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If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn’t have hired them

• carsongross 10y ago
  Face to face interactions are often orders of magnitude more efficient than textual interactions, which is particularly important during highly collaborative activities. Really, even face-to-face is the wrong description, since it implies something like video conferencing can be used as a substitute: human-to-human interaction might be better. Body language, the ability to recognize when a conversation is not making progress or a point is generally accepted and can be set aside, trust building, humanization of The Other, etc. I say this as someone who works remotely, but who recognizes the shortcomings of it.
  • zzalpha 10y ago
    I find it telling that you were downvoted for this comment. Anyone who would claim this isn't the case is deluding themselves. It's starting to feel a lot like the open-office trend in business: it's turned into a religious discussion, and folks who are proponents willfully ignore reasonable arguments to the contrary, as though a plea for moderation is somehow anathema.
    • eeZah7Ux 10y ago
      Name 10 influential thinkers from the last 100 years. How many of them are remembered for the books and how many for their voice and body language? Talk and "body language" is cheap. Summarizing your thoughts into a meaningful article/wiki/book/email is hard and very valuable.
      • arkitaip 10y ago
        Yes but we don't communicate to colleagues using books and articles.
        • pitaj 10y ago
          The "mass communication" among many academics and researchers is almost exactly that: communicating via published works. How well this method applies to different sized groups is another question.
          • arkitaip 10y ago
            Not sure how that's relevant for this discussion where we're in the context of everyday work in a business...
        • eeZah7Ux 10y ago
          I wrote "article/wiki/book/email"...
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I agree. Getting shit done - the actual, hands in the works, not managing or brainstorming - however, is not a collaborative activity. At some point you have to sit down and focus, and other people are a menace then.
    • carsongross 10y ago
      Complete agreement. It's a shame that so much thinking (and this is in general) is Either/Or.
  • collyw 10y ago
    Sometimes face ti face can be good, but I often prefer email, for the reason that everything gets documented. A previous line manager of mine would never document anything, and his standard response was "I thought we talked about that". Sure we did, but you changed your mind then changed it again, then again after that. I can't remember what the final outcome was.
    • zzalpha 10y ago
      Meeting notes are a thing for a reason. Here's a recipe for a successful meeting: 1. Start by setting the agenda, and critically, the desired outcome. "At the end of this meeting I want to have a decision on X, or a date for when we can make that decision." 2. Have your meeting. Minimize attendance. 3 is perfect. 5 is okay. 7 is pushing it. Have a very clear moderator/leader for the discussion. 2b. Moderator/leaders should be hard-asses about forcing tangential discussions offline/into a parking lot. This is probably their most important function. 3. At the end of the meeting, the leader summarizes the outcome to all participants. This is a critical step. "So, Joe, you will come back to me on Friday with a decision on X. Phil, you'll be working with Joe to pull that answer together." 4. Write the meeting notes down in a permanent place. Email is too ephemeral. A document management system of some kind with an email notification is ideal. Record actions for those who have them, with associated dates. Stakeholders should also follow-up on actions with due dates to make sure they're closed out. This can feel like nagging/cat herding, but it's vital. The reality is, many decisions/discussions are too complex to do over email, particularly if the number of stakeholders grows beyond 3. There's far too much room for confusion/ambiguity and a lack of ownership on follow-up actions. Mix in the ease with which emotional components can be lost or mis-interpreted over email, and my tendency is to push for a voice or in-person discussion the minute an email thread goes on for more than a day.
      • dkersten 10y ago
        You need a dedicated person to take meeting minutes, ideally someone who isn't otherwise part of the meeting because humans are bad at multitasking. I especially find it hard to take notes and focus on the meeting (nevermind actually contributing).
  • awad 10y ago
    I'm really not sure why you're being downvoted here. This is absolutely spot-on and part of the reason why the whole 'teleconferencing will wipe out business travel' movement never really took off the way it was intended. There is absolutely value in meeting together in person, if nothing else other than to deepen a relationship. This is especially true in non-US cultures where a deep emphasis is placed on building trust in person before ever getting to business related matters. As a side note, I've used pretty much all of the major video conference vendors and find it extremely annoying that, even in 2017, some rather large percentage of calls will have some kind of issue during a call, if it can connect at all.
  • digler999 10y ago
    on topic of efficiency, how efficient is it to have 20+ people all get up early, get dressed, and drive or commute on a train anywhere from 20m to 90m each way ? (time which of course is unremunerated).
• tomtheelder 10y ago
  I appreciate a lot of the sentiment of this article, but not the self-congratulatory, sanctimonious tone. It refuses to acknowledge that there are people out there who are less productive when working remotely (for example, me, which I discovered after recording personal data on it), and those who are substantially less happy when working remotely. In addition, those of us who prefer an office environment sometimes find it more difficult to work with remote coworkers: something that is more or less important depending on what your day to day tasks include. If I were running a company I would always permit employees to work remotely, or work from home when they want, but I think it's counterproductive to pretend that everyone wants that and would benefit from it.
  • zzalpha 10y ago
    I also think it absurd to presume that there's zero benefit to having folks face-to-face from time-to-time. Wanna work from home 4 days out of 5? I say go nuts. But I would want some amount of face-to-face time, not to see asses in seats (which seems to be what every work-from-advocate assumes... as though there's no other concerns beyond accountability, a strawman if I've every seen one), but because it helps build team camaraderie. I've seen this first hand. I'm the Product Owner for geographically distributed team. Skype is used heavily as a mechanism for the team to communicate, but we also include quarterly face-to-face get-togethers where the team can sit in a room and whiteboard problems, pair program, or really whatever they want to do that feels useful. The first time we did this everyone, every single person, raved about how valuable the activity was. Not because they were inherently more productive, and certainly not because they were being held accountable. Rather, the simple act of people in a room together further cemented their bonds as a team. Humans are social animals. We're used to physical proximity as a component of communication. Hell, the NYT had an article about why it's hard to make friends after 30: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-friends-as-an-adult.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-m... Two of the three are proximity, and repeated, unplanned interactions. That's just not possibility in a 100% remote working environment.
    • geoka9 10y ago
      > The first time we did this everyone, every single person, raved about how valuable the activity was. The first time, yes. But I'd rather not do this every day (or even every week). Once a quarter or so seems just about right.
• smcg 10y ago
  "no evidence that an open office supports collaboration" -- sure, but the choices aren't just open office or working remotely. Face to face interaction is valuable for collaboration, regardless of the office layout.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Also destructive to productivity. Things I'd happily pay for right now: - for people to stop "collaborating" in the office I sit in; even over-the-ear headphones and loud music aren't enough to cancel that out - for people to stop standing behind me and having (work-related) conversations - for the guy working next to me to actually sit on his damn ass and not move around the office every 10 minutes In general, I absolutely hate feeling presence and attention of other people when I'm trying to focus. With each new day I spend in a modern workplace, I more and more understand why cubicles are a fucking awesome idea. One day I swear I'll build myself one out of pizza boxes.
    • vinceguidry 10y ago
      If I were you I'd push hard for an office to work in at your job. Like, go out and get some job offers and tell them you'll take one of these jobs if you don't get your way. Work environment is everything and once I started taking it seriously, my life enjoyment improved immensely.
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I'm not pushing too hard, because beside the points I raised, I'm generally happy about my job. A nice and fair company, with good atmosphere and friendly people. I guess today was one of those days when my inner introvert reared his ugly head. Either way, right now I'm considering moving out of town, so I'm trying to push them into letting me work remotely part of the week ;).
• midgetjones 10y ago
  > Here’s the cycle when I’m forced to be in a chair in your office at 9am This is where the author lost any sympathy from me. It just seems petulant. Go to bed earlier. Your body will get used to it.
  • NickBusey 10y ago
    Seriously? Some of us are night owls. Maybe musicians who need to be up late for shows (like me). Not everyone is you.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • midgetjones 10y ago
      Funnily enough I'm a musician too. But that isn't really relevant to the article. Of course you're a night owl if that's when the majority of your work takes place. But the article was talking about working for a startup. If they want you to work 9-5 so that you can communicate with the team, then get an early night. A closer analogy might be you telling a bandleader to shift the gig forward a couple of hours because you don't like going to bed too late.
      • madez 10y ago
        It is not always about "not liking going to bed" at a certain time. Sleep is not something everybody can easily control. Not giving the body sleep when it asks for it can easily become a health risk.
        • midgetjones 10y ago
          Sure, if you continue going to bed at 2am and having to work at 9, then I can see how it can become a health risk. But if your body doesn't adjust after a week of going to bed at 11pm, then you probably should see your doctor.
• xt00 10y ago
  Working hours being at 9am-5pm is not optimal for plenty of people. Working remotely has never worked for me, but a flexible work schedule time and the option to work from home occasionally is a really good strategy for companies. I always stay up late and there are many brain studies showing that people very often fall into two categories, early risers and late risers. Accommodating both is a good idea to get the most from your workforce.
  • swozey 10y ago
    I'm a night owl. I've forced myself into becoming an early riser just to mitigate the 45-1hr of traffic and get to the gym. I don't feel like it's helped my productivity whatsoever, though. It's like no matter what, I get a complete boost in productivity as soon as the sun goes down.
    • reitanqild 10y ago
      I have switched to waking up 4 or 5 almost every day. I have stuck to that habit for the last about 20 months. It seems I get a boost from a) being alone and knowing I won't be interrupted for hours and b) just start the day by doing something that other people find crazy. Interestingly it seems that if I sleep past 5 it becomes harder to wake up. That might just be me giving up once I realize won't get ut of the house in time though. Oh, and for the record: I use an alarm clock that forces me to go out of bed to scan a code. I have also set it up to turn on the philips hue spot that points at my face gradually starting 30 minutes or so before alarm time.
      • AJ007 10y ago
        Maybe I am wrong but I really don't like the forced to wake up idea. I spent most of my pre-adult life very tired and it may have been partly due to interrupted REM cycles in the morning. For the past few years I've been starting earlier, from 6:30-8:00am. Once I'm awake I'm excited to get out of bed and work. I get to check up on what was completed or happened while I was asleep. Jump back to 5 or even 10 years ago and I would sleep late, anywhere from 10am to 1pm. Getting up wasn't exciting or motivating. A whole lot went in to this (light control at night being probably the biggest factor), but an alarm clock never played a role.
• basseq 10y ago
  There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. A great employee won't be as productive if your environment isn't set up for them to succeed in a remote capacity. I absolutely applaud companies who have this figured out, or who enable very flexible arrangements. But if you as an individual (like the author) "need" a different work environment, go seek it out, don't lambast the company as "non-trustworthy".
  • oftenwrong 10y ago
    >There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. A great employee won't be as productive if your environment isn't set up for them to succeed in a remote capacity. A good example of this: At my company we used to have problems with people working from home accidentally being excluded from meetings because the meeting leaders would forget to set up a video conference room, or would forget to join the video conference room that had been created ahead of time. To fix this, we decided that every meeting would have a video conference room set up for it, and that the meeting leader would always join the video conference room, regardless of whether anybody in the meeting was expected to be working remotely. In other words, we always run our meetings as if there are remote workers involved. This eliminated the issue entirely. Another benefit was that we no longer wasted time determining if we needed a video conference set up for a meeting. We just set it up in all cases. For recurring meetings, we have persistent video conference rooms.
  • minipci1321 10y ago
    > There's a great deal of cultural and technical enablement that needs to happen to allow remote work to be effective. Technical-enablement part is already well known and is quite simple: easy access to all needed information: primarily, source code, schematics, datasheets, VHDL/Verilog, servers, specifications and product roadmaps. People working on FOSS projects successfully do that every day, and proven tools and the methodologies do exist. Anything more than that will be needed just as well for non-remote work to be effective. Culturally though, it is indeed a very different story, and there the mistrust plays its big role, the OP nailed it. Not only from direct team managers, but on all levels, from team members to (cross-team) project people. Another big component of cultural misfit is when the efficient remote communication is simply impossible, not because it is remote but because remote working brings together people who cannot communicate efficiently, even put together in the same room. For various reasons: different timezones, different native tongues, cultures that require active face-to-face confrontation... Interestingly enough, this could actually be the predictable outcome of a company's assumed behaviour -- imagine, for example, a big company frequently acquiring small ones everywhere around the world.
• znpy 10y ago
  This is basically a repost, the same text but on Medium passed a couple of weeks ago. Also, the fact that it works for the author doesn't mean it doesn't work for everybody else.
  • the_watcher 10y ago
    There is a note at the bottom of the post that it originally ran on Medium (which freely licenses its content in this way in the absence of explicit revocation of consent from the author). The piece also explicitly acknowledges that working remote doesn't work for everyone, and states "That is fine."
• tenpoundhammer 10y ago
  Wow, don't know where to begin... 1. this article seems to be aimed at startups, but the author then goes on to complain about having to work 8-5 ( good hours for a startup). 2. "Let the bad actors fail" I've met very few people who are actually trying to game the system, the vast majority of people perceived as "Bad actors" need managements help to align their goals and values with that of the business. 3. The title implies this is an issue of trust, where as it seems that it's more about preference and fit. Some software engineering problems lend themselves more to an in-person environment than not. For instance, when I was working on an oil sensing project, All I did was write software but I had to have the hardware close for testing my software. They sure aren't going to let me drag 20k worth of equipment home in my honda. 4. ROWE, how do you measure the output of knowledge workers especially programmers? If anyone figures it out write a book you will make a bajillion dollars.
  • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Experienced developers can work as well as, or better at home. Even in a startup; especially in a startup where time is important and commute can be expensive that way. I work on embedded frequently; I have way more than $20K of equipment on my desk right now. Not to mention old projects in boxes and on shelves. That's absolutely not an issue. If I need it and need exclusive access to it, in the office or on my desk is all the same. And measuring output? Why, by performance of course. And by the value of the work done. So I can earn well on embedded work whenever that comes my way, because its not a common skill and I can do it quickly. The market sets the value; there's no mystery to this.
    • tenpoundhammer 10y ago
      Hey Joe, I also work from home full time but as a backend systems developer. I was not trying to highlight that it would be impossible for someone with hardware to work from home, simply that in some cases it's not feasible or doesn't make sense ofr the business.
      • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
• eagsalazar2 10y ago
  What a pile of straw man BS. Most objections to working remotely have nothing to do with trust (at least for decent developer or designer jobs) but instead are about quality of collaboration and company culture. People who write cocky condescending articles like this are almost always just stumping for doing what they want which is to work at home themselves.
  • matwood 10y ago
    > Most objections to working remotely have nothing to do with trust For business types, it absolutely does. I've had to answer the question before "if people are working at home, how will we know they are working?" My response is "how do you know they are working at work? The same way."
    • T-hawk 10y ago
      The disconnect here is about the definition of "working". For many managers, that means "attending my meetings" and "easy to ask for status reports" more so than it means "producing good software". The former are what's easier to know in the office versus remote.
• afastow 10y ago
  I always feel very conflicted about remote work. It doesn't work for me personally, I never work remotely unless special circumstances force me to for a day or two. But I realize that is a personal preference and many people have the exact opposite preference and I want to respect that. But I have a couple of teammates that moved to different cities and are now 100% remote, and I find it very frustrating that I can essentially never talk to them in person. They fly in once or twice a year but that doesn't help the situation the entire rest of the year. They report that in their view video calls are working as an adequate replacement for face to face conversations but I completely disagree. I don't know the solution though. They are valuable team members and I'm glad they didn't have to leave the company when they moved, but at the same time I really don't want the trend to expand or for us to hire new people knowing they will be 100% remote.
  • matwood 10y ago
    > But I have a couple of teammates that moved to different cities and are now 100% remote, and I find it very frustrating that I can essentially never talk to them in person. Why is it frustrating? What have you done to replace the in person? These are honest questions, and I'm not trying to be a PITA. The reason I ask, is that I have been working with remote coworkers since the late 90s (keep in mind that you can go to an office every day and still have many of your coworkers be in different offices). Video chat did not work very well then, and we basically did entire projects over the phone and email. Video chat, group chat, project management tools, etc... have made it so much easier to work with people who do not share the same space. Even in the same office, I prefer emails to random chats.
    • afastow 10y ago
      Basically there are lots of times where I want to have a very brief informal conversation but chat isn't high enough bandwidth(I have to spend 3 minutes writing a paragraph that won't communicate what I'm trying to say as clearly as I'd be able to in 10 seconds talking) and jumping on a video call feels too formal. It's hard to give specific examples of this but it happens all the time. Maybe I don't even know what I want to say or ask exactly but I just want to throw a stream of consciousness at them. Sometimes that goes somewhere and there is a longer conversation but sometimes you just say some stuff and realize it didn't go anywhere and you say "nevermind let me think about it more". In person that's easy and not awkward because we do it all the time. It feels weird though to ask someone to jump on a video call, start talking at them for 30 seconds and then go "nevermind" and end it.
• st3v3r 10y ago
  Yes and no, I suppose. I consider myself to be a pretty good employee, but I know that I would struggle a lot working remotely. Someone who's used to working remotely probably has that discipline, but for now, I know I lack it.
• bluGill 10y ago
  Working at the office isn't about floor plan or seat time. Working at the office is about "staying in touch". When you are in the office you see new directions the company is interested in long before you get an assignment. It doesn't matter if you are in an office with the door closed, or working from home: either way you miss things that you should have been told directly but nobody thought to tell you. So you end up doing otherwise great work that it leading the project in the wrong direction. That is when you are in the office someone from marketing can see you in the hallway and ask about the hot new feature of today without invoking all the formal channels to take to the guy remotely. Thus when you are working from home you lose a lot of opportunities to do what is needed as opposed to what you are told. People who can figure out the right thing and do that are more valuable than people who only do what they are told. Note that the title is correct: all employees should be trusted to work remotely from time to time. However that does not mean you should work from home all the time. You should be a regular at the office so that you don't lose touch. At the first sign of illness (you or your kids), bad weather, or a hard no interruptions problem: you should be out of the office and working from home. However you should also be a regular at the office for the benefits of being at the office. Of course this depends on your job. If you are a contractor you might be in a situation where you do the letter of the contract and are gone - the only time you might want to do something else is if you are trying to turn the contract into a full term position. Even then though, some contracts are get release N out the door, with a possibility of renewal for release N+1 - in that case you may have the option to change what is in release N.
  • DenisM 10y ago
    This is what I like to call "ambient communication". It's like water of the company life - too much of it and you drown, too little and you get ill and disoriented.
  • geoka9 10y ago
    > without invoking all the formal channels to take to the guy remotely In the remote shops I worked people discuss everything (and anything) on IRC, slack, hipchat etc. Even their pie in the sky ideas. Never had the problem you described. If anything, people are more open and engaged: they would even sign in after (or before) work to bounce ideas. Sometimes even from their vacations. Never seen that in "onsite-only" shops, BTW (open-space or not).
• balls187 10y ago
  > Treat your employees like adults. Adults get up and go to work. I do treat my employees like adults, but I expect them to act like adults. Like making a decision to join the rest of the team in the office for an agreed set amount of time. Our official policy is it's up to the Manager. I prefer a team, and not just someone who produces code. So I prefer people to be in the office. Children expect the world to revolve around them. Adults do not.
  • Vampires123432 10y ago
    Just sayin'... I'd prefer a manager like you over the alternative.
    • balls187 10y ago
      Not sure if you misstyped. I support my folks needing to work remote, or weird hours to handle their stuff, because life doesn't stop between 9-5. For me to do my job effectively, I want to get to know people as more than just their output. That happens by having lunch as a team, playing foosball, happy hours, going to movies, and so forth.
      • VLM 10y ago
        That's a cult relationship, not an employee employer relationship. I'm not talking about value judgments in that I admit there are probably more toxic employee/employer relationships than toxic cult relationships. Toxic cult realtionships are more famous, brogrammers, literally drinking the kool aide, etc. Just saying the number of people wanting a professional relationship is going to be a lot higher than people wanting a cult relationship, so you're going to have trouble building the best team when you're limiting the hiring pool to, well, basically friends.
        • balls187 10y ago
          > That's a cult relationship, not an employee employer relationship. Some tech companies have abused this mentality to make this feel like a cult relationship, but I see this as just like any non-tech company that has company sponsored soft-ball teams, bowling leagues, picnics, holiday parties etc. I think I understand your sentiment, but I do believe if you were to speak to the people who work for me, they don't feel that it's a cult. Google's research into management had a pretty strong point that managers who took interest in someone as more than an employee were more effective.
• gusfoo 10y ago
  > If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn’t have hired them What an absurdly simplistic view of the world you have there, Yan. The real world is more complex, and people are not static things - they change. Your article applies excellently to you as an individual, but you seem to think you are right to generalise things to other people.
• repomies691 10y ago
  I don't think it is black and white. Also trust is not black and white, and trusted persons can turn bad and unrealiable persons can develop to be reliable and trustworthy. If you are sure that you bring the best value by working remotely, then just do it and explain the situation to potential employers. Some might be happy with that, some not. However to me it looks like the remote job market is about 100x more competitive than on-site. Employers seem to value being able to talk face-to-face etc, and in principle I don't think there is a lot wrong with that. If you don't like it, start a competing company which hires remote people - it is a free market. If remote working is truly more effective, remote work should get more common.
• syshum 10y ago
  I get the most work done when I am the only one in the office, So I tend to take my lunch at a different schedule than my co workers, come in early, stay late, and take work home because during "normal" business hours is a constant stream of "collaboration" that interrupts me doing any actual work. I love flu season, because I normally do not get sick, and everyone else is out of the office sick... sooo peaceful. I would love to work remotely, only interacting with people remotely.
  • tedmiston 10y ago
    I can relate to this. Just curious if you've found any hacks for when the office is full of people? My best so far is noise isolating or noise canceling earbuds + a brown noise generator.
• indymike 10y ago
  There's more to working from home than the worker. Sometimes the management team or coworkers can't work well with remote workers. There are lots of reasons for this, both good and bad.
• Vampires123432 10y ago
  Working from home was removed from our office because of "abuse". Who was "abusing" it? We have 7 Indian (not American) females working in our office in various functions. All (100%) of them were found to have been "working" from home on multiple occasions where they were inaccessible (not logged in, not responding to emails). Their reasons for working from home ranged from children to car troubles. By all measurable attributes, their work output was less than their peers. Now before you knee jerk, please understand that I'm simply pointing out the measurable facts of the situation. I'm not making any claims regarding cultural background. I am, however, questioning whether or not there exists a cultural component here that leads to a different understanding of the "work from home policy". To that degree, the statement, "If you don't trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn't have hired them" can perhaps come across as a bit racist.
  • shas3 10y ago
    Indian: feathers or dots? Seriously, what's the point of mentioning their ethnicity and gender, exactly? I'm thankful that I'm not your co-worker.
    • Vampires123432 10y ago
      Your comment is racist. I am also pointing out that the article itself has a racist undertone. Culture exists.
      • shas3 10y ago
        Wtf is "culture exists"? Like "culture of Indians"? You're digging yourself deeper in a hole. My comment about feathers and dots was ironic to highlight your dog-whistle. India is a country of 1.2 billion people with "many cultures". In any case, tarring people of certain ethnicities or race with "cultures" IS the problem with racism.
  • bdhe 10y ago
    > All (100%) of them were found to have been "working" from home Were there other employees who were abusing the system? What was the consequence of this abuse? Missed tickets? Pagers unattended? Meetings missed? How large was your organization? Is seven a small or a huge number relative to the number of employees in your org? > To that degree, the statement, "If you don't trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn't have hired them" can perhaps come across as a bit racist. Explain. In a statement that says nothing about race, just an employee-employer relationship, how would you perceive that as racist?
• Tharre 10y ago
  To play devils advocate: How can you have a ROWE, if you can't really measure engineer productivity? This just seems to lead back to the most lines of code added = most work done attitude. This is a problem with traditional butts-in-seats as well of course, but (one could argue) less so, as your employees at least have to spent X hours trying to solve the problem. And if you already going to spent so much time, why not do it right.
• oliwarner 10y ago
  Article is clearly written by an idealist. I've worked with plenty of people who are superb in their field, but need constant whipping to stay on track. The threat of your manager sticking their head round the corner is a stick that keeps on-site employees grinding along. Good management helps, but positing that you should only hire people you trust with your life (or whatever nonsense it is they're saying) is silly.
  • shanemhansen 10y ago
    > need constant whipping to stay on track > The threat of your manager sticking their head round the corner is a stick that keeps on-site employees grinding along. I would appreciate it if you'd share your current company/team, I'd imagine some other hner's would appreciate the heads up too, so they can avoid it.
  • carlmcqueen 10y ago
    Agreed. Many very, very talented people don't love what they're talented at. As a result they do as little as they can to get paid well and support their families/interests. Working from home removes a lot of the accountability of their time management and also removes a lot of the 'you don't look busy, got time for something else?' that can happen with working at the office.
  • logfromblammo 10y ago
    The constant whipping at my office generally just keeps me from working on potential backlog items. I have been told too many times to not do extra work beyond the minimum required effort, to do anything other than finish my explicitly assigned tasks and then goof off. I think the danger is that if I get deep into refactoring the nightmare module that no one wants to touch, I might be tempted to waste time getting to a sane stopping point before switching to whatever "change the font of this GUI label to be Comic Sans, bold" task I might be assigned next. If I could work remotely, and weren't specifically barred from having other employers by company policy, I could probably work 2 other full time jobs just like this one, and still have time for HN.
  • amyjess 10y ago
• dsugarman 10y ago
  The reason why open floor plans are so popular is likely due to cost. Think about how much more space / structure complexity you need to implement a non-open floor plan. Decision makers likely look at the options and think 'hey, not only will everyone be forced to communicate and collaborate, we will also be much closer to fitting the office project into our budget and cost projections. '
• vonklaus 10y ago
  I am easily distracted and also like the team environment because you can tighten the feedback loop and communicate efficiently. I am the same way as the author-- night owl, ect. Going to an office is a solution for me and an option I wish I had, and enjoyed in the past. I would ammend the authors point: You should trust employees who have a good track record to work remotely if they want and are sufficiently operating independently. JR employees should be allowed to work part time remotely after some time in office. There isnt a good way to inprint culture remotely, and there is a learning curve for jr devs who need senior devs for support/the internal support structure. So most Incs would be in bad shape if all there strong engineering talent worked from 6pm to 9am (as I would left to my own devices) because their jr devs wouldnt grow and other devs with supporting software on dif schedules have to wait. Tldr not all offices are open plan, growing a team (culturally & skill-wise) is easier in the office, part-time remote work and coordination is a good tradeoff/reward for employees of all skillsets and functions.
• raitom 10y ago
  Question for remote workers here: I'm forced to work remotely during the next 3 months (thanks to the US Visa system) and with my coworkers, we're struggling to find a good communication software for our daily huddle. What we use right now is Hangout for the video and a VOIP solution for the sound. The video quality is not so bad but the sound sucks. We tried Skype, Slack video and couple of other software but I'm not really satisfied by any of them. Discord has a perfect sound but I'd like to know if there's a software out there more "professional"?
  • rbritton 10y ago
    We tried a number of voice options last year. The best voice quality we've found that works internationally is TeamSpeak.
    • raitom 10y ago
      Yeah, Teamspeak uses the same sound codec (Opus I think) as Discord. I use that to talk with my friends and famility that are 6k miles away and the sound is almost perfect.
  • lima 10y ago
    Jitsi Meet. It's great - it gives you a persistent conference room that you leave and join at any time. We use it exclusively for remote work. Self-hosted, too.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • wenbert 10y ago
    Have you tried appear.in ?
    • raitom 10y ago
      I tried it today with my friends who are 6k miles away from me and the video quality is the best I experienced compared to other software.
• whack 10y ago
  I wonder how the author feels about the #NoEstimates movement. Both ROWE and #NoEstimates are very popular trends these days, but they are mutually incompatible. A results-only-work-environment works only if the results (ie quality + time-taken) are clearly defined, and all employees are held accountable for those results. This is fundamentally incompatible with the #NoEstimates movement which says that it's impossible to figure out how much time a task is supposed to take.
  • marcosdumay 10y ago
    Are after the fact, retrospective estimates viable? It looks more possible to me than the before the fact variant. Anyway, I don't think butts in the seats management deals any better with the lack of correct estimates.
    • whack 10y ago
      Retrospective estimates could work better, but I imagine it lends itself to a lot of credibility problems. If you're popular and well-liked, you'll get retrospective estimates that exceed how much time you actually took. If you're unpopular, your manager/teammates can screw you over by giving estimates that are lower than how much time you took. Not to mention the fact that things always seem so much simpler in hindsight, especially when someone does a really good job with design. Butt-in-seats management, despite being much maligned, is much more consistent with the NoEstimates movement. Instead of trying to estimate how much time something is supposed to take, just mandate that they spend X hours working everyday.
• bedros 10y ago
  the biggest mistake people do is assuming one size fits all. working for home is not for everyone, some people are more productive in a group settings when they other people around are working, and they get more incentive to work harder. Personally, I prefer giving the choice to allow people to work from home if they are productive; but we need to remember it's not for everyone
• SurrealSoul 10y ago
  When I worked at a startup, we had a local office and an office on the other coast. To keep communications open we had an iPad facetime 100% of the time with the other office. I feel like this is what remote working is missing, you may not have legs and be able to strut into the lunch room to talk about non-business but at the very least you can some presences improv the "brain-storming" sessions
• jwilliams 10y ago
  This article presumes that trust is the only reason that employers don't allow or support remote work. It's also assumes that the individual's peak productivity is the most important thing. However, neither are necessarily true - I actually really enjoy a team dynamic. A team working well together can lead to amazing leaps in productively. And it's very hard to replicate that remotely. Building remote teams is extremely hard and takes a lot of investment. If you look at the companies that do it well, it's almost a cultural obsession.
  • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    If you've ever agitated for working remotely, you'll discover that trust is probably two of the top three reasons managers don't want to let anybody do it.
    • imsofuture 10y ago
      Which is funny, because remote workers almost to a fault work TOO MUCH. It becomes a lot easier to blend work and life. For some people that's okay (if not an ideal situation), for others it's not, and they either figure out how to segregate the two and work a normal amount or it becomes a one-way ticket to burn-out.
      • tedmiston 10y ago
        This is one of the biggest points Jason Fried & DHH made in REMOTE (https://37signals.com/remote https://37signals.com/remote). The other one was about a human being's natural need for socialization... "cabin fever".
  • jdauriemma 10y ago
    > Building remote teams is extremely hard and takes a lot of investment. But finding, leasing, and maintaining an office is not hard and does not require a lot of investment?
    • clay_to_n 10y ago
• unlogic 10y ago
  The article contains in total 61 occurrences of "I", "me", and "my"; yet somehow the problem of the author is not narcissism, but open offices.
• jack9 10y ago
  This title ensures I ignore the article. Wrong wrong wrong. Might as well say "offshore is just as good as in-house"
• philosopheer 10y ago
  If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you should tell them that work is expected onsite. If it is important to them to work remotely, they shouldn’t have let you hire or have paid them also, people who obsess over issues tend to have issues with the issues they obsess over. Con-men, for instance, obsess over matters of trust, as do people who have been conned. Don't work for or hire people who obsess over trust. People with trusting and trustworthy personalities and a good sense of boundaries expect it and don't obsess over it because it's built into their (metaphoric? literal?) DNA.
• sagivo 10y ago
  have nothing to add. AMEN!
• vacri 10y ago
  I've worked with several devs who are trustworthy in general, but the days they work from home they are curiously unproductive. Or you try to get in contact with them on an issue of theirs and they never seem to be around. Yet in the office they're perfectly functional and available. Not to mention that tech staff are a seller's market at the moment - trust or not, most companies don't get a lot of choice with the staff they get to have. The article's author is supremely selfish in assuming all staff are like them.
• rubicon33 10y ago
  "I am a night owl. You can tell me I have to have my butt in a chair within your line of sight at 8 or 9am, but that is very wasteful. You are wasting my time and yours. I am not a morning person. I will start being very effective around 11am and I really get going in the afternoon/evening. If you force your preferred hours onto me, both employer and employee lose. " THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS! Believe me I understand that it's a difficult problem to solve - everyone seems to have different "optimal" work hours. But right now, the standard work day is HEAVILY favoring the morning person's mind.
  • Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    I second this enough to comment! Furthermore, If your effective times starts at 11, consider yourself lucky. 11 is at the earlier end of my natural waking time. I start getting effective 2 hours afterwards.
    • rubicon33 10y ago
      I'm in the same boat. In fact, I don't REALLY come online until after lunch, sometime around 1 or 2. And if allowed to revert to my natural sleep cycle, my most creative and productive time is between 2pm - 3am. Good luck finding an employer who is cool with that. Not to mention, a spouse.
      • tedmiston 10y ago
        My best hours are similar. I think the best option is a remote team distributed across time zones or one in a time zone that aligns with your ideal hours. Admittedly, much easier said than done.
      • Broken_Hippo 10y ago
        "If allowed to revert to my natural sleep cycle..." I very much understand this. I don't think people realize that for me, I have to watch my sleep every day - including weekends - to be able to be at work at 8am during the week. Sleeping in on the weekends means that sudddenly, I'm awake at 1am monday morning. The spouse bit hasn't been an issue: He has a similar body clock luckily. Jobs are more difficult.
• dpcan 10y ago
  Author of this needs to run a company for a while. If you really are the 110% employee you say you are, you are an edge case. The reality is, most people need to be told to go here, sit there, do this, for X hours, and I need these results. Otherwise, nothing gets done. And as far as work environment is concerned, literally everyone is different. I need a TV on playing reruns of The Office to be productive. We are all strange creatures.
  • nicoburns 10y ago
    Does it really need to be sit there and do this for X hours and I need these results? Would "I need these results (in X timeframe)" not also work? I'm not saying there aren't benefits to working in an office with fixed hours (e.g. despite the advent of email and IM communication is often better in person). But: 1. At jobs with fixed hours I often spend a couple of them a day effectively doing nothing because I'm burnt out that day. And conversely I will go home at home time even if I'm being given really productive at that time. 2. I often work more effectively at home due to lack of distractions and precisely because I'm not expected to be looking like I'm doing some all of the time. For example, sometimes it can really help to get out of the house, go for a walk, and think for a bit. Doing this for 20 minutes can be more productive than 6 hours of sitting at a desk trying to work on the same problem while looking at the a computer screen. But you can't really do that in an office.
    • dpcan 10y ago
      Why not be a contractor then? You get to do whatever you want whenever you want and get paid when the job is done, and done correctly (granted you've setup your contracts this way).
  • NumberCruncher 10y ago
    Managing people means forcing them to do something they do not want to do: to work.
• dalbasal 10y ago
  I don't disagree with the the underlying points, but I do think it's hard to take a full stock of something like this. Workplaces as places where people work is a fairly big piece of culture to just change. It's clearly true that work can be done elsewhere, but that doesn't mean workplaces are something we can just abandon and leave everything else the same. Imagine if a parliament decided they didn't need to see each-other in person. The whole system would be different. This doesn't mean you shouldn't get a remote job. Maybe whole companies should be built this way from the ground up. Companies are cultures of a sort, with their fair share of cultural pathologies. Being in physical proximity is one of the ways companies function culturally, at present. All these things will need to be resolved some other (probably cultural) way for companies to function remotely.
• pcmaffey 10y ago
  Sure, as a rule of thumb. But what about young people, still learning how to be a professional? Structure, consistency, being surrounded by people smarter and more accomplished than you... these are the best ways to learn. Of course, there are plenty of self-motivated kids out there who don't need college to learn and prep for life, but for the majority, immersion in an environment raises the bar.
• OpenDrapery 10y ago
  Management/Educators/Government will always cater to the lowest common denominator(LCD). It only takes one person to screw it up for everyone. This is the real upside to working for a small company. The larger the company, the lower the LCD is likely to be. I admire large companies that have the balls to delineate between groups. Most don't. If you work as an IT professional for a company that has a large call center, God help you. Call center work is some of the highest turnover work out there. Managers of call centers resort to treating they're employees like children. It is frustrating when you find yourself as a college educated, fully formed adult, being lumped in with cretins. IMO, this is largely why work from home is squashed. Because if we let you do it, everyone will want to do it, and we can't have that.
• pavel_lishin 10y ago
  At work, we just figured out a weird problem and resolved it quickly, because five of us are sitting side by side and we could quickly discuss it. Meanwhile, the two remote people are still somewhat confused, and I'm trying to explain it in chat - and likely by the time I'm done explaining the problem, a commit will be added to a pull request to fix it. Granted, I'm probably not the best communicator, but being on location can speed things up a lot. But that's also not about trust.
  • eikenberry 10y ago
    This is a great example of how not to work with remote workers. You chose to organize your team as if everyone is local, so your remote people are left out of the loop. You should have discussed via IM or in a hangout. You can't have your cake and eat it to. You are either are remote team or a local team, there is no in-between. You have remote people, so you are a remote team and you need ALL team interaction to be online. So absolutely no in-person meetings unless you fly your remote people in.
    • pavel_lishin 10y ago
      But the point is that the problem was diagnosed and solved in a few minutes. Literally, not more than three. Just making sure that everyone @here was paying attention would have taken two minutes.
  • _dark_matter_ 10y ago
    So, uh, we usually just hop on video chat for this. They should have been on video chat when you were talking about the problem. The issue with your company is not that remote working is less collaborative, it's that you're not doing the basic, minimum effort required to make remote working even possible.
    • pavel_lishin 10y ago
      We usually do - we're in a remote office, so we have 4 people in Austin, TX, 6 in New York, one remote in San Diego, and one of the Austin folks was working from home. So for standups, etc., we do a video call. But this time, it would have literally taken more time to dial up the two remote-and-interested parties than it did to solve the problem. If we were all remote, we would probably have done that, since it would be almost a necessity. But five heads is enough to solve the problem, and we have five heads here...
• thecourier 10y ago
  your presencial influence as leader matters. I can't imagine facebook or amazon being built using remote workers. grinding is hard, painful and demoralizing. but a close team of uber-focused engineers led by example, frequently beat the asses of the 'work-from-home-is-so-comfy' guys. about why I hire these people: they are gems, who need a coach to make them achieve greatness as a team. this is moneyball.
• jwtadvice 10y ago
  If I’m hiring for a candidate that has expressed a need to work remotely, I interview them very differently. First, I give extra importance to the communication with the candidate over email/LinkedIn to set up the phone screen, and also the phone screen itself. I know that I will be interacting with the person primarily this way. It’s extremely helpful to obtain referrals from people who have worked with the person remotely before, so they can provide feedback about how frequently and engaged that person has been with the on-site team in the past. I also look for and ask questions probing the persons communication skills more than my usually technically-focused interviews. The reason for this is that I’ve experienced different results working with the same people from remote than when they are on-site. For that reason I don’t think it’s enough to assume that because a developer is a good remote worker they will work well in an office setting or that if they are a productive office worker they will function highly from remote. Basically, people are hired into specific roles. If you’ve hired someone for an open space agile environment and the role/work dramatically changes (going remote, acquired by “waterfall method inc”, etc) the hiring decision very well may no longer be informative.
• tropo 10y ago
  This means also trusting their home (cheap door, no alarm, landlord, kids, wife...) and malware-infested computer with business data. It kind of implies that company data is on computers with internet connections, which is a no-no if you care about security.
• emrekzd 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge Humans transfer knowledge most effectively when they are communicating in person. Of course this does not mean you will achieve the highest productivity in an office by putting 20 people in the same room, but it still says a lot about in office vs complete remote work. A lot of companies create the type of culture where it's not pleasant to work in the office. However, having half you team work remotely on random days of the week isn't the right solution to this, and I don't think it could be justified by saying "I trust my employees". Just create the right team and the right environment. People will want to spend time together when there is inspiration and motivation involved. There is a lot more to the implications of strong tacit information transfer that extends to how innovation ecosystems work. For anyone curious I would suggest finding the research around the subject.
• sokoloff 10y ago
  Has anyone found a truly workable remote alternative to everyone standing around a whiteboard for shared, interactive sketching? Let me stipulate that I'd pay a sizable sum ($5K per location wouldn't be out of the question at all) if I could find something that gave me very similar dynamics to 5 people standing around a whiteboard and taking turns drawing, talking, correcting, improving a shared diagram. (So, this doesn't have to be "cheap", but does have to be "awesome".)
  • ZeroFries 10y ago
    Whiteboard VR? Probably a little off from this being a (virtual) reality, but could be interesting.
  • afastow 10y ago
    https://business.smarttech.com/en https://business.smarttech.com/en I've only used these in an academic setting and I don't know how much they cost but I think it's exactly what you're asking for.
    • sokoloff 10y ago
      I've used a couple generations of them and have an older one in my basement. IMO, they're better than nothing but still a very great gap between these and a shared single-location whiteboard. It's hard to capture the dynamics between people. (Reading the room for understanding, quickly collaborating on a drawing, etc.) Smartboards always felt like taking turns playing some laggy VR game.
• mathattack 10y ago
  ROWE - Results Oriented Work Environment. If only the world were so simple that everyone's contribution can be put into a nice neat box. When work can be so well defined, it doesn't get outsourced to a 1 bedroom in San Francisco, it gets outsourced to the cheapest spot on the planet. Creative work (R&D included) can be hard to define. It depends on random interactions between people. It requires both collaboration and periods of quiet. And the outputs can be very hard for a CEO to define in advance. Remote-only can work ok for "Designed for remote-only" companies, but they are the exception not the rule. 100% remote can also work for employees who spent a lot of time in the office building their networks, reputations and relationships. It's ok for people to say "I'll only ever work remote" but you can quickly find yourself in a very tight box.
• compuguy 10y ago
  There are exceptions to this, especially if you work with governments and classified material. You obviously can't work from home.