9 ms·

The no-work-from-home mentality is something I wish would die. I've heard form plenty of friends who've been interviewing with tech companies lately, that it's

• dba7dba 9y ago
  I feel all of this no-remote-encouraged is due to ego trip. Nothing boosts your ego more than having 10 people under your management show up in standup meet and pretend to be listening to what you have to say, and than you dismiss them to go work. It doesn't quite have that feel when you are doing that over Slack.
  • rantanplan 9y ago
    This can be alleviated by meeting once a week(if all members are in the same area) or once per couple of months(for more distributed teams). I would be very wary of companies that can't perform because physical attendance is mandatory every single day!
    • nobleach 9y ago
      And perhaps I'm wrong by measuring our performance by "number of features completed" or "number of bugs fixed". I just don't know what other metric matters to use.
      • lawnchair_larry 9y ago
        If you emphasize metrics, you'll get folks who optimize for the metrics, to the detriment of the project. They will frustrate your best engineers, who will eventually leave.
• Joky 9y ago
  Remote working kills team work IMO. I would never want to work fully remotely, and I can't collaborate as well with fully remote teammate. How do you get a whiteboard brainstorming sessions? 2 days remote / week is a good balance that fits me quite well. Now if you don't work on hard-to-solve problem, or projects that don't require high collaboration, why not. Edit: I should add that I've been working fully remote (500km away of the office) for almost 3 years, and then with a team split on two different continents for one year. I so much enjoy being in the office since then, even just for having lunch and coffee with anyone, and being able to stop by anyone's desk/office to unblock an issue.
  • 8draco8 9y ago
    Here is great article why brainstorming is a waste of time https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-o...
    • ghaff 9y ago
      I took the parent to use "brainstorming" in the sense of get everyone together in a room to solve some problem, consider design alternatives, etc. The article you linked to is about a very specific style of brainstorming that was once very popular. (Basically throw out a bunch of ideas with no filter/criticism.) It's that type of brainstorming that research has largely discredited. I don't think anyone seriously suggests that people working together on a problem in a room never works.
      • scott_s 9y ago
        Agreed that the HBR article attacks a strawman - or, at least, a style of "brainstorming" I have never participated in. To me, "brainstorming" is a small number of people (often just two!) sitting together and thinking through a problem. Personally, this has helped me much more than if I had just continued spinning on the problem myself.
        • ghaff 9y ago
• eksemplar 9y ago
  We've measured productivity of remote work compared to in house work. I work in the public sector so it's mainly not programming, but caseworking and similar. We've found that productivity is way down when people work at home, we've however also found that allowing people to slack once in a while increases their overall performance. The optimal results come from people working mainly at the office. Now this may be completely different for development houses, our coders are some of the most productive when working remote, IT in general is below average though.
  • 8draco8 9y ago
    Can you provide any studies on that?
  • DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
    It's very cool that you guys actually gathered some data on the topic. I wonder how much your conclusions would hold for non-public-sector jobs. AFAIK it's typically harder to fire a public-sector worker for under-performance, than in the private sector. Perhaps that either (a) adds to the temptation to goof around at home, or (b) attracts the kinds of workers who were always more apt to goof around, given the opportunity.
    • pc86 9y ago
      I do a lot of work with public-sector employees. I always thought they were lazy (which I think is a fairly common feeling throughout the private sector). Some are, of course. But unfortunately the problem is not one of drive but of competence. In technology specifically, the public-sector employees I've worked with simply do not have the skills of a private-sector employee with similar responsibilities/experience. I don't know if it's the lower salary or what but I can count on one hand the number of technical public-sector employees who would be able to have a similarly-titled position in any of the private sector companies I've worked for.
      • mschuster91 9y ago
        Main problem is that all the high-quality tech talent is vacuumed up by the private sector. For what it's worth, I once worked at the Munich government and since a couple years in the private sector. In Munich, BMW, Microsoft and the various suppliers for BMW are the most likely target for fresh university graduates, mainly due to the prestige and in the case of BMW the enormous pay. Those who end up in public sector usually are those who value the job security or do it out of dedication. Which doesn't mean they're bad at their job, in my experience it was the exact opposite, but the government sector is waaaaay understaffed, and pay can't be risen to private-sector levels because of rigid union agreements. Also, the competence problems are related more to regulations... why spend your time e.g. learning Docker when you're happy enough you can finally use Ubuntu instead of RHEL? So basically unless you lesrn it in your time off there's no motivation to learn new stuff because it will be outdated when regulation molasses finally catches up.
• johansch 9y ago
  From my experience as an engineering manager I am fine with that as long as I can easily reach "you" with a phone call during core hours. So many people have phone phobia in this field. I feel that if you want to work from home you need to make voice calls work for you. (It usually doesn't happen more than once a week. Being reasonably acccessible on Slack reduces the need for these calls somewhat.)
  • rmgraham 9y ago
    As a full-time remote person (at IBM, ironically), I personally hate using the phone - however, video/voice call via Slack or similar is totally fine. As far as I'm concerned, a decent headset is the #2 requirement after a good internet connection when it comes to working remotely effectively.
    • johansch 9y ago
      What's the difference? (It would typically be initiated the same way, e.g. via a Slack question if they are ok talk on the phone. If there's no reply and it's blocking other stuff; yeah I am going to place an actual 20th century phone call.)
      • dylz 9y ago
        Picking up a phone is interrupting as hell for me. Clicking the green button on Discord or a softphone is not.
        • MockObject 9y ago
          Seriously? What is the difference? Telephone handset vs headphones?
          • johansch 9y ago
            Please don't startle the millennials. They are unique snowflakes. ;)
• DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  "...We're all adults, if you are worried that you won't know what I've been up to, you can check my Pull Requests in our source control system..." But that's not what it's about. Not even close. (Yes, to some micromanagers, that is what it means. But if your job sucks because your manager is an asshole, it's going to suck whether you're at home or at work) I hate co-located teams. The problem is that they work. They are the best and only method I know about to have groups of people solve complex problems creatively. If your problem isn't complex or need a creative solution? Don't use them. But the more rote and simplistic the work you're doing, the more you're going to be replaced by robots. So there's that. I get the fact that folks hate it. Like I said, I hate it also. But that doesn't change the fact that I've seen it work -- over and over again. I've also seen it horribly abused and misunderstood, but I can't help that. Under the appropriate circumstances, it's the best thing we have going right now.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    I don't disagree that co-located teams can be very effective and, for some things, may be the only effective approach. However... >They are the best and only method I know about to have groups of people solve complex problems creatively A vast number of open source projects, including Linux, are created by very distributed groups of people. I would find it hard to argue that none of those projects involve solving complex problems creatively.
    • DanielBMarkham 9y ago
      I would. Because at the end of the day, all of these projects have one or two creative elements with the rest of it being just grunt programming. Note that by solving complex problems creatively, I mean business problems. Not technology. We don't need a co-located team to figure out that a bubble sort is the wrong tool for this job. We need a co-located team to figure out that we're headed down the wrong road and that 3 months of coding might be replaced with two system calls. That kind of conversation can be extremely uncomfortable or impossible to make happen with ten folks meeting over a IM link twice a day.
  • taurath 9y ago
• FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  People only look at it from the employer's side. The employee, if they can manage themselves and not become anti-social, receives a huge increase in the quality of life. Making appointments for the doctor, court, etc. don't require a sick day, you have more time in your life from a lack of commute (for a 30 minute commute, that's 5 hours/wk), you can schedule around your most productive hours, (later in the day for me), you can be tasked based such that if you finish all your work in 32 hours, you don't have to put in time just cause, you can exercise or go for a run during the day (many can't because of lack of shower facilities or a strict 1 hr lunch), you can eat home cooked meals without having to cook a huge serving that will last you the week and you can take a nap if you feel sleepy after lunch without worrying about optics, you don't have to be in at some specific time if you've had a hard time sleeping the night before,. I don't ever feel rushed in the morning and always eat breakfast followed by a meditation. I find mind mapping software superior to whiteboarding when collaboration in my case because my own sketches and handwriting are nearly indecipherable to anyone but me. Also, for work I find tools like slack to be more useful because they are async, not ruining my flow and messages can be very information dense with links, images, etc. I'm much, much more productive at home. I communicate well via slack/phone/Facetime. Also, junior devs will craft their questions in a coherent manner. In doing so, they've found that when they formally present their questions, they can often solve it on their own, making them better devs. I often only work 32-35 hrs/wk, yet I am more productive. This extra time allows me to do more self-learning. Before, the lat thing I'd want to do after driving home is deal with more code. Even if I have to work 10-15 hours more per week, it's less stressful than dealing with coming home from the office at 8pm, exhausted and not wanting to cook so I would eat unhealthy, expensive takeout food and watch some mind-numbing TV. Most importantly I have more time and opportunities to see the people who really matter in my life...my significant other, my friends, my niece, etc. (this was the norm before the industrial revolution.)
  • justsomedude12 9y ago
    Dude I couldn't have said it better myself. All of what you said leads to a happier/healthier employee which more times than not leads to a more productive employee. Happier/healthier employees that are more productive make the company more $ at the end of the day.
• scarface74 9y ago
  It's a little bit of both for me. I work for a large company with a small IT department where I'm the architect. My job involves about 50% development and 50% interacting with the business. I can't be as affective working from home when I'm wearing my "architect" hat, but I'm more effective as a developer working from home.
• cryptarch 9y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't work on site - some bad apples ruined it for the whole bunch. Somehow that sounds more reasonable to me. I'd like to work on-site, but I don't want to abuse it... This one too, actually; you have so little control of being distracted in open office compared to working at home, and you wouldn't want to bankrupt your boss drinking the copious amounts of coffee you need to compensate, right?
• HillaryBriss 9y ago
  >I find this very common with managers that are scared that they are irrelevant. (they may not understand what their employees actually do) Some managers seem to think: "If there are some butts and those butts are in chairs and I can see those chairs and those butts all in a row in a big room outside my office then my team is kicking ass. I'm gonna buy me some more chairs."