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There are the notions of: o clear written requirements expressing the business and high level technical needs. o well defined acceptance test procedures to en

There are the notions of: o clear written requirements expressing the business and high level technical needs. o well defined acceptance test procedures to ensure that the delivered software (or hardware or whatever) meets those requirements o thoughtful partitioning of the work between team members to minimize the needed communication and enable the team members to focus and work on their part without having a committee meeting every few minutes on every minor issue. None of these are new practices. They, or something similar, is needed to work effectively remotely or for that matter in quiet offices with closed doors.

d357r0y3r 10y ago
These are good ideals and they're hard to get right in practice. There's always a certain amount of ambiguity that arises when pen meets paper and it's ambiguity that puts any given task at risk of being done incorrectly or not at all. A positive trait in an engineer is the ability to resolve ambiguity. That isn't to say that all ambiguity can be solved by a single engineer working in isolation, though. What you don't want is people going with their best guess in an isolated, unilateral fashion, so you need good ways of handling uncertainty when it inevitably comes up. My contention is that, according to my experience, remote work results in a "dead in the water" status more often than office work.
- NumberSix 10y ago
  A few points. I have seen remote work go very smoothly and go very badly. It depends a lot on how well specified the remote work is. The "agile" and "issue tracker" methods currently popular do not teach good organizational and design skills needed to partition projects well for remote work. We've gone from one extreme -- rigid up front requirements and designs, the much maligned "waterfall" -- to the other extreme of disorganized, short-term chaos where the big picture is lost. Micromanagement without the big picture planning that is the proper role of project managers. The OP is arguing for remote work versus cramped, noisy, interruption filled open offices modeled on garment industry sweat shops. Somehow most companies are doing this as if they got together in a back room somewhere and formed a cartel to impose garment industry working conditions in a bizarre attempt to magically lower costs by pretending engineers are seamstresses from poverty stricken nations making sub-minimum wages doing piece-work. Are quiet offices either with high-walled quiet cubicles or offices with doors where engineers can concentrate and focus on difficult work but still walk over to someone and quietly discuss a pressing issue better than remote work? Probably so, but these sensible working environments seemed to have been banned by some mysterious executive decree.
alanmackenzie 10y ago
These are all valid points but many organisations are not at the level of maturity where the inputs to the engineering team are of the high quality you're describing. Additionally there's an element of negotiation or dialogue around requirements which can often lead to cheaper/quicker to market/better solutions with input from engineering. Both of these are much easier to do in person.

d357r0y3r 10y ago

These are good ideals and they're hard to get right in practice. There's always a certain amount of ambiguity that arises when pen meets paper and it's ambiguity that puts any given task at risk of being done incorrectly or not at all. A positive trait in an engineer is the ability to resolve ambiguity. That isn't to say that all ambiguity can be solved by a single engineer working in isolation, though. What you don't want is people going with their best guess in an isolated, unilateral fashion, so you need good ways of handling uncertainty when it inevitably comes up. My contention is that, according to my experience, remote work results in a "dead in the water" status more often than office work.

NumberSix 10y ago
A few points. I have seen remote work go very smoothly and go very badly. It depends a lot on how well specified the remote work is. The "agile" and "issue tracker" methods currently popular do not teach good organizational and design skills needed to partition projects well for remote work. We've gone from one extreme -- rigid up front requirements and designs, the much maligned "waterfall" -- to the other extreme of disorganized, short-term chaos where the big picture is lost. Micromanagement without the big picture planning that is the proper role of project managers. The OP is arguing for remote work versus cramped, noisy, interruption filled open offices modeled on garment industry sweat shops. Somehow most companies are doing this as if they got together in a back room somewhere and formed a cartel to impose garment industry working conditions in a bizarre attempt to magically lower costs by pretending engineers are seamstresses from poverty stricken nations making sub-minimum wages doing piece-work. Are quiet offices either with high-walled quiet cubicles or offices with doors where engineers can concentrate and focus on difficult work but still walk over to someone and quietly discuss a pressing issue better than remote work? Probably so, but these sensible working environments seemed to have been banned by some mysterious executive decree.

alanmackenzie 10y ago

These are all valid points but many organisations are not at the level of maturity where the inputs to the engineering team are of the high quality you're describing. Additionally there's an element of negotiation or dialogue around requirements which can often lead to cheaper/quicker to market/better solutions with input from engineering. Both of these are much easier to do in person.