7 ms·
Remote work works best when everyone does it in the organization. Most of these kinds of complaints come from the fact that a mixed org will tend to treat remo
by kemiller 9y ago
Remote work works best when everyone does it in the organization. Most of these kinds of complaints come from the fact that a mixed org will tend to treat remote workers as second class citizens, even with the best intentions.
- dudul 9y agoEveryone may be a little much. But a sizable portion of the workforce at least, yes.
- kemiller 9y agoWell, let's say, everyone should have equal access to the decision makers. So, all of senior management, but in practice that tends to mean everyone.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- falcolas 9y agoI agree. Within the same company, I felt much more connected to my co-workers when there was an no more than two in any given location. On a new team, I'm the only person remote from the others, and I feel sooo out of the loop. It's also impacting my ability to network and display technical competence; It's been... frustrating... to watch someone become the product tech lead solely because folks could walk up to and interrupt them.
- dogma1138 9y agoBeing available for your coworkers is as important as pure technical competency even more so in a corporate environment.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThe idea of a raw meritocracy dies quickly when faced with reality.
- nunez 9y agoBecoming a lead isn’t entirely about technical competence. A large part of it is “will other managers stand working with this person?”
- Spooky23 9y agoThat attitude is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. I work for a place where remote work isn’t very common. In my experience in that environment, it’s a honeypot for employees who have daycare, attention span, or other issues/obligations that get worse with remote.
- BerislavLopac 9y agoI feel that a problem might be that, while remote working for tech and creative people is to a large extent a solved problem (with tools like git, Slack, GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket, video-conferencing, Jira, Invision, Google Docs etc), it is still difficult to imagine how it would work for management. It is still very much based on face-to-face interactions, especially when it comes to delegating and reporting. As the parent says, if an organisation has a mix of co-located and remote workers, usually the managers are co-located too, and because of the culture they naturally tend to focus more on the co-located developers. I haven't yet seen a tool that would offer a well-enough solution that it would be accepted by the managers and prompt a change of that location-focused mindset.
- kemiller 9y agoI can only speak as a manager who a) has a tech background, and b) deliberately founded a remote-only company, but it's really not that bad. With a good video provider (we use zoom) we barely even notice any friction. If you commit and take it seriously, there are solutions for almost everything. The most challenging part I would say is the sort of freewheeling collaborative brainstorming type meetings, and the sort of random overheard serendipitous conversations. Some of that happens in slack, some in zoom, but we do have to be more deliberate about it. But the benefits more than outweigh the drawbacks.
- sytse 9y agoYep, it is really hard for everyone to use the written channels all the time when part of the people are co-located. Remote only http://www.remoteonly.org/ http://www.remoteonly.org/ is much easier than a hybrid organization.