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Absolutely zero remote work, yet I built Stack Overflow with a team of entirely remote developers, and do the same with Discourse today. I guess every company

Absolutely zero remote work, yet I built Stack Overflow with a team of entirely remote developers, and do the same with Discourse today. I guess every company culture is a series of choices, but it is very hard to be diverse -- which appears to be one of Clef's main goals -- when you only recruit in a tightly limited geographic area.

jessepollak 11y ago
Yeah, at our current size + team composition we don't feel like we have the knowledge/experience to do remote work well. With that informing our decision making, we've decided to prioritize other things (that have different tradeoffs). I think as we keep growing this will definitely change. Would love to learn from someone like you who's obviously been super successful at doing remote well :)
- thoman23 11y ago
  You might be overthinking how hard it is to allow remote work.
- eitally 11y ago
  My $.02 is that being successful with remote workers is a management problem. If you're a good manager and you hire well, you'll have few problems. This coming from a guy who worked from home for most of the past ten years, remotely managing a group of 100+ who were located in ten different time zones (including, but not limited to the US, Scotland, Hungary, India, Singapore, China, Mexico and Brazil). Constant, clear communications and a stated set of mid- and long-term coals is absolutely critical. Get the team aligned, organize your product development, and ensure a consistent, timely feedback loop and you'll be ok. Also, make sure you get all the key players physically together at least 2-4 times per year.
cjbprime 11y ago
I tried to read about Stack Overflow and Discourse's diversity, but all I could find was these two pages of guys: http://stackexchange.com/about/management http://stackexchange.com/about/management http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ Maybe you have better links? Or maybe you weren't saying that Discourse and Stack Overflow did well on diversity; merely that you think Clef will do badly too? (They seem to be doing reasonably okay right now to me.)
- meowface 11y ago
  His comment was accurate in that you are constraining many vectors of diversity by only hiring from a specific location, even if gender likely isn't one of those vectors. Also, the gender of a company's management team doesn't necessarily reflect the gender distribution of all their employees. And I don't believe Discourse is owned by Stack Exchange.
- benihana 11y ago
  Completely irrelevant, baiting non-sequitur. Your perception of his company's diversity does not change the validity of his point about having a less diverse pool to hire from.
  - cjbprime 11y ago
    > Your perception of his company's diversity does not change the validity of his point about having a less diverse pool to hire from. It changes how seriously I would take his advice. If someone says "I did X, and without X it would be very hard to do Y.", you would assume that they actually did Y. If you later find out that they didn't do Y, and further that the people they're advising to change their behavior and start doing X are better at Y than they were.. it's a sign you might feel free to ignore their advice.
- RogerL 11y ago
  https://github.com/clef/handbook/issues/69 https://github.com/clef/handbook/issues/69 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/4794bc93db32222855b4ee601e2a7b79554c5b21 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/4794bc93db32222855b4... https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/d25a1e33adf93ad6bb892ec4f185f91a3eadfcf9 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/d25a1e33adf93ad6bb89...
- codinghorror 11y ago
  I just think it is super weird to be completely, categorically opposed to remote work when a primary goal is diversity. It is a severe constraint on hiring, and you want super flexible hiring to maximize diversity.
famousactress 11y ago
Jeff, I didn't know this about SO or Discourse! I follow coding horror, is this something you've written about extensively? We need more voices. The value-leverage remote work has is so huge. Makes it really frustrating that there aren't more people really talking about it (slash doing it). I recently noticed that Slack also doesn't appear to support remote work. Kind of an ultimate irony :(
CamperBob2 11y ago
+1. Unless you're a believer in affirmative action, which I'm not, the ultimate way to work for diversity is to not even know what races, colors, or sexes your employees are.
- stfp 11y ago
  Two thoughts: - It's not a ternary choice between being racist/bigoted, perfectly neutral, or practicing affirmative action. You (along with everyone else) have a set of implicit biases; to curb them and better yourself, you have to take into account things like gender, color or age. - How do you not know these things in a small startup?
  - PopeOfNope 11y ago
    You (along with everyone else) have a set of implicit biases Which you can correct for without ever meeting the person in question or taking into account their gender, color or age. How do you not know these things in a small startup? I don't understand. Does starting a company suddenly make you stupid?
jessedhillon 11y ago
In what way do you consider the Discourse and Stack Overflow teams to be diverse?
slantedview 11y ago
I like how the remote work page mentions how many hours employees typically work. This hints at a misinformed mindset about the nature of remote work.
- slantedview 11y ago
  Not sure what the downvotes are about. The documents mention elsewhere that 45-50 hours are the norm. Mentioning it again on the "no remote work" page gives the impression that the authors view remote is unworkable due to hours or that remote workers need to be reminded of expected hours. You can dislike that and downvote it if you want, but it doesn't change that it is.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
I'm sorry, but I think these recurring "we do everything remote" are cheap shots from the outliers that produce software that, with all due respect, is relatively simple, usually the "for developers, by developers" kind of stuff. I work with a team that deals with a highly complex domain, and for us it is absolutely essential that we are close to and regularly interact with the rest of the business. This can't be replaced by remote work unless I create an extra layer of analysts to tell the developers what to code, which is both highly inefficient, removes a lot of potential innovation that comes from the synergy between people looking at the challenges for different angles, and a lot less fun for everyone involved. For me, what happens between developers and non-technical coworkers in the hallways and during lunch is an essential part of the process of making great products together that cannot be replaced by remote work. (To be clear: within the dev teams we are completely set up for remote work, and any developer can work from home at any time without prior permission. It's certainly not a matter of lack of trust or facilities.)
- scrollaway 11y ago
  How is discourse "for developers"? And how do you call his post "cheap shots from the outliers" when he repeated the success in another domain?
mmaunder 11y ago
Also not sure I agree with the rationale they provide for remote not working for their needs. As a small team, things move very quickly and decisions are made or reversed as new information helps guide us. This makes it really hard to keep up with company progress for anyone who isn’t in the office participating in all of the conversations that are going on. As a result, we put a high premium on physical colocation, even though this limits the geography that we can recruit from. I think this is a common misconception and tools like Slack (or previously IRC) and smart scheduling of skype conferences can go a long way to helping. It's worked great for our team. Our size varies, but up to 14 people collaborating from around the country and world. Remember, working remotely reduces environmental impact, gives your team more family time because you eliminate the commute, diversity has also been mentioned, larger hiring pool, multiple languages is often a nice side-effect and it gives you multiple time zones which is great for support teams.
lultimouomo 11y ago
I do basically all my work as a remote consultant, so I applaud your commitment to remote work, but I want to play devil's advocate. Could it be that hiring remote forces you to be more conservative in choosing developers, favoring ones with ultra strong resumes (in the general sense, not strictly thing written in a PDF), therefore making you pay more for talent and passing on people which could have strong skills but less experience? It seems reasonable that having people come into the office every day lets you judge them better and quicker, especially if they're not expected to be 100% autonomous. This would lower the risk of hiring someone you think has potential but hasn't proved it yet, which could turn out well for both the employee and the company (as he will be - fairly - paid less).
jacques_chester 11y ago
Stack Overflow HQ is in NYC, one of the most diverse population centres in the USA and the world. In my daily work at Pivotal Labs, also in NYC, I am embedded in a TDD, pair-all-the-time team. But I also frequently interact with the fully distributed Spring development team via internal Slack channels. I don't think one approach strictly dominates the other in general. It's contextual. For example: I have ADHD. I have discovered that I actively dislike working alone. Pairing is a godsend for me. Sure, remote pairing is possible. We have one Pivot with around ten thousand hours of remote pairing experience, and others with hundreds to thousands of hours of remote pairing experience. For most cases it is not as good as a single team in a single location and most of our remote pivots spend time in our offices.
mbesto 11y ago
To be fair, not many companies understand how to operate businesses effectively with remote employees.

jessepollak 11y ago

Yeah, at our current size + team composition we don't feel like we have the knowledge/experience to do remote work well. With that informing our decision making, we've decided to prioritize other things (that have different tradeoffs). I think as we keep growing this will definitely change. Would love to learn from someone like you who's obviously been super successful at doing remote well :)

thoman23 11y ago
You might be overthinking how hard it is to allow remote work.
eitally 11y ago
My $.02 is that being successful with remote workers is a management problem. If you're a good manager and you hire well, you'll have few problems. This coming from a guy who worked from home for most of the past ten years, remotely managing a group of 100+ who were located in ten different time zones (including, but not limited to the US, Scotland, Hungary, India, Singapore, China, Mexico and Brazil). Constant, clear communications and a stated set of mid- and long-term coals is absolutely critical. Get the team aligned, organize your product development, and ensure a consistent, timely feedback loop and you'll be ok. Also, make sure you get all the key players physically together at least 2-4 times per year.

cjbprime 11y ago

I tried to read about Stack Overflow and Discourse's diversity, but all I could find was these two pages of guys: http://stackexchange.com/about/management http://stackexchange.com/about/management http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/ Maybe you have better links? Or maybe you weren't saying that Discourse and Stack Overflow did well on diversity; merely that you think Clef will do badly too? (They seem to be doing reasonably okay right now to me.)

meowface 11y ago
His comment was accurate in that you are constraining many vectors of diversity by only hiring from a specific location, even if gender likely isn't one of those vectors. Also, the gender of a company's management team doesn't necessarily reflect the gender distribution of all their employees. And I don't believe Discourse is owned by Stack Exchange.
benihana 11y ago
Completely irrelevant, baiting non-sequitur. Your perception of his company's diversity does not change the validity of his point about having a less diverse pool to hire from.
- cjbprime 11y ago
  > Your perception of his company's diversity does not change the validity of his point about having a less diverse pool to hire from. It changes how seriously I would take his advice. If someone says "I did X, and without X it would be very hard to do Y.", you would assume that they actually did Y. If you later find out that they didn't do Y, and further that the people they're advising to change their behavior and start doing X are better at Y than they were.. it's a sign you might feel free to ignore their advice.
RogerL 11y ago
https://github.com/clef/handbook/issues/69 https://github.com/clef/handbook/issues/69 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/4794bc93db32222855b4ee601e2a7b79554c5b21 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/4794bc93db32222855b4... https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/d25a1e33adf93ad6bb892ec4f185f91a3eadfcf9 https://github.com/clef/handbook/commit/d25a1e33adf93ad6bb89...
codinghorror 11y ago
I just think it is super weird to be completely, categorically opposed to remote work when a primary goal is diversity. It is a severe constraint on hiring, and you want super flexible hiring to maximize diversity.

famousactress 11y ago

Jeff, I didn't know this about SO or Discourse! I follow coding horror, is this something you've written about extensively? We need more voices. The value-leverage remote work has is so huge. Makes it really frustrating that there aren't more people really talking about it (slash doing it). I recently noticed that Slack also doesn't appear to support remote work. Kind of an ultimate irony :(

CamperBob2 11y ago

+1. Unless you're a believer in affirmative action, which I'm not, the ultimate way to work for diversity is to not even know what races, colors, or sexes your employees are.

stfp 11y ago
Two thoughts: - It's not a ternary choice between being racist/bigoted, perfectly neutral, or practicing affirmative action. You (along with everyone else) have a set of implicit biases; to curb them and better yourself, you have to take into account things like gender, color or age. - How do you not know these things in a small startup?
- PopeOfNope 11y ago
  You (along with everyone else) have a set of implicit biases Which you can correct for without ever meeting the person in question or taking into account their gender, color or age. How do you not know these things in a small startup? I don't understand. Does starting a company suddenly make you stupid?

jessedhillon 11y ago

In what way do you consider the Discourse and Stack Overflow teams to be diverse?

slantedview 11y ago

I like how the remote work page mentions how many hours employees typically work. This hints at a misinformed mindset about the nature of remote work.

slantedview 11y ago
Not sure what the downvotes are about. The documents mention elsewhere that 45-50 hours are the norm. Mentioning it again on the "no remote work" page gives the impression that the authors view remote is unworkable due to hours or that remote workers need to be reminded of expected hours. You can dislike that and downvote it if you want, but it doesn't change that it is.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

I'm sorry, but I think these recurring "we do everything remote" are cheap shots from the outliers that produce software that, with all due respect, is relatively simple, usually the "for developers, by developers" kind of stuff. I work with a team that deals with a highly complex domain, and for us it is absolutely essential that we are close to and regularly interact with the rest of the business. This can't be replaced by remote work unless I create an extra layer of analysts to tell the developers what to code, which is both highly inefficient, removes a lot of potential innovation that comes from the synergy between people looking at the challenges for different angles, and a lot less fun for everyone involved. For me, what happens between developers and non-technical coworkers in the hallways and during lunch is an essential part of the process of making great products together that cannot be replaced by remote work. (To be clear: within the dev teams we are completely set up for remote work, and any developer can work from home at any time without prior permission. It's certainly not a matter of lack of trust or facilities.)

scrollaway 11y ago
How is discourse "for developers"? And how do you call his post "cheap shots from the outliers" when he repeated the success in another domain?

mmaunder 11y ago

Also not sure I agree with the rationale they provide for remote not working for their needs. As a small team, things move very quickly and decisions are made or reversed as new information helps guide us. This makes it really hard to keep up with company progress for anyone who isn’t in the office participating in all of the conversations that are going on. As a result, we put a high premium on physical colocation, even though this limits the geography that we can recruit from. I think this is a common misconception and tools like Slack (or previously IRC) and smart scheduling of skype conferences can go a long way to helping. It's worked great for our team. Our size varies, but up to 14 people collaborating from around the country and world. Remember, working remotely reduces environmental impact, gives your team more family time because you eliminate the commute, diversity has also been mentioned, larger hiring pool, multiple languages is often a nice side-effect and it gives you multiple time zones which is great for support teams.

lultimouomo 11y ago

I do basically all my work as a remote consultant, so I applaud your commitment to remote work, but I want to play devil's advocate. Could it be that hiring remote forces you to be more conservative in choosing developers, favoring ones with ultra strong resumes (in the general sense, not strictly thing written in a PDF), therefore making you pay more for talent and passing on people which could have strong skills but less experience? It seems reasonable that having people come into the office every day lets you judge them better and quicker, especially if they're not expected to be 100% autonomous. This would lower the risk of hiring someone you think has potential but hasn't proved it yet, which could turn out well for both the employee and the company (as he will be - fairly - paid less).

jacques_chester 11y ago

Stack Overflow HQ is in NYC, one of the most diverse population centres in the USA and the world. In my daily work at Pivotal Labs, also in NYC, I am embedded in a TDD, pair-all-the-time team. But I also frequently interact with the fully distributed Spring development team via internal Slack channels. I don't think one approach strictly dominates the other in general. It's contextual. For example: I have ADHD. I have discovered that I actively dislike working alone. Pairing is a godsend for me. Sure, remote pairing is possible. We have one Pivot with around ten thousand hours of remote pairing experience, and others with hundreds to thousands of hours of remote pairing experience. For most cases it is not as good as a single team in a single location and most of our remote pivots spend time in our offices.

mbesto 11y ago

To be fair, not many companies understand how to operate businesses effectively with remote employees.