problem with an aspect of it, then it should be taken seriously.
Imagine if you told an employer that the commute to work was rough so you would like to work remote and he told you "that sounds like a personal problem, why don't you move closer to work?"
Where do we draw the line though? Do we draw the line? At what point do my personal preferences/issues (and trust me I have plenty of my own) become my team's/workplace's problem? I certainly fall closer to the side of "it's my job as a professional to find a situation that doesn't drive me nuts", which is probably where our disagreement might arise. (Candidly, and unfortunately, it's probably born out of the pragmatic "a job don't owe you nothing" upbringing)
You aptly point out that "no commuting or stress" is a personal benefit; to play devils advocate with that, wouldn't having a "typical job" then be "dismissive" in not catering to someone who might be incredibly sensitive to the commute? I bring up this contrast since I think a lot of the friction with remote is that it's a change from the status quo, not necessarily that the status quo doesn't incur its own comparable (if inverted) costs.
Let me try and rephrase my point better, regardless. I don't think there's a one size fits all, period. Some people simply want/like/work better in some environments than others, and to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.
You asked the question at the end re: a boss telling me that about my commute. Honestly, yes, this has happened to me. And I switched teams, to the one I'm currently on, which is extremely remote friendly. I don't mean to whitewash remote work for any given person or say that everyone has such a lucky opportunity, I see it as two sides to the same coin, in which we shouldn't assume highly-granular personal choices to be a global downside to remote work, and we should enable as many opportunities for that choice to be present as possible.
Edit: After rereading my posts, I'll concede that "personal problem" may not have been the best way to put it, and comes off as far too accusatory. I want to delineate between problems I expect a professional adult to be able to understand their own exposure to and handle via their own autonomy, vs problems that are only in the purview of the workplace to solve/that we can't expect individuals to navigate feasibly.
> to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.
I'm not sure that listing pros/cons paints them as anything (or vice-versa), though maybe I haven't quite gotten your point (and I've read all your edits).
I've never had an opportunity to work anywhere all-remote, remote-first, or even truly remote-friendly, and I harbor an interest in the discussions, including anecdata, primarily because so many of these things are personal. I, as a reader, am pretty capable of figuring out which personal preferences don't actually match up to my own and which pros/cons may not actually apply to my situation or profession. The water isn't muddied for me by more information.
As such, I very much would prefer to hear a more complete [1] and expansive list of both advantages and disadvantages to a remote-only culture. I find it's even important to include what you describe as "isomorphisms of in-office problems" if only to point how they're easier/harder to deal with when working remote.
[1] I think a grandparent comment used the adjective "honest", but I think that's only relevant as maybe a jab at the article itself, which is clearly promoting an agenda.
> How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit?
My commute is a 20 minute walk through a very nice park, and my partner walks the same route in the morning. It’s one of my favourite parts of the day, and it would be a hard push to get me to give that up right now.
The advantages are not all personal. The environmental benefits that come from reduced travel and reduced need for office space (which sits empty much of the time) is no joke. Neither is the economic / environmental benefit of freeing people up to live anywhere, not just where the corporate offices / factories happen to have located. That means people can go where the housing is available and affordable. We can repopulate areas -- like many midwestern small towns and medium towns -- that have emptied out as jobs have moved away.
These are very significant societal benefits, not personal ones.
That said, remote working isn't going to work for everyone. Extroverts, especially, I think tend to struggle with it a little bit.
I think a lot of it has to do with HN being frequented by people in SF who do like their workplaces, and are being overwhelmingly incentivized monetarily to like them. People outside US seem to be a lot more sympathetic to the idea.
If the downside is "lack of separate workspace / human contact", then it is blown way out of proportion imho. It's easily solved by using a coworking space, and it's not reason enough to dismiss remote work.
This assumes that the only place a remote worker can work from is their home. There is nothing more detrimental to a person's psyche. Cafes and coworking spaces are the most obvious and effective solution to this problem.
I made countless friends while working remotely and a good 90% of them I met in a coworking space (and the so called "digital nomad" community is made of some really awesome people). Plus you have the option to change coworking space if you don't like the people, the coffee, the wallpapers or whatever. You can't do that with a traditional office (or it would be reaaally hard to justify).
That surely helps but at the end of the day it depends on your personality. Some people can go a lot longer working completely alone (e.g. if you have a family), others prefer working in a more social environment (e.g. solo travellers), at least occasionally. I definitely prefer the latter.
I've worked exclusively remotely for a number of years, and while I tend to prefer it, there are times where I miss the hustle and bustle of an office place.
For those occasions, I've always just relocated to either a coffee shop (or similar) or a co-working space with drop-in rates. If you're extremely rural, or those aren't options, I don't know what to tell you.
I got a 3 monitor setup at home, which basically quadrupled my productivity. I now work from coffee shops only if I’m doing “shallow work” - lots of small tasks, none of which requires deep thinking. For example if I need to answer a bunch of emails I’ll do that from a coffee shop.
I think this is a great balance and something I'm interested in trying more. I have three displays at home and four displays at my co-working space desk, but I'm interested in periodically using a local pub for sessions of 2-3 hours to do single-screen work over a beer. e.g., dealing with emails, invoicing, etc.
But seriously, how would it be a problem? In the afternoons, we often have a beer at our desks while working. I often work at night after having a drink at dinner or in the afternoon after lunch at the pub. Having a pint beside the laptop while answering emails or working on a side project or making content changes for a client wouldn't be especially difficult or problematic.
I've worked for myself for 20 years (http://www.isaacforman.com.au/) so there are rarely issues with time and place of work either. I'm mostly anchored to my desk because I like the room to move of four displays.
It never occurred to me to be desirable to mix alcohol and working. I don't drink much but if i choose to have a pint it is as a reward after finishing work. It's like a ritual that delineates clearly that work has finished and it's time to unwind. That feeling is practically the best thing about the pint.
Agree completely. The power of remote work is not just avoiding your commute and working in pyjamas, but being free to choose your environment. You could work for a company based in a big, expensive city, but live hours away in a smaller town.
Or perhaps your partner works in a regional area, but you can take a tech job from afar rather than be limited by the local market.
> This assumes that the only place a remote worker can work from is their home. There is nothing more detrimental to a person's psyche.
That is rather hyperbolic. Many remote workers do fine working from home. Others do not. Not all people are the same. Any of us can think of things that are "more detrimental to a person's psyche" for nearly all individuals.
But, see, the way to get it "clean" is by washing ones hands regularly with soap and warm water (ideally before touching it [1]).
Really, though, you're making the (likely false) assumption that ones "junk" is the only thing touched in the restroom. You're also ignoring the potential for aeresolized bits of feces sprayed by commercial flush mechanisms.
None of this adds up to "filthy" per se, but hand washing is one of the best disease spreading preventions we know of.
Personally, if they're not going to wash I'd rather someone not go anywhere near the sink after using the restroom instead of also touching the fixtures and giving the bacteria on their hands a drink of water.
[1] I once worked in a building with a dentist who washed both before and after.
I always do both and it feels extremely weird to see people not actually do it.
In between bathroom breaks at work I've touched my desk, keyboard, smartphone screen, perhaps adjusted my shoes, perhaps shook someones hand. By that time, hands already feel filthy enough to not want to touch myself anywhere before washing.
I suspect that's where you may be crossing over into an irrational fear of dirt and/or germs, which can lead to, at the very least, people being dismissive of concerns.
After all, your desk, keyboard, smartphone screen, and even shoes aren't likely to be places other people have touched, so not much potential for spreading anything.
Your keyboard is filthy, but your fingers aren't really the best bet for germs to infect you, unless you put them in an orifice or touch some skinless area probably. I'll avoid further details.
But yes, I'm not suggesting that not washing your hands all the time greatly increase your likelihood of getting infected with something. Just slightly. I just have slight OCD and it's still weird to me how people don't feel anywhere close to the same way I do about these things.
I guess I don't see the risk? It's been close to 20 years since I last had a stomach flu, and never got salmonella yet. I believe total avoidance of all bacteria is just going to make my immune system more lax.
Don't worry though, I do wash my hands after a bathroom visit. I just don't care that much if someone else doesn't.
That's the point, though. Once you "see" it, it's way too late.
> It's been close to 20 years since
That's just anecdata, but, as you point out, you do wash your hands.
> total avoidance of all bacteria
That's not exactly possible (and essentially deadly, unless there are archea that can take the place of all our gut bacteria.. I'm not sure).
> I just don't care that much if someone else doesn't.
I'd agree it's unreasonable to care more than just slightly, since they'd be increasing the risk more for themselves than for you. However, increased risk for everyone (including you) is non-zero.
> That's the point, though. Once you "see" it, it's way too late.
I see your point, but it simply falls to things I rather not care about. Adding a mental/habitual burden on something that is either unlikely or not that serious isn't just worth it; a life is more relaxed if it can be disregarded.
I also acknowledge that it's not something that can be simply chosen though. I do I know about certain things way more than some of my friends, even if I didn't want to.
What does it have to do people using the bathroom and not washing their hands with my junk?
I can only suppose you mean everyone can just rinse his hands after using the urinal because his genitals are clean. They aren't, unless your sweat is both antiseptic and insecticide. Anyway, I meant using toilets too, not just urinals.
Everybody is different, which is something that I think HNers seem to forget sometimes.
Some people thrive working from home. Some people thrive working with a colocated team in a private office. Some people would thrive on a remote team, but working in a coworking space (I'm in this boat).
Personally, I'd go stir crazy if I worked from home on a regular basis, not just from social isolation, but from working where I live. I try to keep my life compartmentalised; my gym, my work, my home, and the bar I drink at are all different places and I like it that way.
I work alone from home and love it. I can have quiet/nap time when I need it, make my own food, and spend time with my dog.
I'm very social and love spending time with people, but work isn't my outlet for that. I find that friends in an office end up decreasing my productivity and causing me to have less free time for friends, family, and relaxation.
This hasn't been my experience. I have worked remotely for years and I don't miss the open-office environments in the least. For me, nothing is more detrimental to my psyche and health than an open-office environment. I guess we all have different needs.
Another disadvantage of global employees is the overhead of understanding employment law, taxes, etc for each of your employees' countries and/or provinces.
Having clusters of remote workers, perhaps there is a sweet spot.
This seems more like an opportunity for a company to come in and handle those details for you. I believe those exist already but they seem mostly targeted at larger multinationals rather than scrappy remote-only startups.
Working remote is not for everyone. I was in a 100% remote position for 3 - 4 months and really missed the human contact. We had numerous calls, great tools for sharing, but for me personally I need to be around people.
Perhaps it would be better to remove "remote" from the title completely. You may have several locations where people can come together, don't call them headquarters and those not there remote, but instead everyone is team member who sits in various sites. Some of those sites have 1 person, others have 4 or 5 or 10. And those with more than an individual
For me, personally, working from home has amplified the good parts of working with people and human contact and removed the bad parts.
When we do meet in person (4-5 times a year) we have a blast.
When we communicate via video the communication is a lot of fun and very purposeful at the same time. Sometimes it feels like I speak to remote co-workers by video more than family and people in real life! So, lot's of human interaction there.
At the same time, there is now no interruptions when someone gets bored and wanders over for a chat.
There is no need to instantly answer questions when overly eager bosses have a brain... idea.
There is no need to watch the clock and make it look like I'm staying late just cos everyone else is.
And I can work on stuff anytime I like, like if I wake up at 5am by accident I can knock out the current sprint board and have a break during the day.
So, in my case at least, saying "the most obvious are missing real human contacts" is simply not true.
I do think that remote working is a bit difficult to pull off well and I've found the key is to really get to know people well when in person and on video chat.
Yeah, "missing real human contacts" doesn't reflect my experience with remote work either. I'd characterize it as giving me much more control over my real human contact: I get to spend time with who I want on my own schedule to a much greater degree than I could in office jobs. Day to day that's mostly people who have nothing to do with my current work: girlfriend, friends, family, people at my krav maga classes, etc. and as a (sociable) introvert I don't burn through so much of my "social energy" just having to be around people in an office all day.
I'm sitting at my desk with my noise-cancelling headphones doing a mediocre job of blocking the 20-minute "standup" happening next to me in our open office. I'm going to be transitioning to a remote position soon, and can't wait. I already have two unsolicited offers from friends with office space to let me work in their spaces occasionally, so I have options for getting human contact—when I want it.
My need for human contact is not only verbal communication: it's cleaning the coffee machine, taking a walk, playing around, throwing a duck, being randomly head-butted by a scrum master, going for an afterwork beer... Lot of interaction with people
Yes, I don't think it's one size fits all by any means. It sounds like any company you work for needs to have real world team interaction as part of the day to day. Nothing wrong with that!
I agree here. The extra time I get to spend with my young kids, my wife, and my friends instead of commuting is the polar opposite of a drawback with regards to human contact.
I really hate "real human contacts", when absolutely everybody can interrupt you, when you need to listen somebody's else "interesting" stories just because saying "stop trash talking" is not polite.
I think the HN population is strongly skewed towards people who prefer to sit alone and work.
I just changed job from an open office to remote work, and while everybody thought my new job sounded like a great opportunity, no one was jealous of the remote part - "So, now you have rent a shared office, huh?" (and yes, that is what I did)
There are ways to alleviate these problems though. By "disadvantages" in this respect I understand "inherent problems that can't easily be solved or at least alleviated".
You can establish policies that ensure life and work separation (as in: "No calls outside of designated work hours") but you can't easily allay an instinctive as well as indistinct fear that everything will go the dogs if people don't work in the same office anymore.
> the most obvious are missing real human contacts
Human contact for me is more about friends and out of work activity. Colleagues are colleagues, if you want "real human" interaction, you'd need to get out of the office anyway.
They don't pay us to socialise, and I can count the number of times on my middle finger of how many people who at the offices I've worked at I'd want to spend my free time with.
Strangely, now that I'm working remotely, I actually do socialise with my colleagues when we meet every 3 months, and enjoy it.
Apart from that, I'm around people who I enjoy being with instead of staring the clock or the rear of a car. And I have more social energy to do so.
I've been working remote for 3 years now in software and I agree completely.
The biggest downsides are: loneliness, feeling like a shut in, and working all the time because you're only two steps from your "office". These are NP-hard problems to solve, especially for an introverted 4-eyes like me.
Yo, you gotta tell me when you’re working. You must. You’re on a team that is depending on you and somebody has to know where the fuck your are and when you’re going to fix whatever is broken today.
“Where’s will?”
“I don’t know, our manifesto says nobody gets to know when he’s working.”
“Well he broke the site.”
“That’s his right as a sovereign citizen.”
The end.
The corollary here is that if nobody knows when you're working, people will always expect you to work. That whole work/life balance thing depends on having clearly denoted "working time" and "not working time".
Also full-time remote worker. We solve the problem by letting people know when you will and won't be available. It can be super informal (e.g. "Hey guys, gonna be out of pocket this afternoon") or entered into a shared calendar.
I agree with you (and OP) that there has to be some visibility into what work is going to be done when, and there are lots of ways to solve it, that said, I'm sympathetic to the notion that "I don't care how or when you work, as long as the work gets done." I'm a big fan of measuring developers more by the velocity of their Jira queues and commit history than how often they're available to be bothered with non-coding stuff.
I think this is a valid and important point, especially as this is aimed at #1 on their list of 'practical tips.' The item in question isn't even really a practical tip. You should submit an issue that suggests a real practical tip for how people can be both flexible with their time and available in urgent situations.
I have been working remotely for about 2 years and the last 5 months completely out of cycle with the rest of the company.
This comment hits the nail on the head [0]. Everyone's butt is on the line. It should never be one person's fault that the website was taken down. If one person has the power to damage your business and only they can repair the error, then you have a process problem.
If Kevin broke the site, it's a process problem. Kevin didn't break the site, he introduced code that might have broken the site, and the lack of tests to have detected the it broke the site. Jane then peer reviewed the code that might have broken the site and approved it. Bob then failed to notice that the site was broken during QA. The QA environment was apparently configured differently enough by Taylor that the site could appear working in dev and QA, and pass unit and functional tests without exploding until it hit production.
Additionally, if Jim had configured the backups properly the site could be reverted to a stable build. A lot of measures could prevent these situations.
As true as this is, unexpected problems happen. Kevin may be the only one that can fix it, or at least be able to fix it a lot more effectively than others. The issue might not be Kevin's fault (i.e it's really a process problem), but being able to talk to him immediately (or at least know his schedule) will go a long ways in getting the issue resolved in an acceptable time frame.
Nothing against remote work, but knowing everyone's typical working hours makes things run a lot more smoothly.
Kevin's available hours should be common knowledge, or easily findable in a system of some sort, ranging from text file to excel sheet to Exchange to massively overpriced time-tracking software.
Doesn't really help to know peoples hours. If they're not overlapping with yours then you have a potentially crazy overhead on time it takes to get responses to issues that could hold up your work completely.
That's a fundamental problem of teamwork. This also happens when the coworker sitting right next to you, working the same hours, has a higher-priority task than the one you're waiting for.
It absolutely does, although in my personal experience far, far more rarely. And even if that person was sitting remotely at their own hours you’ld then have to wait for them to get ”to work” and then do that higher-priority task and then get to your request so the overhead is still waaaaay bigger.
And when it's the build server itself that's broken? No process can account for every possible edge case, and you need to have flexibility to handle the unexpected.
At some point problems reach the "Call Kevin now, I don't care what time it is" level. Your processes should enable anyone to handle problems that are not at this level.
if the build system is broken, then no new code gets built to roll to production. Your build system has no resiliency in terms of having more than one, or ability to roll back? Do you even have version control implemented along with a mature change control process, with automation and monitoring in place?
This was in response to Practical Tip #1: "People don't have to say when they are working."
I'm arguing that this tip is harmful. I should know he was on vacation, and thus have a plan in place to handle anything that might come up while he's on vacation. If I'm completely in the dark about when he's working, things are going to be a lot more difficult.
Vacation / Sick time is a bit different than needing to run errands till 10am, either shifting the working day round a bit or spreading the time out over the next days or week etc.
Doesn't hurt to check in when you're available again as a courtesy but the benefit is NOT having to get permission to do something like this up front.
If you're remote as an employee then presumably the company has process around holidays and stuff that would be followed. If you're a freelancer then part of what stops you, and your client, from being fined by HMRC (in Britain) is setting your own working hours and days.
The main bit of process missing here seems to be the requirement that the developer of a given feature is at work (or at least on call) when it's deployed and has it's first full day of usage (or whatever makes sense for the particular type of application). Don't deploy on Friday afternoon, it's better for everyone to wait until Monday morning. Certainly don't deploy major feature work just before going on holiday, etc.
There's nothing more annoying than asking a question, and not knowing if you're going to get a response in 5 minutes, in which case you stretch your legs and grab a water; or a couple of hours, in which case you move onto another task while you wait for a response.
"Oh, but if you ask in a public Slack channel, someone else will answer!", is the inevitable response from someone here on HN. Unfortunately, that is not always the case for a multitude of reasons.
Whenever I've worked remotely, I've always clocked in and out on slack, either through posting in a channel or sending a DM, or by using statuses. That way people can know that I've gone for lunch and will be incommunicado for the next hour.
It's the same as working in a physical office, if you're out of office, your colleagues should know how long for.
That point is a little bit bad worded. It is more pointed to old school managers who think that by controlling working hours they are controlling productivity.
After all in remote work productivity is measured about communication, issues , commits and pull requests done.
So you're saying that "Will" is your organization's single point of failure? So, when he goes on vacation or when he's sick or quits the whole thing comes crashing down?
If that's the case, I hope I don't own any stock of it, as you're a single injury away from disaster.
Having worked on a team that was responsible for uptime of some high traffic web apps, there's a difference between when you're working and when you're on call. We had an on call schedule for emergencies and down time, but we rarely had actual emergencies to respond to. The rest of our work was done in two week sprints. No one cared when we did the work, as long as we stayed on track with those two week sprints and got everything done most of the time.
Yo, why isn't the site monitored with alerting that tells Will the site is broken? Why isn't the site set up so that if a change is deployed and breaks it, the site can be rolled back to the last working state? Yo, why don't you have change control and a roll back process?
If I know someone won't be "at" work for the next 20 hours (part time, different timezone) I can factor that into how the teamwork will... Work.
Is something on fire, and only a single person can put it out? A) that's sad B) sometimes happens anyway (and then you can try and fix A after the fire is out) C) depending on what's on fire, contracts etc - you can always call and wake someone up.
But mostly it's just nice to know people's schedules - so one can plan work.
Maybe there's some pair programming to be done (via shared screen session or whatever) - obviously try and schedule that when both parties are available...
It's really not that different to chasing after a manager that's busy with meetings or a co-worker who's part time out of the office doing on-site consulting work.
Even in a shared office, developers need to plan "deep" time when they have time to focus - or nothing will get done due interruptions.
Just because someone is sitting right there does not mean they're "free" for a chat. They could be deep in the debugger chasing a bug.
Not sure if it's just my perception, but it seems the pendulum has swung back around and remote work is looked at unfavorably.
I've worked remotely the last 3+ years and I'm currently looking for a new gig. Seems like there aren't a lot of companies who are ok with full-time remote.
For the few that are, there is really stiff competition for those few jobs.
Check out German software-related companies. Small ones are usually flexible to be persuaded to hire you, if you can get through to them, that is. A good application should work, and as usual, don't give up too soon.
They don't even know they can handle it. Maybe do some research as to how they'd have to do payroll, to reduce the scariness of someone overseas.
Look at the HRB and GnR "Type of Register" on the advanced search of [0], and add keywords such as "IT", "net", "net" and similar. I'm not that well-versed in these matters, so while I think there is some source you could find a list of these names and just run a regex on, I don't know where to get that list. Also consider mining the CN fields of server certificates on German IP ranges/all IPv4 addresses (it's just 2^32), and check their Impressum. There you can look for a string ending in " GmbH" and " AG" in a footer, to get the company name to use your regex on. The benefit there is that it should yield all companies that have a German website with HTTPS, and I'd take a lack of HTTPS for the company website or a website not reachable via a second level domain under the .de TLD as a red flag. Assume to require a small German introduction telling the recipient to forward the English part to an English speaking colleague, preferably in the IT department, because the risk of hitting someone who can't understand your English application is quite large.
It ebbs and flows. I recently interviewed for a remote position (found on HN 1st of the month job posting) and they couldn't stop gushing about how many candidates they had. At another company, they realized they weren't getting quality candidates and recently became open to the idea.
All in all it does take longer, but with prior remote experience it makes it easier.
People should not have to work all on the same schedule, but having some shared understanding of when people work or take time off is certainly a good thing.
If you mean announcing every time you walk the dog, or run a quick errand, then sure, of course.
I work remotely and keep regular hours. I communicate any major deviation from those hours.
I’ve worked with people that keep super random hours. That is fine too, but they have to communicate some kind of expectations to the team. It’s super frustrating when they don’t. It becomes hard to manage if you’re directly depending on them for any reason.
I think it shouldn't be necessary, but people should do it as a courtesy. It's like a PTO calendar. It's just nice to know when people will be around, especially if your environment requires some collaboration.
A calendar or wth peoples preferred schedule under a specific time zone is would do wonders. If they ever need to deviate they can change it ahead of time and / or let everyone know through Slack. We do this at my job where we are in an office but we do have two or more remote only employees. Its easier for me to look in there and figure out why xyz is not in the office or Slack for the last 4 hours.
having some shared understanding of when people work or take time off is certainly a good thing
Could make a web page that is like an In/Out board[1], but looks at the person's git commits (plus Slack, etc.) to map out when they tend to be active.
> Save on compensation due to hiring in lower cost regions
Pay people what they're worth regardless of where they live. If you have a developer in Nigeria or Ukraine or Vietnam that is as equally capable as a developer in the Bay Area, they should be paid the same.
Doing otherwise, at best, perpetuates Western hegemony, and at worst is simply racism.
This is a bit ridiculous. It's not hegemony or racism. It's how markets work. People in those markets have fewer opportunities for highly paid employment. As a result, employers have more leverage in negotiations. It's as simple as that.
"If a company has the leverage in any capacity to exercise its dominance over a potential employee—to extract as much value from them at the lowest possible financial liability—it should in any case attempt to do so. It would be absurd to do otherwise."
Personally, I can't abide by that—especially when the only basis is locale—and no matter if they bring the same value to the company as a local six-figure-salary employee.
That's pretty much a company's MO no matter where you go. It's always about leverage and market forces. If an employer could pay you 75% less to do the same work they'd do it in a heartbeat.
It's better to know the rules of the game otherwise you'll just end up being played.
Yes and no, I think. Like some other commenters implied, I think it's short sighted. The outcome of working employees like that can end up being of lower quality, so the product suffers, and loses market traction.
I've been witness to this first-hand. Of course, it's only anecdotal, but just the same it's informed my opinions.
Though you're right about your last point absolutely— it's often pretty safe to assume they're (especially larger companies) operating under the pretense we're both referring to.
People in those markets usually aren't comparing their offer with local competition, the job market for remote workers is worldwide. Many companies do pay remote employees based on the value they bring to the company regardless of where they live so they are the competition.
The problem with this is that a remote worker will have problems finding opportunities or getting found, especially because the competition is so huge.
It is like the problems contractors face taken to some non small power.
Markets work by paying for value created. I’ve tested extensively, and found that I’m equally capable of writing code on a beach in Thailand as in a felt cube in California.
I’ll grant that there is a Cost of Living difference between those places, but I would prefer that difference to be captured by me rather than somebody else’s company. It’s me doing the work and creating the value, so that seems reasonable. If you want to purchase my services, you get to pay my market rate. End of story.
Never drop your rate when working remote. That should probably be written in the article we’re discussing.
Unfortunately, you will get outpriced by people doing "the same" work for less. Since you cannot know the global prices, you cannot even meet them, much less compete.
Lowest bidder often wins.
I know, right? I've lost track of all the money I've lost from clients going with the lowest bidder over the years. I must be literally hundreds of dollars by now.
A bit of advice: Those cheap guys are not your competition, and those bargain hunter clients are not the ones you're trying to land. Let them all race to the bottom all they want. Maybe one of them will find a dev who doesn't know his value yet, but the rest will get their money's worth. It doesn't concern you.
There is only one of you, and your rate is the same whether you're onsite in the Bay Area or working remote from anywhere else you choose to be.
That mindset has served me well over the years. I'd recommend taking it on board.
That is not completely true. Market pay also depends on demand and supply. When I was 19 I got 20 Euro an hour (tax free!) doing some CAD work not because of my skills (they were pathetic), but because a large project of a small company depended on some CAD work being done and he (the boss) couldn't find anyone to do it (part-time, for half a year only, very simple work on a shitty laptop were some reasons why I can imagine he had problems). As a test I was asked to draw a line and give it a specific colour in AutoCAD, that was it!
The "labor market" is a pretty good example of how markets don't work. Workers are pretty much forced to participate in the "market" because they have to eat. This alone is a ridiculous distortion of market mechanisms. There are also huge information asymmetries regarding salary levels.
What if you are a nomad, changing locations month after month? What is your employment market? Is getting hired while in a high income place then moving to a low income place immediately after regarded as a good move in this game?
A remote only company playing the local income game is a major red flag for me. It's basically an employee caste system at that point, with second class employees based solely on their physical location.
Personally, if a company uses remote work as an excuse to pay less, that's a red flag for me. Pay should represent the value you offer to the company, period.
I guess we'll have to throw purchasing power out the window to discuss this one. So pay the developer $20k per year or pay them $100k? If the former, I guess those US developers are just screwed and will probably make more money flipping burgers. If the latter, or anywhere between, then we'll just see developers move to the cheapest, lowest tax countries to arbitrage the artificial market inefficiency. Or are you suggesting we force developers to stay where they are too?
Nothing wrong with it per se. As a developer, I would love to move somewhere cheap and still be paid a Bay Area salary, so I could come back to the US and buy several houses after saving up a truckload of money. But I don't think that was the OP's goal.
> So pay the developer $20k per year or pay them $100k?
If they bring you $20k worth of value, pay them $20k. If they bring you $100k worth of value, pay them $100k.
Would it suck to be a developer in San Francisco on the same salary as your colleague in India? Sure, but nobody forces you to live in San Francisco.
> If the latter, or anywhere between, then we'll just see developers move to the cheapest, lowest tax countries to arbitrage the artificial market inefficiency.
So? What does that have to do with your company? Does it have a moral obligation to contribute to global inequality?
Wouldn't it be better for the world if good hard money for taxes and locally sourced goods and services were flowing into less developed countries?
Spoken like a person without a family or property who is fine with moving to India in a heartbeat.
Do you even know Indian culture? Languages?
How to actually acquire a decent living place in there?
It is an existential risk. A pretty big one. You could end up on street or worse. Alleviating this risk takes negligible resources and quite a lot of time.
Sigh. Just because I mentioned San Francisco and India in the same post, that doesn't mean that I believe that those are the only two places on Earth. Get out a map, find a place you like, figure out if there is one that is not San Francisco but might still be acceptable to you. There isn't? Not even elsewhere in the southern US? OK, stay in San Francisco. You have my permission, which apparently you need.
But if you're interested, I do have experience migrating to new places where I had to learn new languages.
Maybe, depending on what you mean. Do you mean it's hard to measure individual developers' contributions in monetary terms? I agree. But they average out. If you can afford to pay two people sitting in your office equal amounts on the assumption that they contribute equally, you can also afford the same if one of them sits elsewhere instead.
Because otherwise, after COL, you might only save $10k per year in a developed country, and $30k per year in a developing country.
That would be just as lopsided and unfair to your remote workers as paying them all market rate, so that your employees in developed countries get paid $80k per year and your employees in India get paid $8k per year.
Or do you expect your developers in America to relocate to India?
Well, I think the idea is meant to be that you get the best developers possible, regardless of where they are, while still trying to keep expenses minimal.
If you've identified the "best" candidate for a position and want to hire or retain that person, you're now competing with the other offers available to that candidate (which include CoL-adjusted offers), not with the salaries you're paying other employees.
It's not racism, it's simple market forces. Supply and demand and the local cost of living. Someone living in Ukraine will do just fine on 10% of what a Bay Area dev gets paid.
The list of disadvantages is missing perhaps the biggest one from a founder's perspective: The conventional wisdom is that remote companies don't get acquired.
If a founder is even considering a big exit due to acquisition then a remote-only workforce is a non-starter. Same goes for investors with the same ambitions.
Not a developer but a product manager in a previous life. Comms channels have changed a lot. But it's still really hard for me to imagine coming out of school into a remote position. Today, I'm great with being 90% remote (from home). But I can't really imagine starting out that way.
I work with junior developers that are fully remote without any issues. We communicate via IM, Slack, email, and Skype as needed. Not sure how to do something, let’s have a quick screen share and we’ll work through it. Finished with your assigned feature, submit a pull request and I’ll leave comments accordingly or we’ll review it via a screen share. It’s not impossible to do but may require some to change their collaboration approach.
We are a remote-only company (Innolitics.com), and have hired several junior developers. I think it is harder for them to get up to speed, but definitely still quite possible. Pair programming, video calls, and detailed PR reviews all help.
I'd be interested to know some long term remote workers experiences with regards to interruptions. It's one of the things that I believe would be better. In many places I've worked I tend to become a "go to" person which results in many many interruptions, it doesn't make too much difference how much you write down, it's usually always quicker to just ask someone who you know knows the answer to whatever question you have. Remote working seems like it would put up just enough of a barrier that written information / async communication would be an easier go to?
My experience is that it's a lot better but that Slack can be the biggest remaining source of interruptions. I still struggle to find the balance between being sufficiently available on Slack and getting focused uninterrupted work done.
My approach has been to encourage email communication and then I just periodically check my email. This allows me the ability to get in the zone without constant distractions, while still providing the ability to assist when needed. If it’s an absolute emergency then I can be reached via mobile. There are also times though that I will sign into our internal instant messaging system or Slack and will respond there as well. My current tasks tend to dictate how “available” I am.
I've long been that "go-to" guy. I'm friendly, I like to help, and I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. That's fine, it's my natural fit and I enjoy it.
I've been working remotely (from home) for about 2 months now and my productivity is through the roof. It's astonishing. When I work 8 hours, I get ~6.5 hours productive work done. That feels like a theoretical maximum. In the office, 8 hours "at work" – read "in the building" – often felt like 2 or 3 hours of actual work, on a good day.
You spend so much time in the office chatting to people, getting coffee, overhearing interesting conversations, waiting in a meeting room for people to turn up, waiting at the door for people to come to lunch, getting there in the first place, setting up, packing up. It's madness, really. (I'm in Melbourne, Australia. I think our work ethic is different to you Americans.)
I'm lucky, my partner is also a freelancer. We wake up – often at 5am – and make a cup of tea and a slice of toast. "First breakfast." Half an hour later we're awake and we wander upstairs to the office. We put some ambient music on, or not. We knuckle down and work. Two hours later, sun's up, we make a coffee and have "second breakfast". :-)
It's transformed how I live and work. I'm lucky in that my boss is an old friend and he trusts me absolutely. The work I'm doing is exclusively for him, so it's not a problem that I'm not around colleagues. We just use the phone or iMessage to communicate.
We set a weekly rhythm so I don't have to tell him when I'm working; but, because he's a friend, if he calls and I'm not at my desk that's cool.
I am in love with this situation. I can never go back.
If I may play devil's advocate for a minute, I would say that just because you felt like were not productive doesn't mean that you weren't being productive for your team/company. Those people interrupting you with questions are often stuck or could use the extra input to do their own work better.
Gitlab, thank you for posting your handbook that can be reviewed transparently ahead of time by prospective hires.
The complexity of hiring in various countries and jurisdictions is often completely under appreciated by anybody who hasn't had to set up or wind down an entity. GitLab's page[1] gives a flavour of the machinations required to for a legal entity that represents your company to process payroll and adhere to local and regional labour, tax and medical insurance regulations and practices.
I'm very appreciate of companies committed to remote work, especially more so when they are receptive to hiring international staff due to the extra non-trivial administrative overhead required.
This "manifesto" really clarified for me something that I've often noticed about people who strongly believe in remote working but had trouble putting to words. For a lot of people remote work is less about the actual remote aspect of it and more about the kind of relationship the employee has with their employer. It is a relationship where I think the employee is more empowered and freer to find a work life balance that satisfies them.
Precisely. And I think this is why many employers are also highly hesitant about remote work (at times). They don't necessarily want to give their employees that much power, but they lack the courage to say that directly. And instead you hear the criticism that it's less productive.
I analyzed my commits at my last part-time-remote job, before I went full remote, and I was about 2x as productive during times when I was not at the office, even when accounting for the fact that I scheduled meetings during in-office days.
You're asserting a kind of direct malicious intent that I don't think is fair. Certainly, remote work puts some demands on the manager that a bad manager won't be able to handle. If anything, it's an unwillingness to confront this inability.
But remote work also puts very high demand on the workers: they have to be very conscientious, self-motivated and proactive and effective communicators. Everybody know slackers who are not pulling their weights, and who would slack even harder if given the "power". The idea that "working from home" could be a euphemism for a half day+ off did not gestate out of the blue in a mean-spirited managers head. A classically managed working environment can mitigate a lot of this in a way remote environments can't.
A successful remote working environment requires a particular non-average grade of manager and employee.
An an employer who allows people to work remotely. My experience has been that some employees cannot handle the responsibility and their output drops a lot if they're not behind their desk. Others are fine / better. (Because I found it hard to tell some people they're not allowed to work remotely, while others can, I ended up replacing the ones who performed poorly when working remote.)
My point is that you cannot really argue for or against remote work without taking into account that your employees might not all be suitable for that work style. (But if you're building a new organisation then you can pick the right people from the start)
If you give people more explicit feedback about their performance and hold them accountable only for their performance regardless of where they get the work done, the problem disappears. I get the sense that you're holding yourself responsible for the performance of your employees, but for remote work to be successful, you need to hold the employees responsible. If you find that some employees aren't responsible enough to handle that, don't you want more responsible employees anyway?
Yes, I came to the same conclusion: I need employees that don't need to be micro-managed. Changing their behaviour (if that is even possible) seemed to require more effort than I was prepared to put in, so I ended up replacing them.
However, I haven't found a good way to assess whether potential hires are good at this. Everyone claims to be an independent self-starter who is great at remote work whilst in the hiring process...
This is the kind of thing you can suss out of personal references. Of course, many people will provide the best / most reliable (for them) references they possibly can, but you can still get a good signal with the right question. Ex. "Can you tell me about any times ____ pulled through without oversight", or "delivered something both useful and unexpected", etc. Anything that isn't a fast, resounding "yes" with details is probably a "no".
Potentially filter for people who have a demonstrated history of successfully freelancing. They've likely learned how they work most efficiently already.
When joining any company, I recommend understanding the values, culture, and work environment. It is not one size fits all. You should ensure that you would enjoy working with the people, values, and environment you are joining. Remote work may not be for everyone, and doesn't need to be, however it can be wonderful! It has been life-changing for me and my family. My son's math scores have gone up 30% since joining GitLab, because I now have time in the afternoon to dedicate to helping with his homework, before he's exhausted after his latest sports game/practice. That is just one example of how it has impacted my life, but there are many more. I'm home for dinner. I have more time for my friends, but I also have more time for work (I had a 3 hour commute before GitLab). My health has improved. I am happier. At GitLab, we take steps to make remote work successful. In addition to our daily "social" call together, we also enable our team members to rent space at a co-working facility (we work, for example), or work from anywhere with an internet connection if that is preferable for them. It is not unusual for my teammates to see me taking Video conferencing calls from the beach. It has been proven that humans do their best thinking surrounded by nature, and I try to take advantage of that. I love the freedom that remote work gives me and my fellow team members. But I agree that we must always be thinking about how to maximize the benefits of this arrangement and decrease the downsides. If you are willing to put in the effort, which includes changing the way you work and communicate, as asynchronous communication is required to make remote work successful, it can be very rewarding. I don't feel that I have less human contact, I feel that I have more but different contact. I definitely get more direct time with my friends and family, but I also get to know more people at work. In an office building, I tended to only spend time with those who sat near me or interacted regularly with me. Occasionally it ventured out passed that if I joined the SCUBA group, or something similar. At GitLab, our team calls, our meetings, and our summits allow me to get to know people from around the world that I would have never had the opportunity to learn from before. We have different experiences and perspectives and it is fascinating! If you know that remote work isn't for you, that you love decisions being made in hallways vs. organized communication, for example, then it is great that you know that. The wonderful thing is that there are many companies conducting their business in different ways, that we should all be able to find the one that matches our needs and values. I'm thrilled to have found a company that matches my needs, to balance wellness, work, family, and friends, while making an impact in our industry. If you are at a remote company and feel that things could be done better, I hope that they are willing to hear your recommendations. I wouldn't give up on the model without trying to make it work. If you work at GitLab and have recommendations, I'm happy to hear them!
I just started working remotely, after a year plus of a three-hour commute.
My quality-of-life improvements have been very similar to yours. I cannot believe how much happier I am now, on a daily basis.
I have written some of the best code of my life while sitting on a picnic table in a park. I see my friends more. I see my family more. I have more energy to put into my work, which results in better work satisfaction.
Timezones make scheduling team meetings hard, and if your organization ever becomes big enough to warrant a physical office people far away will start working late hours to keep up with the main office.
YMMV, but it's 3 AM here in Berlin and until 10 minutes ago I was still actively working.
I've been full-time remote for just shy of 5 years and timezones is definitely an issue. Up to 4 hour difference is sustainable indefinitely, 8 hours can be with the right people (doing split days is great for this), but beyond 8 hours and the amount of effort required for synchronous communication (video calls) causes it to not happen and the team loses cohesion.
You need the synchronous communication to have non-work conversations, and you need those non-work conversations to develop and maintain the relationships required (trust, rapport, etc.) for remote work.
> if your organization ever becomes big enough to warrant a physical office
...then you probably don't have enough buy-in to be a fully remote company and that is far harder to work around than timezones.
> Fast internet everywhere - 100Mb/s+ cable, 5GHz Wifi, 4G cellular
I used to say that. Now I live in a rural area, and the fastest speed that's even available is 5Mbps (and the uptime isn't great). My house also has zero cell service from any provider.
It's also a bit presumptive that everyone can afford a 100Mbps connection. The last place I lived, it was like $120/month for 100Mbps. Not everybody can afford that.
That being said, has anyone out there come up with creative solutions for working remotely on a crappy connection?
It may not fit your use case, but I found Speedify to be a great boon when dealing with working remotely over crappy wifi with 3g cellular. It's a VPN type app than can split your packets between two connections (e.g WiFi and my phone tethered via Bluetooth) for increased bandwidth or can send all packets over both connections to assist with lost packets or inconsistent latency.
1. A lot of places that are remote will cover or subsidize internet costs for employees
2. I think the the poor access to Internet in rural areas is more of a US thing. In LDCs we have often wider availability for low cost 4g and/or more equal distribution of telecom infrastructure in general.
Yeah and poor access to Internet in metro areas is a thing here in Australia. There's plenty of people here (myself included) in the middle of the city with 5/0.5 connections.
You have misunderstood. The grandparent is not saying that fast internet is expensive. He’s saying that there is simply no way of attaining it at his house for any price.
That describes a lot of places in the developed world. My little farming town in rural France, as well as the medium sized City in England where I lived previously.
>no way of attaining it at his house for any price
I bet Amazon jungle doesn't have gbit internet either.
The question is whether OP chose a location without internet knowingly or he was cut off and left stranded.
The sad part is that in many developing countries 100mbps is now quite common. Meanwhile, even in LA it’s not very consistent when you have this speed advertised on your contract.
Only place where I reliably saw 100mbps down was in SFO on tmobile LTE by one very specific window. Go figure...
EDIT: consumer grade connections - if you have a business, gigabit is easy to get in the office.
The details notwithstanding; I work for a F50 and my wife works for Gitlab. I was a tad bit skeptical at first (and I'm the one that encouraged her to apply). But watching her go through it, remote only is quickly becoming much more appealing - at least the way Gitlab does it.
what do you look for in a candidate when hiring for a remote position ? I am 3 years experienced dev and cant even get my resume filtered for first round. I do have 3 months of remote Gsoc experience if that counts. But i am curious, is there some particular factor that gives an edge over other candidates ?
One of the benefits listed in the manifesto (and often touted elsewhere) is that you are not limited to a specific region when hiring.
Unfortunately, what this means for candidates is they may have to compete with a LOT more people.
Another challenge you're likely facing is that a lot of companies are only willing to hire senior developers to work remotely because hesitant upper management thinks they will be more trustworthy (completely ignoring the level of trust inherent in having someone write code for them when they themselves can't even verify it).
That negativity aside, here's some advice: As much as there is some backlash around the idea of a GitHub profile being mandatory, one VERY practical use of an open source portfolio of some kind is that almost all open source project work is done remotely using the very same skills required for successful remote employment. This applies even more so to non-programming contributions, in my opinion, which means you don't even need to contribute code to demonstrate these skills.
This is good but impractical. Many workplaces are full of jackasses who don't care about the rules, and are not going to take the extra effort of saving a screenshot to meeting notes to help out the remote guy/people. Instead this person will happily subtly disadvantage the remote people just because it makes him/her look one shade better. There are lots of these types out there, i.e. those that think middle school politics is the name of the game. So manifestos like this are of little practical value.
This is not just 'remote only' but has other good practices as writing down requirements and processes. This is exceptionally healthy approach, even if you have local employees. It prevents silos and people undermining other people's work.
My biggest problem is this: While there is a surplus of remote only positions, this surplus always wants the same thing: very senior developers with tons of wide experience sets.
Seems like there's a lot of talent being left on the floor by only looking for senior developers. There's a lot of goodwill that can be earned by trusting in potential and helping candidates grow into a position. Even an experienced developer in one set of languages and frameworks is junior to others -- and they can't get the foot in the door anywhere remotely.
The "years of experience" drought is real, but I feel like it's an eternal desert for remote work.
That is something bad at our industry. Managers or whoever do that decision believes that being senior automagically makes you a genious, when it can be the other way around, the more senior you are, the more averse to change you are. I doubt that senior could easily change to remote lifestyle after years of onsite.
People must learn that anyone can be remote, the thing is that everyone must agree to communicate better instead of more.
> the more senior you are, the more averse to change you are. I doubt that senior could easily change to remote lifestyle after years of onsite.
Why not? Going from on-site to remote is strictly easier, as the only thing it needs is to stop leaving home every morning.
I don't get this "the more senior you are, the more averse to change you are" - the only thing I've seen is older people having higher expectations and less tolerance for abuse and working for pie-in-the-sky promises of future wealth. But maybe my bias is showing, I'm nearing 30, so pretty old by software industry standards.
LOL. What makes someone senior? What are the advantages that being senior brings to the job at hand? Should we all be non-senior instead so that we have no experience or skills formed? Change is a part of life. You are going to get older and then die. Too often, technology firms worship youth at the expense of experience. In any case, youth ages and then it is your turn in the box, being lectured by the next generation about how averse to change YOU are. sigh.
Honestly, I find it a bit weird so much of this blog post focus on making all information visible and documenting everything (which I agree with) and then there is:
> People don't have to say when they are working.
That just seems a bit at odds with the rest of the post and I don't really agree with it.
Sometimes there are questions that only one person (let's say Nick) can answer or situations where Nick is more valuable than other employees. Let's say I've got a moderately time sensitive issue and I'm pretty sure Kevin knows the answer as he's an expert in the subject, alternatively, I could pull aside Bob, Joe, and Linda and we could probably figure it out after a little while.
Knowing when Nick will be back online plays a big factor in what I chose to do next. If Nick is offline for lunch and will be back in an hour, I'll wait for Nick. If Nick started work early and is now offline for a long weekend, well then I need to pull Bob, Joe, and Linda away from their work to help me.
Having at least a general idea of when people will be available seems like it'd be even more important in a situation where I can't ask the people around me, "Has anyone seen Nick today?"
If all information is visible and everything is well documented, it should be rare to have the situation where one person is the only one that can answer that question. This will totally still happen for remote teams, but I think it happens more in other organizations that rely on face time and verbal information exchange.
I still generally agree that knowing when folks are online can be helpful and don’t see a big issue with that as long as you don’t have a culture that starts measuring people by how many hours they put in. Rather than an upfront “I will be working today from X to Y” something passive like a Slack recent activity indicator could be enough.
> If all information is visible and everything is well documented, it should be rare to have the situation where one person is the only one that can answer that question. This will totally still happen for remote teams, but I think it happens more in other organizations that rely on face time and verbal information exchange.
I worked at my last job for just over 2 1/2 years and, while we had an actual office, for the first two years I was there, we also had a true "unlimited vacation/remote work" policy. It wasn't unheard of that some people would take 4-6 week vacations and others would work remote for multiple months.
Documentation was great, but you can't document everything you know, so there will always be gaps. I'm a developer, so these will be dev focused, but some scenarios I can remember where one specific person was needed are:
- Legacy code. Bob was the only one around when this code was written and it hasn't been touched in years, now it's breaking and no one understands why. (In an ideal world, there wouldn't be knowledge silos like this, but there always are)
- Specialties. Most developers know this tool, but Bob is an expert. We need to do something that requires an expert. We need Bob.
- Bob left an ominous, yet vague comment on my PR. I don't want to merge until I get clarification. (something like "This looks hacky. I guess it works, but we should probably change this ASAP." or "Eww")
> Legacy code. Bob was the only one around when this code was written and it hasn't been touched in years, now it's breaking and no one understands why. (In an ideal world, there wouldn't be knowledge silos like this, but there always are)
Not sure how well/different that works in a remote-first company, but at previous workplaces I was, we tried to have one day a week dedicated to refactoring, which might reduce that problem.
> - Legacy code. Bob was the only one around when this code was written and it hasn't been touched in years, now it's breaking and no one understands why. (In an ideal world, there wouldn't be knowledge silos like this, but there always are)
Not sure if valid, if some legacy code was written a few years before, probably even author will have no clue what's wrong.
The author might have a higher chance of figuring it out. This is playing the likelihood game though. In perfect world, the code would be tight and small enough that you wouldn't take long to understand it, and then the complex components (there are always a bunch of these) are well tested and documented. Especially rationale for design decisions or implementation quirks.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 420 ms ] threadEmbrace asynchronous communication.
It seems pragmatic until you actually struggle to get everyone to be on the same page at the same time, then you spend a lot of time figuring out how to be consistent.
I agree the video calls are probably over the top - but asynchronous communication != synchronous communication.
It’s particularly bad when you combine it with timewasting predetermined Agile meetings and distraction-oriented open plan offices.
Employers who want happy, productive, collaborative workers: Stop disrupting people with useless meetings and denying them large chunks of private, quiet time to work however they see fit. Stop embedding them in open plan spaces.
You know, treat them like an adult, with basic human dignity, who wants to be respected and trusted that they will succeed with their own judgment for how to effectively communicate and manage their work schedule.
Needless to say, I became a lot more fond of Amazon's pre-meeting written notes after that.
Nonstop video calls are dumb, but people should try to be on video when there are scheduled meetings. It really helps to see other people when having a discussion.
- Difficulty scheduling a time that fits for all participants. Some team-members are inevitably stuck with a non-ideal timeframe. Often times it's the same employee suffering each meeting, which leads to resentment.
- Interruptions during productive hours. See the Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html) - reacting to interruptions can be disastrous.
- Frustration from choppy/laggy video that results in loss of important parts of updates and valuable information.
I'm actually building an app called Tape to address these kinds of issues and to improve communication and collaboration across teams by integrating into existing workflows not against them. If any of you guys are interested in learning more or trying out our product, I'd love to connect: https://trytape.typeform.com/to/pKe6X5
I feel like the downsides of remote conferences really only kick in with multiple participants.
We do a full remote policy at SerpApi.com, however I found this disadvantages list a bit dishonest, they are more way numerous and important, the most obvious are missing real human contacts (and it doesn't get easier with time), and harder life and work separation.
If you were to write that list, what would it look like?
Despite technological advances, I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information and come to conclusions on difficult decisions. It's also the least susceptible to misinterpretation.
Why do people think this. For one thing, and I think it is most important, face to face communication does not give either parties time to think. It ends up with awkward, unproductive pauses.
Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought...
wat.
When you want productive communication, you want thought backing content and framing of every one of your sentences...
Live video chat is a good alternative, but I think more natural human empthay comes out in face to face experiences. People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved quickly before they fester. Live video chat gets you much of this but isn’t quite as effective in my experience.
To me this observation just means that on remote teams you need to be observant of such issues and spend a little more time to resolve them, which can be a fine trade off for remote teams. (Or ideally avoid overly contentious debates in the first place)
If the metric is "time to decision" then face to face will do very well.
I have observed the same. But 9 out of 10 times, it was because the losing party couldn't spend much time thinking about counter arguments.
So again, it cures the symptom, but it benefits only the person with the loudest voice in the room, and not the one with sound reason.
>People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved...
Don't buy this either. As I said before, the "seem to understand" bit might come from the fact that people often does not express disagreement in face to face communication that often, because they didn't have time to think it through.
EDIT: This is assuming that the both parties in the discussion are more or less on the same level of competence. If the communication is going to be mostly one sided, then face to face communication (Like a teacher in a class room) is fine.
..or even just the facts. I have, on (fortunately rare) occasions, refused to heed a manager's encouragement to speak with someone directly, because my disagreement isn't even about reasoning, but about facts.
It can be remarkably frustrating to have to repeat the same thing to someone who believes in something that is demonstrably false. At least over e-mail one can copy-and-paste.
It's as if (some) people can't tell the difference between matters of fact and matters of opinion (or judgment).
It may be true that face-to-face is best at resolving contentious disagreements on matters of opinion. However, I'd think it could only be true if those disagreements are based on everyone reaching their opinions from the same facts, and even determining if that's the case could easily be short-circuited by a premature opinion (e.g. loudest voice in the room).
Time zones, were a huge issue and pain point when trying to get a large number of people on the same page. I found my self often having to give the same meeting twice, which put more pressure on me. Even worse was when i would have to go over points only for someone who wasn't available for the first meeting, to raise issues that we didn't notice, and so on.
After 6 months the team basically felt like it dissolved into the European team, and the North American Team. With me trying to ferry information from one team to another.
So many times regardless of how amazing the latest tools we tried were, it still pales in comparison to a whiteboard. The company bought me a high end digital whiteboard, that allowed me to pass control to other people, it was a buggy POS. On top of that since i was the only one unfortunately with the white board, it meant i was the one who was always doing the drawing and trying to extrapolate a diagram from what someone says.
Sometimes some team members would spend hours drawing up a digital mock up of what they were going to push for only for it to become completely useless within a very short time.
I also found some people no matter how hard i tried, some people seemed to interpret working remote meant, they got to work in their own silo, and would ignore 99% of everything going on around them. This lead to numerous conflicts, and other issues.
Also one other thing i found, was that 1 on 1's became super impersonal, and frankly felt extremely uncomfortable.
I'd say "missing real human contacts" is summarized well under a combination of harder rampup/scares some potential employees; as the lack of "Real contacts" seems more of a personal/subjective or team-process-and-tooling-rooted feeling than anything I've observed to be inherent and unsolvable; it's trivial for me to get a face to face with anyone on my multi-national team. Now, to try and read this charitably, if you meant something like "increased difficulty networking" I'd actually agree, but again, if you're at a place in your career where you accept that, it's significantly less of a downside.
Mostly, that's the gist of a lot of the things people list as hard negatives to my ears, including your second point of harder life/work separation. I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." (Edit: see my clarification in child post re: this wording, I came off more accusatory than I'd have liked, but didn't want to rewrite history) With the broad slew of coworking spaces, home offices, coffee shops, and other ways to partition one's time and mental spaces, I don't accept that that's something that can't be solved in the same proactive fashion as a professional would approach any assorted social frictions one might run into in _any_ office environment.
If you read any frustration in this, it comes from a place of, "a lot of the complaints I read are solvable problems or isomorphisms of in-office problems", and a hope that we'd be self-interested enough as a field to be more proactive in seeking solutions, given the benefits that can come from a more distributed workforce. I want to encourage and productively improve sites that try to support this, and part of that is avoiding a re-encroachment of remote work stigma/fear in many people's eyes.
Edit: yes, I'm going to break the HN rules, but christ people, at least _respond_ before blindly downvoting. This was not a glib response, and this topic (remote work) is something we should be able to discuss in good faith without accruing negative score before I even finish grammar-checking my own writing.
I do have made my company fully remote so I do believe remote work is way of the future, but we can't be disingenuous about its downsides.
When you are intending to speak to an audience, I think it matters to know your audience, which gets complicated, when the audience is constantly shifting.
Cheers!
This is incredibly dismissive. Almost all the "advantages for employees" are personal. How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit? The advantages for remote work are almost entirely being sold that they are better for people. If someone has a personal problem with an aspect of it, then it should be taken seriously.
Imagine if you told an employer that the commute to work was rough so you would like to work remote and he told you "that sounds like a personal problem, why don't you move closer to work?"
You aptly point out that "no commuting or stress" is a personal benefit; to play devils advocate with that, wouldn't having a "typical job" then be "dismissive" in not catering to someone who might be incredibly sensitive to the commute? I bring up this contrast since I think a lot of the friction with remote is that it's a change from the status quo, not necessarily that the status quo doesn't incur its own comparable (if inverted) costs.
Let me try and rephrase my point better, regardless. I don't think there's a one size fits all, period. Some people simply want/like/work better in some environments than others, and to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.
You asked the question at the end re: a boss telling me that about my commute. Honestly, yes, this has happened to me. And I switched teams, to the one I'm currently on, which is extremely remote friendly. I don't mean to whitewash remote work for any given person or say that everyone has such a lucky opportunity, I see it as two sides to the same coin, in which we shouldn't assume highly-granular personal choices to be a global downside to remote work, and we should enable as many opportunities for that choice to be present as possible.
Edit: After rereading my posts, I'll concede that "personal problem" may not have been the best way to put it, and comes off as far too accusatory. I want to delineate between problems I expect a professional adult to be able to understand their own exposure to and handle via their own autonomy, vs problems that are only in the purview of the workplace to solve/that we can't expect individuals to navigate feasibly.
At the point when the company is losing value and opportunities that you could be providing. It's a business.
To be clear: whether or not it's economical to deal with this problem also matters.
I'm not sure that listing pros/cons paints them as anything (or vice-versa), though maybe I haven't quite gotten your point (and I've read all your edits).
I've never had an opportunity to work anywhere all-remote, remote-first, or even truly remote-friendly, and I harbor an interest in the discussions, including anecdata, primarily because so many of these things are personal. I, as a reader, am pretty capable of figuring out which personal preferences don't actually match up to my own and which pros/cons may not actually apply to my situation or profession. The water isn't muddied for me by more information.
As such, I very much would prefer to hear a more complete [1] and expansive list of both advantages and disadvantages to a remote-only culture. I find it's even important to include what you describe as "isomorphisms of in-office problems" if only to point how they're easier/harder to deal with when working remote.
[1] I think a grandparent comment used the adjective "honest", but I think that's only relevant as maybe a jab at the article itself, which is clearly promoting an agenda.
My commute is a 20 minute walk through a very nice park, and my partner walks the same route in the morning. It’s one of my favourite parts of the day, and it would be a hard push to get me to give that up right now.
These are very significant societal benefits, not personal ones.
That said, remote working isn't going to work for everyone. Extroverts, especially, I think tend to struggle with it a little bit.
If the downside is "lack of separate workspace / human contact", then it is blown way out of proportion imho. It's easily solved by using a coworking space, and it's not reason enough to dismiss remote work.
I made countless friends while working remotely and a good 90% of them I met in a coworking space (and the so called "digital nomad" community is made of some really awesome people). Plus you have the option to change coworking space if you don't like the people, the coffee, the wallpapers or whatever. You can't do that with a traditional office (or it would be reaaally hard to justify).
For those occasions, I've always just relocated to either a coffee shop (or similar) or a co-working space with drop-in rates. If you're extremely rural, or those aren't options, I don't know what to tell you.
But seriously, how would it be a problem? In the afternoons, we often have a beer at our desks while working. I often work at night after having a drink at dinner or in the afternoon after lunch at the pub. Having a pint beside the laptop while answering emails or working on a side project or making content changes for a client wouldn't be especially difficult or problematic.
I've worked for myself for 20 years (http://www.isaacforman.com.au/) so there are rarely issues with time and place of work either. I'm mostly anchored to my desk because I like the room to move of four displays.
Or perhaps your partner works in a regional area, but you can take a tech job from afar rather than be limited by the local market.
That is rather hyperbolic. Many remote workers do fine working from home. Others do not. Not all people are the same. Any of us can think of things that are "more detrimental to a person's psyche" for nearly all individuals.
Really, though, you're making the (likely false) assumption that ones "junk" is the only thing touched in the restroom. You're also ignoring the potential for aeresolized bits of feces sprayed by commercial flush mechanisms.
None of this adds up to "filthy" per se, but hand washing is one of the best disease spreading preventions we know of.
Personally, if they're not going to wash I'd rather someone not go anywhere near the sink after using the restroom instead of also touching the fixtures and giving the bacteria on their hands a drink of water.
[1] I once worked in a building with a dentist who washed both before and after.
After all, your desk, keyboard, smartphone screen, and even shoes aren't likely to be places other people have touched, so not much potential for spreading anything.
Shaking hands, though.. filthy habit ;)
But yes, I'm not suggesting that not washing your hands all the time greatly increase your likelihood of getting infected with something. Just slightly. I just have slight OCD and it's still weird to me how people don't feel anywhere close to the same way I do about these things.
Don't worry though, I do wash my hands after a bathroom visit. I just don't care that much if someone else doesn't.
That's the point, though. Once you "see" it, it's way too late.
> It's been close to 20 years since
That's just anecdata, but, as you point out, you do wash your hands.
> total avoidance of all bacteria
That's not exactly possible (and essentially deadly, unless there are archea that can take the place of all our gut bacteria.. I'm not sure).
> I just don't care that much if someone else doesn't.
I'd agree it's unreasonable to care more than just slightly, since they'd be increasing the risk more for themselves than for you. However, increased risk for everyone (including you) is non-zero.
I see your point, but it simply falls to things I rather not care about. Adding a mental/habitual burden on something that is either unlikely or not that serious isn't just worth it; a life is more relaxed if it can be disregarded.
I also acknowledge that it's not something that can be simply chosen though. I do I know about certain things way more than some of my friends, even if I didn't want to.
I can only suppose you mean everyone can just rinse his hands after using the urinal because his genitals are clean. They aren't, unless your sweat is both antiseptic and insecticide. Anyway, I meant using toilets too, not just urinals.
Some people thrive working from home. Some people thrive working with a colocated team in a private office. Some people would thrive on a remote team, but working in a coworking space (I'm in this boat).
Personally, I'd go stir crazy if I worked from home on a regular basis, not just from social isolation, but from working where I live. I try to keep my life compartmentalised; my gym, my work, my home, and the bar I drink at are all different places and I like it that way.
I'm very social and love spending time with people, but work isn't my outlet for that. I find that friends in an office end up decreasing my productivity and causing me to have less free time for friends, family, and relaxation.
There's also a good chunk of people actively seeking that because of their personal characteristics (psyche?).
Having clusters of remote workers, perhaps there is a sweet spot.
Perhaps it would be better to remove "remote" from the title completely. You may have several locations where people can come together, don't call them headquarters and those not there remote, but instead everyone is team member who sits in various sites. Some of those sites have 1 person, others have 4 or 5 or 10. And those with more than an individual
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/issues/
For me, personally, working from home has amplified the good parts of working with people and human contact and removed the bad parts.
When we do meet in person (4-5 times a year) we have a blast.
When we communicate via video the communication is a lot of fun and very purposeful at the same time. Sometimes it feels like I speak to remote co-workers by video more than family and people in real life! So, lot's of human interaction there.
At the same time, there is now no interruptions when someone gets bored and wanders over for a chat.
There is no need to instantly answer questions when overly eager bosses have a brain... idea.
There is no need to watch the clock and make it look like I'm staying late just cos everyone else is.
And I can work on stuff anytime I like, like if I wake up at 5am by accident I can knock out the current sprint board and have a break during the day.
So, in my case at least, saying "the most obvious are missing real human contacts" is simply not true.
I do think that remote working is a bit difficult to pull off well and I've found the key is to really get to know people well when in person and on video chat.
I just changed job from an open office to remote work, and while everybody thought my new job sounded like a great opportunity, no one was jealous of the remote part - "So, now you have rent a shared office, huh?" (and yes, that is what I did)
You can establish policies that ensure life and work separation (as in: "No calls outside of designated work hours") but you can't easily allay an instinctive as well as indistinct fear that everything will go the dogs if people don't work in the same office anymore.
Human contact for me is more about friends and out of work activity. Colleagues are colleagues, if you want "real human" interaction, you'd need to get out of the office anyway.
They don't pay us to socialise, and I can count the number of times on my middle finger of how many people who at the offices I've worked at I'd want to spend my free time with.
Strangely, now that I'm working remotely, I actually do socialise with my colleagues when we meet every 3 months, and enjoy it.
Apart from that, I'm around people who I enjoy being with instead of staring the clock or the rear of a car. And I have more social energy to do so.
The biggest downsides are: loneliness, feeling like a shut in, and working all the time because you're only two steps from your "office". These are NP-hard problems to solve, especially for an introverted 4-eyes like me.
“Where’s will?” “I don’t know, our manifesto says nobody gets to know when he’s working.” “Well he broke the site.” “That’s his right as a sovereign citizen.” The end.
What you lose in having a fairly rigid schedule, you more than gain back by not having to carry around that “always on” feeling.
I agree with you (and OP) that there has to be some visibility into what work is going to be done when, and there are lots of ways to solve it, that said, I'm sympathetic to the notion that "I don't care how or when you work, as long as the work gets done." I'm a big fan of measuring developers more by the velocity of their Jira queues and commit history than how often they're available to be bothered with non-coding stuff.
This comment hits the nail on the head [0]. Everyone's butt is on the line. It should never be one person's fault that the website was taken down. If one person has the power to damage your business and only they can repair the error, then you have a process problem.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17252798
The team broke the site.
Nothing against remote work, but knowing everyone's typical working hours makes things run a lot more smoothly.
About the only time where I've seen this fail is if it was a publicised feature launch that was way premature.
I'm arguing that this tip is harmful. I should know he was on vacation, and thus have a plan in place to handle anything that might come up while he's on vacation. If I'm completely in the dark about when he's working, things are going to be a lot more difficult.
Doesn't hurt to check in when you're available again as a courtesy but the benefit is NOT having to get permission to do something like this up front.
If you're remote as an employee then presumably the company has process around holidays and stuff that would be followed. If you're a freelancer then part of what stops you, and your client, from being fined by HMRC (in Britain) is setting your own working hours and days.
"Oh, but if you ask in a public Slack channel, someone else will answer!", is the inevitable response from someone here on HN. Unfortunately, that is not always the case for a multitude of reasons.
Whenever I've worked remotely, I've always clocked in and out on slack, either through posting in a channel or sending a DM, or by using statuses. That way people can know that I've gone for lunch and will be incommunicado for the next hour.
It's the same as working in a physical office, if you're out of office, your colleagues should know how long for.
After all in remote work productivity is measured about communication, issues , commits and pull requests done.
If that's the case, I hope I don't own any stock of it, as you're a single injury away from disaster.
Sure, have core hours, and make them known.
If I know someone won't be "at" work for the next 20 hours (part time, different timezone) I can factor that into how the teamwork will... Work.
Is something on fire, and only a single person can put it out? A) that's sad B) sometimes happens anyway (and then you can try and fix A after the fire is out) C) depending on what's on fire, contracts etc - you can always call and wake someone up.
But mostly it's just nice to know people's schedules - so one can plan work.
Maybe there's some pair programming to be done (via shared screen session or whatever) - obviously try and schedule that when both parties are available...
It's really not that different to chasing after a manager that's busy with meetings or a co-worker who's part time out of the office doing on-site consulting work.
Even in a shared office, developers need to plan "deep" time when they have time to focus - or nothing will get done due interruptions.
Just because someone is sitting right there does not mean they're "free" for a chat. They could be deep in the debugger chasing a bug.
I've worked remotely the last 3+ years and I'm currently looking for a new gig. Seems like there aren't a lot of companies who are ok with full-time remote.
For the few that are, there is really stiff competition for those few jobs.
[0]: https://www.handelsregister.de/
All in all it does take longer, but with prior remote experience it makes it easier.
This is a bad idea.
People should not have to work all on the same schedule, but having some shared understanding of when people work or take time off is certainly a good thing.
I work remotely and keep regular hours. I communicate any major deviation from those hours.
I’ve worked with people that keep super random hours. That is fine too, but they have to communicate some kind of expectations to the team. It’s super frustrating when they don’t. It becomes hard to manage if you’re directly depending on them for any reason.
Could make a web page that is like an In/Out board[1], but looks at the person's git commits (plus Slack, etc.) to map out when they tend to be active.
1. https://cloudfront.zoro.com/product/full/Z-_Ntvfo5oz.JPG
Pay people what they're worth regardless of where they live. If you have a developer in Nigeria or Ukraine or Vietnam that is as equally capable as a developer in the Bay Area, they should be paid the same.
Doing otherwise, at best, perpetuates Western hegemony, and at worst is simply racism.
Simplified, the counter argument appears to be:
"If a company has the leverage in any capacity to exercise its dominance over a potential employee—to extract as much value from them at the lowest possible financial liability—it should in any case attempt to do so. It would be absurd to do otherwise."
Personally, I can't abide by that—especially when the only basis is locale—and no matter if they bring the same value to the company as a local six-figure-salary employee.
It's better to know the rules of the game otherwise you'll just end up being played.
I've been witness to this first-hand. Of course, it's only anecdotal, but just the same it's informed my opinions.
Though you're right about your last point absolutely— it's often pretty safe to assume they're (especially larger companies) operating under the pretense we're both referring to.
You're right about the mechanisms at play though.
Markets work by paying for value created. I’ve tested extensively, and found that I’m equally capable of writing code on a beach in Thailand as in a felt cube in California.
I’ll grant that there is a Cost of Living difference between those places, but I would prefer that difference to be captured by me rather than somebody else’s company. It’s me doing the work and creating the value, so that seems reasonable. If you want to purchase my services, you get to pay my market rate. End of story.
Never drop your rate when working remote. That should probably be written in the article we’re discussing.
A bit of advice: Those cheap guys are not your competition, and those bargain hunter clients are not the ones you're trying to land. Let them all race to the bottom all they want. Maybe one of them will find a dev who doesn't know his value yet, but the rest will get their money's worth. It doesn't concern you.
There is only one of you, and your rate is the same whether you're onsite in the Bay Area or working remote from anywhere else you choose to be.
That mindset has served me well over the years. I'd recommend taking it on board.
That is not completely true. Market pay also depends on demand and supply. When I was 19 I got 20 Euro an hour (tax free!) doing some CAD work not because of my skills (they were pathetic), but because a large project of a small company depended on some CAD work being done and he (the boss) couldn't find anyone to do it (part-time, for half a year only, very simple work on a shitty laptop were some reasons why I can imagine he had problems). As a test I was asked to draw a line and give it a specific colour in AutoCAD, that was it!
The "labor market" is a pretty good example of how markets don't work. Workers are pretty much forced to participate in the "market" because they have to eat. This alone is a ridiculous distortion of market mechanisms. There are also huge information asymmetries regarding salary levels.
A remote only company playing the local income game is a major red flag for me. It's basically an employee caste system at that point, with second class employees based solely on their physical location.
Note that people are fine with getting a lower salary in exchange for being able to work remotely.
You could turn it around and say remote employees are "paying their employer what working remotely is worth".
Sure, but value works both ways.
"Your salary should represent the value working remotely offers to you"
If it's reasonable for you to think that way, why wouldn't it be reasonable for companies too?
If they bring you $20k worth of value, pay them $20k. If they bring you $100k worth of value, pay them $100k.
Would it suck to be a developer in San Francisco on the same salary as your colleague in India? Sure, but nobody forces you to live in San Francisco.
> If the latter, or anywhere between, then we'll just see developers move to the cheapest, lowest tax countries to arbitrage the artificial market inefficiency.
So? What does that have to do with your company? Does it have a moral obligation to contribute to global inequality?
Wouldn't it be better for the world if good hard money for taxes and locally sourced goods and services were flowing into less developed countries?
Spoken like a person without a family or property who is fine with moving to India in a heartbeat.
Do you even know Indian culture? Languages? How to actually acquire a decent living place in there?
It is an existential risk. A pretty big one. You could end up on street or worse. Alleviating this risk takes negligible resources and quite a lot of time.
But if you're interested, I do have experience migrating to new places where I had to learn new languages.
Gitlab does this when calculating salary [1] for their employees. It seems only fair to me.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
That would be just as lopsided and unfair to your remote workers as paying them all market rate, so that your employees in developed countries get paid $80k per year and your employees in India get paid $8k per year.
Or do you expect your developers in America to relocate to India?
Would you pay more money for the exact same product made in a different city? How is hiring developers different?
If a founder is even considering a big exit due to acquisition then a remote-only workforce is a non-starter. Same goes for investors with the same ambitions.
I've long been that "go-to" guy. I'm friendly, I like to help, and I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. That's fine, it's my natural fit and I enjoy it.
I've been working remotely (from home) for about 2 months now and my productivity is through the roof. It's astonishing. When I work 8 hours, I get ~6.5 hours productive work done. That feels like a theoretical maximum. In the office, 8 hours "at work" – read "in the building" – often felt like 2 or 3 hours of actual work, on a good day.
You spend so much time in the office chatting to people, getting coffee, overhearing interesting conversations, waiting in a meeting room for people to turn up, waiting at the door for people to come to lunch, getting there in the first place, setting up, packing up. It's madness, really. (I'm in Melbourne, Australia. I think our work ethic is different to you Americans.)
I'm lucky, my partner is also a freelancer. We wake up – often at 5am – and make a cup of tea and a slice of toast. "First breakfast." Half an hour later we're awake and we wander upstairs to the office. We put some ambient music on, or not. We knuckle down and work. Two hours later, sun's up, we make a coffee and have "second breakfast". :-)
It's transformed how I live and work. I'm lucky in that my boss is an old friend and he trusts me absolutely. The work I'm doing is exclusively for him, so it's not a problem that I'm not around colleagues. We just use the phone or iMessage to communicate.
We set a weekly rhythm so I don't have to tell him when I'm working; but, because he's a friend, if he calls and I'm not at my desk that's cool.
I am in love with this situation. I can never go back.
The complexity of hiring in various countries and jurisdictions is often completely under appreciated by anybody who hasn't had to set up or wind down an entity. GitLab's page[1] gives a flavour of the machinations required to for a legal entity that represents your company to process payroll and adhere to local and regional labour, tax and medical insurance regulations and practices.
I'm very appreciate of companies committed to remote work, especially more so when they are receptive to hiring international staff due to the extra non-trivial administrative overhead required.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
I analyzed my commits at my last part-time-remote job, before I went full remote, and I was about 2x as productive during times when I was not at the office, even when accounting for the fact that I scheduled meetings during in-office days.
But remote work also puts very high demand on the workers: they have to be very conscientious, self-motivated and proactive and effective communicators. Everybody know slackers who are not pulling their weights, and who would slack even harder if given the "power". The idea that "working from home" could be a euphemism for a half day+ off did not gestate out of the blue in a mean-spirited managers head. A classically managed working environment can mitigate a lot of this in a way remote environments can't.
A successful remote working environment requires a particular non-average grade of manager and employee.
My point is that you cannot really argue for or against remote work without taking into account that your employees might not all be suitable for that work style. (But if you're building a new organisation then you can pick the right people from the start)
However, I haven't found a good way to assess whether potential hires are good at this. Everyone claims to be an independent self-starter who is great at remote work whilst in the hiring process...
[0]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/29/making-remote-work-beh...
My quality-of-life improvements have been very similar to yours. I cannot believe how much happier I am now, on a daily basis.
I have written some of the best code of my life while sitting on a picnic table in a park. I see my friends more. I see my family more. I have more energy to put into my work, which results in better work satisfaction.
I pinch myself every day.
Disadvantages -> Timezones
Timezones make scheduling team meetings hard, and if your organization ever becomes big enough to warrant a physical office people far away will start working late hours to keep up with the main office.
YMMV, but it's 3 AM here in Berlin and until 10 minutes ago I was still actively working.
You need the synchronous communication to have non-work conversations, and you need those non-work conversations to develop and maintain the relationships required (trust, rapport, etc.) for remote work.
> if your organization ever becomes big enough to warrant a physical office
...then you probably don't have enough buy-in to be a fully remote company and that is far harder to work around than timezones.
Sounds like an unhealthy implementation. I've worked 12 hours apart from a main office for 3 years and never worked past my local business hours.
See written & async first communication. Mailing lists work for things like linux kernel development.
I used to say that. Now I live in a rural area, and the fastest speed that's even available is 5Mbps (and the uptime isn't great). My house also has zero cell service from any provider.
It's also a bit presumptive that everyone can afford a 100Mbps connection. The last place I lived, it was like $120/month for 100Mbps. Not everybody can afford that.
That being said, has anyone out there come up with creative solutions for working remotely on a crappy connection?
That describes a lot of places in the developed world. My little farming town in rural France, as well as the medium sized City in England where I lived previously.
I bet Amazon jungle doesn't have gbit internet either. The question is whether OP chose a location without internet knowingly or he was cut off and left stranded.
Only place where I reliably saw 100mbps down was in SFO on tmobile LTE by one very specific window. Go figure...
EDIT: consumer grade connections - if you have a business, gigabit is easy to get in the office.
Unfortunately, what this means for candidates is they may have to compete with a LOT more people.
Another challenge you're likely facing is that a lot of companies are only willing to hire senior developers to work remotely because hesitant upper management thinks they will be more trustworthy (completely ignoring the level of trust inherent in having someone write code for them when they themselves can't even verify it).
That negativity aside, here's some advice: As much as there is some backlash around the idea of a GitHub profile being mandatory, one VERY practical use of an open source portfolio of some kind is that almost all open source project work is done remotely using the very same skills required for successful remote employment. This applies even more so to non-programming contributions, in my opinion, which means you don't even need to contribute code to demonstrate these skills.
Great manifesto.
Seems like there's a lot of talent being left on the floor by only looking for senior developers. There's a lot of goodwill that can be earned by trusting in potential and helping candidates grow into a position. Even an experienced developer in one set of languages and frameworks is junior to others -- and they can't get the foot in the door anywhere remotely.
The "years of experience" drought is real, but I feel like it's an eternal desert for remote work.
People must learn that anyone can be remote, the thing is that everyone must agree to communicate better instead of more.
Why not? Going from on-site to remote is strictly easier, as the only thing it needs is to stop leaving home every morning.
I don't get this "the more senior you are, the more averse to change you are" - the only thing I've seen is older people having higher expectations and less tolerance for abuse and working for pie-in-the-sky promises of future wealth. But maybe my bias is showing, I'm nearing 30, so pretty old by software industry standards.
> People don't have to say when they are working.
That just seems a bit at odds with the rest of the post and I don't really agree with it.
Sometimes there are questions that only one person (let's say Nick) can answer or situations where Nick is more valuable than other employees. Let's say I've got a moderately time sensitive issue and I'm pretty sure Kevin knows the answer as he's an expert in the subject, alternatively, I could pull aside Bob, Joe, and Linda and we could probably figure it out after a little while.
Knowing when Nick will be back online plays a big factor in what I chose to do next. If Nick is offline for lunch and will be back in an hour, I'll wait for Nick. If Nick started work early and is now offline for a long weekend, well then I need to pull Bob, Joe, and Linda away from their work to help me.
Having at least a general idea of when people will be available seems like it'd be even more important in a situation where I can't ask the people around me, "Has anyone seen Nick today?"
I still generally agree that knowing when folks are online can be helpful and don’t see a big issue with that as long as you don’t have a culture that starts measuring people by how many hours they put in. Rather than an upfront “I will be working today from X to Y” something passive like a Slack recent activity indicator could be enough.
I worked at my last job for just over 2 1/2 years and, while we had an actual office, for the first two years I was there, we also had a true "unlimited vacation/remote work" policy. It wasn't unheard of that some people would take 4-6 week vacations and others would work remote for multiple months.
Documentation was great, but you can't document everything you know, so there will always be gaps. I'm a developer, so these will be dev focused, but some scenarios I can remember where one specific person was needed are:
- Legacy code. Bob was the only one around when this code was written and it hasn't been touched in years, now it's breaking and no one understands why. (In an ideal world, there wouldn't be knowledge silos like this, but there always are)
- Specialties. Most developers know this tool, but Bob is an expert. We need to do something that requires an expert. We need Bob.
- Bob left an ominous, yet vague comment on my PR. I don't want to merge until I get clarification. (something like "This looks hacky. I guess it works, but we should probably change this ASAP." or "Eww")
Not sure how well/different that works in a remote-first company, but at previous workplaces I was, we tried to have one day a week dedicated to refactoring, which might reduce that problem.
Not sure if valid, if some legacy code was written a few years before, probably even author will have no clue what's wrong.
Old code does not necessarily mean legacy code.