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As a former software eng. who has been on the management side for a few years, I am quite ambivalent about remote work, and I find most arguments for it a bit n

by cdavid 7y ago

As a former software eng. who has been on the management side for a few years, I am quite ambivalent about remote work, and I find most arguments for it a bit naive. For example, the idea that the manager schedule is built around taylorism is not true IMO. I have never seen a single senior manager who do not have their life consisting mostly of 30 / 60 / 90 mins slots in my life, and I have worked in very technical environments, e.g. where the average engineer had a PhD. First, to let it out of the way: yes, you can definitely have remote teams which work very well and produce high quality products. In my experience, those have the following characteristics: clear and fairly technical product definition (e.g viz software which are built for scientists), excellent teams with no bad performer, and healthy business environments. The problem is when at least some of those conditions are not met: 1. Most organizations are dysfunctional in some ways. Product and engineering are not aligned, or there are constant re-organizations, lack of ownership. It is extremely challenging for managers to improve this situation if everybody is remote, because communication is your main tool here, and doing so remotely is even more difficult. My experience in those situations is that face to face discussions are the most effective tool to untangle the mess. 2. When things go south (e.g. you lose a big client, etc.), it is almost always the case that people will start to find teams / people to blame. Executives have shallow information, and most will rely on what is available to them (kind of availability bias, but for people instead of ideas). Remote teams will be at a disadvantage. 3. When your team is not very good, or not very experienced, it is very difficult to improve their skills remotely. First, being remote means you lose a lot of very useful information, such as "do they often talk to other people when they are stuck". Instead of observing how people act, you have to ask, which paradoxically means more interruption. Generally, my sense is that remote-first work is quite fragile, or said differently, is an unstable equilibrium. As soon as things go badly, it is much harder to fix things. As long as everything goes well, it may well be more efficient though.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I am a big fan of remote work but your points are very valid. I think a remote company need to have a fundamentally different way of management. I think most important is for management to have a good grasp of the type of work people are doing. When I look at my company my managers just one or two levels up haven’t even the foggiest idea how one does the work my team does. When something goes wrong the only thing they can do is to see that people are at the office and working hard. They have no tools to judge work without seeing people at their desks.
- cdavid 7y ago
  Yes, performance management is really hard (remote or not): the reality is that it is actually quite difficult to measure the output of software engineers. There are definitely overly bad measures (LOC, etc.), but things like mentoring, quality of code review, etc. are hard to measure if you are not observing them directly.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    Bad management often uses metrics like this. Instead, it is managements job to define goals and distribute work. A developer should be measured if he reached the defined goal and the efficiency of the solution. Any other metric would probably fall short.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      It’s not that simple. Nobody knows how much a tech project takes so it’s hard to allocate resources and budget for it. I often see people producing nothing tangible for months but I know they are working on something difficult and I can judge their work because I understand it. If you don’t have that knowledge how can you manage your workforce? It gets even worse with remote where you don’t know if somebody is at least working or just sitting around.
      - ska 7y ago
        It gets even worse with remote where you don’t know if somebody is at least working or just sitting around. This is less clear in a office than it seems at first glance - appearing productive and being productive are two very different things.
        Ididntdothis 7y ago
        From my experience appearing to be productive is sufficient in most companies.
      - matwood 7y ago
nullspace 7y ago
I don’t know why you got downvoted, your points are certainly good and reflect my one personal data point.* I have also seen that face 2 face interactions are the best in order to align within or across product and engineering. Especially at the level of longer-term goals. Not so much at the level of weekly or monthly cycles. And I’ve seen the exact same thing with coaching and mentoring people and teams. It feels like it’s much harder. I think when you are the person who needs to upskill, it is a lot more obvious when you are sitting next to a person senior to you. That you have to grow becomes more “material” maybe? I love remote work, the benefits brought up are very real. I’m curious about solutions to these very real issues. * Although in my case, I’m sure someone could come and say “you are not doing it right!” We were fairly new to this.
- nullspace 7y ago
  And there’s one more thing, I’ve found that building good interpersonal relationships are quite important to having effective discussions with someone. Especially when the topic is controversial. I’ve found this to be a lot harder when two people have never met each other. How do people work around this?
  - lukethomas 7y ago
    Hey, I'm the author of the post and have been working remotely for 6 years. There is no replacement for meeting up in person periodically. Anyone who tells you it's not a key requirement of remote work is foolish. Smart teams + companies have figured this out and do regular meetups. With that being said, there are ways to "maintain" relationships with coworkers. I wrote a big post about this last week you might like: https://www.friday.app/build-relationships-remote-team https://www.friday.app/build-relationships-remote-team
    - cdavid 7y ago
      Did you write anything about remote team management ? The "value proposition" for remote work for IC is obvious to me, but much less so from a management perspective.
workremotely 7y ago
What you're saying makes no sense. Suppose remote work was the norm. Your comments somehow imply moving work to be on-premise would be an improvement. Let's examine your claims one by one. > 1. Most organizations are dysfunctional in some ways. Product and engineering are not aligned, or there are constant re-organizations, lack of ownership. It is extremely challenging for managers to improve this situation if everybody is remote, because communication is your main tool here, and doing so remotely is even more difficult. My experience in those situations is that face to face discussions are the most effective tool to untangle the mess. In a remote-only organization, communication is necessarily all done in a matter that's transparent and not transient like face-to-face communication. You claim doing so remotely is more difficult but do not substantiate this. You claim that face-to-face discussions are effective... for what reason? What about face-to-face communication makes this more effective? Just a bunch of unsubstantiated claims made here. > 2. When things go south (e.g. you lose a big client, etc.), it is almost always the case that people will start to find teams / people to blame. Executives have shallow information, and most will rely on what is available to them (kind of availability bias, but for people instead of ideas). Remote teams will be at a disadvantage. If remote were the norm you could easily make this same claim about the lone on-premise team whose communication is isolated from the rest of the organization. This has more to do with the fact that remote teams are rare and less with the fact that they're remote. In fact what you're saying here is what often happens with satellite offices. Again, nothing here you're saying is unique to a remote team. > 3. When your team is not very good, or not very experienced, it is very difficult to improve their skills remotely. First, being remote means you lose a lot of very useful information, such as "do they often talk to other people when they are stuck". Instead of observing how people act, you have to ask, which paradoxically means more interruption. Again, assuming remote was the norm your claims make no sense. It would be trivial to see how much workers were communicating with each other in a remote team. In fact, I don't know how you would even get your purported "useful information" unless as a manager all you're doing is micromanaging your employees all day? TLDR - all of your claims against remote work are trivially countered. Remote work has no disadvantages except the loss of (important) non-verbal information when communicating.
- cdavid 7y ago
  > In a remote-only organization, communication is necessarily all done in a matter that's transparent and not transient like face-to-face communication. You claim doing so remotely is more difficult but do not substantiate this. You claim that face-to-face discussions are effective... for what reason? What about face-to-face communication makes this more effective? Just a bunch of unsubstantiated claims made here. The problem is when communication are broken, you don't even know who you are supposed to talk to. In that case, I think it is quite obvious that doing it remotely is harder than if everybody is on the same building. > If remote were the norm you could easily make this same claim about the lone on-premise team whose communication is isolated from the rest of the organization. That's correct, the problem is the same. It has been my experience that as soon as things go south in a company, you have a vast advantage if you and your team work in HQ. It has almost always been my experience that the projects that got the most pull politically (and hence resources) were the one pushed by managers in HQ, or with an existing strong relationship that was created... by being at HQ. > Again, assuming remote was the norm your claims make no sense. It would be trivial to see how much workers were communicating with each other in a remote team. You are the first manager I have met who claims this is trivial, remote or not.
dudul 7y ago
1. What do you get out of a face to face discussion that you don't get from a zoom call? I would argue that remote teams have a strong advantage there: remote teams rely more on written, async communication. This forces product and business experts to really think about what they want engineers to do. Having to write things done is the best way to avoid the usual handwaving "just add a checkbox there and we're good". Yes, it may seem to be taking a bit longer with some back and forth, but in the end you get a more solid and clear path forward. 2. Maybe, I've never observed that either as an IC or a manager, so yeah, if there is such a toxic culture it's a problem. 3. Don't you have weekly 1:1 to dive into that? I would argue that relying too much on observations instead of directly asking people is a problem.
- cdavid 7y ago
  1. I am the first to recognize it is hard to quantify, it is just my experience. I should note that I have always worked in fairly diverse environments, at least culturally (e.g. in my current team, I have people from France, the US, Australia, Spain, China, India and Japan, only 2 speak their native language), which likely affects my experience. 3. Of course, you cannot only rely on observation, and 1:1 are crucial. But especially with junior people, just asking questions is not enough. You really have to look how people work to understand your team's dynamic. In my experience, 1:1 utility decreases the more junior reports are, and observations utility increases the more junior reports are.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  My favorite thing about remote work is the written communication. It creates a form of documentation in itself. I've worked remotely for 15 years. I can go back to any conversation on any feature we've ever had. It's extremely powerful.
  - Phillips126 7y ago
    I miss this greatly from when I was remote. If I am walking back from a meeting and get detoured into helping some people with a specific problem it's hard to remember everything from the meeting. Having that "hard proof" of everything said and easy to refer to is powerful.
snarf21 7y ago
I'm not going to state an opinion on remote being good or bad. I think it is very team and company dependent. However, people who want remote work usually talk about the benefit of remote work to limit distractions. However, the team/product/company success is largely not determined by LOC/hour productivity. What may be high productivity for an individual may not help the team/product/company, as they could be implementing the "wrong" thing. I do think if you want to do remote work as a company, you need to focus extra resources on facilitating and overdoing communications. Most companies have problems getting on the same page when they are in the same room. It is possible with a remote team but it requires someone to be explicitly in charge of communication.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
I'll accept that your points seem valid, but when stacked up against the awfulness of the daily commute psychologically, environmentally, and in terms of safety, I still think more remote work is a net benefit.
- cdavid 7y ago
  Yeah, the advantages are obvious and real, especially for individual contributors. I am myself quite pessimistic about the reality of a massive change there because of the points I raised, and the ability to do commute < 30 minutes has always been a strong factor when changing jobs for me.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Depends on your commute! Mine is a 15 minute bike ride.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    It is much more difficult to find a way to get a lot of people within a 15 minute bike ride of their job (not even accounting for Winter) than to allow them to work remotely.
    - hectormalot 7y ago
      Depends on and culture. Quite common where I live to commute by bike (Netherlands), even up to 45 minutes, also in winter. But you’re right of course for eg UK/US in most cases. Difference between ‘where companies are’ and ‘where (affordable) houses are’ is much bigger in less bikeable countries.
paulsutter 7y ago
You’re describing all the ways remote work is a problem at an office-first company. Remote-first companies operate differently, in particular communication https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/
- cdavid 7y ago
  true to a point, but difficulty to transition is real. I would be the first to agree that a lot of the elements in the remote manifesto are good things in absolute (written down processes, etc.). In fact, that's one of the first thing I focus on as a manager in a new position as those are often lacking.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
  As a side note > Hiring and working from all over the world instead of from a central location. Am I naive to think that the legal requirements of complying with all of the world's labor laws and tax reporting (w.r.t to income) would outweigh any benefit of the increased productivity of remote work? I could see this crippling any fledgling startup attempting to bootstrap, and only see those backed with massive VC cash being able to do this.
  - forgingahead 7y ago
    > Hiring and working from all over the world instead of from a central location. *Except Russia and China
  - GoToRO 7y ago
    You don't. You make a business to business contract. So it's not really employment.
    - ska 7y ago
      It's not enough to contract it that way, you have to actually have a business to business relationship. If the company can set your hours and deeply control how/when you do the work, you may both have a nasty surprise from the IRS
ilaksh 7y ago
1. Why do you think that you can't have a face-to-face discussion remotely. You can using video chat software. It works very well. No, its not _exactly_ the same as being in the same room, but it doesn't need to be. 2. If executives blame a remote team that is functioning well and punish or fire them for it incorrectly, then those executives should be replaced. That's just lazy scapegoating. 3. It sounds like you are saying that you think that you should lterally watch over a software engineer's shoulder to see if he is typing a lot, or if not, asking for help. This is extremely ignorant. Programming doesn't mean that you look busy a lot. A good engineer might spend a lot of time just Googling. Or actually sitting there and thinking for a couple of minutes without even necessarily typing (unless he is afraid the manager looking over his shoulder might get suspicious).
matwood 7y ago
> Most organizations are dysfunctional in some ways. > communication is your main tool I think at its heart, remote work will amplify any existing communication issues in an organization. Being in the same office can smooth over some of these issues, but they are still issues. This is why it is hard for a company to transition to remote work. The inertia of dealing with communication issues by being co-located is hard to overcome. This is also why companies that started remote are still the best at remote. They simply would not have survived without proper communication from the get go.
konschubert 7y ago
What I don’t get: Why does every remote company have to be async? Why can I not get the setup (remote work) without the ideology (async work)? Maybe it’s due to a lack of tooling?

by cdavid 7y ago

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I am a big fan of remote work but your points are very valid. I think a remote company need to have a fundamentally different way of management. I think most important is for management to have a good grasp of the type of work people are doing. When I look at my company my managers just one or two levels up haven’t even the foggiest idea how one does the work my team does. When something goes wrong the only thing they can do is to see that people are at the office and working hard. They have no tools to judge work without seeing people at their desks.

cdavid 7y ago
Yes, performance management is really hard (remote or not): the reality is that it is actually quite difficult to measure the output of software engineers. There are definitely overly bad measures (LOC, etc.), but things like mentoring, quality of code review, etc. are hard to measure if you are not observing them directly.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Bad management often uses metrics like this. Instead, it is managements job to define goals and distribute work. A developer should be measured if he reached the defined goal and the efficiency of the solution. Any other metric would probably fall short.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    It’s not that simple. Nobody knows how much a tech project takes so it’s hard to allocate resources and budget for it. I often see people producing nothing tangible for months but I know they are working on something difficult and I can judge their work because I understand it. If you don’t have that knowledge how can you manage your workforce? It gets even worse with remote where you don’t know if somebody is at least working or just sitting around.
    - ska 7y ago
      It gets even worse with remote where you don’t know if somebody is at least working or just sitting around. This is less clear in a office than it seems at first glance - appearing productive and being productive are two very different things.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        From my experience appearing to be productive is sufficient in most companies.
    - matwood 7y ago

nullspace 7y ago

I don’t know why you got downvoted, your points are certainly good and reflect my one personal data point.* I have also seen that face 2 face interactions are the best in order to align within or across product and engineering. Especially at the level of longer-term goals. Not so much at the level of weekly or monthly cycles. And I’ve seen the exact same thing with coaching and mentoring people and teams. It feels like it’s much harder. I think when you are the person who needs to upskill, it is a lot more obvious when you are sitting next to a person senior to you. That you have to grow becomes more “material” maybe? I love remote work, the benefits brought up are very real. I’m curious about solutions to these very real issues. * Although in my case, I’m sure someone could come and say “you are not doing it right!” We were fairly new to this.

nullspace 7y ago
And there’s one more thing, I’ve found that building good interpersonal relationships are quite important to having effective discussions with someone. Especially when the topic is controversial. I’ve found this to be a lot harder when two people have never met each other. How do people work around this?
- lukethomas 7y ago
  Hey, I'm the author of the post and have been working remotely for 6 years. There is no replacement for meeting up in person periodically. Anyone who tells you it's not a key requirement of remote work is foolish. Smart teams + companies have figured this out and do regular meetups. With that being said, there are ways to "maintain" relationships with coworkers. I wrote a big post about this last week you might like: https://www.friday.app/build-relationships-remote-team https://www.friday.app/build-relationships-remote-team
  - cdavid 7y ago
    Did you write anything about remote team management ? The "value proposition" for remote work for IC is obvious to me, but much less so from a management perspective.

workremotely 7y ago

What you're saying makes no sense. Suppose remote work was the norm. Your comments somehow imply moving work to be on-premise would be an improvement. Let's examine your claims one by one. > 1. Most organizations are dysfunctional in some ways. Product and engineering are not aligned, or there are constant re-organizations, lack of ownership. It is extremely challenging for managers to improve this situation if everybody is remote, because communication is your main tool here, and doing so remotely is even more difficult. My experience in those situations is that face to face discussions are the most effective tool to untangle the mess. In a remote-only organization, communication is necessarily all done in a matter that's transparent and not transient like face-to-face communication. You claim doing so remotely is more difficult but do not substantiate this. You claim that face-to-face discussions are effective... for what reason? What about face-to-face communication makes this more effective? Just a bunch of unsubstantiated claims made here. > 2. When things go south (e.g. you lose a big client, etc.), it is almost always the case that people will start to find teams / people to blame. Executives have shallow information, and most will rely on what is available to them (kind of availability bias, but for people instead of ideas). Remote teams will be at a disadvantage. If remote were the norm you could easily make this same claim about the lone on-premise team whose communication is isolated from the rest of the organization. This has more to do with the fact that remote teams are rare and less with the fact that they're remote. In fact what you're saying here is what often happens with satellite offices. Again, nothing here you're saying is unique to a remote team. > 3. When your team is not very good, or not very experienced, it is very difficult to improve their skills remotely. First, being remote means you lose a lot of very useful information, such as "do they often talk to other people when they are stuck". Instead of observing how people act, you have to ask, which paradoxically means more interruption. Again, assuming remote was the norm your claims make no sense. It would be trivial to see how much workers were communicating with each other in a remote team. In fact, I don't know how you would even get your purported "useful information" unless as a manager all you're doing is micromanaging your employees all day? TLDR - all of your claims against remote work are trivially countered. Remote work has no disadvantages except the loss of (important) non-verbal information when communicating.

cdavid 7y ago
> In a remote-only organization, communication is necessarily all done in a matter that's transparent and not transient like face-to-face communication. You claim doing so remotely is more difficult but do not substantiate this. You claim that face-to-face discussions are effective... for what reason? What about face-to-face communication makes this more effective? Just a bunch of unsubstantiated claims made here. The problem is when communication are broken, you don't even know who you are supposed to talk to. In that case, I think it is quite obvious that doing it remotely is harder than if everybody is on the same building. > If remote were the norm you could easily make this same claim about the lone on-premise team whose communication is isolated from the rest of the organization. That's correct, the problem is the same. It has been my experience that as soon as things go south in a company, you have a vast advantage if you and your team work in HQ. It has almost always been my experience that the projects that got the most pull politically (and hence resources) were the one pushed by managers in HQ, or with an existing strong relationship that was created... by being at HQ. > Again, assuming remote was the norm your claims make no sense. It would be trivial to see how much workers were communicating with each other in a remote team. You are the first manager I have met who claims this is trivial, remote or not.

dudul 7y ago

1. What do you get out of a face to face discussion that you don't get from a zoom call? I would argue that remote teams have a strong advantage there: remote teams rely more on written, async communication. This forces product and business experts to really think about what they want engineers to do. Having to write things done is the best way to avoid the usual handwaving "just add a checkbox there and we're good". Yes, it may seem to be taking a bit longer with some back and forth, but in the end you get a more solid and clear path forward. 2. Maybe, I've never observed that either as an IC or a manager, so yeah, if there is such a toxic culture it's a problem. 3. Don't you have weekly 1:1 to dive into that? I would argue that relying too much on observations instead of directly asking people is a problem.

cdavid 7y ago
1. I am the first to recognize it is hard to quantify, it is just my experience. I should note that I have always worked in fairly diverse environments, at least culturally (e.g. in my current team, I have people from France, the US, Australia, Spain, China, India and Japan, only 2 speak their native language), which likely affects my experience. 3. Of course, you cannot only rely on observation, and 1:1 are crucial. But especially with junior people, just asking questions is not enough. You really have to look how people work to understand your team's dynamic. In my experience, 1:1 utility decreases the more junior reports are, and observations utility increases the more junior reports are.
bcrosby95 7y ago
My favorite thing about remote work is the written communication. It creates a form of documentation in itself. I've worked remotely for 15 years. I can go back to any conversation on any feature we've ever had. It's extremely powerful.
- Phillips126 7y ago
  I miss this greatly from when I was remote. If I am walking back from a meeting and get detoured into helping some people with a specific problem it's hard to remember everything from the meeting. Having that "hard proof" of everything said and easy to refer to is powerful.

snarf21 7y ago

I'm not going to state an opinion on remote being good or bad. I think it is very team and company dependent. However, people who want remote work usually talk about the benefit of remote work to limit distractions. However, the team/product/company success is largely not determined by LOC/hour productivity. What may be high productivity for an individual may not help the team/product/company, as they could be implementing the "wrong" thing. I do think if you want to do remote work as a company, you need to focus extra resources on facilitating and overdoing communications. Most companies have problems getting on the same page when they are in the same room. It is possible with a remote team but it requires someone to be explicitly in charge of communication.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

I'll accept that your points seem valid, but when stacked up against the awfulness of the daily commute psychologically, environmentally, and in terms of safety, I still think more remote work is a net benefit.

cdavid 7y ago
Yeah, the advantages are obvious and real, especially for individual contributors. I am myself quite pessimistic about the reality of a massive change there because of the points I raised, and the ability to do commute < 30 minutes has always been a strong factor when changing jobs for me.
IshKebab 7y ago
Depends on your commute! Mine is a 15 minute bike ride.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  It is much more difficult to find a way to get a lot of people within a 15 minute bike ride of their job (not even accounting for Winter) than to allow them to work remotely.
  - hectormalot 7y ago
    Depends on and culture. Quite common where I live to commute by bike (Netherlands), even up to 45 minutes, also in winter. But you’re right of course for eg UK/US in most cases. Difference between ‘where companies are’ and ‘where (affordable) houses are’ is much bigger in less bikeable countries.

paulsutter 7y ago

You’re describing all the ways remote work is a problem at an office-first company. Remote-first companies operate differently, in particular communication https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/

cdavid 7y ago
true to a point, but difficulty to transition is real. I would be the first to agree that a lot of the elements in the remote manifesto are good things in absolute (written down processes, etc.). In fact, that's one of the first thing I focus on as a manager in a new position as those are often lacking.
tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
As a side note > Hiring and working from all over the world instead of from a central location. Am I naive to think that the legal requirements of complying with all of the world's labor laws and tax reporting (w.r.t to income) would outweigh any benefit of the increased productivity of remote work? I could see this crippling any fledgling startup attempting to bootstrap, and only see those backed with massive VC cash being able to do this.
- forgingahead 7y ago
  > Hiring and working from all over the world instead of from a central location. *Except Russia and China
- GoToRO 7y ago
  You don't. You make a business to business contract. So it's not really employment.
  - ska 7y ago
    It's not enough to contract it that way, you have to actually have a business to business relationship. If the company can set your hours and deeply control how/when you do the work, you may both have a nasty surprise from the IRS

ilaksh 7y ago

1. Why do you think that you can't have a face-to-face discussion remotely. You can using video chat software. It works very well. No, its not _exactly_ the same as being in the same room, but it doesn't need to be. 2. If executives blame a remote team that is functioning well and punish or fire them for it incorrectly, then those executives should be replaced. That's just lazy scapegoating. 3. It sounds like you are saying that you think that you should lterally watch over a software engineer's shoulder to see if he is typing a lot, or if not, asking for help. This is extremely ignorant. Programming doesn't mean that you look busy a lot. A good engineer might spend a lot of time just Googling. Or actually sitting there and thinking for a couple of minutes without even necessarily typing (unless he is afraid the manager looking over his shoulder might get suspicious).

matwood 7y ago

> Most organizations are dysfunctional in some ways. > communication is your main tool I think at its heart, remote work will amplify any existing communication issues in an organization. Being in the same office can smooth over some of these issues, but they are still issues. This is why it is hard for a company to transition to remote work. The inertia of dealing with communication issues by being co-located is hard to overcome. This is also why companies that started remote are still the best at remote. They simply would not have survived without proper communication from the get go.

konschubert 7y ago

What I don’t get: Why does every remote company have to be async? Why can I not get the setup (remote work) without the ideology (async work)? Maybe it’s due to a lack of tooling?