7 ms·

Distributed teams are rewriting the rules of office politics

106 points by haasted 8y ago

maxxxxx 8y ago
Purely distributed teams are great if all processes are designed for that. But most companies don't do it right. In my company we augment the US team with Indian devs and it really sucks royally. Most decisions are still made in meetings so the Indians don't know what's going on. The 12 hour time difference requires either that the Indians stay up late or come in early or the US workers have to do it which sucks if you have a life outside of work. Resolving even little issues takes too long because round trip time between question and answer is often several days. We also never travel to India so we don't know the people personally and don't know how they are set up. The way a lot of companies go about with distributed teams is the same they do with agile. Management picks a few artifacts (daily standups, detailed backlog) but most other structures stay in place so the result is highly dysfunctional.
- some_account 8y ago
  Ive never seen it work in practice. It just leads to endless meetings in attempt to synchronize what each team's are doing, and it's often very difficult to understand eachother over video only. When I was working like that for a short while, I was trying hard to not collaborate with anyone and just do things myself in order to continue to make progress and get something done. Other team members who were trying to collaborate had extremely low output and their days were filled with troubleshooting stuff together with the remote team since basic things didn't work or got blocked by knowledge not existing on one side etc. It was a nightmare.
  - j16sdiz 8y ago
    It could work if everybody is comfortable to use email (or another async form of communication) and task tracker. A few bad members can ruin everything.
    - growlist 8y ago
      Definitely agree with that. Issue trackers in particular I've found to be a very powerful tool for navigating an environment that has bad actors within it - when everything is down in black and white it greatly reduces attempts at weasally behaviour from the more Machiavellian. Sad to say, I've come across this type more than once.
- mr_tristan 8y ago
  I've worked full time remote for two companies now, and one was more like you described, where most of the team was in one place with "augmented" remote employees, and the other bit the bullet and treated everyone remotely, even though there are large physical offices where some people like to work. And the main issue is communication. "Augmenting" your team with remote workers leads to horrible communication. First, meeting rooms require very good audio setup, and very few people will spend the time, hire a sound engineer, and operate the meeting such that everyone in the room is clearly audible. As a end result, the remote workers often sit there with the sound up trying to figure out what's being said most of the time. Thus, people can never really act normally - everything has to be this composed, staged, response. Additionally, the mostly local team will frequently have offhand conversations the remote workers are never a part of. Thus, you get siloing. Add time zone shifts, and the amount of siloing increases. The place I work for now has teams that rarely meet in a physical room together - even though several members sit near each other, everyone's got a headset. It is amazing how decent audio changes communication. We also frequently have chats online. Additionally, all major meetings at my current company are held as if people are remote. And events or other informal affairs are kept organized and isolated. I don' t have to sit through notifications about the coffee machine on the 3rd floor of a building 1300 miles away being broken. I believe this has led to senior management feeling comfortable working remotely as well, so some VPs work from cities where there is no significant office or company presence. Now, I _do_ wish this company relied on writing, but not everyone is a good writer. It takes a lot of time to build up that kind of confidence. If I could make one change, it would be to improve writing.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    As someone who has to sit next to a team that does that, it's annoying as fuck to listen to people have a meeting like that. EDIT: I don't know why this is downvoted. It's incredibly rude to have meetings at your desk like that in an open plan office.
- ptero 8y ago
  I agree that to make remote teams work the company (leads, actually) have to work differently. It can pay off or not, but assuming one can manage remote team just as you do a local one is a almost always a recipe for failure. > Resolving even little issues takes too long because round trip time between question and answer is often several days. This is the crux of the issue. You can expect question and answer round trip to be up to 24 hours, but the work flow must not depend on this being being minutes or hours. This means structuring work flow in larger chunks, writing tasks for remote teams clearly and having robust success criteria that remote team can check against, locally, before claiming they are done. And remote team must be able to understand what the request is before signing off on it -- at the very least they should have crystal clear understanding on those written success criteria. Done this way, little issues that require a 24-hour turnaround are few and far between. It never works perfectly, so the company should also bring key tech leads together a few times per year. It is a different setup, requiring more careful planning at headquarters and competent leads, but it can be done. But companies that manage remote teams as if they sit in the same building will get some serious disappointment. My 2c.
hashkb 8y ago
All no-brainers as usual. I've been working remotely full time for three years now. There is no downside for me. Offices (and open floorplans) exist out of inertia only, and, because of the politics they encourage, are havens for the incompetent.
onion2k 8y ago
I worked remotely for four years and liked it a lot. The only problem was as the company grew more people came onboard who didn't really understand how to work well in a remote environment, which eventually ruined it. If you're on a remote team with people who don't like video conferencing, asynchronous text chat, etc then it's very hard to work effectively. This is going to be a bigger problem as remote work gets more common - at the moment companies that work remotely attract developers who want to work remotely, so it works. As time goes on more developers who don' want to work remotely are going to be pushed in to remote environments as a cost saving measure, and that's going to make it much harder for everyone. How to deal with that problem is going to be a challenge.
- Rotdhizon 8y ago
  You hear about remote jobs all the time, with more and more people wanting them because of the leisure and convenience. Along with that, you hear about people with on site jobs that want to go remote. You never really hear about people who prefer on site over remote. I'd be interested to hear some stories about on site workers who were forced(or pushed towards) remote work and denied it.
  - beat 8y ago
    I worked remote for two years for a large bank. There was an office right downtown, but I never used it. There were other people, though, who came into the office, even though they could do their jobs remotely. They liked the ritual of it, and the psychology of being able to say "Not at work now".
    - notahacker 8y ago
      It's one of the major reasons the workspace industry exists. Had a flatmate who had a beautiful big room in a usually empty house to run his one-man agency from and contracted all his developers remotely, but he bought himself a desk space with 30 minute commute as soon as he had the cashflow to do so. I guess it helped create an illusion of separation even when he was still emailing clients after getting home, and offered social interaction during the day as well as the evenings As for workers being forced to work remote by bigger companies, a colleague of mine who mostly worked from home because they closed her local office always insisted she much preferred the days she came into the London office, even though she seldom participated in office chat outside formal social events (even in the original office) and was very productive when working mostly at home. Had another friend who didn't mind the remote work one day a week because we don't have the space for all of you rota at all, but found it a bit weird since he was a quant at a major bank...
growlist 8y ago
I'm remote but part of a team where some people are office based, and it can be nightmarish at times - I'm cut out of the loop time and time again, and the excuse that 'oh we just had a quick conversation about it and you didn't happen to be there' has now worn thin to the point of transparency. It's definitely the case with remote working that failure to prepare (on a company's part) is preparing for failure.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  This happened to me in companies with teams scattered across different rooms/buildings/countries. That's bad communication and insularity. Remote working only makes it more obvious.
  - growlist 8y ago
    > That's bad communication and insularity Suspect it's more than that, unfortunately. Thankfully though my circumstances are changing soon and I'll hopefully be out the door to somewhere better. Life's too short etc.
aero142 8y ago
Is it just me, or did the article completely fail to answer it's premise? I really wanted to hear about how office politics works in a full time remote workplace. The closest thing to an answer for this is "we write stuff down so it's permanent."
- SlightRespect 8y ago
  People talk shit about each other over Slack, and hope it never comes back to bite them.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
1. Remote is not "from your house". Rent an office near home, walk there. 2. Use video conferencing every day without fail. Something very monkey brain makes a human face you are talking to real, and prevents you flipping the doofus bit on people (and they you) 3. Everyone and everything must be remote-first - business and IT. There is real advantage to walking over and saying hello, shaking peoples hands. 4. Meet up in person and work together (pairing, meetings, clarifications) at least once a week. This basically limits the distance you can all be from each other (roughly two major metro areas apart - London and Paris, NY and Washington) Ultimately this all costs money. it's cheaper to hire crap people and expensive office space. YMMV
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  "Rent an office near home, walk there." Why should I have to be the one to pay extra?
  - rimliu 8y ago
    Does your company pay for your commute? If they don't, why have you to be the one to pay extra?
  - umurkontaci 8y ago
    Some companies compensate you for colocated offices. In certain areas you can deduct your expenses from your taxes. But yeah, you should certainly take this into account when you are discussing your salary.
tspike 8y ago
It is important to differentiate between distributed and remote, as well. I work for a very large company that has offices scattered all over the country. We are distributed, and remote exists but is not the norm. It is unusual to have a meeting that doesn't make use of videoconferencing, even when everyone involved works primarily from an office. For employees who are remote, this setup is wonderful. It means that there's little difference between being remote and working from a different office.
motohagiography 8y ago
Most ambiguous thing I have found about remote work is how a decision gets made in a group, and then who directs the action on it. It's too easy to talk past one another on conferences. Add flat organizations where you are supposed to be able to read the dynamic between the lines, then local culture differences, and you can end up in passive aggression hell. Without physical presence, you need clear, logical rules in place. The article splits the main challenges of "loneliness," and "collaboration," almost evenly. I don't get loneliness, but collaboration and distance are almost definitely conflicting needs. I would be surprised if the rules for managing distance being a constraint on the dynamic aspect of collaboration was not a hard zero sum trade off.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
Sarah Cooper’s “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings,” which includes… I took the bait and read the 10 tricks. These are all natural tendencies for me. This must explain why clients think I'm smart because I'm really not as smart as everyone treats me.
- wadkar 8y ago
  I would very much like to have a small discussion on this if you don’t mind sharing your thoughts on the following: What would be the ground truth for some notion of smartness level? It could certainly be subjective, sure, but could you please tell me what you think being smart means? Do you think people around you have different scale/notion of smartness than you? Would it be possible that you’re being hard on yourself? If not, how would you rate/think about your coworkers smartness? I am really interested in knowing your thought process because a part of me certainly identifies with your statement. And I am very much interested in discussing “appearing to be smart” vs “being smart”. Something tells me there’s not much difference between the two or perhaps only the former exists and latter is too abstract to be useful for any comparison.
  - ryanmarsh 8y ago
    I do a lot of consulting so that might have something to do with it. Basically I get paid to appear to be the smartest person in the room (which I personally think is utter and total horse shit but that's another rant). I've been told my whole life that I'm "smart" but the problem is there are lots and lots of people out there who seem (I've tried to read their papers on ML) like they're an order of magnitude smarter. I write like a 13 year old, but maybe I speak better? IDK. For most people I think it's totally subjective. If you surprise someone with a bit of knowledge they don't have (either memorized or figured out for yourself) people think you're "smart". People who share what they know or help others come to a novel solution appear "smart". I do believe in a general concept of intelligence (q). I'm willing to bet mine is only slightly above average if even that, only because I keep meeting programmers who cannot think as clearly as I can so I have to assume I'm smarter than some of them. I'm sorry I don't have a better answer. It's a total mystery to me. I feel like a total dumb fuck most of the time. You said you identify with my first comment. How so?

106 points by haasted 8y ago

Purely distributed teams are great if all processes are designed for that. But most companies don't do it right. In my company we augment the US team with Indian devs and it really sucks royally. Most decisions are still made in meetings so the Indians don't know what's going on. The 12 hour time difference requires either that the Indians stay up late or come in early or the US workers have to do it which sucks if you have a life outside of work. Resolving even little issues takes too long because round trip time between question and answer is often several days. We also never travel to India so we don't know the people personally and don't know how they are set up. The way a lot of companies go about with distributed teams is the same they do with agile. Management picks a few artifacts (daily standups, detailed backlog) but most other structures stay in place so the result is highly dysfunctional.

some_account 8y ago
Ive never seen it work in practice. It just leads to endless meetings in attempt to synchronize what each team's are doing, and it's often very difficult to understand eachother over video only. When I was working like that for a short while, I was trying hard to not collaborate with anyone and just do things myself in order to continue to make progress and get something done. Other team members who were trying to collaborate had extremely low output and their days were filled with troubleshooting stuff together with the remote team since basic things didn't work or got blocked by knowledge not existing on one side etc. It was a nightmare.
- j16sdiz 8y ago
  It could work if everybody is comfortable to use email (or another async form of communication) and task tracker. A few bad members can ruin everything.
  - growlist 8y ago
    Definitely agree with that. Issue trackers in particular I've found to be a very powerful tool for navigating an environment that has bad actors within it - when everything is down in black and white it greatly reduces attempts at weasally behaviour from the more Machiavellian. Sad to say, I've come across this type more than once.
mr_tristan 8y ago
I've worked full time remote for two companies now, and one was more like you described, where most of the team was in one place with "augmented" remote employees, and the other bit the bullet and treated everyone remotely, even though there are large physical offices where some people like to work. And the main issue is communication. "Augmenting" your team with remote workers leads to horrible communication. First, meeting rooms require very good audio setup, and very few people will spend the time, hire a sound engineer, and operate the meeting such that everyone in the room is clearly audible. As a end result, the remote workers often sit there with the sound up trying to figure out what's being said most of the time. Thus, people can never really act normally - everything has to be this composed, staged, response. Additionally, the mostly local team will frequently have offhand conversations the remote workers are never a part of. Thus, you get siloing. Add time zone shifts, and the amount of siloing increases. The place I work for now has teams that rarely meet in a physical room together - even though several members sit near each other, everyone's got a headset. It is amazing how decent audio changes communication. We also frequently have chats online. Additionally, all major meetings at my current company are held as if people are remote. And events or other informal affairs are kept organized and isolated. I don' t have to sit through notifications about the coffee machine on the 3rd floor of a building 1300 miles away being broken. I believe this has led to senior management feeling comfortable working remotely as well, so some VPs work from cities where there is no significant office or company presence. Now, I _do_ wish this company relied on writing, but not everyone is a good writer. It takes a lot of time to build up that kind of confidence. If I could make one change, it would be to improve writing.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  As someone who has to sit next to a team that does that, it's annoying as fuck to listen to people have a meeting like that. EDIT: I don't know why this is downvoted. It's incredibly rude to have meetings at your desk like that in an open plan office.
ptero 8y ago
I agree that to make remote teams work the company (leads, actually) have to work differently. It can pay off or not, but assuming one can manage remote team just as you do a local one is a almost always a recipe for failure. > Resolving even little issues takes too long because round trip time between question and answer is often several days. This is the crux of the issue. You can expect question and answer round trip to be up to 24 hours, but the work flow must not depend on this being being minutes or hours. This means structuring work flow in larger chunks, writing tasks for remote teams clearly and having robust success criteria that remote team can check against, locally, before claiming they are done. And remote team must be able to understand what the request is before signing off on it -- at the very least they should have crystal clear understanding on those written success criteria. Done this way, little issues that require a 24-hour turnaround are few and far between. It never works perfectly, so the company should also bring key tech leads together a few times per year. It is a different setup, requiring more careful planning at headquarters and competent leads, but it can be done. But companies that manage remote teams as if they sit in the same building will get some serious disappointment. My 2c.

hashkb 8y ago

All no-brainers as usual. I've been working remotely full time for three years now. There is no downside for me. Offices (and open floorplans) exist out of inertia only, and, because of the politics they encourage, are havens for the incompetent.

onion2k 8y ago

I worked remotely for four years and liked it a lot. The only problem was as the company grew more people came onboard who didn't really understand how to work well in a remote environment, which eventually ruined it. If you're on a remote team with people who don't like video conferencing, asynchronous text chat, etc then it's very hard to work effectively. This is going to be a bigger problem as remote work gets more common - at the moment companies that work remotely attract developers who want to work remotely, so it works. As time goes on more developers who don' want to work remotely are going to be pushed in to remote environments as a cost saving measure, and that's going to make it much harder for everyone. How to deal with that problem is going to be a challenge.

Rotdhizon 8y ago
You hear about remote jobs all the time, with more and more people wanting them because of the leisure and convenience. Along with that, you hear about people with on site jobs that want to go remote. You never really hear about people who prefer on site over remote. I'd be interested to hear some stories about on site workers who were forced(or pushed towards) remote work and denied it.
- beat 8y ago
  I worked remote for two years for a large bank. There was an office right downtown, but I never used it. There were other people, though, who came into the office, even though they could do their jobs remotely. They liked the ritual of it, and the psychology of being able to say "Not at work now".
  - notahacker 8y ago
    It's one of the major reasons the workspace industry exists. Had a flatmate who had a beautiful big room in a usually empty house to run his one-man agency from and contracted all his developers remotely, but he bought himself a desk space with 30 minute commute as soon as he had the cashflow to do so. I guess it helped create an illusion of separation even when he was still emailing clients after getting home, and offered social interaction during the day as well as the evenings As for workers being forced to work remote by bigger companies, a colleague of mine who mostly worked from home because they closed her local office always insisted she much preferred the days she came into the London office, even though she seldom participated in office chat outside formal social events (even in the original office) and was very productive when working mostly at home. Had another friend who didn't mind the remote work one day a week because we don't have the space for all of you rota at all, but found it a bit weird since he was a quant at a major bank...

growlist 8y ago

I'm remote but part of a team where some people are office based, and it can be nightmarish at times - I'm cut out of the loop time and time again, and the excuse that 'oh we just had a quick conversation about it and you didn't happen to be there' has now worn thin to the point of transparency. It's definitely the case with remote working that failure to prepare (on a company's part) is preparing for failure.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago
This happened to me in companies with teams scattered across different rooms/buildings/countries. That's bad communication and insularity. Remote working only makes it more obvious.
- growlist 8y ago
  > That's bad communication and insularity Suspect it's more than that, unfortunately. Thankfully though my circumstances are changing soon and I'll hopefully be out the door to somewhere better. Life's too short etc.

aero142 8y ago

Is it just me, or did the article completely fail to answer it's premise? I really wanted to hear about how office politics works in a full time remote workplace. The closest thing to an answer for this is "we write stuff down so it's permanent."

SlightRespect 8y ago
People talk shit about each other over Slack, and hope it never comes back to bite them.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

1. Remote is not "from your house". Rent an office near home, walk there. 2. Use video conferencing every day without fail. Something very monkey brain makes a human face you are talking to real, and prevents you flipping the doofus bit on people (and they you) 3. Everyone and everything must be remote-first - business and IT. There is real advantage to walking over and saying hello, shaking peoples hands. 4. Meet up in person and work together (pairing, meetings, clarifications) at least once a week. This basically limits the distance you can all be from each other (roughly two major metro areas apart - London and Paris, NY and Washington) Ultimately this all costs money. it's cheaper to hire crap people and expensive office space. YMMV

s73v3r_ 8y ago
"Rent an office near home, walk there." Why should I have to be the one to pay extra?
- rimliu 8y ago
  Does your company pay for your commute? If they don't, why have you to be the one to pay extra?
- umurkontaci 8y ago
  Some companies compensate you for colocated offices. In certain areas you can deduct your expenses from your taxes. But yeah, you should certainly take this into account when you are discussing your salary.

tspike 8y ago

It is important to differentiate between distributed and remote, as well. I work for a very large company that has offices scattered all over the country. We are distributed, and remote exists but is not the norm. It is unusual to have a meeting that doesn't make use of videoconferencing, even when everyone involved works primarily from an office. For employees who are remote, this setup is wonderful. It means that there's little difference between being remote and working from a different office.

motohagiography 8y ago

Most ambiguous thing I have found about remote work is how a decision gets made in a group, and then who directs the action on it. It's too easy to talk past one another on conferences. Add flat organizations where you are supposed to be able to read the dynamic between the lines, then local culture differences, and you can end up in passive aggression hell. Without physical presence, you need clear, logical rules in place. The article splits the main challenges of "loneliness," and "collaboration," almost evenly. I don't get loneliness, but collaboration and distance are almost definitely conflicting needs. I would be surprised if the rules for managing distance being a constraint on the dynamic aspect of collaboration was not a hard zero sum trade off.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

Sarah Cooper’s “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings,” which includes… I took the bait and read the 10 tricks. These are all natural tendencies for me. This must explain why clients think I'm smart because I'm really not as smart as everyone treats me.

wadkar 8y ago
I would very much like to have a small discussion on this if you don’t mind sharing your thoughts on the following: What would be the ground truth for some notion of smartness level? It could certainly be subjective, sure, but could you please tell me what you think being smart means? Do you think people around you have different scale/notion of smartness than you? Would it be possible that you’re being hard on yourself? If not, how would you rate/think about your coworkers smartness? I am really interested in knowing your thought process because a part of me certainly identifies with your statement. And I am very much interested in discussing “appearing to be smart” vs “being smart”. Something tells me there’s not much difference between the two or perhaps only the former exists and latter is too abstract to be useful for any comparison.
- ryanmarsh 8y ago
  I do a lot of consulting so that might have something to do with it. Basically I get paid to appear to be the smartest person in the room (which I personally think is utter and total horse shit but that's another rant). I've been told my whole life that I'm "smart" but the problem is there are lots and lots of people out there who seem (I've tried to read their papers on ML) like they're an order of magnitude smarter. I write like a 13 year old, but maybe I speak better? IDK. For most people I think it's totally subjective. If you surprise someone with a bit of knowledge they don't have (either memorized or figured out for yourself) people think you're "smart". People who share what they know or help others come to a novel solution appear "smart". I do believe in a general concept of intelligence (q). I'm willing to bet mine is only slightly above average if even that, only because I keep meeting programmers who cannot think as clearly as I can so I have to assume I'm smarter than some of them. I'm sorry I don't have a better answer. It's a total mystery to me. I feel like a total dumb fuck most of the time. You said you identify with my first comment. How so?