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I'm the CTO of 17hats. The entire engineering team works remotely. It's not as challenging as you seem to suggest. Right now is the best time ever to be remote.

• swampthinker 11y ago
  What's Speak?
  • 4684499 11y ago
    https://speak.io/ https://speak.io/
  • buf 11y ago
    speak.io Super low bandwidth audio/video/screensharing.
    • abraae 11y ago
      Its funny, your elevator pitch makes me want to use them. But over at their web site, they just look like a me-too skype replacement. They don't push the low bandwidth aspect at all.
      • buf 11y ago
        They were just purchased by Slack as well.
        • samhoggnz 11y ago
          I think you're thinking of Screenhero - https://slack.com/screenhero https://slack.com/screenhero
          • buf 11y ago
            Woops! Yes, you're right. Speak was originally Sqwiggle, but then pivoted. Got my S-companies confused.
• ygjb 11y ago
  Here are some: communication, loneliness, isolation, timezones, discipline It's really great that working remotely (anecdotally) works well for your team. It also doesn't work well for some folks. Like any other approach to business, YMMV, but discounting the disadvantages that have been enumerated for you is explicitly ignoring the fact that some people, including those who are top performing employees in their fields, prefer not to work remotely. It's best to make the decision and your own recommendations acknowledging there are trade offs, no?
  • buf 11y ago
    You have a point. If someone does not enjoy remote work, then they should not get a remote job. I'm not a very good country music singer. When I sing country music, I feel shame, discomfort, and general depression. Therefore, I don't sing country music.
    • percept 11y ago
      As a remote worker you can sing it loud and proud.
      • buf 11y ago
        I didn't want to rub it in.
    • gkop 11y ago
      Ok, so your company only hires country singers? You are missing out on amazing, qualified candidates that don't sing country music. Even if you are having a successful time hiring great people that are happy remote, how are you going to retain them? A remote software job is much closer to a commodity than a traditional software job. (I read the 37signals book and built a remote team over 5 years; in the end the difficulty finding people that are truly happy remote meant retention was difficult and, overall recruiting and cost of living considered, a remote team was, for me, a net wash). Edit: after thinking more, it's even worse; you don't know if most applicants can really be happy singing country music for a year, 2 years, or longer... Even those that seem to really value and are excited about the prospect of singing country music may learn before too long that it's not for them.
• AJ007 11y ago
  One this is certain, it has gotten easier. In my case I can work remote and be entirely mobile. In the past that involved a drop of productivity at least 50%. The disadvantages are the health problems that occur if a remote worker is sitting at home all day, physically and mentally. These can take years to begin manifesting themselves and are really bad if the remote worker can't self identify them.
  • blisterpeanuts 11y ago
    What kind of health problems? I've been working remote for about three years now and so far, haven't noticed any problems in myself. Certainly it's made it easier to jump on the home elliptical, lift a few weights, do a few chin-ups, or run outside for 45 mins. Back when I was in an office downtown, it was an expensive and time consuming project to go out 4-5 times a week to a gym at lunchtime or after work, then need to shower immediately before you can be around your workmates again, etc. I'm also so much more relaxed now that I don't have to commute. That was a real stressor.
• AJ007 11y ago
  One this is certain, it has gotten easier. In my case I can work remote and be entirely mobile. In the past that involved a drop of productivity at least 50%. The disadvantages are the health problems that occur if a remote worker is sitting at home all day, physically and mentally. These can take years to begin manifesting themselves and are really bad if the remote worker can't self identify them.
• AJ007 11y ago
  One this is certain, it has gotten easier. In my case I can work remote and be entirely mobile. In the past that involved a drop of productivity at least 50%. The disadvantages are the health problems that occur if a remote worker is sitting at home all day, physically and mentally. These can take years to begin manifesting themselves and are really bad if the remote worker can't self identify them.
• d_t_w 11y ago
  I've been working remotely for the same client since late 2012, in general it's been ideal in a number of ways and the positives out-weigh the negatives. I do miss the casual social side of having colleagues in an office from time to time, but I tend to be quite a social person. That, and maintaining delivery over a long period of time requires focus and discipline, no small effort.
• velocitypsycho 11y ago
  Screenhero is an amazing tool also.
• hamburglar 11y ago
  How long have you been doing this? I'm a pretty serious introvert and I have been working remotely for about 6 years. I started out absolutely loving it but the shine is definitely off over the past year and the drawbacks are feeling like they are balancing out the benefits. The only thing that keeps me sane is if I am fairly religious about having at least two social outings per week, and even with that, it's starting to wear on me. It's possible that it's actually cured me of being an introvert.
• eplanit 11y ago
  This is interesting. It seems that you at 17hats built remote work into the core business model, establishing the processes and tool sets to enable and encourage it. Your story stands out as your outcome is so much more positive. The difference in your approach vs. what what most clients/companies do is that they tolerate and accommodate remote work rather than embrace and enable it. The accommodation approach, in my own experience, leads to the comms and isolation issues.
• mikekchar 11y ago
  I'm in the middle of a blog post of what it's like to work 9 time zones from the rest of your colleagues. There are lots of good things, but there are also a lot of challenges. If the entire team is distributed, a lot of those challenges are mitigated. If only a few people are distributed, then you can get problems like unequal access to information, or unequal access to people. Even though my team is used to remote workers and is very conscientious, it is not unusual to have things change direction without anyone thinking to inform me. The "everybody knows" problem is pervasive. Access to people is even more difficult. When you are working locally, it is easy to brainstorm with someone while walking to the store to buy lunch, for instance. You have a certain amount of influence on the team because conversations are low cost. Remotely, you have to come up with the idea on your own, then send an email, wait for a response, etc, etc. It is not spontaneous, which means that by and large remote workers have much less influence than local workers. Even with hangouts, IRC and slack, it's hard to generate the same banter that you would have locally (especially when you are separated by 9 timezones). If there is anyone local who is keen on political machinations, you pretty much have to be happy with letting them have their way. You will be outmaneuvered at every turn. This places a much higher requirement for trust on remote workers. You have to trust that people will tell you about things, and then ask for your input and then wait for your reply -- rather than just doing what they wanted to do in the first place. As I said, if you are a fully remote team, this is less of an issue. However, there are still lots of challenges in this scenario. One of the biggest surprises that I had when I moved from local to remote on my present team was how my attitude towards my team mates changed. When I was local, I went out for drinks with people, and chatted about sports and basically hung out with them. When I was remote, most of my interaction centred around code. In the local situation, if I was pissed off about a technical issue, or something that somebody did, then my attitude towards the person was tempered by my general good feelings about them as a person. In the remote situation, my interface with people is almost entirely technical, so when someone does something I don't like, I tend to feel badly about the person as well as the issue. This is something that I need to constantly remind myself about -- they are good people doing things I don't like. It is much easier to forget this when you are working remotely, I find. There are many other challenges as well. It's not that these challenges are insurmountable, though. You need to build a culture where people operate in the way that works for your team. It sounds like you have done that on your team. On our team as well, I don't think there is anyone remote who would rather be local, so from that perspective it works well. There are people on our team who would much rather be local and I can understand their feeling. I suspect there may be one or two people who would rather that there weren't any remote people on the team because it interferes with how they would prefer to work. I respect that too and always try to accommodate my team mates. It's a balancing act.
• spotman 11y ago
  +1 for occasionally meeting up. My team works remote and while some of us do see each other more frequent, others are on the other side of the country. So about two times per year, once for a tech summit we go to , and another we have our own summit, we take over a hotel and hang out. During this time we also gives talks and other things but it is half fun and half work. I think occasional face to face time and bonding time is super helpful, but not everyone needs that every day, and I think in our case it had made these twice a year meet ups something we all really get excited about and look forward too.