10 ms·

Remote work: 6 months later

84 points by couac 10y ago

bbcbasic 10y ago
Good on ya!
huhtenberg 10y ago
> Our only office is Slack. You mistyped Mattermost :) Seriously, no reason to share all your company inner workings with a random 3rd party when it takes literally 5 minutes to set up a completely private (and also free!) clone of the same.
- couac 10y ago
  You're absolutely right! When we started, Mattermost did not exist (or was version 0.0.0.1). Now, just like GitLab, it is a very serious thing and we consider using it instead of relying on a 3rd party. Yet, we are a very small team and cannot dedicate too much time in maintaining/upgrading apps :\
  - unixhero 10y ago
    Gitlab can be run "selfhosted" but still turnkey. Just look up Digitalocean or Bitnami.
  - jhoechtl 10y ago
    You may find https://try.gogs.io/ https://try.gogs.io/ interesting, which is much less resource hungry, performs better and got only LFS support as of recent.
- Roritharr 10y ago
  We tried. Oh we tried. But the mobile apps being not native made the mobile usage drop like a rock compared to Slack, leading to the fact that it was harder to reach people than via the old Slack. When I saw that Rocket.Chat also used non-native clients leading to similar complaints, we just dropped the whole project and moved back to Slack.
  - bpicolo 10y ago
    That's a blessing in disguise, can avoid taking work with you everywhere you go.
    - samtho 10y ago
      I'm sure we all understand what you're trying to say here, but this is the classic "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" and doesn't quite roll with everyone's use-case. I have a work phone that I take with me when I am on-call or on a customer site. Slack (or whatever we decide to use) absolutely has to work here.
- johannes1234321 10y ago
  Other companies give access to the company-internal information to the cleaning company. Many exchange business critical information by using a phone company. When self-hosting you have to care about your service-level agreements and trouble solving. If you rely on it you quickly need a growing IT/operations team. sometimes it's cheaper to pay somebody how is specialized on this. Of course one has to evaluate the company, with the ones which make money from selling information (to advertisers) I'd be more critical, but that's a matter of evaluation of options.
- briandear 10y ago
  And how much time does it take to manage the required infrastructure?
  - huhtenberg 10y ago
    Hard to say, few minutes per month, amortized?
- nickpp 10y ago
  Do they have Reactions already in Mattermost?
  - huhtenberg 10y ago
    As in "emoji"? A critical feature that precludes effective professional communication in work environment?
    - briandear 10y ago
      When someone says "we need to refactor the Whatever class" Rather than 10 people writing "agree" one can react and others can click the reaction similar to an upvote. That cuts down considerably on the noise so yes, I'd say it enhances professional communication.
      - huhtenberg 10y ago
        Ah, OK. We have no need for this, so I assumed it was the emoji thing, like in other messengers.
- briandear 10y ago
  I might argue that Slack has no interest in anyone's inner workings. I've been at companies building relatively uninteresting products that treated Github like it was the same as emailing source code and server logins to the competition. I could be wrong, but I have never heard of a single instance of a company on Github having code stolen because it was on Github. I have heard of many companies who have had their internal systems hacked. I might trust Github more simply because their entire product and value proposition is built around the use case of storing code while some company that builds a restaurant app -- their primary business isn't building code storage infrastructure. So why add operational overhead because of unfounded paranoia? Unless you're running your own metal in your own data center, there's always 'risk.' Even then, if your system is connected to the internet there's still risk. Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that hazard occurring. Then mitigating that risk in a way that is commensurate with those variables.
  - shanemhansen 10y ago
    GitHub delivered the wrong source code to people for a while. https://github.com/blog/2273-incident-report-inadvertent-private-repository-disclosure https://github.com/blog/2273-incident-report-inadvertent-pri... I'm not bashing GitHub, but some people find more value and less risk in using git in its "native" distributed mode.
    - taylorfausak 10y ago
      I think it's a little misleading to call that "a while". The post says "156 private repositories" were affected during a "ten-minute window" representing "0.0013% of the total operations at the time".
  - eeZah7Ux 10y ago
    > Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that hazard occurring. Risk analysis: using online DVCS/bugtracker/chat service you are one compromised password away from letting an attacker read the whole contents and potentially alter them. Many of those passwords will be stored in browser. Browsers are known for being softer targets compared to servers, generally speaking. Contrast this with an on-premise services: You still have login credentials but also require people to badge-in to access the building and login on the desktops or start a VPN (often requiring creds and 2fa).
draw_down 10y ago
How's the pay?
dep_b 10y ago
Working with mixed French / German teams seems to be a more interesting problem than having everybody working remote ;)
- chunkiestbacon 10y ago
  I can imagine difficulties that happen regularly in those teams not appearing, since remote work probably attracts more internationally minded people with fluent english. I've had to work with a french dev that only wanted to write emails in english and refused to speak it on the phone, maybe because his office mates could listen. A francophone boss that was so overconfident in his english ability, that he considered using "yeah" instead of "yes" as rude.
- rasur 10y ago
  I work in/with a mixed Swiss German/German/French/Spanish/Others office department. I don't suppose it will come as much of a shock to hear that English is used in general, with smaller localised dialect outbreaks occurring regularly. Works pretty well, and as an added bonus, you slowly pick up a better understanding/confusion of a variety of languages :)
lr4444lr 10y ago
it is definitely great to meet in person, to shake hands, grab a coffee together, etc. but what is the value, professionally speaking? Years of socialization training stemming from childhood to gauge whether it's really worth interrupting people. I do enjoy the opportunity to do remote work, but even in the office, I'm finding an unstated expectation that I should always have a second pair of eyes on my slack notifications. It's not really consistent to praise the elusive "in the zone" state where developers get their most productive work done, and simultaneously expect that they should break what they're doing to bucket the importance of every little IM. The need to walk over to another person when you have something important to say, and use your human senses to determine whether this person should really be distracted for what you think is important at the moment puts the onus and effort of distraction on the asker where I think it best belongs.
- RyanZAG 10y ago
  Unlike in real life where someone can come and distract your full attention, IM gives you the ability to set your status to 'Busy'. Seems far better at dealing with interruptions to me.
  - i__believe 10y ago
    Slack doesn't, unless I'm not finding that feature after a year+ of using it.
    - scalesolved 10y ago
      It totally does and I use it heavily, although if urgent a co-worker can have the option to force the notification through. Usually doesn't happen as people realise you'll get back to it soon. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/214908388-Do-Not-Disturb-and-snooze-settings https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/214908388-Do-Not-Di...
    - lost_my_pwd 10y ago
      One can set their status to "Away" in slack.
kriro 10y ago
It's mentioned in the "myths about remote work" article that's linked but I think for startup-y kind of things social/power norms kind of force you to not work remotely for at least a decent stretch of the time. o/~ Move to SV, move to SV, move to SV sure there's some poo on the streets but...move to SV. o/~
- agibsonccc 10y ago
  I run a 16 person 5 timezone startup cofounded in the valley. I moved to asia from SF. The best thing about this is lack of "startup-y things". All of those things are huge distractions to getting things done. Many companies run remote fine. Schedules allow people to be home with their kids when needed, no commute over head for most. Emphasis is on self management. Communication is async. We have 1 stand up a week.
  - pryelluw 10y ago
    Wow 5 timezones. That's gotta be pretty tough. Can you tell more about it?
    - couac 10y ago
      Yes I'd be interested to hear more about that setup too!
      - agibsonccc 10y ago
        Basically all of us are async. A few of us in the bay area,a few on the east coast, 1 in australia, 1 in eastern europe, and a few in japan/korea. We have 1 weekly standup at 3:00 PM PST which is ~8am Japan Time (where I live). All of our messaging is async. Most people manage themselves. Tasks tend to be longer sprints. Half of our team has kids. Work is more independently scheduled. We all collaborate asynchronously. We use gitter for all of our communications. The reason for this is customer support, user support, team chat, all in 1 place. It works fairly nicely. All of our communication is remote first. This means most things happen via text or hangout. Our business development is split in 2 main time zones. "Asian timezone" and "US timezone". Many of us fly. Marketing material gets cross pollinated across language and time zone via 1 shared folder. (Language is important due to selling in japan,korea,china, and parts of the US). I usually come back to the US every few months for conferences to try to keep touch. I also get on a call every other day or so with my cofounder during his afternoon and my morning to make sure things stay in sync across time zones. We started as 2 people in San Francisco.
k__ 10y ago
That page only shows white text on white background for me.
k__ 10y ago
I switched to working remote professionally 1 1/2 year ago and worked 1 1/2 year remote on private projects (Firefox committer, university projects) before that. I make about 20% more money (before tax) than on my last job. I save 1h every day on commuting, which I had to do on my last job. I buy my food in my local store, which is much cheaper than buying food in the city. I have my "own" office, without any people talking, getting sick, etc. I probably could improve things a bit, by moving into a cheaper city, but overall I'd say, remote work has made my life much better.
- michalstanko 10y ago
  I've been working remotely for 7 years now. Do you ever miss contact with other people? Fun in the office, interesting conversations, etc.
  - hobolord 10y ago
    I force myself to attend as many meetups as possible. I find it beneficial to just attend and even if you have no interest in the talk, it's nice being around other people who potentially are
    - k__ 10y ago
      I tried that, but it's hard, I'm not a very social person and the meetups I attended here were not very interesting...
      - Grishnakh 10y ago
        I like to go on hikes with outdoors-oriented Meetup groups. I like hiking anyway, and I frequently find someone to have an interesting conversation with. If I don't, no problem, it's still fun to do the hike anyway even if I don't talk to anyone.
        Grishnakh 10y ago
        To expand on this a bit, I also find these Meetup hikes great for learning about trails in my area I otherwise probably wouldn't know about, so I can go back to them on my own later or with a friend or date. Also there's a lot of singles in some of these hiking groups so it can be a good way of finding new dates.
ComodoHacker 10y ago
Their fonts are broken in my Firefox 43.0.1. (I know it's old but still.)
rekoros 10y ago
"Our only office is Slack" But they're also doing consulting. What if one client adds them to HipChat and another to Skype? Three offices this way?
- couac 10y ago
  Ha ha. If they use HipChat and Skype, then it is a bit like we are "outside of the office" ;-)
weatherstorme 10y ago
Wish I enjoyed working remotely, but it drove me insane when I did it for 8 months. I was ignored, time zone differences sucked, actually need human interaction, and I needed guidance as a junior. It's 100% a culture thing, and if I ever do it again, then I'll make sure to choose a company which embraces remote work.
amyfransz 10y ago
Yeah working with people in different timezones definitely comes with even more challenges. I've been working with a 13-hour time difference with my co-founder on our startup called "The Remote Trip" for three months now (I'm working from Thailand while she's working from Costa Rica). The best tool we've used so far has definitely been Trello, it's so easy to keep track of each others work activities and to ask/answer any questions (that's a benefit from working with such a time difference: you leave a question late at night and its answered the next morning!). Next to that, we use Skype for elaborate weekly calls and Google Drive as it is so useful for working in docs simultaneously (plus I love the autosave function). We now also have two additional team members, one from the USA and one from Germany, and although time differences are a challenge - with the right tools and a commitment to written communication it's definitely manageable. We've written an overview of all the tools we find helpful when working remotely in this blog post: http://www.theremotetrip.com/2016/10/21/7-tools-will-boost-remote-workers-productivity-road-every-day/ http://www.theremotetrip.com/2016/10/21/7-tools-will-boost-r... Does anybody else have any other tool that they would really recommend for a remote team?
- couac 10y ago
  We love iDoneThis here at TailorDev.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
Is there an expectation that you're available during non-work hours? Or does work time and personal time blend together?

84 points by couac 10y ago

Good on ya!

> Our only office is Slack. You mistyped Mattermost :) Seriously, no reason to share all your company inner workings with a random 3rd party when it takes literally 5 minutes to set up a completely private (and also free!) clone of the same.

couac 10y ago
You're absolutely right! When we started, Mattermost did not exist (or was version 0.0.0.1). Now, just like GitLab, it is a very serious thing and we consider using it instead of relying on a 3rd party. Yet, we are a very small team and cannot dedicate too much time in maintaining/upgrading apps :\
- unixhero 10y ago
  Gitlab can be run "selfhosted" but still turnkey. Just look up Digitalocean or Bitnami.
- jhoechtl 10y ago
  You may find https://try.gogs.io/ https://try.gogs.io/ interesting, which is much less resource hungry, performs better and got only LFS support as of recent.
Roritharr 10y ago
We tried. Oh we tried. But the mobile apps being not native made the mobile usage drop like a rock compared to Slack, leading to the fact that it was harder to reach people than via the old Slack. When I saw that Rocket.Chat also used non-native clients leading to similar complaints, we just dropped the whole project and moved back to Slack.
- bpicolo 10y ago
  That's a blessing in disguise, can avoid taking work with you everywhere you go.
  - samtho 10y ago
    I'm sure we all understand what you're trying to say here, but this is the classic "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" and doesn't quite roll with everyone's use-case. I have a work phone that I take with me when I am on-call or on a customer site. Slack (or whatever we decide to use) absolutely has to work here.
johannes1234321 10y ago
Other companies give access to the company-internal information to the cleaning company. Many exchange business critical information by using a phone company. When self-hosting you have to care about your service-level agreements and trouble solving. If you rely on it you quickly need a growing IT/operations team. sometimes it's cheaper to pay somebody how is specialized on this. Of course one has to evaluate the company, with the ones which make money from selling information (to advertisers) I'd be more critical, but that's a matter of evaluation of options.
briandear 10y ago
And how much time does it take to manage the required infrastructure?
- huhtenberg 10y ago
  Hard to say, few minutes per month, amortized?
nickpp 10y ago
Do they have Reactions already in Mattermost?
- huhtenberg 10y ago
  As in "emoji"? A critical feature that precludes effective professional communication in work environment?
  - briandear 10y ago
    When someone says "we need to refactor the Whatever class" Rather than 10 people writing "agree" one can react and others can click the reaction similar to an upvote. That cuts down considerably on the noise so yes, I'd say it enhances professional communication.
    - huhtenberg 10y ago
      Ah, OK. We have no need for this, so I assumed it was the emoji thing, like in other messengers.
briandear 10y ago
I might argue that Slack has no interest in anyone's inner workings. I've been at companies building relatively uninteresting products that treated Github like it was the same as emailing source code and server logins to the competition. I could be wrong, but I have never heard of a single instance of a company on Github having code stolen because it was on Github. I have heard of many companies who have had their internal systems hacked. I might trust Github more simply because their entire product and value proposition is built around the use case of storing code while some company that builds a restaurant app -- their primary business isn't building code storage infrastructure. So why add operational overhead because of unfounded paranoia? Unless you're running your own metal in your own data center, there's always 'risk.' Even then, if your system is connected to the internet there's still risk. Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that hazard occurring. Then mitigating that risk in a way that is commensurate with those variables.
- shanemhansen 10y ago
  GitHub delivered the wrong source code to people for a while. https://github.com/blog/2273-incident-report-inadvertent-private-repository-disclosure https://github.com/blog/2273-incident-report-inadvertent-pri... I'm not bashing GitHub, but some people find more value and less risk in using git in its "native" distributed mode.
  - taylorfausak 10y ago
    I think it's a little misleading to call that "a while". The post says "156 private repositories" were affected during a "ten-minute window" representing "0.0013% of the total operations at the time".
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  > Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that hazard occurring. Risk analysis: using online DVCS/bugtracker/chat service you are one compromised password away from letting an attacker read the whole contents and potentially alter them. Many of those passwords will be stored in browser. Browsers are known for being softer targets compared to servers, generally speaking. Contrast this with an on-premise services: You still have login credentials but also require people to badge-in to access the building and login on the desktops or start a VPN (often requiring creds and 2fa).

draw_down 10y ago

How's the pay?

dep_b 10y ago

Working with mixed French / German teams seems to be a more interesting problem than having everybody working remote ;)

chunkiestbacon 10y ago
I can imagine difficulties that happen regularly in those teams not appearing, since remote work probably attracts more internationally minded people with fluent english. I've had to work with a french dev that only wanted to write emails in english and refused to speak it on the phone, maybe because his office mates could listen. A francophone boss that was so overconfident in his english ability, that he considered using "yeah" instead of "yes" as rude.
rasur 10y ago
I work in/with a mixed Swiss German/German/French/Spanish/Others office department. I don't suppose it will come as much of a shock to hear that English is used in general, with smaller localised dialect outbreaks occurring regularly. Works pretty well, and as an added bonus, you slowly pick up a better understanding/confusion of a variety of languages :)

lr4444lr 10y ago

it is definitely great to meet in person, to shake hands, grab a coffee together, etc. but what is the value, professionally speaking? Years of socialization training stemming from childhood to gauge whether it's really worth interrupting people. I do enjoy the opportunity to do remote work, but even in the office, I'm finding an unstated expectation that I should always have a second pair of eyes on my slack notifications. It's not really consistent to praise the elusive "in the zone" state where developers get their most productive work done, and simultaneously expect that they should break what they're doing to bucket the importance of every little IM. The need to walk over to another person when you have something important to say, and use your human senses to determine whether this person should really be distracted for what you think is important at the moment puts the onus and effort of distraction on the asker where I think it best belongs.

RyanZAG 10y ago
Unlike in real life where someone can come and distract your full attention, IM gives you the ability to set your status to 'Busy'. Seems far better at dealing with interruptions to me.
- i__believe 10y ago
  Slack doesn't, unless I'm not finding that feature after a year+ of using it.
  - scalesolved 10y ago
    It totally does and I use it heavily, although if urgent a co-worker can have the option to force the notification through. Usually doesn't happen as people realise you'll get back to it soon. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/214908388-Do-Not-Disturb-and-snooze-settings https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/214908388-Do-Not-Di...
  - lost_my_pwd 10y ago
    One can set their status to "Away" in slack.

kriro 10y ago

It's mentioned in the "myths about remote work" article that's linked but I think for startup-y kind of things social/power norms kind of force you to not work remotely for at least a decent stretch of the time. o/~ Move to SV, move to SV, move to SV sure there's some poo on the streets but...move to SV. o/~

agibsonccc 10y ago
I run a 16 person 5 timezone startup cofounded in the valley. I moved to asia from SF. The best thing about this is lack of "startup-y things". All of those things are huge distractions to getting things done. Many companies run remote fine. Schedules allow people to be home with their kids when needed, no commute over head for most. Emphasis is on self management. Communication is async. We have 1 stand up a week.
- pryelluw 10y ago
  Wow 5 timezones. That's gotta be pretty tough. Can you tell more about it?
  - couac 10y ago
    Yes I'd be interested to hear more about that setup too!
    - agibsonccc 10y ago
      Basically all of us are async. A few of us in the bay area,a few on the east coast, 1 in australia, 1 in eastern europe, and a few in japan/korea. We have 1 weekly standup at 3:00 PM PST which is ~8am Japan Time (where I live). All of our messaging is async. Most people manage themselves. Tasks tend to be longer sprints. Half of our team has kids. Work is more independently scheduled. We all collaborate asynchronously. We use gitter for all of our communications. The reason for this is customer support, user support, team chat, all in 1 place. It works fairly nicely. All of our communication is remote first. This means most things happen via text or hangout. Our business development is split in 2 main time zones. "Asian timezone" and "US timezone". Many of us fly. Marketing material gets cross pollinated across language and time zone via 1 shared folder. (Language is important due to selling in japan,korea,china, and parts of the US). I usually come back to the US every few months for conferences to try to keep touch. I also get on a call every other day or so with my cofounder during his afternoon and my morning to make sure things stay in sync across time zones. We started as 2 people in San Francisco.

k__ 10y ago

That page only shows white text on white background for me.

k__ 10y ago

I switched to working remote professionally 1 1/2 year ago and worked 1 1/2 year remote on private projects (Firefox committer, university projects) before that. I make about 20% more money (before tax) than on my last job. I save 1h every day on commuting, which I had to do on my last job. I buy my food in my local store, which is much cheaper than buying food in the city. I have my "own" office, without any people talking, getting sick, etc. I probably could improve things a bit, by moving into a cheaper city, but overall I'd say, remote work has made my life much better.

michalstanko 10y ago
I've been working remotely for 7 years now. Do you ever miss contact with other people? Fun in the office, interesting conversations, etc.
- hobolord 10y ago
  I force myself to attend as many meetups as possible. I find it beneficial to just attend and even if you have no interest in the talk, it's nice being around other people who potentially are
  - k__ 10y ago
    I tried that, but it's hard, I'm not a very social person and the meetups I attended here were not very interesting...
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      I like to go on hikes with outdoors-oriented Meetup groups. I like hiking anyway, and I frequently find someone to have an interesting conversation with. If I don't, no problem, it's still fun to do the hike anyway even if I don't talk to anyone.
      - Grishnakh 10y ago
        To expand on this a bit, I also find these Meetup hikes great for learning about trails in my area I otherwise probably wouldn't know about, so I can go back to them on my own later or with a friend or date. Also there's a lot of singles in some of these hiking groups so it can be a good way of finding new dates.

ComodoHacker 10y ago

Their fonts are broken in my Firefox 43.0.1. (I know it's old but still.)

rekoros 10y ago

"Our only office is Slack" But they're also doing consulting. What if one client adds them to HipChat and another to Skype? Three offices this way?

couac 10y ago
Ha ha. If they use HipChat and Skype, then it is a bit like we are "outside of the office" ;-)

weatherstorme 10y ago

Wish I enjoyed working remotely, but it drove me insane when I did it for 8 months. I was ignored, time zone differences sucked, actually need human interaction, and I needed guidance as a junior. It's 100% a culture thing, and if I ever do it again, then I'll make sure to choose a company which embraces remote work.

amyfransz 10y ago

Yeah working with people in different timezones definitely comes with even more challenges. I've been working with a 13-hour time difference with my co-founder on our startup called "The Remote Trip" for three months now (I'm working from Thailand while she's working from Costa Rica). The best tool we've used so far has definitely been Trello, it's so easy to keep track of each others work activities and to ask/answer any questions (that's a benefit from working with such a time difference: you leave a question late at night and its answered the next morning!). Next to that, we use Skype for elaborate weekly calls and Google Drive as it is so useful for working in docs simultaneously (plus I love the autosave function). We now also have two additional team members, one from the USA and one from Germany, and although time differences are a challenge - with the right tools and a commitment to written communication it's definitely manageable. We've written an overview of all the tools we find helpful when working remotely in this blog post: http://www.theremotetrip.com/2016/10/21/7-tools-will-boost-remote-workers-productivity-road-every-day/ http://www.theremotetrip.com/2016/10/21/7-tools-will-boost-r... Does anybody else have any other tool that they would really recommend for a remote team?

couac 10y ago
We love iDoneThis here at TailorDev.

nommm-nommm 10y ago

Is there an expectation that you're available during non-work hours? Or does work time and personal time blend together?