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I got to say, I disagree with nearly every point here. Taps on the shoulder are the worst, anonymous cubical farms would be way better than the current situatio
by skizm 7y ago
I got to say, I disagree with nearly every point here. Taps on the shoulder are the worst, anonymous cubical farms would be way better than the current situation (all open offices), skype/zoom/etc. are all immediately available for impromptu meetings, I'm not sure why working on code independently would lead to more silos? Does everyone always pair program in offices? Do you theorize less design meetings or something?
Plus remote you can not play the butts-in-seats game, get non-work related life things done at your leisure, wear whatever clothes you like, shit in your own bathroom, don't have to worry about anyone tapping you on the shoulder, eat what you want when you want, the list goes on. Theses are just the immediate things that come to mind.
- auggierose 7y agoShit in your own bathroom. I second this.
- cpursley 7y agoI'm not sure why you're getting downvotes. This is actually huge for me at least.
- potta_coffee 7y agoThe bathroom in my office is nasty. Nobody has a gallbladder and they all eat greasy food. It's a shit factory and I hate being here for that reason alone.
- c0vfefe 7y agoxD Thanks for the laugh!
- dkersten 7y agoRegarding pair programming, some of my best work was done “remote pair programming” with voice chat and screen sharing.
- pelasaco 7y agowe use gotomeeting and atom and it works fantastically. I wouldn't switch that for a 40 hours/week office routine. The coffee at home tastes much better!
- justjico 7y agoI agree. Even if within the same building, I find it more ergonomic to screen share / voice chat than awkwardly try to share the same monitor, etc.
- Huggernaut 7y agoAgree with this, but most places set up to pair effectively have mirrored monitor set ups. Makes a huge difference.
- drewnick 7y agoAgree. With tools like Remote VS Code it's definitely as good if not better than in person because you each have your own creature comforts but share the same workspace (even terminal) and can edit the same file at the same time.
- test1235 7y agowe've only just started using live share, but it seems quite good, so far
- imdsm 7y agoYeah, I've been remote first for three years now and don't have any of these problems. Perhaps OP had a bad experience. And not knock IRL first — there are definitely things I miss about being in an office but they are all social aspects and not work — but I think remote first does have a lot more benefits. It's also tougher, the discipline required, the social isolation, all difficult issues.
- skizm 7y agoTBH, OP sounds like a manager. Which is fine, but their experience is usually constantly worrying people under them will work more slowly when given more freedom. So, since their job is contingent on the people under them doing a good job, its easier to claim accountability when they can physically seem them in their seats every day. People who talk about "impromptu collaboration" generally aren't individual contributors.
- otabdeveloper3 7y ago> Which is fine, but their experience is usually constantly worrying people under them will work more slowly when given more freedom. Protip, they will. In fact, they won't just work slowly, they will actively work towards sabotaging your project. (I.e., spending two years "refactoring" towards a hip new technology, fucking the project up up to and including complete non-functionality and then jumping ship with a payraise to a competitor because they now have "experience".)
- Supermancho 7y ago> In fact, they won't just work slowly, they will actively work towards sabotaging your project. If your estimation and metrics tracking doesn't catch this remote, it won't catch this in an office. It is true that it's easier to hide incompetence and laziness, but perfection is the enemy of good on those scales.
- tomc1985 7y agoSo you had a bad experience. Plenty of us work on remote teams that deliver working, relatively bug-free products and code on the regular
- dasil003 7y agoI’ve done multi-year stints of both, and it’s highly contextual. For ICs I get the quiet and focus is a net win (assuming proper self-motivation and no social isolation issues). However for high-level or cross-functional collaboration there is no online tool that approaches the bandwidth of two people in a room with a whiteboard. The energy in person, serendipity and the ideas that come from prolonged close collaboration (especially in a startup) is hard to quantify but it’s real. It’s not optimal for everyone all the time, but then neither is full remote.
- closeparen 7y agoI think this is more or less the consensus opinion among managers, which is why we mostly have office jobs that support some WFH rather than fully in office or fully remote.
- geekbird 7y agoIMO, that's because managers favor butts-in-seats and the idea that they can "see you working". IME the only people who actually like open plan offices are managers, extroverts, and flakes, most of whom irritate non-managers, introverts, and non-flakes.
- closeparen 7y agoThe managers I’m referring to don’t need to see you working. They want you to see you collaborating and socializing with the team in person, but are fine with you doing your actual coding at home and rarely if ever touching your desk. The office is open plan but usually pretty empty, as everyone is either in conference rooms or at home.
- oblio 7y ago1. I'm an extrovert and I don't like open plan offices. I'm not a manager and I'm probably not a flake, I'd say :p 2. Your tone is super condescending, regarding the extrovert - introvert bit.
- thebigspacefuck 7y ago
- dcolkitt 7y agoI mostly agree with you. But I do see what OP is getting at. There's a lot of accidental innovation that occurs during casual bull sessions over coffee breaks. In a remote environment the tendency is for communication to be more formalized and structured. "Hey, are you available for a call. I just want to go cover X, Y and Z, then I'll let you get back to work." Often time half-baked ideas end up getting polished into important innovations. Without some sort of channel for informal, impromptu discussions a lot of ideas get overlooked.
- pts_ 7y agoAll of which can be done via texts, chats and video conferencing.
- rat9988 7y agoTexts maybe. Video conferencing and chats tend to be more tedious than human to human conversations from my experience.
- cliffy 7y agoIRC/Slack/etc is great because you can have informal conversations in a channel where your whole team can observe and participate in a more asynchronous nature. Human conversations are fine, but you generally don't get a durable record of them after the fact, and only those present will have a chance to participate.
- throwawaymath 7y agoIn theory, sure. In practice, I've never had a Slack conversation or video conference which felt as natural, rich, spontaneous or productive as a focused discussion in person. I say that as someone who worked fully from home for five years on a remote dev team. That's not to say it's not useful. It's better than email, leaves a neat record to come back to and supports asynchronous communication. There are advantages. But strictly speaking, no, you cannot capture everything good and useful about in-person conversation using text and video. I don't think it should be controversial that much of the richness of in-person conversation - tone, nuance, body language, facial expression, spontaneity, speed - can't be meaningfully replicated through remote mediums. You can't get all of these things from a message or video chat. You can get some of them well, and a few others decently, but it isn't the same. I like remote work a lot and wish more companies would support it. That being said, in my experience when people give honest, cogent criticisms of remote work they mostly receive responses which don't speak to the spirit of their point. In this comment thread, for example, the person you responded to is talking about difficulties. You are responding as if the person was talking about impossibilities. It is (emphatically) not impossible to function as a remote team, and very few people will try to make that case. But in the world we live in and with the technology we currently have, there are things about in-person discussion you will not be able to capture on a remote team. If nothing else people have different values. Some developers enjoy being highly social when they're working, others don't. Some don't mind interruptions, others do. Many people feel a sense of comfort and empowerment by using Slack or Zoom which makes it easier for them to have productive discussion, for a variety of reasons. Likewise many developers do not get any of the same enjoyment out of a Slack or Zoom conversation that they do from face to face communication.
- bobthepanda 7y agoI don’t get why it’s always presented as cubicle farm vs fully open floor. My company uses semi-open offfices; you have an open office with 8-10 people in a team, but don’t share space with other teams. So it’s access to the people you work with directly and no more.
- WalterSear 7y agoThat's still an open office.
- rpedela 7y agoTechnically yes, but it feels very different to an open office with 50 people in it. <=10 is small enough that everyone is able to respect each others' privacy, noise, etc while still enjoying some of the benefits of an open office such as turn-your-chair-around collaboration. I think we need a new term for when <=10 people are in an open office. It just isn't the same as what is usually referred to when someone says "open office".
- WalterSear 7y agoIt is exactly what people are referring to when they say 'open office'. What we need is a word for offices with 50 people in them.
- chimeracoder 7y ago> It is exactly what people are referring to when they say 'open office'. What we need is a word for offices with 50 people in them. Those have historically been called "bullpen offices".
- rpedela 7y agoIt really isn't. Most people are thinking of this: https://blog.nuclino.com/files/9f08086a-9bde-4d95-929a-f7f2c67bb1ad/facebook-office-plan.jpg https://blog.nuclino.com/files/9f08086a-9bde-4d95-929a-f7f2c...
- Diederich 7y agoI agree and disagree with both of you. There are real, tangible advantages and disadvantages to both. My approach is to embrace both at the same time, by almost always coming into the office, but arriving before 0700. The first half of my day is super focused, uninterrupted work, and the second half is relatively unfocused, talk to people and be talked to at random times kind of work. I leave around 4pm. I've had no substantial problems going home so 'early' among the eight or so orgs I've worked at in the past couple of decades.
- hinkley 7y agoFor remote workers to be effective, a lot of things that go unsaid or unwritten have to be written down. If you have that, then the difference between sitting in the same building and being remote isn't as pronounced. But also if you have that, the advantage of sitting next to each other instead of just in the same building is also less pronounced. It's also easier to train your replacement, and some people are terrified of that. You can learn a lot about the problems or architectural issues with your system by participating in conversations, and that supports the bullpen organization of offices. But you learn a ton more by participating in private or one-on-one conversations. In public only the brash get to talk. In private people will share their real fears as long as you don't belittle them for it. And those fears may reveal existential crises that are brewing in the system that nobody talks about. It's much easier to have a private conversation with a remote person than it is to have a private conversation in a bull pen.
- PunchTornado 7y agoI think you should pair program at least once a week...
- PunchTornado 7y agothe thing is I'd rather shit in the office bathroom, it's so much nicer than mine. I'd rather eat the FREE food at the office, it's so much better than what I could cook spending money and time. I sometimes regret weekends because I don't have access to those things.
- baddox 7y agoI think it's safe to say there are people who work best in radically different environments. I can't stand working from home, or working from a coffee shop. I also can't stand offices where everyone is just wearing their headphones as if to say "don't you dare ask me about something important that I know a lot about." What's the point in being at the office? In my opinion and experience, professional programming is a deeply collaborative experience. But of course other people who ostensibly do the same kind of work have completely different preferences, and that's great. It does mean that people need to be very careful what kind of company they take a job at.