8 ms·

I've worked for over 30 years only remote on one thing or another... most of this guy's points are on the money. Unless it's enforced to share information prop

I've worked for over 30 years only remote on one thing or another... most of this guy's points are on the money. Unless it's enforced to share information properly, if some people are in an office and others are not, there are two classes of political animal created immediately and that will affect everything. Unless I missed it, he didn't get into how variable work really is... this 10h thing is kind of a crock for the kind of work I do anyway... sometimes you are blocked on the one thing you have to be doing and it's difficult to focus on things that are of secondary importance just because you should be working. Other times you're being paid, but there's nothing to do for one reason or another. You can usually find useful things to do but at these times, they already know the situation. They want you to just note it, keep your head down and do something you can do yourself that should be somewhat helpful, and pick up immediately the thing is unblocked. It's just not always possible to move things forward for 10h each day... be transparent about it. Sometimes if it's an architectural or philosphical issue, you need to study it and then do something else while your brain thinks about it. Some days nothing is going to move forward no matter what you do because of your personal state... you learn to recognize it and let it go... tomorrow or the day after you'll be back in triple force and more than make it up. The people who are paying you usually care about results not hour by hour but week by week. So long as it's all happening on that scale everyone's happy.

EastSmith 7y ago
I am working remote for 3 and a half years now. Meeting the "week by week" expectations is the most important thing, period.
- blazespin 7y ago
  The fundamental problem with scrum is that bugs happen and nothing interesting from a development point of view can be predicted effort wise before hand, at least not accurately. The right way, is to do all velocity analysis backward-looking. Create a culture where code reviews are done constantly and long after they've been merged in. Use metrics like KLOC, duplicate lines of code, changes to code, stories completed, etc. That's the way to measure velocity. Measuring done done done by end of sprint, is really wasteful as some engineers get it into their head to pad their estimates to make sure it's completed by some arbitrary date. This just leads to a culture of padding estimates rather than completing work when it's done. That said, I do like letting engineers pull tasks as they like. If a more senior engineer in a certain area can complete a task better and more thoughtfully, than he should have a chance to pull it. This also does require technical PMs which can discuss and understand the cost of their stories. This is important regardless however.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- CameronBanga 7y ago
  I'm about to add our first remote hire to our team, where 4 will be based out of office and one will be remote. Would love to hear your thoughts on this and get some feedback as to how I should best plan for this on our side, if you're willing to share? My contact info is in my profile.
  - machiaweliczny 7y ago
    You just need to embrace async communication even with one remote worker. In short: all relevant problems/design/communication solved on project channel and not offline or private coversations.
  - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
    I've been the only remote worker on a team in the past, and it was a horrible experience. Ways you might be able to avoid that: - Treat communications as a first-class management consideration for yourself and every team member. Make sure your team gets the message. - Treat telecommunications issues, especially the quality of teleconference calls, as a top-level issue. Otherwise the remote worker will, again, be at an information disadvantage. He/she will have to choose between (a) repeatedly asking everyone in the meeting to repeat themselves, move closer to the mic, adjust the camera orientation, etc., or (b) miss some potentially important communication. - Remember that every fun perk for physically present staff (going out to lunch together, having an after-hours beer, etc.) runs the risk of making the remote worker feel left out and not an integral member of the team. Treat this as a management problem. If these problems are manifest, not only will you suffer the direct implications of missed communications, but you're likely to face a disengaged worker, which is fun for nobody.
cm2012 7y ago
This is true in offices too. Anyone in knowledge work claiming to consistently work 10 hours a day either does way too much busywork or is lying.
- haihaibye 7y ago
  That's a strong claim: that human capacity for working hours at the outliers never exceeds by more than 25% what the average has converged upon.
  - cm2012 7y ago
    The average that real knowledge workers work per today is probably closer to 6, including meetings. I did a simple poll of HN a while back. Here is the result: https://imgur.com/qdSltlM https://imgur.com/qdSltlM It's a normal distribution around 4-8 hours. There's no correlation with hours worked to seniority. Poll language here: https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1 https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1 I specifically included meetings, etc, in the time counted. If you took anecdotes from office workers IRL you'd think everyone was in the top quintile. You can argue that its an unrepresentative sample (people browsing HN) but I'd postulate that people not on HN are using downtime elsewhere. And I'm not convinced the 8+ people are being more productive with their time (as per my busy work note in the other comment). Anecdotally, the people who most complain about being busy seem to be the least impactful.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Wrong imgur link? Shows a random image dump here.
      - cm2012 7y ago
        Fixed!
    - haihaibye 7y ago
      OK, so that's a strong claim, that outliers can't work 1.5 times as much as normal. I've worked in GameDev and now science... I've seen them, they exist! Some people work not just harder but longer as well, they are extremely productive compared to average. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html Richard Hamming says: You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office! What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.'' He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it.
CameronBanga 7y ago
I'm about to add our first remote hire to our team, where 4 will be based out of office and one will be remote. Would love to hear your thoughts on this and get some feedback as to how I should best plan for this on our side, if you're willing to share? My contact info is in my profile.

EastSmith 7y ago

I am working remote for 3 and a half years now. Meeting the "week by week" expectations is the most important thing, period.

blazespin 7y ago
The fundamental problem with scrum is that bugs happen and nothing interesting from a development point of view can be predicted effort wise before hand, at least not accurately. The right way, is to do all velocity analysis backward-looking. Create a culture where code reviews are done constantly and long after they've been merged in. Use metrics like KLOC, duplicate lines of code, changes to code, stories completed, etc. That's the way to measure velocity. Measuring done done done by end of sprint, is really wasteful as some engineers get it into their head to pad their estimates to make sure it's completed by some arbitrary date. This just leads to a culture of padding estimates rather than completing work when it's done. That said, I do like letting engineers pull tasks as they like. If a more senior engineer in a certain area can complete a task better and more thoughtfully, than he should have a chance to pull it. This also does require technical PMs which can discuss and understand the cost of their stories. This is important regardless however.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
CameronBanga 7y ago
I'm about to add our first remote hire to our team, where 4 will be based out of office and one will be remote. Would love to hear your thoughts on this and get some feedback as to how I should best plan for this on our side, if you're willing to share? My contact info is in my profile.
- machiaweliczny 7y ago
  You just need to embrace async communication even with one remote worker. In short: all relevant problems/design/communication solved on project channel and not offline or private coversations.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  I've been the only remote worker on a team in the past, and it was a horrible experience. Ways you might be able to avoid that: - Treat communications as a first-class management consideration for yourself and every team member. Make sure your team gets the message. - Treat telecommunications issues, especially the quality of teleconference calls, as a top-level issue. Otherwise the remote worker will, again, be at an information disadvantage. He/she will have to choose between (a) repeatedly asking everyone in the meeting to repeat themselves, move closer to the mic, adjust the camera orientation, etc., or (b) miss some potentially important communication. - Remember that every fun perk for physically present staff (going out to lunch together, having an after-hours beer, etc.) runs the risk of making the remote worker feel left out and not an integral member of the team. Treat this as a management problem. If these problems are manifest, not only will you suffer the direct implications of missed communications, but you're likely to face a disengaged worker, which is fun for nobody.

cm2012 7y ago

This is true in offices too. Anyone in knowledge work claiming to consistently work 10 hours a day either does way too much busywork or is lying.

haihaibye 7y ago
That's a strong claim: that human capacity for working hours at the outliers never exceeds by more than 25% what the average has converged upon.
- cm2012 7y ago
  The average that real knowledge workers work per today is probably closer to 6, including meetings. I did a simple poll of HN a while back. Here is the result: https://imgur.com/qdSltlM https://imgur.com/qdSltlM It's a normal distribution around 4-8 hours. There's no correlation with hours worked to seniority. Poll language here: https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1 https://strawpoll.com/47x15cf1 I specifically included meetings, etc, in the time counted. If you took anecdotes from office workers IRL you'd think everyone was in the top quintile. You can argue that its an unrepresentative sample (people browsing HN) but I'd postulate that people not on HN are using downtime elsewhere. And I'm not convinced the 8+ people are being more productive with their time (as per my busy work note in the other comment). Anecdotally, the people who most complain about being busy seem to be the least impactful.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Wrong imgur link? Shows a random image dump here.
    - cm2012 7y ago
      Fixed!
  - haihaibye 7y ago
    OK, so that's a strong claim, that outliers can't work 1.5 times as much as normal. I've worked in GameDev and now science... I've seen them, they exist! Some people work not just harder but longer as well, they are extremely productive compared to average. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html Richard Hamming says: You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office! What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. On this matter of drive Edison says, ``Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.'' He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it.

CameronBanga 7y ago

I'm about to add our first remote hire to our team, where 4 will be based out of office and one will be remote. Would love to hear your thoughts on this and get some feedback as to how I should best plan for this on our side, if you're willing to share? My contact info is in my profile.