Right, but development this is correct; if you're remote and require sync, you're not actually getting things done. Meetings are not the desired outcome; deployed, working code is. Communication is necessary, but not the output, and so to be effective you have to find ways to make that communication asynchronous wherever possible. It's fine to still have the -output- be synchronous (i.e., pairing), but don't confuse the default synchronous tasks (meetings) without output.
Anyway, all of that is a red herring; don't just tell me you're remote, tell me if you're prioritizing asynchronous work or not. The places trying to recreate the office, just now remote, are not places I want to work at.
Yeah, I have too. Oftentimes for business stakeholders and leadership, that is the case, as it helps justify their existence ("I was so busy!"). Which presents, unfortunately, opportunities for useless devs to glom on; sit in meetings, do no work, collect a paycheck.
> Meetings are not the desired outcome; deployed, working code is
Maybe if all you want to do is code. I get the sentiment. If you're working on a product, getting input from team members and stopping bad ideas from making their way to the hands of the "don't bother me with meetings, I only want to code" person is important.
You seem to have completely ignored my "Communication is necessary, but not the output". Put another way, meetings are the 'how', not the 'what'. The how is not a deliverable, and so can be changed so long as the 'what' stays the same. You can get input, collaborate, etc, in other ways that are not synchronous.
We've all had that "this meeting could have been an email" experience. Make it an email. Start re-evaluating every meeting; any sort of unidirectional informational meeting can be offloaded onto a doc or recorded presentation just as efficiently. Bidirectional decisional meetings can often be done more effectively by writing up a problem statement, the various options, and a 'due' date for input. Allow people to read over it, comment, propose new suggestions, etc, then at that due date, hold a vote (can be done sync or async). Voila, a decision is reached that allowed for greater amounts of discussion, and was arrived at as democratically or 'loudest voice in the room' (if only a select few people's votes count) as you care to have it, rather than whatever organically happens in your meetings. Etc. In my experience what I'm left with are the meetings where it's the 'personal connection' that matters; these are things like the occasional AMA/Town Hall style meetings, and 1-on-1s. 90% of my pre-COVID meetings turned out not to need to be meetings.
I didn't ignore anything. The product is the output. Code is not the output. Your code is as much the output as communication is. Users don't care if you spent your time coding or in a meeting. They care if the product fulfills their needs. A meeting that stops a terrible redesign contributes as much the output as the heads down programmer who would have implemented it. Now I would hate to be in meetings all day, don't get me wrong. But I disagree that code is the output specifically for a product.
It's the difference between using mostly meetings (real or virtual), IM and phone calls versus using mostly email. If you use mostly email for your comms it is perfectly possible to be both remote and async.
Most large companies are some combination of async and sync. If you have offices in the US and offices in Europe--much less Asia--you may have some hopefully not too inconvenient real-time calls. But you'll probably do a lot of things asynchronously. (And even within an office or within a country, a lot of people travel, have customer meetings, etc. so they're often just not immediately available.
Or software engineers. I've been working remotely for about 12 years with teams spread around the globe. In the decade or so before that I worked in various offices with coworkers scattered around the globe.
Async issues related to timezones or personal preferences are in no way unique to remote working.
Remote working is about location, not about time.
Over this past couple of decades, the only times that I have felt the need to announce my absence from the keyboard are when it is something out of the ordinary and unexpected. I never announce to the world that I am eating lunch, nor do I feel obligated to respond to IMs or other interruptions during any time that shows busy or out-of-office on my calendar.
Just like when I was in the office, if I need to step away from an active conversation for a few minutes for whatever reason, I'll let people know I need to step away and the estimated time of my return.
"They are office-less companies but they are not remote-friendly."
It's going to be a long, long time before most companies are remote-friendly. That is a skill that will run short of demand for a long time to come. I spoke with 30 entrepreneurs and tried to survey the current scene, what work can be done from home, and what work managers prefer to have done at the office. For anyone interested:
Pieter levels (remoteok.io) has been writing about this for a while. He calls it "async work" https://levels.io/async/
While I'm a fan of the idea. I'm not sure everything can be accomplished asynchronously. Or maybe it just requires more planning up front to make sure peoples do not have a lot of inter-dependencies.
I like the specific term of async work. Haven't seen companies use it in the wild yet.
I definitely agree that not everything can be done async, but the reality is that most companies don't even try. They just default to sync workflows without the office.
It takes some effort for sure, but I think the benefits are enormous.
Just getting rid of inconsiderate pings would be a start. Valuing your time over others is a shockingly common cultural failing. I've come to expect it from managers that don't know how important uninterrupted focus time is to developers, but increasingly developers have been doing it too. Without checking documentation. Without the willingness to wait in the channel for the product they need support for. No, they're blocked NOW and they need a response NOW. Better pull the entire team out of their work.
Huge downside of working in platform teams, and sadly not the only reason you develop an adversarial relationship with "feature teams".
I want a company where pings are reserved for fires, and everything else is handled either at fixed syncronization points (e.g. a batch of code reviews) or whenever someone is out of the zone anyhow.
I’ve worked in mostly remote companies with heavy use of emails and chat on and off for many years, and this has never been a concern for me. I can’t even remember thinking about it once. It seems quite petty.
Frankly the much bigger problem is global time zones and limited overlap restricting the time available for synchronous discussions.
Here's why it's annoying: You're now taking my attention while I have to wait for you to actually type your question. If you just sent me your question, I can read it, answer it, and get back to what I was doing. But by saying hi first, now I can't go back to what I was doing because I know your question is coming in a minute or so, which isn't enough time to do anything else, but you've already broken my concentration because I had to check your initial message.
There are many layers to this if you think about it. They may try to save effort by only typing the question in case you are there. But also, it's a way to avoid you not answering. I mean, they may (perhaps subconsciously) fear that you will read the question and decide to procrastinate on answering it because it looks too hard somehow. Instead, if they get you on the hook in synchronous communication, it will be harder for you to "snooze" on the question. I mean you can explicitly tell them you'll take a look later but you can't pretend that you haven't read it yet. Or some may use it as an excuse to pause working.
That plus a lot of other mind games. In a way it's a power game, whose time is more valued, who gets to demand attention right now etc., who has more flexibility and convenience...
Also, sometimes when people are confused, they sort of emotionally panic and just need someone beside them, to hold their hand and comfort them virtually. Then if you don't respond, they somehow do manage to solve their problem on their own anyway. But it felt simpler to just interrupt your work and ask you instead of thinking or searching in the internal docs etc.
I think for the example given on the page, given it seems to be a quick question, it's easy for it to seem a bit petty (and I might agree). The hard part for me is by responding, I have no idea if I'm walking into a 2hr debugging session or a 30s question.
I agree 100% with the sentiment of nohello.com. I used to have it has my status message. I've also gone long periods where I just won't respond when someone hello or hi's me. I've since realized that I was just being difficult and now I just type hey back and it makes life a lot easier.
They are just lazy to type their question, in case you don't happen to be there right now. So if you don't respond quickly, then they save the work of having to formulate the question.
Typical scenario though is that then they move on ask somewhere else. So they have to type it out anyway. If you don't reply, they can copy-and-paste the question to somebody else.
The strategy I've adopted is to first be polite by writing "hey" back [0] and then helping them with whatever they were asking. But THEN I end the conversation with a link to nohello.com to politely ask them to just directly ask next time. That's not being difficult but has the potential to improve things over time.
[0] If I'm in a bad mood I reflect the exact sentence back, meeting "hi" with "hi" and "Hey how are you?" with "Hey how are you?", but still, it's a reply..
I think a remote office is one where folks are remote. An asynchronous work place is one where work is done (IMO) efficiently. They aren’t the same - you can do asynchronous work in offices, some of the most effective global companies did this for decades already and when they went remote it was a smooth transition because, yes, remote works best when done asynchronously. But so does in office work.
I disagree with the premise. Remote workplace and asynchronous workplace are two different things. Perhaps they’re on a scale.
Remote work is not having to spend two hours every day commuting. Remote companies hire more broadly because they’re not limited to a single very specific geographic zone (while they may just limit themselves to time zones instead, regardless of the city/state/country).
To say this is not "remote" is a strange moving of the goal posts. It sounds like this person might work at a dysfunctional company, or they might actually be looking for an asynchronous company/team.
Edit: the great irony/timing of this is I’m currently mid flight meeting all my colleagues for the first time…
They don't even need to be on the same axis (although probably not really orthogonal in practice).
Async on-site work is entirely possible -- if you're working in a high-security place, or where the physical infrastructure is the point, or where you're building some physical object, it might make sense that work can only be done on site, but scheduling might be entirely up to you. Similarly remote but synchronous is easy to understand (calls, etc.). Another dimension is probably consistent vs. variable on both of those dimensions over time -- my ideal job is sync remote, sync in person, async in-person, and async remote at different times.
A remote first company almost has to encourage asynchronous workplace. Because expecting to have synchronous communication is just not very efficient. If everyone is in the office, you can observe if a person is busy, turn your chair and ask "do you have a sec", knock on their door, or walk into their cubical and interrupt their workflow.
But when everyone's working from home, you have less visibility on other people's availability. When you send a message to a person on slack, that person is likely doing something else, they may be working on something different, eating a meal, or even sleeping in another timezone. As a result, you should not expect people to always be ready to have a synchronous conversation with you.
To keep communication efficient in a remote workplace, you have to consider all these facts. People says "how are you" on slack to me everyday, not because they really care about how I am doing, nor do they love wasting time waiting for my response to that, but .simply because mentally, when they type messages in slack, their brain is still thinking about mimicking a face-to-face synchronous conversation. They only realize this is a problem after they are exposed on the recipient side frequently enough.
>Remote work is not having to spend two hours every day commuting
Choosing a home and workplace that are reasonable in relation to each other is not having to spend two hours every day commuting. Voting for local politicans who will do reasonable housing and transportation planning and instead of suburban sprawl, is not having to spend two hours every day commuting.
Things change: you can plan and build the perfect city for today needs, it can be built and be that perfect for a bit of time, but can't evolve so sooner or later the disaster happen.
USA/CA suburbs does not work because they are residential-only and you generally need to commute, Rivieras does work far better IF they are not that dense, but in general there is nothing that keep working without changes eternally and as density grow changes became harder and harder. So it does not matter if you feel an USA failed sub-urb or an EU failed dense city or a too dense Riviera: they equally might work for a certain timeframe, than an "innocent & small" evolution at a time and things became ugly, perhaps in different ways, but with equal outcome.
No politicians can solve that, people's can't solve that because they can't always reach agreements.
That's for instance one of the reasons why we start saying since a decade at least that the "really sustainable transportation of the future" can only be by air and where possible by open water: you can change routes depending on needs, while you can't change much rails and roads, at least not with sustainable costs. That's why very few say that urbs aren't sustainable because they are effective for a certain timeframe than needs changes and they can't adapt etc.
Efficiency, resilience and sustainability are not much different than the CAP theorem, you can't have all, you have to choose just two. Seeing Darwin works personally I prefer the last two at the expense of the first one.
Do most people really want this world where you rarely interact directly with another human? Every time I try it for a few days, I start feeling depressed.
I agree with you. Remote optimizes for one set of things, using a model that works great in a low-trust environment like open source. And you can probably get pretty good results with it. And I find Zoom calls far more fatiguing than in-person meetings.
I like this world where I'm not drained by daily commute and strict hours so I can enjoy my relatives on the evening instead of feeling tired and avoiding going out during the week.
Where this "you want an async work environment? You must not want communication at all!" narrative is coming from is beyond me. There is more beyond the office to communicate with.
Yeah that's true, I think the async world is probably one that works for many.
For me, "working to live" doesn't resonate. I miss is the camaraderie and feeling of going to battle with people I like. For me, building something, and competing to win is what gives me the most meaning in life. I love my family, but there's something in me that wants to give more to the world. It's not for everyone and of course it's not the only way to live. But that's what feels right for me, and I miss it.
> where you rarely interact directly with another human
I hardly call that async / remote work at all! Quite the contrary, remote work and async work define themselves by how interaction with other people happen.
Most importantly: The issues TFA discuss also are important for face-to-face work. A manager who constantly interrupts, and wastes time by allowing too many meetings, is ineffective. It doesn't matter if the interruptions are a tap on the shoulder or an IM; and it doesn't matter if the meeting is face-to-face or via Zoom.
In order for remote / async to work, there needs to be a clear recognition that effective office work requires time management. The time management skills that keep meetings effective and provide for uninterrupted concentration are the same, both for face-to-face and virtual workplaces.
Why don’t we create an even more extreme take: remote work is only truly remote if you communicate through git commit messages. The only thing that matters is the result of your work and anything higher level is simply corporate fluff.
I'm not convinced we've seen what "should" be with the pandemic. We've done a thing for a few years, that's not a lot of time.
I think it takes a lot longer to see what works about a thing, what doesn't, for each company, even individuals, and in the long run how they play out on an individual basis.
I guess we can come up with all sorts of very strict rules about what is "remote" ... but that will just mean everyone has to declare they're some sort of hybrid and I'm not sure we've gotten anywhere / know anything about it... kinda back to square one as far as the author is concerned.
Not only that, we were forced to do it for the past two years. Does this "thing" truly have any merit? We don't know because companies did not have an alternative. We have nothing to compare it to.
I think that as the author matures, they’ll come to the realisation that software engineering is 20% coding and 80% working out who needs to code what where when. And that is much easier with synchronous communication.
If ICs spend only 20% of their time in coding then there must be in an unproductive team and company.
Product owners and managers could easily move tickets and fill excels and notion pages asynchronously.
I really don’t see any important reason for synchronous work other than something has caught fire live.
so back when i used to spend an hour or more reading and responding to email every morning i was closer to this definition of "remote" even though i was sitting in an office.
> If what I wrote so far resonated with you, and especially if you can influence this, please stop this farce and start truly supporting remote work.
It's not a farce, it's something else and you don't have to like it. Pick a good term and try to get it to stick, and then look for companies that don't use that term.
I have to disagree with this because that's not what I've seen in the wild.
If everyone made a clear distinction between remote and async, I'd agree with you 100%. But the term "remote" is in my view intentionally conflated with async most of the time.
Companies will advertise themselves as remote, remote friendly, remote first, etc and then have a culture of completely synchronous work. That's why I called it a farce.
I don't think you should have an opinion that people are misrepresenting something maliciously without being able to back it up.
Your interpretation of the term "remote-friendly" is not the common interpretation. They don't need to change how they work. You don't have to work at those places. If you're confusing about what the terms mean _in practice_, talk to people who work at different places and look at job postings and try to infer from usage what the terms mean.
A Google search for "what is a remote friendly job" can also be helpful.
I strongly disagree with the jump from "I'm confused about what a term means" to "People should change what they do to match what I understand they say they do". I don't think you did that intentionally, as it's a common mistake when people are surprised by a term's meaning, but it's still a wrong reaction.
>Your interpretation of the term "remote-friendly" is not the common interpretation.
Maybe on a general level that's not the common interpretation, but in software that's a different story.
You don't expect to join a remote-friendly company for software development and then have to work in a strict time regiment with meetings as one of the default means of communication, for example. Async is implied - at varying degrees - when you apply for a remote-friendly company.
> You don't have to work at those places.
You'll have a hard time finding a job opening where they say "we actually work as a typical office, just remotely". You can probably get that answered when interviewing, but that's not a guarantee by any means.
I've joined multiple companies that were "remote-friendly" and boasted all the flexibility of async work, only to find out it's not quite real.
Could I be unlucky and everyone else has a different experience? Sure. Is it likely though?
I had been working 50-75% of the time remote since 2001, and full time remote since 2008 except for occasional travel for short onsite customer visits. Communication with project leaders and managers was usually just the right amount. The best was a short email or chat message asking to schedule a one-one voice call or voice group meeting with or without customers. I hardly even thought about how it could be different. Then in 2017, there was a shift of project handlers who would only call with direct questions or a request to join an in-progress group voice meeting. It was very disrupting to my flow, and was such a quick change, that I could not even politely describe to leadership the problem. I burnt-out quickly and quit.
Remote, distributed, asynchronous - they're not all synonymous. Remote is simply that, far apart, so I think it's fair to say that if a company primarily employs people who work from wherever they may be, then I'm fine with them wearing the "remote" badge. There is absolutely nothing in the word "remote" that implies synchronicity or otherwise, everything else is just a matter of opinion, or taste, or what's practical and works.
I begrudgingly agree with many of the comments here saying remote/not and a/sync are orthogonal, and that most software work requires a lot of synchronicity.
If someone really wants to work in software as asynchronously as possible, where could they find such work? What sorts of companies, industries, roles are most amenable to primarily asynchronous work?
> Remote is about getting things done asynchronously. Is it perfect for every type of work? Of course not. But should we default to copying the inefficient processes of physical offices because you’re used to “talking it out”? No!
This is _exactly_ how I feel, where, and I've tried and failed before to express this to colleagues pre-pandemic, when I was already part time remote. Instead of demanding people be at a desk where you can walk over and interrupt them to 'throw some ideas around', make the effort to write your idea down and share it asynchronously, and others can thoughtfully reply and collaborate.
Comes down to people's brains working differently than you and I expect, where thinking only gets done if their mouth is moving and sound is coming out. These are the people that the in person offices and meetings and shoulder taps are built for, at the expense of those who can manage a coherent thought in silence, and are able to outline a problem or a question using the written word.
One is not better or worse necessarily, but being more independent in preparing communication of ideas should be something that all can work towards. It's just more flexible and "async" and adapts well to "remote".
A rough analogy might be packet switching - if you have to be in the same room with someone and only share data in real time, as opposed to being able to prepare data ahead of time and transmit it over the wire... Which of these is more robust and adaptable to changing network conditions?
After the first year of the pandemic I deleted all work apps off my phone — just remove the ability for Slack/Teams, GCal, Lattice, Figma, etc. to constantly badger you.
People will call if it’s actually urgent. But gotta protect/prioritize yourself in this new faux-remote reality.
I've waffled on this a bit. I joined a new company about a year ago, and swore to myself I'd keep work email, slack, etc. off my phone. I eventually caved because my boss expected a certain amount of "presence", and being able to check in and respond from my phone meant I could enjoy my coffee in the morning, run errands, take a walk, or do whatever else without being chained to my laptop.
A better middle-ground might be to have a separate phone, so it's only with me if it has to be. Starting a new job with this setup soon, we'll see how it goes.
I think it's a matter of trust and boundaries with work. I love having work email and IM on my phone; but everyone I work with respects work/life boundaries.
It's especially useful at the moment, because I'm in a small company and we do devops.
If I start getting a barrage of work-related IMs after-hours, first I'll point out to the offender that I expect them to respect boundaries. Then I'll try to configure quiet hours. Finally I'll remove the apps.
As a remote-only employee for more than a decade now, I can say that I don't have a problem with "core hours," like 10am - 2pm for your time zone.
I understand that sometimes we need to get together internally and with clients. What I cannot stand is the premise of this article: locking me into a cage that I pay for where I have to be available at a moment's notice.
I've quit two jobs that made me do that. I'm sure they learned their lesson . . . ;)
I like core hours in theory, especially if the window is that small (in practice I've seen it more like 10-4).
What should the window be when the team is split across timezones like PST & EST, with a 3 hour difference? Either someone is online very early, or very late.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadNot necessarily. Consider a call center or help desk, or any form of customer service done remotely. Asynchronous and remote are different.
Anyway, all of that is a red herring; don't just tell me you're remote, tell me if you're prioritizing asynchronous work or not. The places trying to recreate the office, just now remote, are not places I want to work at.
Maybe if all you want to do is code. I get the sentiment. If you're working on a product, getting input from team members and stopping bad ideas from making their way to the hands of the "don't bother me with meetings, I only want to code" person is important.
We've all had that "this meeting could have been an email" experience. Make it an email. Start re-evaluating every meeting; any sort of unidirectional informational meeting can be offloaded onto a doc or recorded presentation just as efficiently. Bidirectional decisional meetings can often be done more effectively by writing up a problem statement, the various options, and a 'due' date for input. Allow people to read over it, comment, propose new suggestions, etc, then at that due date, hold a vote (can be done sync or async). Voila, a decision is reached that allowed for greater amounts of discussion, and was arrived at as democratically or 'loudest voice in the room' (if only a select few people's votes count) as you care to have it, rather than whatever organically happens in your meetings. Etc. In my experience what I'm left with are the meetings where it's the 'personal connection' that matters; these are things like the occasional AMA/Town Hall style meetings, and 1-on-1s. 90% of my pre-COVID meetings turned out not to need to be meetings.
I've never heard companies say they're async though, only remote. The two seem to be conflated most of the time.
Async issues related to timezones or personal preferences are in no way unique to remote working.
Remote working is about location, not about time.
Over this past couple of decades, the only times that I have felt the need to announce my absence from the keyboard are when it is something out of the ordinary and unexpected. I never announce to the world that I am eating lunch, nor do I feel obligated to respond to IMs or other interruptions during any time that shows busy or out-of-office on my calendar.
Just like when I was in the office, if I need to step away from an active conversation for a few minutes for whatever reason, I'll let people know I need to step away and the estimated time of my return.
It's going to be a long, long time before most companies are remote-friendly. That is a skill that will run short of demand for a long time to come. I spoke with 30 entrepreneurs and tried to survey the current scene, what work can be done from home, and what work managers prefer to have done at the office. For anyone interested:
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-work-can-be-done-f...
While I'm a fan of the idea. I'm not sure everything can be accomplished asynchronously. Or maybe it just requires more planning up front to make sure peoples do not have a lot of inter-dependencies.
I definitely agree that not everything can be done async, but the reality is that most companies don't even try. They just default to sync workflows without the office.
It takes some effort for sure, but I think the benefits are enormous.
Huge downside of working in platform teams, and sadly not the only reason you develop an adversarial relationship with "feature teams".
I want a company where pings are reserved for fires, and everything else is handled either at fixed syncronization points (e.g. a batch of code reviews) or whenever someone is out of the zone anyhow.
https://www.nohello.com
Though there's also https://nohello.club
Frankly the much bigger problem is global time zones and limited overlap restricting the time available for synchronous discussions.
That plus a lot of other mind games. In a way it's a power game, whose time is more valued, who gets to demand attention right now etc., who has more flexibility and convenience...
Also, sometimes when people are confused, they sort of emotionally panic and just need someone beside them, to hold their hand and comfort them virtually. Then if you don't respond, they somehow do manage to solve their problem on their own anyway. But it felt simpler to just interrupt your work and ask you instead of thinking or searching in the internal docs etc.
[0] If I'm in a bad mood I reflect the exact sentence back, meeting "hi" with "hi" and "Hey how are you?" with "Hey how are you?", but still, it's a reply..
> Incentivize written communication and by all means use synchronous meetings when necessary, but don’t default to it.
Remote work is not having to spend two hours every day commuting. Remote companies hire more broadly because they’re not limited to a single very specific geographic zone (while they may just limit themselves to time zones instead, regardless of the city/state/country).
To say this is not "remote" is a strange moving of the goal posts. It sounds like this person might work at a dysfunctional company, or they might actually be looking for an asynchronous company/team.
Edit: the great irony/timing of this is I’m currently mid flight meeting all my colleagues for the first time…
Async on-site work is entirely possible -- if you're working in a high-security place, or where the physical infrastructure is the point, or where you're building some physical object, it might make sense that work can only be done on site, but scheduling might be entirely up to you. Similarly remote but synchronous is easy to understand (calls, etc.). Another dimension is probably consistent vs. variable on both of those dimensions over time -- my ideal job is sync remote, sync in person, async in-person, and async remote at different times.
I'd love to be able to search for jobs with the keyword "async" instead!
But when everyone's working from home, you have less visibility on other people's availability. When you send a message to a person on slack, that person is likely doing something else, they may be working on something different, eating a meal, or even sleeping in another timezone. As a result, you should not expect people to always be ready to have a synchronous conversation with you.
To keep communication efficient in a remote workplace, you have to consider all these facts. People says "how are you" on slack to me everyday, not because they really care about how I am doing, nor do they love wasting time waiting for my response to that, but .simply because mentally, when they type messages in slack, their brain is still thinking about mimicking a face-to-face synchronous conversation. They only realize this is a problem after they are exposed on the recipient side frequently enough.
Choosing a home and workplace that are reasonable in relation to each other is not having to spend two hours every day commuting. Voting for local politicans who will do reasonable housing and transportation planning and instead of suburban sprawl, is not having to spend two hours every day commuting.
USA/CA suburbs does not work because they are residential-only and you generally need to commute, Rivieras does work far better IF they are not that dense, but in general there is nothing that keep working without changes eternally and as density grow changes became harder and harder. So it does not matter if you feel an USA failed sub-urb or an EU failed dense city or a too dense Riviera: they equally might work for a certain timeframe, than an "innocent & small" evolution at a time and things became ugly, perhaps in different ways, but with equal outcome.
No politicians can solve that, people's can't solve that because they can't always reach agreements.
That's for instance one of the reasons why we start saying since a decade at least that the "really sustainable transportation of the future" can only be by air and where possible by open water: you can change routes depending on needs, while you can't change much rails and roads, at least not with sustainable costs. That's why very few say that urbs aren't sustainable because they are effective for a certain timeframe than needs changes and they can't adapt etc.
Efficiency, resilience and sustainability are not much different than the CAP theorem, you can't have all, you have to choose just two. Seeing Darwin works personally I prefer the last two at the expense of the first one.
For me, "working to live" doesn't resonate. I miss is the camaraderie and feeling of going to battle with people I like. For me, building something, and competing to win is what gives me the most meaning in life. I love my family, but there's something in me that wants to give more to the world. It's not for everyone and of course it's not the only way to live. But that's what feels right for me, and I miss it.
I hardly call that async / remote work at all! Quite the contrary, remote work and async work define themselves by how interaction with other people happen.
Most importantly: The issues TFA discuss also are important for face-to-face work. A manager who constantly interrupts, and wastes time by allowing too many meetings, is ineffective. It doesn't matter if the interruptions are a tap on the shoulder or an IM; and it doesn't matter if the meeting is face-to-face or via Zoom.
In order for remote / async to work, there needs to be a clear recognition that effective office work requires time management. The time management skills that keep meetings effective and provide for uninterrupted concentration are the same, both for face-to-face and virtual workplaces.
- Has or doesn't have physical office;
- Has or doesn't have culture of getting things done with less back-and-forth.
If you look at it like this then you have 4 different combinations -- that translate to 4 different types of companies.
I think it takes a lot longer to see what works about a thing, what doesn't, for each company, even individuals, and in the long run how they play out on an individual basis.
I guess we can come up with all sorts of very strict rules about what is "remote" ... but that will just mean everyone has to declare they're some sort of hybrid and I'm not sure we've gotten anywhere / know anything about it... kinda back to square one as far as the author is concerned.
I imagine the scales start turning the other way as companies grow, which is exactly why big companies move slowly.
What you're describing is work that is riddled with red-tape. Some of it might be necessary, but 80% is a bit too high.
It's not a farce, it's something else and you don't have to like it. Pick a good term and try to get it to stick, and then look for companies that don't use that term.
If everyone made a clear distinction between remote and async, I'd agree with you 100%. But the term "remote" is in my view intentionally conflated with async most of the time.
Companies will advertise themselves as remote, remote friendly, remote first, etc and then have a culture of completely synchronous work. That's why I called it a farce.
I don't think you should have an opinion that people are misrepresenting something maliciously without being able to back it up.
Your interpretation of the term "remote-friendly" is not the common interpretation. They don't need to change how they work. You don't have to work at those places. If you're confusing about what the terms mean _in practice_, talk to people who work at different places and look at job postings and try to infer from usage what the terms mean.
A Google search for "what is a remote friendly job" can also be helpful.
I strongly disagree with the jump from "I'm confused about what a term means" to "People should change what they do to match what I understand they say they do". I don't think you did that intentionally, as it's a common mistake when people are surprised by a term's meaning, but it's still a wrong reaction.
Maybe on a general level that's not the common interpretation, but in software that's a different story.
You don't expect to join a remote-friendly company for software development and then have to work in a strict time regiment with meetings as one of the default means of communication, for example. Async is implied - at varying degrees - when you apply for a remote-friendly company.
> You don't have to work at those places.
You'll have a hard time finding a job opening where they say "we actually work as a typical office, just remotely". You can probably get that answered when interviewing, but that's not a guarantee by any means.
I've joined multiple companies that were "remote-friendly" and boasted all the flexibility of async work, only to find out it's not quite real.
Could I be unlucky and everyone else has a different experience? Sure. Is it likely though?
I simply stopped responding to "Hello" Slacks. Eventually they'll either type in what they need or give up and go bother someone else.
If someone really wants to work in software as asynchronously as possible, where could they find such work? What sorts of companies, industries, roles are most amenable to primarily asynchronous work?
This is _exactly_ how I feel, where, and I've tried and failed before to express this to colleagues pre-pandemic, when I was already part time remote. Instead of demanding people be at a desk where you can walk over and interrupt them to 'throw some ideas around', make the effort to write your idea down and share it asynchronously, and others can thoughtfully reply and collaborate.
Comes down to people's brains working differently than you and I expect, where thinking only gets done if their mouth is moving and sound is coming out. These are the people that the in person offices and meetings and shoulder taps are built for, at the expense of those who can manage a coherent thought in silence, and are able to outline a problem or a question using the written word.
One is not better or worse necessarily, but being more independent in preparing communication of ideas should be something that all can work towards. It's just more flexible and "async" and adapts well to "remote".
A rough analogy might be packet switching - if you have to be in the same room with someone and only share data in real time, as opposed to being able to prepare data ahead of time and transmit it over the wire... Which of these is more robust and adaptable to changing network conditions?
People will call if it’s actually urgent. But gotta protect/prioritize yourself in this new faux-remote reality.
A better middle-ground might be to have a separate phone, so it's only with me if it has to be. Starting a new job with this setup soon, we'll see how it goes.
It's especially useful at the moment, because I'm in a small company and we do devops.
If I start getting a barrage of work-related IMs after-hours, first I'll point out to the offender that I expect them to respect boundaries. Then I'll try to configure quiet hours. Finally I'll remove the apps.
I understand that sometimes we need to get together internally and with clients. What I cannot stand is the premise of this article: locking me into a cage that I pay for where I have to be available at a moment's notice.
I've quit two jobs that made me do that. I'm sure they learned their lesson . . . ;)
What should the window be when the team is split across timezones like PST & EST, with a 3 hour difference? Either someone is online very early, or very late.
The more synchronous work they required, the worse the work environment was.