I agree entirely -- I've been telecommuting for ten years now, and this is easily the #1 reason the recruitment process fails with me (with small companies as well as large).
Nope, I mean recruiters contact me about positions but then find out that I cannot relocate and that ends the discussion because the company they are recruiting for disallows telecommuting for one reason or another.
we love the fact that we can recruit folks from anywhere in the world and not disrupt their lives, since we are completely remote. it opens up a much wider talent pool and allows you to benefit from local economies as well, without actually being there.
Companies seem to forget (or not put much emphasis on) another aspect of having telecommuters: you don't get tunnel vision due to locality. I've worked for offices around the globe, and one thing that's always struck me about remote vs local is that remote can bring in a new way of thinking that you don't always get locally due to local cultural thought processes.
I think it really depends on what you are doing and how your company culture has adapted to that.
For example, my company's work in the biomedical space often necessitates us being in partner and customer labs to best understand workflows. While it's possible for us to have some elements of our development be remote, we strongly prefer keeping things local; we believe it's important for everyone on the team to have exposure to the domain we work in. This is a cultural choice we've made, but it does make remote work tricky.
It's all about trust. Can the employer trust the employee to work honestly and be dedicated to the company without having another job or occasional project on the side. When startup is small, every minute of focus counts.
Easiest way to make this work is to give developers enough equity, so they are motivated for startup to succeed more or equally as getting the paycheck. Eric's POV stands, but he's a co-founder, he has a significant stake in the success of the company.
Your point is taken, but it seems to me that if my employer can't trust me to work remotely, then they shouldn't hire me at all. How can you employ (or work for) someone you can't trust?
I'm speaking from my own bad experience with some remote employees. Accidentally learning from another founder that this guy ALSO works for them, was a really bad experience with remote workers for both of us.
He was covering up his lack of productivity for some months with "personal problems" on both sides, while not being focused in either company. If you have many employees, such behavior can go unnoticed for a long time.
OTOH, after this event, I tried giving significant equity to some other guys on the team, and their productivity went up. I guess some of them had side projects as well before that.
Maybe one can work around this by requiring full-time Skype camera access during work hours, or similar, but I hate to be "the police". I feel much better giving away some equity in exchange for loyalty.
True but many engineers and game devs I know spend lots of time on personal projects while at the office. So side projects are really just what engineers do whether they are at the office or at home. Also if the engineer is getting the other deliverables, does it matter they have an occasional side project? If it starts to distract from work produced it is much easier to see remotely but probably matters less remotely.
well, for me, right now, not only do I demand that I work from home, I require the latitude to have side projects. I tried committing 100% of my time to a company, and it sucked, and my productivity fell below 50%. So if I work on your project, you'll get up to 75% of my work-time. Or 100% for short bursts.
I've been working remotely for 1 year and 3 months. The company I'm working for checks in once a week for about 20 minutes, other than that all communication is done through basecamp. I have to admit it's really hard for me and I just handed in my two weeks notice. I feel so isolated working from home and not being around other co-workers. I miss seing and interacting with other people. I'll be looking for a new job in New York next month and I'm really excited.
Why do you guys want to work from home? Isn't the isolation during the working hours hard on you?
> Why do you guys want to work from home? Isn't the isolation during the working hours hard on you?
I think the ideal thing would be an office about a block away from where I live. I am pretty happy being back in an office myself, but hate the commute.
In my case, the company I work for is based in California (I started out from there) but I now live in Connecticut. It's been over a year since I last saw them.
Some people feel the opposite in regards to isolation. Introverts gather energy from spending time alone, and are actually drained by interactions with other people.
In my case, getting paid $110k/year in a country that pays $40k/year as the cap (and the currency is 2:1). I'm at it for six months and I have a huge family around me -- helps with the isolation. I will jump on a plane friday and work 3 weeks from the beach, and once I feel this remote thing has stabilized I will move to the countryside to about half the cost of living, so in one year going from the local national market cap to almost 6 times that, working much less (more focus without the office interruptions and away from the 8 hours sitting=8 hours of work) will be attractive to some people like it is to me, I guess.
That is what appeals to me...the freedom to work from anywhere in the world, especially places with a lower cost of living. But even if I stayed local, it would be nice to just be free from a daily commute and regular hours. Most of the time I'm very productive at 5am-7am and 10pm-2am. My 3 month old daughter is most active between 9am and 5pm, so it would be nice to spend this part of the day with her. I'm still looking for a company that is open to remote work.
I've been doing remote work since college, and I travel all the time while working. That may be the best part of remote work. I even worked for a few weeks on a cruise ship. As long as there's an Internet connection, I can do my job.
As for the isolation thing, my family is usually at home, and I also go out a lot during the day.
I can imagine, if I were simply home alone for most of the day, that it'd get lonely and being able to go to the "office" to be around people would seem like a good trade.
I had a very similar experience. I know and respect people for whom remote work is a good fit. I'm glad they are able to take advantage of it, and support that option for them. But for me, after about a year of it, I was starting to have real emotional problems, which I've never really had before in my life. The isolation just took a tole on me. Perhaps I wasn't doing it right. Regardless, my new job, a twenty minute bike ride from my house, is, even two years in, still fantastic.
The isolation can definitely get to you. I've been working remotely for just over a year and a month now. I found it was becoming really difficult around the 6 month mark.
I was rarely leaving my apartment and working long hours because it was really difficult to "turn off", especially when I never really left the office. I fixed this by getting a dog, and honestly it was one of the best choices I've made. Working remotely, you're in a unique position to provide a great lifestyle for a pet. My dog gets a couple walks a day, and is rarely home alone.
Getting out of the house for one or two hours a day to get some sunshine and take a break is extremely healthy. Plus, there is a local dog park near by that is always filled with people.
Dog aside, it seems that you had much less conversation with other employees than I've got at my job. There is an unwritten rule to leave Skype on, just to hear about updates with the company. Just being able to easily reach out and send someone a message (not through email, basecamp, etc) is important to me.
Why do you guys want to work from home? Isn't the isolation during the working hours hard on you?
I work from home to help keep my family life a priority. That extra 2 hours not lost to a commute (and sometimes another hour for lunch) that is spent with my family has immeasurable value.
i think it depends on personal taste. i'm lucky - i love working from home and, since i live in s america, that lets me telecommute (which means better pay). but i have always been a "loner". i don't mean i'm a socipath(!), i can get on just fine with people (and enjoy their company), but am happiest by myself. i also find it hugely more productive (although you do have to worry more about compensating for low bandwidth communication - but that gets easier with practice, and easier still when you're working with the same people for a while).
although once a week for 20m sounds a bit low. we do also have a daily email (progress/plans) and i will typically chat or email with co-workers or clients (as necessary) most days.
i'm sorry it didn't work for you - hope you find a more communal job! :)
Isn't having to deal with coworkers and people and commuting and workings fixed times hard on you? You say isolation as if that's a bad thing, I say solitude because it's not.
I work remotely not by choice but rather because the people I wanted to start this company with don't live in Seattle, and I love Seattle. So remote it is - and for the last 7 years it's been worth it.
However the issolation is an issue - chat rooms, and Skype/Hangouts have always been a big part of how we hold the company together, and how we solve this issue. But for me coffee shops, are a big deal. I'm in one every day for an hour or 2, and that's where I get all my "water cooler talk" and random socalizing. Which on the whole works out quite well for me.
Because the location of my wife's job is completely non-negotiable (she's a surgical resident), whereas there are no actual impediments to me doing my job from anywhere with an internet connection.
As for the isolation during working hours, it makes me fantastically productive -- no junior coworkers sticking their head into my office to ask questions they could answer themselves if they thought about it for a couple minutes. If they can't figure it out after a couple minutes, they can email me or we chat and I'll help them sort it out. When it comes to feeling isolated, I start work early and take a long lunch break. I go over to the college and have lunch with faculty and grad students whose work I find interesting. I give a seminar talk every now and then. I don't really feel isolated at all.
Working from home is awesome if you're the type of person where lots of noise/movement disrupts your work (which is most programmers). It's very hard to continually be in focus in an office, while at home it's much easier to be in the flow. Not only is it more productive, but I've noticed over time that I've been able to flesh out ambitious ideas much more often and have personally grown because of it.
Think of all the office drama, personal conflicts from trivial things, etc. A lot of it is gone. There is still conflict, of course, but it's real conflict, not petty about desk space or something.
As other's say, you also waste no time on commuting.
You lose constant communication though, yes, so you have to balance this with tools. We use IRC and are constantly chatting, joking around, sending funny pictures, etc. so I don't feel isolated at all. We also meet up 3 or 4 times a year, and it's fun to travel.
It's not for everybody, but it's optimal for some.
I've been working remotely for more than a decade now, and other than the occasional day or two now and again, I don't think I've been completely alone that entire time. Either someone is in and out of my place, or I go to somewhere where others are. I imagine that helps a lot with any feelings of isolation.
> Why do you guys want to work from home? Isn't the isolation during the working hours hard on you?
That depends on the person.
As you grow up, you may prefer to stay close to the ones you love, rather than to the ones you work with. Or you work better alone, with less noise and distractions. Or you realize that wasting 2 hours or more a day commuting for warming up a chair and using an Internet connection doesn't cut it. Or you may just like isolation.
Whatever reason, it's up to the person, and there are quite valid ones. You're doing no harm in leaving if remote working is not for you. In fact, you're doing the right thing.
I've been talking to possible employers recently and I have a whole list of reasons not withstanding some family circumstances. Note that I'm talking about partial remote work, not full telecommute.
1. My commute is a drain, doing it five days a week drives me to be less motivated and productive
2. Working remotely has less distractions.
3. I know I work better when I'm not in the same place all the time, I have to mix it up or I end up staring at the wall.
4. A company that can't handle remote work has some major process issues, this is a red flag for me.
5. I have a kid, if I'm at the library or the coffee shop near home, I can come home to him at lunch. If you want to make me hate my job, ask me to spend all my time working in an office without seeing him.
6. If I can work remotely, I'm going to do more work. I'm going to keep working past 5 because I'm on a roll. If not, soon as five comes around, I'm gone.
An office is good, and having the option to come in is great. Forcing me to come in all five days a week says something bad about your culture and process. At least to me.
Some people have experience with folks 'working from home' that are not 100% positive. Some folks (like me) have experiences working remotely that are not 100% positive.
And yes, casual, face to face communication is an important dynamic, even for tech workers.
> And yes, casual, face to face communication is an important dynamic, even for tech workers.
I guess this is even more important for small companies of up to 20 people where there is no exact "you have to do exactly this and this and this and then you're clear"-thingie. I gained lots of insights regarding customers or how we should better build things in our tech dept. just by having daily casual water-cooler chit-chats with the couple of people we employ in the sales department. It's very, very difficult to emulate using modern technology.
100% agree. I'm in a similar position. I willnot move from where I live; I like the friends and hobbies I have here way too much. There is absolutely no reason in this day and age why the type of work we do has to be done onsite. The hundreds (probably more) companies working this way are a testament to this fact, and there would probably be even more companies doing it this way if it wasn't for inertia, tradition or just plain old CYA ("but if we do something different and fail, the shareholders will hold me accountable!"). To add insult to injury, I am easily measurably more productive when telecommuting, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
Conjure up any wishy-washy "reasons" or anecdotes why you have to be onsite, but I've yet to see any facts to back up the position that onsite all the time is better.
That is the best part of a remote team, your deliverables are the main way you are reviewed. Superficial things are less emphasized such as if you went to lunch with the right group, were in 8-6 on the dot or work on the right team, have the right office for visibility etc etc. So many levels of extra unneeded layers of fluff in an office when it should be on product development.
I do think it is good to work on site periodically and sometimes at least a day or two per week if you can, not because it is needed to produce good work and products, but because it helps kick off, complete + integration days and earns some office points in the not so fun office game.
Many places that have offices and require 8-6, their engineers end up getting interrupted all day and then do all their work at night. So in that case telecommuting would be a huge benefit to the individual but maybe not as much the company since they get so much extra time out. Maybe it is more a salary thing, getting lots of work out of you. I'd argue it looks like more work is being done at an office but remote teams HAVE to get actual work done, there is no other metric to be measured on.
There are workflows that don't need you to be in the office. There are workflows that need you to be in the office almost every day. And there are workflows in between.
Some people can't effectively work from home. After a while, they stop doing what they're supposed to be doing. Some people have no problems with that.
Every job is different, every person is different, every company is different. No one answer will fit every situation.
My IT shop tried working from home for a couple of years and the team fragmented, we lost a sense of teamwork, and we started wondering what each other are doing. A new CIO mandated working from the office and it has made for a much better culture and collaboration environment. There's definitely something you lose when you don't work in the office with your fellow team members.
I think that depends on your process and team culture. My current team is remote and we aren't fragmented. For most remote teams all it seems to take is a daily status meeting and a chat room.
I am beginning to feel even a daily status meeting is too much - I would much prefer to take on tasks of around a couple of days, and when done, demo.
I feel the same way. Often times I really have nothing meaningful or relevant to share with the team on a daily basis.
"So yeah, that feature we all agreed would take about 3 days to complete? Welp, it's day 2 and I'm still working on it. Progress is good."
Any other details further than that are not of any significant interest to anyone else in the meeting because they all have their own tasks that they're focused on that week. People argue that these daily status meetings help identify problems early on but whenever I run into an issue, big or small, I don't wait for tomorrow's status meeting to rectify it I just immediately start a discussion in the chat room. Obviously this requires trusting your co-workers to not hide potential issues/blockers but if you're not trusting your team than there's bigger issues to deal with that daily status meetings aren't going to help you with.
That said, the benefits of a daily status meeting is all very dependent on the type of project and the amount of collaboration the tasks require.
1. The managers way of finding out what is going on instead of seeing git, running latest code.
2. A way of giving developers bi-polar disorder as they either happen to have just checked in a working piece of code (up) or are still ploughing through on what they said they would do yesterday (down).
It can be good - but only when it requires execution not thought.
My solutions:
1. A selenium / CLI recorder. We make changes to a piece of code - which is covered by ten tests. You fill in the bug report and the recorder does video grab of the selenium web broswer doing the ten tests. Then anyone who is non technical can see what the actually results are - on Youtube!
I heard of some "developer lead development" in a job ad - I think it was Sky. The idea was github like I suppose - devs think "what we really need is" and go do it.
The boss effectively has a veto not a driver. The boss becomes a government.
Agreed. I can definitely see how a team that's used to working in physical proximity would need time and good direction to get used to such a drastic change in methods and environment, but that's simply a matter of acclimation, not an indictment of remote engagement.
We've been experimenting with remote workers for the last two years or so. Our team was used to work in the same place (in Paris), so it took a little bit of time to get used to, as we tried different ideas. Now it works really well with phone/video conferences, trello boards, github, remote pairing, and a (few) permanent chat rooms (thank you Freenode <3), etc.
I think the biggest complaint is that the offices sometimes feel empty to those who chose to work "on site". My take on this is "let's get smaller office space". Plus it costs less. :)
we're 30 strong and 100% remote at dito. we don't have an office. it's pretty great. we live on google apps and other collaborative tools that make this an advantage, rather than a sacrifice. our employees are dedicated, work hard, and for the most part, love their jobs. we enjoy seeing each other in person at customer sites and during company events, but for the most part, we use things like uber conference and google hangouts to meet and keep in sync. not to mention google chat.
I think a big part of this boils down to communication style, and how comfortable people are communicating via the written word.
I've worked places where remote working was discouraged, and the reason given was along the usual lines of "well, it just works better to have everyone in the same room". But these were also places where I noticed an aversion to and an avoidance of writing in general.
Totally agree. Where I work, the loudest person wins and gets promoted. It's hard to be loud in email, not to mention, talk over a quiet persons ideas.
When I get contacted for freelance/contract work, directly from the company/startup, they're always open for remote work when I inquire about it (and we communicate through mainly Basecamp)
I've had 0 remote work opportunities via recruiters.
The irony I keep seeing is that at a small startup, everyone's output is severely visible.. regardless of where you're at. I was the first technical hire at the startup I'm with now (details in profile), working remotely from San Diego while the cofounders were based in SF. There's definitely never been any question about what's getting done and by whom. In a lot of ways I understand the challenge that being a larger shop who's grown locally and is considering adding remote working might face much more than the "We're so small we have to be in the same room" argument.
The benefits of hiring remote workers early on are numerous. The fact that it leads to working more asynchronously, and makes you available to talent anywhere are worth the price of admission alone, IMHO.
We've considered moving, sure. For us though the cost of moving houses in this market, and my wife's local reputation-based business (wedding photographer) would make it an extremely expensive proposition in the short term. I think getting left behind is definitely a risk. So far I'm the only employee outside of the bay, but the culture has remained pretty asynchronous and conducive. If we continue to find talent local to SF I imagine there's a solid chance that'll change, if we happen upon more awesome remote talent it might not. I think it'll just depend on who we end up hiring over time.
Early on though, getting big enough to have that issue sounded like a very high class problem so we decided not to care much where people were and focus on getting things built.
[Aside: That's awesome that you're in SD! Drop me a line and I'd be happy to pass your details along to some of my SD developer friends]
Another "me too". The past 8 years, about 80% of the projects I have done have been remote. I get contacted often from recruiters, as well as HR in big name companies, and they nearly always indicate that telecommute is a deal-breaker, so that ends the discussion right there. I live where I live, and I'm not moving. Even if a client/company is local, a balance of local/remote is the right way to go. Dealing with traffic / commute, ergonomics, distraction-free are all important.
This is really pretty simple. If the local talent pool is exhausted, and you want good people, the smart move is to hire good, remote people. Bring them in periodically as needed.
The really smart move is to have smart guys on retainer,
ensuring they keep up to date on your code base and deployment practises. Then they can be pulled in periodically.
The really really smart move is to let them bid on some of the tasks - a sort of granular level development contracting.
It all boils down to preferences of management who are calling the shots.
Many of them are addicted to worthless, frequent meetings. Others just don't trust people. Third are control freaks.
I personally find a 50/50 balance between working on- and offsite.
With 2 dogs and 2 kids and stay-at-home wife - working from home for me is a challenge.
But working on-site 15 minutes away from home is a perfect arrangement.
> I personally find a 50/50 balance between working on- and offsite. With 2 dogs and 2 kids and stay-at-home wife - working from home for me is a challenge. But working on-site 15 minutes away from home is a perfect arrangement.
That's my plan.
3 days working from home as daughter is at nursery and wife at work.
1 day working at the house of one of the other founders 20 minutes away, wife and daughter.
1 day looking after daughter whilst wife at work.
Weekend a mixture of family time and work (required since some events relating to startup occur at the weekend.)
I started to telecommute three days each week (office is ~ 2hrs from where I live) right after Thanksgiving in 2012 and am still adjusting to the lifestyle.
The biggest takeaway - so far - is that successful telecommuting is determined just as much by the given task as the person. I serve as a mixture of business analyst/developer/test coordinator/project lead/cat herder for my project team. Some tasks are easy to coordinate via e-mail/IM, screen sharing and conference calls (like scheduling, status updates, walkthroughs of protoypes). Being able to power through functional and technical specifications is a tremendous bonus of working from home. When it comes to gathering requirements, acquiring feedback and dealing with politics, however, it's really much better (for me) to be in the office.
I meet a lot of people that work in "tech" that describe their jobs similarly to the way you just did. Just as an aside, I think it's a disturbing trend. It's very easy to reach the point where you're being underpaid and stretched to your limits simultaneously.
Almost always this is an inability to measure and monitor output.
Continuous Integration / Delivery is going to simply change all of that. If you cannot measure a writers output by reading their writing daily, you cant run the team anyhow
I've been working remotely as a developer for a NYC startup for about 2.5 years now. There are a couple of other remote workers, with the rest of the team working in the office. My team has weekly meetings using webex, skype, etc and we mostly use IM and email for other communication. I make periodic visits to the NY office (I live in NC). I find that working remotely really agrees with my personality and work style. I am better able to focus for long periods and I don't really suffer from the social need for regular face to face contact with my co-workers. :) I also avoid a commute and I can spend time with my kids by just walking downstairs.
Who are you to say they don't understand their own business process and culture well enough to determine that remote employees aren't a fit for them? I've worked with several remote team members, and it's always been frustrating. Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello???
Communication is extremely important when working in teams, and you'd have to be pretty ignorant to claim remote workers are able to communicate as well as on-site workers. If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately. Sure, you can set up some sort of always-on video or teleconferencing, but do all new, growing companies have the know-how and resources to implement that for multiple remote workers? Or are you just so special that you deserve all that extra effort?
Small, early stage companies also seem to be focusing a lot on developing a company culture these days. Remote workers don't fit into that strategy very well, if at all.
I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time.
> If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately.
And then they stand the chance of losing anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour of productivity thanks to your interruption.
Part of the reason remote work appeals to so many of us is because we don't deal well with the constant stream of interruptions that occur in many office environments.
I don't believe this is the case for everyone. There are some individuals capable of working productively in a noisy environment all day while sleeping only 3-4 hours per day. But I think such individuals are rare, and you're doing yourself and your organization a disservice if you think all developers can work this way effectively.
My main drivers for working remotely are what you just described and eliminating commuting time. I find I'm much more productive and happy without those inconveniences in my life.
Yeah, I get that. You are more productive. You are interrupted less. You can focus more easily. You are happier at home.
Now, where's the consideration for everyone else on your team? That seems to be the one thing missing from all these counter arguments, yet it's the crux of the matter.
They can reach me via IM, phone, webex, etc. Initiating communication this way (maybe excluding IM) is somewhat more formal than face to face chatting. This gives the initiator more incentive try to work out their own problems first without bugging me (and that's great). If they truly need me for something, I'm happy to oblige. The casual face-to-face "do you have a minute" interruptions are the ones that really kill productivity.
I'd like to respond to some of your other comments:
If I had to endure a culture where this was acceptable:
> Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello???
I wouldn't work there for very long. This mentality of "butts must be in chairs" flies against the notion that software engineers are professionals and should be treated as such. This nagging is a great way to lead to a broken, angry engineer.
That said, I agree with your premise:
> Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something.
But there is a fine line between nagging and actual necessary interruptions that is deepened by remote work. Asking a professional why haven't they responded to the email you sent 5 minutes ago, to me, is crossing the line and if everyone on the team has to endure that kind of behavior then individual and team productivity will both suffer. I've experienced being micromanaged and it's terrible and it's definitely not conducive to my productivity. The rest of the team seemed the same way and thus the team productivity suffered as well. Creative thinkers need uninterrupted time to plan, think, and execute.
Still teams of gifted individuals tend to achieve more than sum of gifted individuals working alone, distractions notwithstanding.
Anyway I'm reserved about the very thesis that office life is particularly full of distractions. At home office you might have spouse and kids who are even less understanding of your "zone" than your coworkers. If you are single it might be neighbors driving their renovation project with hammer drills at work hours. You probably have a TV, game console, your guitar, your pet, and basically have to rely on self-discipline with that.
Absolutely - anyone wandering into one of these opinion articles/discussions would think that developers are a self-centred bunch of arseholes whose productivity is the most important thing in the entire universe, and isolation/concentration is critical. Even brain surgeons need to collaborate and operate - literally - in conjunction with other people.
Absolutely agree - anyone wandering into one of these opinion articles/discussions would think that developers are a self-centred bunch of arseholes whose productivity is the most important thing in the entire universe, and isolation/concentration is critical. Even brain surgeons need to collaborate and operate - literally - in conjunction with other people.
I'm a software engineer married to brain surgeon. She will be the first to tell you that the actual procedures, while technical, are essentially arts and crafts; they require care, but not extreme mental focus.
However, when she's reviewing patient charts and imaging to prepare for a procedure, that requires absolute focus, and she will isolate herself completely for hours and not talk to anyone no matter what. So, there is a time for collaboration, but there is also a time for focusing on one task to the exclusion of everything else.
So when brain surgeons are operating, do their bosses pop in and ask them inane questions they could get answers to via email?
Developers don't need to continuously collaborate. Even brain surgeons spend a lot of time reading up on papers and research and interruptions do not help them.
I can usually deal with interruptions in a gracious and friendly manner. I'm a nice guy, usually laid back, and capable of rapid context switching.
I have discovered, however, that since I do not work for an emergency room, my context-switching-skills are rather undervalued by the free market. The value I generate for clients and employers is very much correlated to my ability to train clients & colleagues to let me focus on solving one problem completely before moving on to the next problem.
I find when you describe the effect of interruptions in terms employers understand — "working this way costs you money, both directly, because I charge a not-insignificant amount per hour, and indirectly, because there are opportunity costs to my working on emergencies instead of farther-reaching goals" — they will become your allies in fighting off interruptions. If you just complain that interruptions are distracting and irritating, well, you're just gonna get a prima-donna label for yourself.
I love working as a team. My creatives can make something look more visually appealing in a few hours that I could in a few months. I can develop the functionality in a few days when they wouldn't know where to start. We all have our strengths. But creative work is inherently a selfish, individual act requiring concentration, and interruptions, in most instances, don't help the team meet their goals.
Oh, really? Because researchers disagree with you:
> Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." -- http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008
Have you even read the study, or are you just quoting it blindly? Your link provides a very brief summary but mentions no details about what tools and workflows remote workers were using. It also doesn't mention anything about the type of project that was being delivered and the various constraints that it had. Maybe you're just taking this stuff on faith.
So reading through that study it appears as though that the remote test group ("Team Solo"):
- was actually working in cubicles in the same room and could overhear each others conversations.
- used email and a very basic text-based chatroom built in 2002 as their primary means of communication, as well as the telephone. Doesn't sound like a sophisticated setup to me.
- did not use any screen sharing software or VOIP software like google hangouts or skype and no mention was made about version control software, wikis, project management software ala Asana or Basecamp, or any other of the modern tools we developers use today.
They mention that "Team Pair" benefited greatly from pair programming, which any remote worker (including myself) can tell you is more than just possible using the tools of today, but perhaps even better than hovering over someone's shoulder in the instances where the software allows you to take control of the other person's screen.
From the study:
"On Team Solo, by contrast, intrusions were both functional and
social in nature. Intrusions were longer and generally involved
movement – team members physically visited another team
member’s cubicle."
Again, their "remote" team is actually just a team in the same room but separated by cubicles. They state that the reason the interruptions were lengthier for Team Solo was because of the physical distance between the team members. In my experience, when team members are truly remote, the interruptions drop significantly in both length and frequency.
You have linked to a very old study that determined that working in an open-plan office is better than working in a cubicle-based office. You either didn't read the study, or are not understanding how this clearly does not apply to truly remote workers and the topic at hand.
The tools people have today to collaborate remotely are much better than they were in 2002, and getting better every year. Unless you can point to a recent study that actually compares truly remote workers using modern tools to co-located employees I'm going to go ahead and say that the evidence is weak at best.
This... x10. Having worked remotely from 2000-2002 and also 2010 to the present, I don't know how anyone can make an accurate statement about remote working in 2013 based on a study from 2006.
Do you require that local employees be physically visible at all times? What if they need to take a walk to clear their head and focus on the problem at hand? What if they need to go to the bathroom?
Do you require that local employees drop the task they're working on to respond immediately to any question from anyone and completely lose focus on real work just to save you from a minute of reading some documentation?
Either this is an absurd double standard, or your office is a terrible environment for doing any sort of independent focused work (which may well be just fine, if your office doesn't do that sort of thing, but that's what most people who work remotely are going to be doing).
> Do you require that local employees be physically visible at all times? What if they need to take a walk to clear their head and focus on the problem at hand? What if they need to go to the bathroom?
Yes, remote and physical team members must have a mobile webcam that they bring with them on all breaks. The webcam must have RFID tags built into it, and their homes and frequent break locations must be equipped with RFID scanners to verify the location of the camera and prevent any funny business. No exceptions, ever.
Also, when people ask questions they never EVER preface them with "Let me know when you have a second".
Seriously, are you in third grade? Can you read something and not interpret it literally? The Greek knew reduction to absurdity was a shitty argument more than 2,000 years ago... how come you still haven't figured it out?
From adrianhoward above:
> Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." -- http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008
I think after reading the tone of your response I can determine that I would have a difficult time working with this type of personality. As a developer interruptions are a huge productivity drag. I have to stop whatever I'm doing, answer your question, and figure out where I left off and get back into the right mode to program which can take a while.
Right now I have a few work-from-home days a week and I find I'm enormously productive on those days due to lack of interruptions. If the company cannot sacrifice face time and trust for higher developer productivity (even in the name of teambuilding) then I wouldn't want to work there.
Like a few others who have responded, you're not seeing the forest through the trees. That's somewhat alarming for a group of people who are supposed to be creative problem solvers.
Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something. As a resource to the team, you hurt it's overall performance by making yourself less availble.
It's a problem of personal organisation. If you have an urgent problem, then by all mean interrupt someone for it. If not, schedule a time. This works whether they're local or remote. The difference is, most people are phenomenally bad at
* asking to schedule times
* rebuffing people who interrupt
hence it makes it easier for people when they're local to get their answers, but this also impacts on the interrupted person's productivity. So yes, your "Team productiviy > your individual productivity" formula wins out. On the other hand, if you take the win-win route of being organised well, everyone's productivity will go up, wherever they are based, team or individual.
> Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something.
Team productivity is the sum of individual productivity though. Having all of the individual productivity disrupted is going to lead to lower team productivity.
"Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).
Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. "
Team productivity is the sum of individual productivity though. Having all of the individual productivity disrupted is going to lead to lower team productivity.
This is generally untrue in my experience. Team productivity is usually limited by a bottlenecks and silos where progress stops. It seems counter-intuitive but you really can go faster as a whole by slowing some folks down. You don't get faster as a whole until you get your critical bottlenecks in the process faster.
Are we really talking about "the team" here, or are we talking about a PM who interrupts developers multiple times during a day, in order to re-prioritize tasks, get status reports, etc?
I completely agree. Dealing with remote team members has always been difficult with teams I've been on, and I would guess they have been only half as productive.
This isn't through any fault of their own, but they just can't be "in the loop" as much. Most communication takes way too long to type out in e-mail or IM, so you need to get them on the phone -- but calling and getting transferred, and then they're not at their desk, etc., is just too much of a pain. There's a HUGE difference between waiting until you see that someone is at their desk, and repeatedly remembering to keep trying to call them -- or sending them an e-mail to call you, and then you're out.
They can't see when someone on your team is having a little difficulty and instantly help out, turning someone's hour task into 5 min. They're not involved in the informal meetings behind someone's screen where a feature is changed slightly. They're just missing out on a lot of "informal" information that is crucial for productive development.
And even over the phone, I find it's much more difficult to explain things and make sure they're understood crystal-clear. Sometimes you need to see the understanding in their face. Sometimes you need to draw, sometimes you need visual aids, sometimes you need to pull up a web page, but it's too much work to pull up videoconferencing or something.
In the end, all these problems are "technically" surmountable, sure, but I've never seen it work. Maybe remote work would be fine in a waterfall-type development model, but with modern-day "agile" development, it just doesn't work as well for collaborative teams.
That's exactly the kind of interruptive behavior that worsens productive. Communication should be batch, considered, and efficient.
The "Hello???" kind of attitude toward peer engineer communication is akin to a mobile phone notification or a blinking chat icon, all enemies of organized thought that leeds to maximum quality output in minimum time.
> Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello???
You're confusing people who are bad at communication with working remotely being bad.
Maybe you've never worked in an office environment with someone who has the same issues, but they're by no means alleviated merely by having their ass in a particular chair.
> Or are you just so special that you deserve all that extra effort?
From the employee point of view: Is your business so special I should sell my house, pull my kids out of school, and move so I can work for it? Do you really want to pay me the 50% pay differential I'd need in order to live in your higher-cost-of-living and lower-quality-of-life area? Is your (presumably internet-focused) company so incompetent it can't manage to use the same systems that we use in our day to day work and life to communicate?
> I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time.
Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?
> From the employee point of view: Is your business so special I should sell my house, pull my kids out of school, and move so I can work for it? Do you really want to pay me the 50% pay differential I'd need in order to live in your higher-cost-of-living and lower-quality-of-life area? Is your (presumably internet-focused) company so incompetent it can't manage to use the same systems that we use in our day to day work and life to communicate?
People make those choices knowing it limits their career options. Since when are companies expected to accomodate every lifestyle and location employees might desire? That's pretty self-centered.
> Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?
Why would you need closed circuit TV for team members who are all sitting in an office together? Is there something difficult to understand about tying to create an on-site presence for a remote employee? There are companies that already do it.
> People make those choices knowing it limits their career options. Since when are companies expected to accomodate every lifestyle and location employees might desire? That's pretty self-centered.
Companies make the choice not to hire remote workers knowing it limits their hiring options. Since when are workers expected to accomodate every workplace and management decision an employer might desire? That's pretty myopic.
> Why would you need closed circuit TV for team members who are all sitting in an office together? Is there something difficult to understand about tying to create an on-site presence for a remote employee? There are companies that already do it.
My point is that it's beyond the pale for anything reasonable. You don't record your offices 24/7 or install keyloggers on your computers, I hope, why would you expect anything different remotely? Can you really not measure effectiveness and communications skills except via panopticon?
It has nothing to do with measuring productivity or making sure they're at their desk instead of watching TV. It's about creating a virtual presence in the office to reduce communication barriers. I don't see anything ridiculous about that -- several people on HN have mentioned that their company does it.
Having worked nearly half my career as a remote employee, I find Skype mostly eliminates this problem...
Onsite Employee: "Hey, got a second?"
Me: "Yep"
Video chat commences
It's a horrible work habit to get into to interrupt someone like that, but sometimes it's necessary. Plus, sometimes it's nice to just chitchat with your coworkers, just like you would in an office setting.
The bottom line is, I'm good at my job and if you're not willing to let me work remotely, you are welcome to discriminate based on geographic presence and eliminate 90% of qualified employees and I'll just go work for the increasing number of enlightened companies that have figured that they can get better talent by making telecommuting a reasonable option. Not all awesome engineers live within a commutable distance to a major metropolitan hub.
>> I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time.
> Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?
I'm actually working with a distributed team that does this. Everyone is on a shared video conference eight hours a day. If you want to talk to someone you look at your video conference team to see if they are at their desk, on the phone, or talking to someone else. If two people need to talk without disturbing others, they mute their video conference mic and jump on Skype. You can still see them, get their attention, etc. but you don't have everyone talking over each other on the main video conference channel.
That actually sounds pretty effective, and would get around a lot of the inefficiencies I've had in the past with remote workers.
Curious, is it just a window with all the other video feeds that you keep in the background? Or a thumbnail version of to the side? Or a second monitor? I'm curious as to the difference between it being always visible, or something you have to pull up.
Most of the people from home have it on a second monitor. There are about four team rooms on the call as well. They usually have one or two 30 to 50 inch televisions showing the other members.
What technology are you using for the shared video conference? I'm looking for something like this. It needs to restore connections when they die (something like Skype will reliably crap out after an hour or so, and doesn't re-establish the connection).
Because team work is all about you, right? Quite a myopic view. How dare anyone try to increase the productivity of the team by stealing precious seconds from you!
Teams are more productive when they're in the same location. That is a fact. Your individual productivity may suffer at times, but the team will do better overall if you all work together in one location.
I've noticed quite a few responses in this vein.
It may be worth considering that indeed, personal productivity is part of the benefit people get out
of this kind of work.
I, too, am much more productive working at home. So much so that I started working from home 3 days a week and eventually just switched to remote work.
I understand the need for team productivity but there are ways to solve it that don't require constant face time.
When I, as a remote worker, had to hire employees to work for me at the office, I made sure to hire people who were good enough not to require constant supervision and did not need to ask a question every 5 minutes. After the initial orientation, I made sure to be available by email, IM, phone (in that order) which worked out just fine.
I think part of the reason for the strong differences of opinion is that both can be right. The right team, colocated, can be very productive. However, I have seen many colocated teams fail, sometimes horribly.
Conversely, I've seen remote teams do extremely well also.
In fact, all remote teams I've worked with have done quite well. Obviously some of that may be due to their motivation, skills, experience, etc. But the fact remains.
As I say to everyone who asks, remote work is not for everyone. We're used to the norm of working on location, but that, too, isn't for everyone.
That same comment could be turned around just as easily though. If your team mates have no concept of just how much of a distraction they are, or worse they don't care, then they'll interrupt you all the time for random reasons. Some times that's fine, some times it really does speed up what ever we're working on, but the `vast` majority of the time it's things that would have been 100% ok getting typed into a 2 sentence email for me to look at when I next opened my email. By slightly increasing the "cost" of communicating it makes people think a little more about the way they do it, and if a response is truly needed "right now".
"you'd have to be pretty ignorant to claim remote workers are able to communicate as well as on-site workers. If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately."
And here's why, Skype overcomes this problem... I've worked remotely in plenty of team situations where I've sent a chat message, and got instant response, consistently.
When I get a Skype message in these situations, the only reason I wouldn't respond is if I wasn't at my desk for the same reasons someone wouldn't be at their desk in a face-to-face office situation.
I think, as a business community, we just need to get more and more comfortable with remote working arrangements, and implement policies that could cover the various productivity issues (if you don't respond to a message within 'X'... this happens etc...).
I also think we have to remember there are productivity issues in the face-to-face office scenario as well, when people get together they tend to "talk around the water cooler," they tend to "go out for drinks, then call in sick the next day" etc... and other social-oriented productivity issues.
Not all productivity issues are bad either, if someone working remotely doesn't answer a chat message in 7 seconds, they might be improving themselves in some manner. ;)
> Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello???
That sounds like an incredibly frustrating work environment.
Having worked in both environments before, one thing that I observed is that working remotely can indeed be highly productive, but it's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to do it successfully if only a few employees are working remotely.
Otherwise what happens is that the people who can see each other face to face and in the hallway will of course do it, leaving the odd remote person out of many conversations. So either the remote person won't be as in the loop as the others (bad for them, and bad for the overall team dynamic because someone needs to be treated specially), or else everyone on the team needs change their otherwise perfectly normal and perfectly productive patterns of communication (leading to frustration with the artificial constraint).
So there's nothing inherently wrong with remote workers, but it's probably better to go "all in" like some companies are starting to do, or try to avoid it at all, except in very special circumstances.
I bet many of the "99%" of companies the author was referring to that said "no" to his working remotely simply fell into the category where the majority of existing employees weren't remote, so they they chose not to introduce the new and arguably difficult to manage dynamic.
Perhaps a better way to put it is that it is difficult to retrofit an office to allow a few telecommuters.
In my experience, I was working remotely in the company's early days. The in-office employes really started to grow after me. While I remain the only one that really works outside of the office, the culture of remote workers was instilled from nearly the beginning and don't really find any of the problems you suggest to be true in my case.
This parent post is what I came in to say. I'm a sole remote employee at my current company and I think I miss out on like 75% of discussions that go on.
This is a huge factor. When most people are in the office, the means of communication becomes different, in tons of little ways.
For example, brainstorming sessions end with scribbles on whiteboards, and a fleet of Post-Its that say "Do Not Erase!" It's perfectly adequate documentation because the same team comes in the following afternoon and keeps going. But the one or two people that work remotely are never going to see it. And no matter how much Skype you do, it's just not the same as being in the room as it happens.
Same problem (seems off-topic but i am not so sure it is) is for someone who doesn't smoke. I don't and I thought about starting (or at least getting myself chocolate cigarettes) to join the colleagues outside during the break to stay in the information loop.
> else everyone on the team needs change their otherwise perfectly normal and perfectly productive patterns of communication (leading to frustration with the artificial constraint).
I have yet to work in any place, remote or local, that doesn't have a large portion of the executive team (which is always a double-digit percentage of the total headcount of the company) on the road for various reasons a substantial chunk of the time.
I think companies that rely on this face-to-face dynamic (of which there are many) are doomed because the normal operation of their company will necessarily disconnect people on a regular basis. If you're not putting all the critical information somewhere reachable by everyone, all the time, you're shooting yourself in the foot, even if (in the usual case) everyone shows up to the same room every day.
I'm personally not a big fan of remote workers. Not because I don't think the tools are adequate or that I trust they are actually working. I think there's something special that can't be reproduced when a small team that's just starting out is physically together. I've been at a few startups and I can't count how many times a good idea or breakthrough came while we were out getting lunch, a beer or playing pool in the office. Sure, your remote workers are a phone call away, but it's just not the same as being able to turn to the guy next to you and start talking or white boarding. It's definitely possible to make remote teams work and the tools have come a long way. By there's something special about working together in person.
Is it really that difficult to type your question into skype or campfire group chat? We're all remote and we have daily 20 minute video conferences, and everyone is always logged into campfire. It's the most productive team I've ever worked with, and if someone isn't pulling their weight, you can tell from their git commits. Every argument I've heard against remote working boils down to that "something special" you mention, which is pretty darn vague. We have had a few new hires lose it and go AWOL, but those people wouldn't have been a good fit in a co-located team either.
It's not the day to day interactions. Hell, most of the companies I work with that aren't remote chat over IM and group chat while we sit next to each other. As I said, I don't think it's a breakdown of the tools. It's not that people aren't productive either. It's the "other" stuff that doesn't fit into those categories. There's no technology to replace sitting around with a group of guys having a beer. While its vague, it's just a different experience that Skype or group chat. It's a different setting and a different mindset. The things that are special are the things that don't fit into the normal daily workflow. For many companies remote teams might make sense and even strive, this is just my personal opinion of what I think is missing. So much of it depends on the company, the culture and the people.
Point taken; in fact we recently rented a couple of houses in Belize just so we could spend some time together. Funny thing is, I found the entire experience to be extremely draining and couldn't wait for everyone to leave. I had a really difficult time getting anything done in a house full of people, but I think it's just one of those things that varies between individuals. I think the great thing about the rise of distributed companies is they give an opportunity for introverts to come together and thrive in an environment that suits their working style, instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, so to speak.
I currently work remotely, and I agree with you that there is something special about working physically together. There isn't a good remote substitute for standing in front of a white board with another coder. We tended to get excited when we thought of a cool new feature or solved a problem. I fed off of their excitement and they fed off mine.
In general, I totally agree. Being able to hire the best person, anywhere, and allow them to work super-effectively is a strong moat. I share this opinion and hire accordingly.
I think the "these companies are wrong" posts, though, are not attempting to see it from the other side.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of these startups. In super-super early startups (e.g. pre-profitability or definitely pre-revenue) one of the goals (aside from staying afloat) is to build a sustainable culture (company etc.). It's very difficult to build a company culture AND product AND hit profitability AND 1,000 other things from scratch before going out of business.
When most are co-located and a few are distributed it just adds one more thing to the pile. I've done it before, so I know how hard it is, even when we were all 'on board' with it.
It's just harder; you need to start from scratch with the assumption that any one can be remote at any time, and so you build your tools/processes accordingly (if you have a physical kanban board then it'll be a real hard thing to support remote devs).
For just one non-top 1% of all software-developer persons? The overhead is probably not worth it if you have a ready talent pool in your city (especially if you now have nexus in another state, which is a very real risk as states are looking to increase their revenue. ugh).
For Joe Average, or Jane Above Average, these companies would prefer to hire a local person than remote. That makes sense to me.
As a big part of getting from 'startup' to 'sustainable business' involves managing risk. So, understand where most of these businesses are coming from. Having one or two remote people in a company full of on-site people is a risk (not from a technical perspective, but from a culture and focus one), and not one they're willing to take.
It's a trade-off, and one that can make sense if viewed in context and done for the right reasons (note: "We can't control them/see their work/trust them/need to see their faces/need them from 9-5/etc." are WRONG REASONS).
Ranting about a system problem isn't very useful; I'd like to see more posts about how to convert a primarily on-site team to support 'work anywhere'. What processes and tools need to change to do this?
1. Continuous Integration (and or delivery)
This is the sine qua non. Everyone should be able to check out and build a complete working eco system and run
all tests on their local laptop or Rackspace cluster you rent just for them
2. Really, get the continuous integration working. Stop now and do nothing else till you have. Tell the dev's remote working is only possible after one month of a CI process that is never broken itself (although build can break). Spurred on, everyone will suddenly get that CI build working.
3. The CEO must build a complete off site copy of the entire company on his remote laptop. Is it getting boring yet.
4. Agree on one place to store all documents, all meeting notes, everything. Do not split comms over IRC and Skype and gmail and ... It will mean no one can reliably contact anyone else because "oh I left you a message on Skype", "but I live on IRC"
5. Get different people to work together on different areas. Pair programming is not ideal IMO, but having Fred write the code for task A and Bob principlaly write the first tests, means they have to talk and decide a solution, and Bob keeps a friendly competitive eye on progess. Move these pairs around a bit.
6. Stop trying to get updates for management - its either working code or not.
7. talk to people a lot. Watch thier checkin velocity - it will speak volumes. Talk if it changes.
8. Assume, perhaps commit visibly, to people as being safe in their jobs for a long time (2 years minimum). This to me seems the biggest - people need to feel safe. Maybve thats just me
"4. Agree on one place to store all documents, all meeting notes, everything."
This can't be understated. When I ask the founder where the company logo is and they say "it's on one of the external harddrives sitting around the office somewhere", it's incredibly frustrating. The most well-oiled startup I worked for had a perfectly organized central-storage of digital resources, which greatly contributed to the smooth workings of the company.
If you're looking for a self-hosted solution to keep you from becoming overly dependent on Github, take a look at Gitlab [1].
Since you're using Git, all those repos are presumably backed up on individual development machines. Or you could easily write a cron job to mirror them every day or so.
The real problem is other content like issue tracking, wikis, and pull requests. If keeping these is important, you may be locked into the platform, at least as far as existing projects are concerned.
Remote working is ofter perceived as a dream job, which, in fact, isn't so much. Besides performing your regular tasks, you have to deal with all the self-support stuff yourself, including avoiding your work stepping over your personal life, which is even worse if you work at home. It takes some practice to do that properly, to say the least.
I think that's where most people trying to work remotely utterly fail. They think they should be able to work anytime, when others will likely want to talk to them in normal hours. They think they don't need an schedule, when the only thing that would allow them to do their work is at least a self-imposed one. You won't be able to cook your meal and do your work at the same time, trust me. Lastly, if you lack self-discipline, remote working isn't for you.
The other side of the coin is even sadder: it's not that companies are not "open" to remote work, is that they just don't know how to manage it. They usually play their silly manager techniques by the book, which are for on-site teams (and often don't work, anyway). They just can't handle remote work. A clever manager capable of that is more scarce and expensive, also.
Hiring/Recruiters have the worst of both worlds, plus one thing that drives me nuts: regular hiring doesn't work for science and technology. If your task is looking for a "Python developer" and you think that it involves training some snakes, you're out of your element. If you're not capable to understand at least the basics of what you're looking for, you won't find it, and even worse, you won't understand what "training snakes remotely" means.
In the end, combination of all those things hurt remote working for everyone: people who doesn't (and doesn't want to) know how to do it, companies that doesn't know how to handle it (and they try with their archaic means, failing completely), and the guys in the middle that just want to score another commission for a hire of dubious quality.
Sorry, it ended up being longer that the rant itself.
(Disclosure: I've been working remotely for a few years, and I wouldn't change that for anything else. I agree completely about the current status of "remote working", hiring and reasons for meetups. But please, if anyone thinks remote working is a dream job, go get a regular one and stop making things more difficult for the ones that actually want and know how to make it work)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadFor example, my company's work in the biomedical space often necessitates us being in partner and customer labs to best understand workflows. While it's possible for us to have some elements of our development be remote, we strongly prefer keeping things local; we believe it's important for everyone on the team to have exposure to the domain we work in. This is a cultural choice we've made, but it does make remote work tricky.
Easiest way to make this work is to give developers enough equity, so they are motivated for startup to succeed more or equally as getting the paycheck. Eric's POV stands, but he's a co-founder, he has a significant stake in the success of the company.
He was covering up his lack of productivity for some months with "personal problems" on both sides, while not being focused in either company. If you have many employees, such behavior can go unnoticed for a long time.
OTOH, after this event, I tried giving significant equity to some other guys on the team, and their productivity went up. I guess some of them had side projects as well before that.
Maybe one can work around this by requiring full-time Skype camera access during work hours, or similar, but I hate to be "the police". I feel much better giving away some equity in exchange for loyalty.
Why do you guys want to work from home? Isn't the isolation during the working hours hard on you?
I think the ideal thing would be an office about a block away from where I live. I am pretty happy being back in an office myself, but hate the commute.
As for the isolation thing, my family is usually at home, and I also go out a lot during the day.
I can imagine, if I were simply home alone for most of the day, that it'd get lonely and being able to go to the "office" to be around people would seem like a good trade.
I was rarely leaving my apartment and working long hours because it was really difficult to "turn off", especially when I never really left the office. I fixed this by getting a dog, and honestly it was one of the best choices I've made. Working remotely, you're in a unique position to provide a great lifestyle for a pet. My dog gets a couple walks a day, and is rarely home alone.
Getting out of the house for one or two hours a day to get some sunshine and take a break is extremely healthy. Plus, there is a local dog park near by that is always filled with people.
Dog aside, it seems that you had much less conversation with other employees than I've got at my job. There is an unwritten rule to leave Skype on, just to hear about updates with the company. Just being able to easily reach out and send someone a message (not through email, basecamp, etc) is important to me.
I work from home to help keep my family life a priority. That extra 2 hours not lost to a commute (and sometimes another hour for lunch) that is spent with my family has immeasurable value.
although once a week for 20m sounds a bit low. we do also have a daily email (progress/plans) and i will typically chat or email with co-workers or clients (as necessary) most days.
i'm sorry it didn't work for you - hope you find a more communal job! :)
However the issolation is an issue - chat rooms, and Skype/Hangouts have always been a big part of how we hold the company together, and how we solve this issue. But for me coffee shops, are a big deal. I'm in one every day for an hour or 2, and that's where I get all my "water cooler talk" and random socalizing. Which on the whole works out quite well for me.
As for the isolation during working hours, it makes me fantastically productive -- no junior coworkers sticking their head into my office to ask questions they could answer themselves if they thought about it for a couple minutes. If they can't figure it out after a couple minutes, they can email me or we chat and I'll help them sort it out. When it comes to feeling isolated, I start work early and take a long lunch break. I go over to the college and have lunch with faculty and grad students whose work I find interesting. I give a seminar talk every now and then. I don't really feel isolated at all.
Think of all the office drama, personal conflicts from trivial things, etc. A lot of it is gone. There is still conflict, of course, but it's real conflict, not petty about desk space or something.
As other's say, you also waste no time on commuting.
You lose constant communication though, yes, so you have to balance this with tools. We use IRC and are constantly chatting, joking around, sending funny pictures, etc. so I don't feel isolated at all. We also meet up 3 or 4 times a year, and it's fun to travel.
It's not for everybody, but it's optimal for some.
That depends on the person.
As you grow up, you may prefer to stay close to the ones you love, rather than to the ones you work with. Or you work better alone, with less noise and distractions. Or you realize that wasting 2 hours or more a day commuting for warming up a chair and using an Internet connection doesn't cut it. Or you may just like isolation.
Whatever reason, it's up to the person, and there are quite valid ones. You're doing no harm in leaving if remote working is not for you. In fact, you're doing the right thing.
I worked in an office for the last several years, and finally just being around people all day every day just got unbearable.
I've been working from home for the last few months, and having 8 hours completely alone every weekday is wonderful.
And my coworkers skype and chat so I get low-grade social interaction.
So I guess that's the answer: for some people being around others is more stressful than being alone.
1. My commute is a drain, doing it five days a week drives me to be less motivated and productive 2. Working remotely has less distractions. 3. I know I work better when I'm not in the same place all the time, I have to mix it up or I end up staring at the wall. 4. A company that can't handle remote work has some major process issues, this is a red flag for me. 5. I have a kid, if I'm at the library or the coffee shop near home, I can come home to him at lunch. If you want to make me hate my job, ask me to spend all my time working in an office without seeing him. 6. If I can work remotely, I'm going to do more work. I'm going to keep working past 5 because I'm on a roll. If not, soon as five comes around, I'm gone.
An office is good, and having the option to come in is great. Forcing me to come in all five days a week says something bad about your culture and process. At least to me.
Some people have experience with folks 'working from home' that are not 100% positive. Some folks (like me) have experiences working remotely that are not 100% positive.
And yes, casual, face to face communication is an important dynamic, even for tech workers.
I guess this is even more important for small companies of up to 20 people where there is no exact "you have to do exactly this and this and this and then you're clear"-thingie. I gained lots of insights regarding customers or how we should better build things in our tech dept. just by having daily casual water-cooler chit-chats with the couple of people we employ in the sales department. It's very, very difficult to emulate using modern technology.
Conjure up any wishy-washy "reasons" or anecdotes why you have to be onsite, but I've yet to see any facts to back up the position that onsite all the time is better.
I do think it is good to work on site periodically and sometimes at least a day or two per week if you can, not because it is needed to produce good work and products, but because it helps kick off, complete + integration days and earns some office points in the not so fun office game.
Many places that have offices and require 8-6, their engineers end up getting interrupted all day and then do all their work at night. So in that case telecommuting would be a huge benefit to the individual but maybe not as much the company since they get so much extra time out. Maybe it is more a salary thing, getting lots of work out of you. I'd argue it looks like more work is being done at an office but remote teams HAVE to get actual work done, there is no other metric to be measured on.
There are workflows that don't need you to be in the office. There are workflows that need you to be in the office almost every day. And there are workflows in between.
Some people can't effectively work from home. After a while, they stop doing what they're supposed to be doing. Some people have no problems with that.
Every job is different, every person is different, every company is different. No one answer will fit every situation.
Otherwise just skype and chat keeps one in touch
(I would be tempted to mandate a person to person chat for each team member to each)
I feel the same way. Often times I really have nothing meaningful or relevant to share with the team on a daily basis.
"So yeah, that feature we all agreed would take about 3 days to complete? Welp, it's day 2 and I'm still working on it. Progress is good."
Any other details further than that are not of any significant interest to anyone else in the meeting because they all have their own tasks that they're focused on that week. People argue that these daily status meetings help identify problems early on but whenever I run into an issue, big or small, I don't wait for tomorrow's status meeting to rectify it I just immediately start a discussion in the chat room. Obviously this requires trusting your co-workers to not hide potential issues/blockers but if you're not trusting your team than there's bigger issues to deal with that daily status meetings aren't going to help you with.
That said, the benefits of a daily status meeting is all very dependent on the type of project and the amount of collaboration the tasks require.
1. The managers way of finding out what is going on instead of seeing git, running latest code.
2. A way of giving developers bi-polar disorder as they either happen to have just checked in a working piece of code (up) or are still ploughing through on what they said they would do yesterday (down).
It can be good - but only when it requires execution not thought.
My solutions:
1. A selenium / CLI recorder. We make changes to a piece of code - which is covered by ten tests. You fill in the bug report and the recorder does video grab of the selenium web broswer doing the ten tests. Then anyone who is non technical can see what the actually results are - on Youtube!
I heard of some "developer lead development" in a job ad - I think it was Sky. The idea was github like I suppose - devs think "what we really need is" and go do it.
The boss effectively has a veto not a driver. The boss becomes a government.
I think the biggest complaint is that the offices sometimes feel empty to those who chose to work "on site". My take on this is "let's get smaller office space". Plus it costs less. :)
I've worked places where remote working was discouraged, and the reason given was along the usual lines of "well, it just works better to have everyone in the same room". But these were also places where I noticed an aversion to and an avoidance of writing in general.
I've had 0 remote work opportunities via recruiters.
The benefits of hiring remote workers early on are numerous. The fact that it leads to working more asynchronously, and makes you available to talent anywhere are worth the price of admission alone, IMHO.
[EDIT: oh also: we're hiring]
We're also in SD, but trying to build a team here and not finding as many local applicants as we'd like.
Early on though, getting big enough to have that issue sounded like a very high class problem so we decided not to care much where people were and focus on getting things built.
[Aside: That's awesome that you're in SD! Drop me a line and I'd be happy to pass your details along to some of my SD developer friends]
This is really pretty simple. If the local talent pool is exhausted, and you want good people, the smart move is to hire good, remote people. Bring them in periodically as needed.
The really really smart move is to let them bid on some of the tasks - a sort of granular level development contracting.
I personally find a 50/50 balance between working on- and offsite. With 2 dogs and 2 kids and stay-at-home wife - working from home for me is a challenge.
But working on-site 15 minutes away from home is a perfect arrangement.
That's my plan.
3 days working from home as daughter is at nursery and wife at work.
1 day working at the house of one of the other founders 20 minutes away, wife and daughter.
1 day looking after daughter whilst wife at work.
Weekend a mixture of family time and work (required since some events relating to startup occur at the weekend.)
The biggest takeaway - so far - is that successful telecommuting is determined just as much by the given task as the person. I serve as a mixture of business analyst/developer/test coordinator/project lead/cat herder for my project team. Some tasks are easy to coordinate via e-mail/IM, screen sharing and conference calls (like scheduling, status updates, walkthroughs of protoypes). Being able to power through functional and technical specifications is a tremendous bonus of working from home. When it comes to gathering requirements, acquiring feedback and dealing with politics, however, it's really much better (for me) to be in the office.
Continuous Integration / Delivery is going to simply change all of that. If you cannot measure a writers output by reading their writing daily, you cant run the team anyhow
Communication is extremely important when working in teams, and you'd have to be pretty ignorant to claim remote workers are able to communicate as well as on-site workers. If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately. Sure, you can set up some sort of always-on video or teleconferencing, but do all new, growing companies have the know-how and resources to implement that for multiple remote workers? Or are you just so special that you deserve all that extra effort?
Small, early stage companies also seem to be focusing a lot on developing a company culture these days. Remote workers don't fit into that strategy very well, if at all.
I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time.
And then they stand the chance of losing anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour of productivity thanks to your interruption.
Part of the reason remote work appeals to so many of us is because we don't deal well with the constant stream of interruptions that occur in many office environments.
I don't believe this is the case for everyone. There are some individuals capable of working productively in a noisy environment all day while sleeping only 3-4 hours per day. But I think such individuals are rare, and you're doing yourself and your organization a disservice if you think all developers can work this way effectively.
Now, where's the consideration for everyone else on your team? That seems to be the one thing missing from all these counter arguments, yet it's the crux of the matter.
I'd like to respond to some of your other comments:
If I had to endure a culture where this was acceptable:
> Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello???
I wouldn't work there for very long. This mentality of "butts must be in chairs" flies against the notion that software engineers are professionals and should be treated as such. This nagging is a great way to lead to a broken, angry engineer.
That said, I agree with your premise:
> Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something.
But there is a fine line between nagging and actual necessary interruptions that is deepened by remote work. Asking a professional why haven't they responded to the email you sent 5 minutes ago, to me, is crossing the line and if everyone on the team has to endure that kind of behavior then individual and team productivity will both suffer. I've experienced being micromanaged and it's terrible and it's definitely not conducive to my productivity. The rest of the team seemed the same way and thus the team productivity suffered as well. Creative thinkers need uninterrupted time to plan, think, and execute.
I agree that it's distracting and irritating at times, but that's the nature of working with other people.
Anyway I'm reserved about the very thesis that office life is particularly full of distractions. At home office you might have spouse and kids who are even less understanding of your "zone" than your coworkers. If you are single it might be neighbors driving their renovation project with hammer drills at work hours. You probably have a TV, game console, your guitar, your pet, and basically have to rely on self-discipline with that.
However, when she's reviewing patient charts and imaging to prepare for a procedure, that requires absolute focus, and she will isolate herself completely for hours and not talk to anyone no matter what. So, there is a time for collaboration, but there is also a time for focusing on one task to the exclusion of everything else.
Developers don't need to continuously collaborate. Even brain surgeons spend a lot of time reading up on papers and research and interruptions do not help them.
I have discovered, however, that since I do not work for an emergency room, my context-switching-skills are rather undervalued by the free market. The value I generate for clients and employers is very much correlated to my ability to train clients & colleagues to let me focus on solving one problem completely before moving on to the next problem.
I find when you describe the effect of interruptions in terms employers understand — "working this way costs you money, both directly, because I charge a not-insignificant amount per hour, and indirectly, because there are opportunity costs to my working on emergencies instead of farther-reaching goals" — they will become your allies in fighting off interruptions. If you just complain that interruptions are distracting and irritating, well, you're just gonna get a prima-donna label for yourself.
I love working as a team. My creatives can make something look more visually appealing in a few hours that I could in a few months. I can develop the functionality in a few days when they wouldn't know where to start. We all have our strengths. But creative work is inherently a selfish, individual act requiring concentration, and interruptions, in most instances, don't help the team meet their goals.
> Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." -- http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008
From adrianhoward's post above.
- was actually working in cubicles in the same room and could overhear each others conversations.
- used email and a very basic text-based chatroom built in 2002 as their primary means of communication, as well as the telephone. Doesn't sound like a sophisticated setup to me.
- did not use any screen sharing software or VOIP software like google hangouts or skype and no mention was made about version control software, wikis, project management software ala Asana or Basecamp, or any other of the modern tools we developers use today.
They mention that "Team Pair" benefited greatly from pair programming, which any remote worker (including myself) can tell you is more than just possible using the tools of today, but perhaps even better than hovering over someone's shoulder in the instances where the software allows you to take control of the other person's screen.
From the study:
"On Team Solo, by contrast, intrusions were both functional and social in nature. Intrusions were longer and generally involved movement – team members physically visited another team member’s cubicle."
Again, their "remote" team is actually just a team in the same room but separated by cubicles. They state that the reason the interruptions were lengthier for Team Solo was because of the physical distance between the team members. In my experience, when team members are truly remote, the interruptions drop significantly in both length and frequency.
You have linked to a very old study that determined that working in an open-plan office is better than working in a cubicle-based office. You either didn't read the study, or are not understanding how this clearly does not apply to truly remote workers and the topic at hand.
The tools people have today to collaborate remotely are much better than they were in 2002, and getting better every year. Unless you can point to a recent study that actually compares truly remote workers using modern tools to co-located employees I'm going to go ahead and say that the evidence is weak at best.
Do you require that local employees drop the task they're working on to respond immediately to any question from anyone and completely lose focus on real work just to save you from a minute of reading some documentation?
Either this is an absurd double standard, or your office is a terrible environment for doing any sort of independent focused work (which may well be just fine, if your office doesn't do that sort of thing, but that's what most people who work remotely are going to be doing).
Yes, remote and physical team members must have a mobile webcam that they bring with them on all breaks. The webcam must have RFID tags built into it, and their homes and frequent break locations must be equipped with RFID scanners to verify the location of the camera and prevent any funny business. No exceptions, ever.
Also, when people ask questions they never EVER preface them with "Let me know when you have a second".
Seriously, are you in third grade? Can you read something and not interpret it literally? The Greek knew reduction to absurdity was a shitty argument more than 2,000 years ago... how come you still haven't figured it out?
From adrianhoward above:
> Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." -- http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008
Right now I have a few work-from-home days a week and I find I'm enormously productive on those days due to lack of interruptions. If the company cannot sacrifice face time and trust for higher developer productivity (even in the name of teambuilding) then I wouldn't want to work there.
Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something. As a resource to the team, you hurt it's overall performance by making yourself less availble.
* asking to schedule times
* rebuffing people who interrupt
hence it makes it easier for people when they're local to get their answers, but this also impacts on the interrupted person's productivity. So yes, your "Team productiviy > your individual productivity" formula wins out. On the other hand, if you take the win-win route of being organised well, everyone's productivity will go up, wherever they are based, team or individual.
Team productivity is the sum of individual productivity though. Having all of the individual productivity disrupted is going to lead to lower team productivity.
I think Joel said it best 13 years ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html
===
"Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).
Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. "
This is generally untrue in my experience. Team productivity is usually limited by a bottlenecks and silos where progress stops. It seems counter-intuitive but you really can go faster as a whole by slowing some folks down. You don't get faster as a whole until you get your critical bottlenecks in the process faster.
This isn't through any fault of their own, but they just can't be "in the loop" as much. Most communication takes way too long to type out in e-mail or IM, so you need to get them on the phone -- but calling and getting transferred, and then they're not at their desk, etc., is just too much of a pain. There's a HUGE difference between waiting until you see that someone is at their desk, and repeatedly remembering to keep trying to call them -- or sending them an e-mail to call you, and then you're out.
They can't see when someone on your team is having a little difficulty and instantly help out, turning someone's hour task into 5 min. They're not involved in the informal meetings behind someone's screen where a feature is changed slightly. They're just missing out on a lot of "informal" information that is crucial for productive development.
And even over the phone, I find it's much more difficult to explain things and make sure they're understood crystal-clear. Sometimes you need to see the understanding in their face. Sometimes you need to draw, sometimes you need visual aids, sometimes you need to pull up a web page, but it's too much work to pull up videoconferencing or something.
In the end, all these problems are "technically" surmountable, sure, but I've never seen it work. Maybe remote work would be fine in a waterfall-type development model, but with modern-day "agile" development, it just doesn't work as well for collaborative teams.
The "Hello???" kind of attitude toward peer engineer communication is akin to a mobile phone notification or a blinking chat icon, all enemies of organized thought that leeds to maximum quality output in minimum time.
You're confusing people who are bad at communication with working remotely being bad.
Maybe you've never worked in an office environment with someone who has the same issues, but they're by no means alleviated merely by having their ass in a particular chair.
> Or are you just so special that you deserve all that extra effort?
From the employee point of view: Is your business so special I should sell my house, pull my kids out of school, and move so I can work for it? Do you really want to pay me the 50% pay differential I'd need in order to live in your higher-cost-of-living and lower-quality-of-life area? Is your (presumably internet-focused) company so incompetent it can't manage to use the same systems that we use in our day to day work and life to communicate?
> I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time.
Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?
People make those choices knowing it limits their career options. Since when are companies expected to accomodate every lifestyle and location employees might desire? That's pretty self-centered.
> Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?
Why would you need closed circuit TV for team members who are all sitting in an office together? Is there something difficult to understand about tying to create an on-site presence for a remote employee? There are companies that already do it.
Companies make the choice not to hire remote workers knowing it limits their hiring options. Since when are workers expected to accomodate every workplace and management decision an employer might desire? That's pretty myopic.
> Why would you need closed circuit TV for team members who are all sitting in an office together? Is there something difficult to understand about tying to create an on-site presence for a remote employee? There are companies that already do it.
My point is that it's beyond the pale for anything reasonable. You don't record your offices 24/7 or install keyloggers on your computers, I hope, why would you expect anything different remotely? Can you really not measure effectiveness and communications skills except via panopticon?
Onsite Employee: "Hey, got a second?" Me: "Yep" Video chat commences
It's a horrible work habit to get into to interrupt someone like that, but sometimes it's necessary. Plus, sometimes it's nice to just chitchat with your coworkers, just like you would in an office setting.
The bottom line is, I'm good at my job and if you're not willing to let me work remotely, you are welcome to discriminate based on geographic presence and eliminate 90% of qualified employees and I'll just go work for the increasing number of enlightened companies that have figured that they can get better talent by making telecommuting a reasonable option. Not all awesome engineers live within a commutable distance to a major metropolitan hub.
I'm actually working with a distributed team that does this. Everyone is on a shared video conference eight hours a day. If you want to talk to someone you look at your video conference team to see if they are at their desk, on the phone, or talking to someone else. If two people need to talk without disturbing others, they mute their video conference mic and jump on Skype. You can still see them, get their attention, etc. but you don't have everyone talking over each other on the main video conference channel.
It actually works a lot better than I expected.
Curious, is it just a window with all the other video feeds that you keep in the background? Or a thumbnail version of to the side? Or a second monitor? I'm curious as to the difference between it being always visible, or something you have to pull up.
Avoiding this is the primary reason I like working at home. Getting distracted by things like that are a productivity killer for me.
Teams are more productive when they're in the same location. That is a fact. Your individual productivity may suffer at times, but the team will do better overall if you all work together in one location.
I, too, am much more productive working at home. So much so that I started working from home 3 days a week and eventually just switched to remote work. I understand the need for team productivity but there are ways to solve it that don't require constant face time. When I, as a remote worker, had to hire employees to work for me at the office, I made sure to hire people who were good enough not to require constant supervision and did not need to ask a question every 5 minutes. After the initial orientation, I made sure to be available by email, IM, phone (in that order) which worked out just fine.
I think part of the reason for the strong differences of opinion is that both can be right. The right team, colocated, can be very productive. However, I have seen many colocated teams fail, sometimes horribly. Conversely, I've seen remote teams do extremely well also. In fact, all remote teams I've worked with have done quite well. Obviously some of that may be due to their motivation, skills, experience, etc. But the fact remains. As I say to everyone who asks, remote work is not for everyone. We're used to the norm of working on location, but that, too, isn't for everyone.
"you'd have to be pretty ignorant to claim remote workers are able to communicate as well as on-site workers. If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately."
And here's why, Skype overcomes this problem... I've worked remotely in plenty of team situations where I've sent a chat message, and got instant response, consistently.
When I get a Skype message in these situations, the only reason I wouldn't respond is if I wasn't at my desk for the same reasons someone wouldn't be at their desk in a face-to-face office situation.
I think, as a business community, we just need to get more and more comfortable with remote working arrangements, and implement policies that could cover the various productivity issues (if you don't respond to a message within 'X'... this happens etc...).
I also think we have to remember there are productivity issues in the face-to-face office scenario as well, when people get together they tend to "talk around the water cooler," they tend to "go out for drinks, then call in sick the next day" etc... and other social-oriented productivity issues.
Not all productivity issues are bad either, if someone working remotely doesn't answer a chat message in 7 seconds, they might be improving themselves in some manner. ;)
WTF? What kind of person checks their email every 5 minutes and gets any work done?
> If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them.
How is that a sign of productiveness? If anything this is an argument for working remotely. Read PG's essay on Maker's Schedule: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
That sounds like an incredibly frustrating work environment.
I mean for them, not for you.
I see why the OP would want to complain about how most companies out there don't encourage remoting but then again they are paying you to work.
Otherwise what happens is that the people who can see each other face to face and in the hallway will of course do it, leaving the odd remote person out of many conversations. So either the remote person won't be as in the loop as the others (bad for them, and bad for the overall team dynamic because someone needs to be treated specially), or else everyone on the team needs change their otherwise perfectly normal and perfectly productive patterns of communication (leading to frustration with the artificial constraint).
So there's nothing inherently wrong with remote workers, but it's probably better to go "all in" like some companies are starting to do, or try to avoid it at all, except in very special circumstances.
I bet many of the "99%" of companies the author was referring to that said "no" to his working remotely simply fell into the category where the majority of existing employees weren't remote, so they they chose not to introduce the new and arguably difficult to manage dynamic.
In my experience, I was working remotely in the company's early days. The in-office employes really started to grow after me. While I remain the only one that really works outside of the office, the culture of remote workers was instilled from nearly the beginning and don't really find any of the problems you suggest to be true in my case.
For example, brainstorming sessions end with scribbles on whiteboards, and a fleet of Post-Its that say "Do Not Erase!" It's perfectly adequate documentation because the same team comes in the following afternoon and keeps going. But the one or two people that work remotely are never going to see it. And no matter how much Skype you do, it's just not the same as being in the room as it happens.
Same problem (seems off-topic but i am not so sure it is) is for someone who doesn't smoke. I don't and I thought about starting (or at least getting myself chocolate cigarettes) to join the colleagues outside during the break to stay in the information loop.
I have yet to work in any place, remote or local, that doesn't have a large portion of the executive team (which is always a double-digit percentage of the total headcount of the company) on the road for various reasons a substantial chunk of the time.
I think companies that rely on this face-to-face dynamic (of which there are many) are doomed because the normal operation of their company will necessarily disconnect people on a regular basis. If you're not putting all the critical information somewhere reachable by everyone, all the time, you're shooting yourself in the foot, even if (in the usual case) everyone shows up to the same room every day.
I think the "these companies are wrong" posts, though, are not attempting to see it from the other side.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of these startups. In super-super early startups (e.g. pre-profitability or definitely pre-revenue) one of the goals (aside from staying afloat) is to build a sustainable culture (company etc.). It's very difficult to build a company culture AND product AND hit profitability AND 1,000 other things from scratch before going out of business.
When most are co-located and a few are distributed it just adds one more thing to the pile. I've done it before, so I know how hard it is, even when we were all 'on board' with it.
It's just harder; you need to start from scratch with the assumption that any one can be remote at any time, and so you build your tools/processes accordingly (if you have a physical kanban board then it'll be a real hard thing to support remote devs).
For just one non-top 1% of all software-developer persons? The overhead is probably not worth it if you have a ready talent pool in your city (especially if you now have nexus in another state, which is a very real risk as states are looking to increase their revenue. ugh).
For Joe Average, or Jane Above Average, these companies would prefer to hire a local person than remote. That makes sense to me.
As a big part of getting from 'startup' to 'sustainable business' involves managing risk. So, understand where most of these businesses are coming from. Having one or two remote people in a company full of on-site people is a risk (not from a technical perspective, but from a culture and focus one), and not one they're willing to take.
It's a trade-off, and one that can make sense if viewed in context and done for the right reasons (note: "We can't control them/see their work/trust them/need to see their faces/need them from 9-5/etc." are WRONG REASONS).
Ranting about a system problem isn't very useful; I'd like to see more posts about how to convert a primarily on-site team to support 'work anywhere'. What processes and tools need to change to do this?
1. Continuous Integration (and or delivery) This is the sine qua non. Everyone should be able to check out and build a complete working eco system and run all tests on their local laptop or Rackspace cluster you rent just for them
2. Really, get the continuous integration working. Stop now and do nothing else till you have. Tell the dev's remote working is only possible after one month of a CI process that is never broken itself (although build can break). Spurred on, everyone will suddenly get that CI build working.
3. The CEO must build a complete off site copy of the entire company on his remote laptop. Is it getting boring yet.
4. Agree on one place to store all documents, all meeting notes, everything. Do not split comms over IRC and Skype and gmail and ... It will mean no one can reliably contact anyone else because "oh I left you a message on Skype", "but I live on IRC"
5. Get different people to work together on different areas. Pair programming is not ideal IMO, but having Fred write the code for task A and Bob principlaly write the first tests, means they have to talk and decide a solution, and Bob keeps a friendly competitive eye on progess. Move these pairs around a bit.
6. Stop trying to get updates for management - its either working code or not.
7. talk to people a lot. Watch thier checkin velocity - it will speak volumes. Talk if it changes.
8. Assume, perhaps commit visibly, to people as being safe in their jobs for a long time (2 years minimum). This to me seems the biggest - people need to feel safe. Maybve thats just me
This can't be understated. When I ask the founder where the company logo is and they say "it's on one of the external harddrives sitting around the office somewhere", it's incredibly frustrating. The most well-oiled startup I worked for had a perfectly organized central-storage of digital resources, which greatly contributed to the smooth workings of the company.
That's getting scary.
Since you're using Git, all those repos are presumably backed up on individual development machines. Or you could easily write a cron job to mirror them every day or so.
The real problem is other content like issue tracking, wikis, and pull requests. If keeping these is important, you may be locked into the platform, at least as far as existing projects are concerned.
[1] http://gitlab.org/
Remote working is ofter perceived as a dream job, which, in fact, isn't so much. Besides performing your regular tasks, you have to deal with all the self-support stuff yourself, including avoiding your work stepping over your personal life, which is even worse if you work at home. It takes some practice to do that properly, to say the least.
I think that's where most people trying to work remotely utterly fail. They think they should be able to work anytime, when others will likely want to talk to them in normal hours. They think they don't need an schedule, when the only thing that would allow them to do their work is at least a self-imposed one. You won't be able to cook your meal and do your work at the same time, trust me. Lastly, if you lack self-discipline, remote working isn't for you.
The other side of the coin is even sadder: it's not that companies are not "open" to remote work, is that they just don't know how to manage it. They usually play their silly manager techniques by the book, which are for on-site teams (and often don't work, anyway). They just can't handle remote work. A clever manager capable of that is more scarce and expensive, also.
Hiring/Recruiters have the worst of both worlds, plus one thing that drives me nuts: regular hiring doesn't work for science and technology. If your task is looking for a "Python developer" and you think that it involves training some snakes, you're out of your element. If you're not capable to understand at least the basics of what you're looking for, you won't find it, and even worse, you won't understand what "training snakes remotely" means.
In the end, combination of all those things hurt remote working for everyone: people who doesn't (and doesn't want to) know how to do it, companies that doesn't know how to handle it (and they try with their archaic means, failing completely), and the guys in the middle that just want to score another commission for a hire of dubious quality.
Sorry, it ended up being longer that the rant itself.
(Disclosure: I've been working remotely for a few years, and I wouldn't change that for anything else. I agree completely about the current status of "remote working", hiring and reasons for meetups. But please, if anyone thinks remote working is a dream job, go get a regular one and stop making things more difficult for the ones that actually want and know how to make it work)