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Why isn't office disrupted by transferring to remote work? You have these companies that make tools like 'slack', 'asana', 'dropbox' etc. which help you work re

Why isn't office disrupted by transferring to remote work? You have these companies that make tools like 'slack', 'asana', 'dropbox' etc. which help you work remotely and all of them require their employees to be at the office in the most expensive location in the US. Programming/customer_support/sales/design/marketing jobs can all be done from anywhere. What is stopping these startups from going remote?

gaius 11y ago
Because it isn't true. Remote work is fine one or two days a week but nothing beats the bandwidth of a dozen engineers in a room with a whiteboard when it comes to tackling hard problems. If you're just making cookie-cutter intranets or shopping carts or something sure, go 100% remote, but that is not what Silicon Valley is for.
- ghaff 11y ago
  No, much of Silicon Valley these days is for making cookie-cutter mobile social apps and the like.
- ironchef 11y ago
  Gaius, Studies are mixed on the pros/cons of office vs remote. For example a Stanford study showed productivity increased 9 to 13% for remote office workers. Some have shown that collaboration can increase as well as communication was more intentional (I don't remember the study offhand). Anyways, point is it's not all or nothing and the data is still out on effectiveness and efficiency (I'd think it also depends on the nature of the work etc)
  - geggam 11y ago
    Totally depends on the person IMO... We have one day a week we work from home... I find myself producing more that day than the rest combined. Others on the team function differently
    - johansch 11y ago
      And on the role. Compare: 1. A role which requires very little communication with the rest of team and quite a lot of long, uninterrupted concentration. E.g. a developer working a long time on some internally intricate sub-system which has well-defined interfaces to the rest of the system. 2. E.g. a UX designer (or perhaps a product manager) who needs to talk to many people, whose projects shift quickly, whose work affects many other people's work, etc.
      - RyanZAG 11y ago
        UX design of customer facing systems would actually benefit most from remote work. The UX designer should create a company wide blog (or similar) showing off the current iteration of the design, along with reasons why each design element is included. This is far better than simply talking to many people 1 to 1. It creates a written history indicating why each design element was chosen. It allows stakeholders to understand the requirements behind a particularly strange UX choice and allows them to give suggestions for better UX in a way that takes those requirements into account. Iteration can be faster as comments can be taken from all sides at the same time instead of having to seek people out and set up meetings. I only see positives for a UX designer given the nature of their work is highly visual, functional and is cross-organizational. In fact, I think any company NOT doing UX design this way is probably being inefficient?
  - jblow 11y ago
    Given how much we know at this point of the utter questionability of studies in the social and psychological sciences, I don't think it's at all productive to make this kind of point. Sad but true.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >If you're just making cookie-cutter intranets or shopping carts or something sure, go 100% remote, but that is not what Silicon Valley is for. Maybe that's not what Silicon Valley is for, in some grand cosmic sense, but I'd require some convincing that it isn't what Silicon Valley actually mostly does.
- gedy 11y ago
  Fine, but this supposed benefit is _easily_ negated by the huge problem of employees leaving the Bay Area due to costs, trying to rehire, inflated salaries for cost of living, etc. Our new management came in with "no more remote!", but then trying to keep up with what SV is "for" has been a giant hassle and destroyed ability to deliver.
antiviral 11y ago
Many smaller and mid-size companies tend to have more of an ad-hoc process of setting meetings and making decisions than larger firms. In my experience, people who are working from home or in another time-zone tend to miss out on a chance to participate. And if they are on another continent like Asia, their influence becomes even more remote.
- ghaff 11y ago
  That's true and can even be true with larger companies--at least if teams aren't already highly distributed through acquisitions, etc. That said, barring major shifts, it's probably also true that new companies are increasingly going to have to choose between having a nominal HQ in a favored area like SV and being largely distributed or locating somewhere more affordable.
- tamana 11y ago
  Time zones are a major challenge, but remote work includes a huge range of locations in the same timezone.
lordnacho 11y ago
As someone who worked in an office for many years and then moved to fully remote, here are the reasons: - Politics / Face Time. Some people really do think that nothing goes on when people are working from home. Some people like to have everyone's attention now and again, to demonstrate something about their status. - They haven't figured out how to do it yet, both technically and socially. If you have one or two people who don't know how GitHub works, or how Trello or Slack work, you can't do it. There are certain people who come from an age where you never needed productivity tools, and they just can't use them, no matter how easy it is. Unfortunately, they tend to be the people who can decide whether remote is working out for the team. - They haven't figured it out socially: some people have configured their home life in a way that doesn't work for remote. The associations between being in the home and being away from home are deeply ingrained in some folks. As for actual productivity, I've found it skyrockets in a properly functioning remote team. We have a Slack/Trello/Github/etc mashup where Slack is the hub. Anything that comes up can be pinged to the right person, and you can see when people are pushing code. The cards let you organise things. No commute + set your own hours means you get things done. Not being tied to a location is great, too, though I do try to make sure the family gets enough attention.
- cageface 11y ago
  I've been way more productive working remotely than I ever was in an office. I think it has a lot to do with a comfortable working environment, no commuting, and fewer distractions.
- tamana 11y ago
  Re slack etc: at my office we have a solution for people who can't competently use the tools required by their job function: unemployment insurance
  - lordnacho 11y ago
    Doesn't work when the person in question is a partner.
- electricEmu 11y ago
beachstartup 11y ago
the irony is that hiring older workers, remote workers (sometimes older, remote workers) is something that only younger managers/executives do.
jacques_chester 11y ago
I work for Pivotal Labs, so my daily style of working is all about colocation and pair programming. I am accustomed to being able to turn to any of my peers, especially product managers and designers, to ask a question. Previously I worked entirely remotely as a freelancer. I've also interacted quite a bit with the Spring team, either in the office or through Slack. They are a fully distributed team, some of whom choose to work in various Pivotal offices because of the amenities. Both approaches work, they just work differently. The cats-and-dogs arguments people have about local/remote is, in my experience, largely about personal preference.
BurningFrog 11y ago
I think we need to level up the tools one or two more notches, until it's more like being in the same room. Both because people may slack of when unsupervised, and because you want a team dynamic where you can have a quick 10 minute meeting about stuff, and so on. Maybe Oculus Rift will be the beginning the end of astronomical SF real estate prices.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Things have improved but we still don't really have the like whiteboarding (or whatever) together in a conference room. I agree that it's partly the lack of tools--maybe VR will help although this whole "like being in the same room" notion has been around for a long time and it hasn't been cracked. Some of it is also cultural. If you're not going to have drop by conversations and other serendipitous meetings, you need to be more disciplined about having those conversations anyway even if they wouldn't have historically risen to the level of sending an email or making a call.
nzoschke 11y ago
It's still the early days of remote work but it's coming... It's really hard to turn an office culture into a remote culture. I experienced this at my last employer (Heroku). We hired a ton of great remote staff, but there was always an impedance mismatch. Lots of local people still want to solve problems face to face. It's much easier to start remote from scratch. I am doing this with my new venture (Convox). There are challenges. The high bandwidth face to face time is indeed better for problem solving. And is truly important for serendipity. But we are willfully trading those things in to work from home, live all around the country, and not spend money on an office. Even YC is behind the curve here. They make you move to Mountain View and tell you distributed startups don't work.

gaius 11y ago

Because it isn't true. Remote work is fine one or two days a week but nothing beats the bandwidth of a dozen engineers in a room with a whiteboard when it comes to tackling hard problems. If you're just making cookie-cutter intranets or shopping carts or something sure, go 100% remote, but that is not what Silicon Valley is for.

ghaff 11y ago
No, much of Silicon Valley these days is for making cookie-cutter mobile social apps and the like.
ironchef 11y ago
Gaius, Studies are mixed on the pros/cons of office vs remote. For example a Stanford study showed productivity increased 9 to 13% for remote office workers. Some have shown that collaboration can increase as well as communication was more intentional (I don't remember the study offhand). Anyways, point is it's not all or nothing and the data is still out on effectiveness and efficiency (I'd think it also depends on the nature of the work etc)
- geggam 11y ago
  Totally depends on the person IMO... We have one day a week we work from home... I find myself producing more that day than the rest combined. Others on the team function differently
  - johansch 11y ago
    And on the role. Compare: 1. A role which requires very little communication with the rest of team and quite a lot of long, uninterrupted concentration. E.g. a developer working a long time on some internally intricate sub-system which has well-defined interfaces to the rest of the system. 2. E.g. a UX designer (or perhaps a product manager) who needs to talk to many people, whose projects shift quickly, whose work affects many other people's work, etc.
    - RyanZAG 11y ago
      UX design of customer facing systems would actually benefit most from remote work. The UX designer should create a company wide blog (or similar) showing off the current iteration of the design, along with reasons why each design element is included. This is far better than simply talking to many people 1 to 1. It creates a written history indicating why each design element was chosen. It allows stakeholders to understand the requirements behind a particularly strange UX choice and allows them to give suggestions for better UX in a way that takes those requirements into account. Iteration can be faster as comments can be taken from all sides at the same time instead of having to seek people out and set up meetings. I only see positives for a UX designer given the nature of their work is highly visual, functional and is cross-organizational. In fact, I think any company NOT doing UX design this way is probably being inefficient?
- jblow 11y ago
  Given how much we know at this point of the utter questionability of studies in the social and psychological sciences, I don't think it's at all productive to make this kind of point. Sad but true.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>If you're just making cookie-cutter intranets or shopping carts or something sure, go 100% remote, but that is not what Silicon Valley is for. Maybe that's not what Silicon Valley is for, in some grand cosmic sense, but I'd require some convincing that it isn't what Silicon Valley actually mostly does.
gedy 11y ago
Fine, but this supposed benefit is _easily_ negated by the huge problem of employees leaving the Bay Area due to costs, trying to rehire, inflated salaries for cost of living, etc. Our new management came in with "no more remote!", but then trying to keep up with what SV is "for" has been a giant hassle and destroyed ability to deliver.

antiviral 11y ago

Many smaller and mid-size companies tend to have more of an ad-hoc process of setting meetings and making decisions than larger firms. In my experience, people who are working from home or in another time-zone tend to miss out on a chance to participate. And if they are on another continent like Asia, their influence becomes even more remote.

ghaff 11y ago
That's true and can even be true with larger companies--at least if teams aren't already highly distributed through acquisitions, etc. That said, barring major shifts, it's probably also true that new companies are increasingly going to have to choose between having a nominal HQ in a favored area like SV and being largely distributed or locating somewhere more affordable.
tamana 11y ago
Time zones are a major challenge, but remote work includes a huge range of locations in the same timezone.

lordnacho 11y ago

As someone who worked in an office for many years and then moved to fully remote, here are the reasons: - Politics / Face Time. Some people really do think that nothing goes on when people are working from home. Some people like to have everyone's attention now and again, to demonstrate something about their status. - They haven't figured out how to do it yet, both technically and socially. If you have one or two people who don't know how GitHub works, or how Trello or Slack work, you can't do it. There are certain people who come from an age where you never needed productivity tools, and they just can't use them, no matter how easy it is. Unfortunately, they tend to be the people who can decide whether remote is working out for the team. - They haven't figured it out socially: some people have configured their home life in a way that doesn't work for remote. The associations between being in the home and being away from home are deeply ingrained in some folks. As for actual productivity, I've found it skyrockets in a properly functioning remote team. We have a Slack/Trello/Github/etc mashup where Slack is the hub. Anything that comes up can be pinged to the right person, and you can see when people are pushing code. The cards let you organise things. No commute + set your own hours means you get things done. Not being tied to a location is great, too, though I do try to make sure the family gets enough attention.

cageface 11y ago
I've been way more productive working remotely than I ever was in an office. I think it has a lot to do with a comfortable working environment, no commuting, and fewer distractions.
tamana 11y ago
Re slack etc: at my office we have a solution for people who can't competently use the tools required by their job function: unemployment insurance
- lordnacho 11y ago
  Doesn't work when the person in question is a partner.
electricEmu 11y ago

beachstartup 11y ago

the irony is that hiring older workers, remote workers (sometimes older, remote workers) is something that only younger managers/executives do.

jacques_chester 11y ago

I work for Pivotal Labs, so my daily style of working is all about colocation and pair programming. I am accustomed to being able to turn to any of my peers, especially product managers and designers, to ask a question. Previously I worked entirely remotely as a freelancer. I've also interacted quite a bit with the Spring team, either in the office or through Slack. They are a fully distributed team, some of whom choose to work in various Pivotal offices because of the amenities. Both approaches work, they just work differently. The cats-and-dogs arguments people have about local/remote is, in my experience, largely about personal preference.

BurningFrog 11y ago

I think we need to level up the tools one or two more notches, until it's more like being in the same room. Both because people may slack of when unsupervised, and because you want a team dynamic where you can have a quick 10 minute meeting about stuff, and so on. Maybe Oculus Rift will be the beginning the end of astronomical SF real estate prices.

ghaff 11y ago
Things have improved but we still don't really have the like whiteboarding (or whatever) together in a conference room. I agree that it's partly the lack of tools--maybe VR will help although this whole "like being in the same room" notion has been around for a long time and it hasn't been cracked. Some of it is also cultural. If you're not going to have drop by conversations and other serendipitous meetings, you need to be more disciplined about having those conversations anyway even if they wouldn't have historically risen to the level of sending an email or making a call.

nzoschke 11y ago

It's still the early days of remote work but it's coming... It's really hard to turn an office culture into a remote culture. I experienced this at my last employer (Heroku). We hired a ton of great remote staff, but there was always an impedance mismatch. Lots of local people still want to solve problems face to face. It's much easier to start remote from scratch. I am doing this with my new venture (Convox). There are challenges. The high bandwidth face to face time is indeed better for problem solving. And is truly important for serendipity. But we are willfully trading those things in to work from home, live all around the country, and not spend money on an office. Even YC is behind the curve here. They make you move to Mountain View and tell you distributed startups don't work.