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Employee retention, continuity, and fewer disruptions. I'm not management but I am on the interview team, and I can tell you that hiring senior and architect le
by b_t_s 7y ago
Employee retention, continuity, and fewer disruptions. I'm not management but I am on the interview team, and I can tell you that hiring senior and architect level positions isn't easy in this job market. Loose one of those folks and an entire scrum team is crippled for maybe 3 to 9 months. Say 10 people for 6 months at 2/3 productivity, and you're looking at 20 developer months wasted, and user facing projects delayed or tabled. Even if you happen to find someone quick, you're loosing years worth of company specific history/experience.
As a remote engineer at a good but little known medium sized company, I could get an offer from a FAANG company(no interview, automatic hire, big raise) and realistically I'd probably tell them no. They don't have offices where I want to live, so if they won't do remote, then they just don't have a compelling offer. My quality of life would suffer too much. The most important and overlooked part of the hiring pipeline is employee retention, and my employer has already retained the $%^&* out of me by letting me work remote.
- zarkov99 7y agoRight, I understand your point completely, my wife is fully remote, and we are both pretty burrowed in where we live, so it would take some doing to get us to move. It seems to me though that all this talk about greater productivity is self-serving nonsense. Remote work is a loss for the employer, all else being equal, though it might very well be worth it at least in this market.
- b_t_s 7y agoYea, I'm not sold on the productivity thing either, at least not on an individual contributor level when everything is going perfectly. But high turnover and/or low headcount in the senior engineering ranks can really send your team/company productivity right down the drain. And with a little investment in tooling and process, having a third of the team on video rather than in the room is a fairly modest inconvenience. And I'm sure better than half of slack messages at my company are between people sitting in the same room.
- thirdsun 7y agoI disagree about the self-serving nonsense part. Sure, it requires a certain degree of discipline and self organization, but whenever I work at home on side projects, even if they aren't particularly enjoyable, I'm freuqently surprised by how much faster I seem to work if I'm not interrupted by chatty co-workers, ringing telephones and other minor annoyances that are quite significant in their sum. Don't get me wrong, all these things have their time and place, but asynchronious communication allows me to deal with them when I feel like it, which is a major advantage for me.
- zarkov99 7y agoSure, but do you just do more work or do you do the same work in less time (and use the extra the time for work balance) ? In my experience most people will just do the later.
- thirdsun 7y agoIsn't either case a win?
- b_t_s 7y agoI think this depends a lot on the company and your personal ability to tune out noise. Also whether your company uses slack heavily. Office or remote I find 99% of my interruptions are from slack, but they're semi-async and mostly ignorable if I'm heads down on something.
- thirdsun 7y agoThe difference is that I can ignore or mute Slack for a while, which doesn't work as well with people physically visiting your desk.