7 ms·

What’s stopping it from being a no brainer at this point? This feels like one of those things where old school taxi companies just couldn’t see how fast stuff l

• chrisco255 7y ago
  What kind of professional work lines up with the assembly line paradigm?
  • runawaybottle 7y ago
    Web development
    • sidlls 7y ago
      What kind? Wordpress, or large platform with many different features serving traffic at non-trivial scale (not necessarily google scale, but a few tens of or a hundred thousand requests per second)?
      • runawaybottle 7y ago
        Yes, a lot of web related work is easily defined, encapsulated and distributable. But I’ll appease your indignation with the fact that most of us lowly Wordpress developers are not doing the amazing work you’re involved in.
  • symplee 7y ago
    For remote work, pretty much anything that's not done on an actual assembly line.
  • DarthGhandi 7y ago
    Ironically am sitting here waiting for some upstream fixes from a team on the other side of the planet before I can even start my work this week, it was meant to be done a few days ago. Perhaps some things are more assembly line than you might imagine.
    • hanniabu 7y ago
      When this happen do you literally just hang out waiting for that? Or do you work on other miscellaneous stuff in the mean time?
      • DarthGhandi 7y ago
        There's an unlimited amount of work to do but in an asynchronous development world some things require others to finish their projects first.
    • bigato 7y ago
      Well, I don't work remotely but I am waiting on a task to be completed by another team for about a week now. It's something that can't possibly take more than one hour or so to be completed, and I even talked to them in person before submitting the task. That didn't change a thing about their deadlines.
• atq2119 7y ago
  Training new employees is still quite a bit lower friction with on-premise work. This obviously depends on the kind of work you do, but in my case the work is sufficiently eclectic that even very smart and experienced people tend to take a long time until they have a good level of understanding of the problem domain. That doesn't mean I'm against remote work, by the way, we do a lot of it. But we need to be realistic about its limitations.
  • hanniabu 7y ago
    Easy, you have a mandatory 2 week in office period for training and then move to off site. Whichever employee that will be training you will also come train you. The company can even pay for a coworking space that's in between or closer to trainer so they don't need to migrate for the training.
    • jakobegger 7y ago
      Training a junior dev is going to take a bit more than two weeks. I'm convinced that remote work is something that works only for some people and some kinds of tasks. Anything that requires a lot of coordination sucks doing remote.
      • dangero 7y ago
        You hit the nail on the head. These types of discussions are sensitive because remote work is sometimes considered to be an opportunity to improve working conditions worldwide and people don't take kindly to push-back on that. Our startup has gone through distinct phases -- It took us years to find product-market-fit and with that our ability to work remotely has gone through distinct phases that were obvious to the whole team. At certain points it worked great, but once we moved from the idea testing phase to execution, we wanted to be face to face much more so that we could coordinate our work. Also since new hiring ramped, we have to prioritize face-to-face training.
      • PeterisP 7y ago
        Remote work is quite reasonable for senior employees that have a demonstrated ability to work independently. In essence, some people are capable to be productive as "independent contractors" even if they're actually a full-time employee, self-managing their time, tasks and coordination with others; and some people can't (yet? is it a stage of career develoment or separate skills?) reliably provide the results that the company needs without a strong management structure doing that coordination, task assignment and information flow for them.
• jib 7y ago
  The tasks are not the hard part. Alignment is a lot easier when you’re all close. I went from a distributed team (4 offices spread between EU and US) to a team that’s all co-located. The speed and quality of alignment is miles different. There’s stuff we outsource (easy to describe tasks), but the stuff that needs tight iteration loops is so much easier when you can just get up, walk a few meters, and talk about it.
  • 14 7y ago
    I really think that in the future people will use something like holoportation[0] to work at home or remotely across the world. Because like you say sometimes it makes sense to be present with a person to accomplish a task. It is very hard if they are trying to describe something when it would only take half a moment to visually look yourself and understand the direction the person is coming from. Holoportation looks very neat I really hope I get to try it one day. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0
    • newqer 7y ago
      When I'm retiring, +/- 30 years from now, I'm going to put on my Virtual Reality glasses and never leave the house again.
      • runawaybottle 7y ago
        Don’t underestimate humanity’s ability to adapt to staring at screens as the norm (on a societal level).
  • pnako 7y ago
    The Linux kernel is developed remotely. I'm tiring of hearing cat food delivery startups pretend it won't work for them.
    • JoshTriplett 7y ago
      The Linux kernel is willing to sacrifice the time of individual developers on the altar of project efficiency. That works for the Linux kernel because there are a huge number of prospective developers, and on balance the project doesn't generally care if any specific developer wastes some time or duplicates some effort. That, by itself, isn't an argument that remote work for a given company will work.
• mongol 7y ago
  Certain things are just a lot easier when you are together. I have never had as constructive discussions online as I have had when gathered in a room with a whiteboard.
• antupis 7y ago
  Yeah, and there is definitely a huge need for tooling remote-first teams, other than yet another chat clients.
  • runawaybottle 7y ago
    We use your standard common video conferencing and screen sharing apps (Skype can do this, but I’m sure there are better options) if we need a quick chat or need to pair program. People just ping each other and agree on a time to sync up (usually immediately if possible , otherwise after your standard human bullshit like ‘grabbing some lunch first’). Its felt pretty natural, but since we are a fully distributed team, we had no choice but to get over the conceptual hang ups of not physically being near the other person. But I agree, better tools that integrate communication with project management is going to be a good space to try to build something in.
• Avicebron 7y ago
  Except I don't have a suite of class A glassware, a dewar, liquid nitrogen, and semi-infinite fridge space at home nor have the infrastructure to provide them to all my people
  • mirimir 7y ago
    I do miss that stuff.
• sytelus 7y ago
  I've gotten into remote work experiments (unplanned) and it hadn't been all rosy. The good things are huge cut on unnecessary meetings and great productivity but the bad things include much harder path to collaborate. For example, if you are designing a very complex system requiring multiple participants then it's very very hard to communicate your ideas over video conferences - even when tech worked flawlessly. It's not because people are not able to articulate the ideas but there is a lot goes on in body language, facial expressions and quick back-and-forth exchanges over whiteboard. The high bandwidth of occupying same physical 3D space permits speedy iterations while low bandwidth constraints what you must express in given slot you are expected to express. So, remote work doesn't work for all scenarios. It works well when everyone knows things fair bit, number of iterations during communications needed are small and number of ideas don't need huge bandwidth. It doesn't work as well otherwise. For example, early days of startup where the product is in embryonic state, everybody working remotely would not work out well. However, if product is mature and roadmap is well under control then remote team might work great.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    And yet, startups have been started as fully remote. Stack Overflow, Zapier, Seeq, just off the top of my head. And there are countless of successful open source projects as well. Personally, while I agree that the bandwidth is higher locally, I don't agree you are prevented from expressing what you wish by communicating remotely; it just takes a bit longer, which is more than compensated by the time saved on other things.
    • SkyPuncher 7y ago
      I work at a fully remote startup, after working at a mostly remote startup before. Having an easily accessibly video conference software, committing to getting employees good headsets, and enforcing videos on/1 person per screen makes collaboration very easy. ---- The only thing that's missing is whiteboarding sessions (which seem to be more about fun than actual productivity). Instead, we typically ask a single engineer to write up a proposal doc then have everybody comment on that. It requires a bit more lead time - write up, feedback, then finalization. However, the actual developer time is significantly less. One developer doing most of the work, with others chiming in periodically.
• hkai 7y ago
  Well for one, video calls don't really work, even with excellent internet connection. A lot of time is spent just trying to understand what the other person is saying and asking them to repeat or get closer to the mic, or mute themselves because we keep hearing their background noise. Most importantly, distractions from family members and lack of a boss looking over your shoulder means most people's productivity will be perhaps 20% of normal.
  • highstep 7y ago
    Most family members can learn to not disurb -- but I do agree that young children are a problem. Call quality is easy to solve with decent hardware, a quiet office and proper muting (I see this work all the time with 10 to 100 person meetings.)
  • SkyPuncher 7y ago
    > Well for one, video calls don't really work, even with excellent internet connection I felt this way for a very long time. Then I switched jobs and realized (1) there are some very good video conferencing tools that work even on 1 bar of LTE (2) a small investment in a camera/headset/microphone goes a long ways.
• bartread 7y ago
  Remote work can be very effective but it's not for everyone, or at least not all the time. We have a liberal remote working policy to the point where one of our team works from home almost all the time, whilst at the other end of the spectrum there are people who prefer to be in the office almost all the time, and then everything in between. I fall somewhere in the middle. A day a week from home, particularly one with few or no meetings, can enable me to get a huge amount done. But I live alone so, whilst I am an introvert, I am not a misanthrope and need to ensure I get enough social contact. Multiple consecutive days working from home can leave me feeling quite depressed and demotivated. I certainly wouldn't want to do it all the time.
  • unsignedint 7y ago
    I guess some people are more fit for remote work than others. I certainly miss day to day interaction with people, too. I've had to do remote probably half dozen days in past couple of years. Here are some things I've observed: 1) As someone who do not regularly work from home, simply I'm not equipped well enough. I don't have extra monitors sitting around at home to hook up my laptop to give myself multiple monitors, for example, so I'm forced to work in a suboptimal setting. 2) Meetings can get tricky (Note: I also do language interpretation) I have mitigated this by hooking up my recording gear, which actually worked pretty decent. 3) Where there are clear objective for the day, it is relatively easy to handle. For anything other like supporting people who managed to show up at work remotely, was certainly harder part. 4) Everything becomes distractions. Something as simple as getting a cup of coffee. In other word I have to make one myself (or go out and get one myself) where at office I would have access to one close by or walk short distance to buy one. I would probably sustain... maybe a week of remote at the most. Maybe regular remote workers have designed their life to work with it but certainly not for me. (Again, this also depending on the nature of tasks I need to get done.)