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We're all remote: how we deal with a 100% remote dev team
- rorrr 16y agoI'm also working remotely, and it's absolutely fantastic. When people don't have to commute, and live where they want, happiness level is through the roof. We also use Skype mostly for communication (although it's pretty shitty when it comes to searching chat logs).
- technomancy 16y agoSkype chat is definitely the weakest link the chain for our remote team as well; it's basically unusable beyond a handful of groups. We've been migrating over to IRC for as much as we can. We also briefly toyed with using Mumble (http://mumble.sourceforge.net/ http://mumble.sourceforge.net/) for voip, and while it was pretty compelling in terms of cross-platform stability it never really took off in our organization. The article mentions only moving off Skype if it's sufficiently advanced beyond Skype. IRC by itself is not, but we've got our own IRC server that adds some important features like indexing and catchup: http://writequit.org/blog/?p=444 http://writequit.org/blog/?p=444
- gregburek 16y agoConvore is pretty new, but have you tried it for private chats? When it was announced, I immediately started to think how much easier it would be to set up for my non-technical co-workers. Link that explains basic functionality: http://gigaom.com/collaboration/set-up-real-time-conversations-fast-with-convore/ http://gigaom.com/collaboration/set-up-real-time-conversatio...
- iki23 16y agoConvore looks promising, hope it will get support in clients soon .. either twitter-ones like tweetdeck, or im/irc ones like pidgin.
- technomancy 16y agoTying you to the browser is only slightly better than tying you to a single client; textareas are not the kind of place you want to spend much time. I'd be game if there were an Emacs client.
- leahculver 16y agoIt's true that there aren't a lot of clients out there for Convore yet. There are quite a few Convore projects started on GitHub (https://github.com/search?q=convore&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=convore&type=Repositories) and more clients are welcome!
- kemayo 16y agoI've certainly decided that remote-working is worth a reasonable chunk of money in my salary when negotiating. It's not quite a must-have, but it's close.
- pmichaud 16y agoDon't sell yourself short. It's also good for the employer. They can afford to pay you MORE if you're remote.
- kemayo 16y agoIt's more that I'll consider a lower offer from a remote-friendly company than I would from one which requires in-office work. It's worth money to me to not have to commute, essentially. Actually making the offer to them of "I will take $X/year less if you let me work from home" wouldn't be smart, just because if they took it then it'd put me into a weird special-case category which wouldn't be at all good for my integration with their team.
- blinkingled 16y agoAnother happy remote worker! Microsoft Office Communicator is great in that sense - it nicely integrates with Outlook(Calendar/Free-busy/OOO etc.), chats are searchable from within the OS and within Outlook just like emails. Best part is if I am outside with my phone (haven't found a nice OCS client for Android yet) and I miss a conversation it emails me with the conversation which I can continue over email.
- elliottcarlson 16y agoAs far as the final question of better communication tools. At our company (even though we aren't all remote) we use OpenFire[1] as our communication platform. By tieing it in with LDAP we can automatically add new employees to everyones Roster quickly. It's worked out great over the course of the last 2 years. We do have gateways enabled to allow employees to use it as their all-in-one IM system, and we were going to experiment with the video-chat features but never got around to it. It's worth looking in to IMHO. [1] OpenFire - GPL Real Time Collaboration Server: http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/ http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/
- city41 16y agoI work at home at my current job about 95% of the time. I don't mind it, and it does have some serious advantages. But I still feel having your team in one building is the better way to go. It can also get a little lonely, and spending so much time in your own home does get old. The trend of the "virtual company" where everyone works remotely will only increase, and I think it might even become the norm. So I'm getting used to it and looking to ways to make it truly ideal for me. Recently I've been contacted by companies about potentially working with them and when I tell them I really can't move, every one of them has said working remotely would be fine. Even just a year ago that wouldn't have been the case.
- wladimir 16y agoI do hope this becomes the trend. I'd love to work mostly from home, or at least from where ever I want. I don't like offices much.
- warrenwilkinson 16y agoIf it did become the norm, imagine how much less downtown office space we would need.
- wladimir 16y agoIndeed, and how much fuel and pollution it would save from people not having to commute every day.
- Goronmon 16y agoI sometimes I feel like a rare case when I say I really dislike working remotely. I find it a pain having to call people, and I feel it's tough to have meaningful discussions using text-based forms of chat. I just feel like communication is much easier and more effective to communicate face to face with people as the norm. And being able to just talk over my cube to another member of the team is something I would have a hard time giving up.
- ericmoritz 16y agoI'm about two months into my first remote gig and I have to agree with you that communication is the worse. Sometimes I feel like I'm pulling teeth to get an answer out of anyone.
- garagebander 16y agoI think this depends on your requirements... if you are a liaison between departments, or the specs of what you are trying to do aren't well defined, there's too much to communicate. Some remote jobs are great: they lay out what you need and you provide it without having to pester people for information.
- kemayo 16y agoI do think that it's not for everyone. Some people have a communication style that works much better for in-person interactions. However, I suspect that the people who are suited for remote-working are rather concentrated in the engineering disciplines. :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- presidentender 16y agoWell, it looks like I'm applying for a position at DeviantArt, then.
- garagebander 16y agoI don't think most business owners or bosses are mature enough for this yet... they just assume the remote worker is sloughing off. No use trying to convince them otherwise... they think their staff is slackers. Period. (Not all business owners or bosses, just those that lack the maturity to direct a remote workforce.) But for the seasoned manager, it's no problem at all.
- japherwocky 16y agoThis drives me nuts; either I'm checking (timestamped no less!) code into the repo, and delivering what I say I'll deliver by the appointed deadlines, or I'm not. It's not like you can fake productivity as a coder.
- waqf 16y agoYou can (or at least they'll assume you can) if you have input into your own deadlines: they'll say you're padding your estimates.
- getsat 16y agoI love when non-coders tell me how long a coding task should take. This is one reason why I decided to work for myself.
- technomancy 16y agoLet's be honest, coding is really only half the story. There's lots of deployment, debugging, and maintenance work that is much fuzzier and harder to measure. In fact, if you are actually actively coding for more than half your time, you're either really lucky or you don't have any users yet.
- mikey_p 16y agoOn Skype: I've found that running our own IRC server and setting up ZNC* with accounts for all employees/developers has made a huge difference. The bonus for us is that since we do alot of open source work, it encourages developers to connect with other open source developers over IRC which is a great way to grow knowledge or get quick feedback for whatever framework/language/library we're working with at the time. * http://en.znc.in/wiki/ZNC http://en.znc.in/wiki/ZNC is a IRC bouncer that allows each user to keep their choice of clients, but still have catchup if they're offline.
- kemayo 16y agoI'd actually love to use IRC... but we're just not confident that it'd work well for the non-technical people, and we need them to be able to get into the project chats and demo chats. Possibly we're selling them short here.
- Cyranix 16y agoWe're experimenting with IRC at MyEdu; while it hasn't been awful for non-technical users, it's not necessarily great either. The above-mentioned HipChat seems like it could be more viable, so I'm adding it to the candidate list. EDIT: Not primarily for remote working, granted, but for quick collaboration and some dev-related announcements.
- aristidb 16y agoThere's a plethora of IRC clients available, many of them very easy to use. No, you do not need to be a genius to be on IRC. Administrating channels (/mode and such) is a bit harder, but not everybody needs to do that.
- trefn 16y agoRegarding group chat, I strongly recommend HipChat - (http://www.hipchat.com http://www.hipchat.com). We're in there all day at Mixpanel. It's like IRC but easier, with persistent chat storage, file sharing, etc.
- brndnhy 16y agoI've been working in a home office for the past five years for two companies: one large, one small. WFH can be and has been a great privilege. It doesn't work for every personality or organization type, but I've seen far more benefits than disadvantages. Merits aside, there are a few things almost everyone faces at one point or another: You are likely to gain weight. You may be surprised by how often work overlaps your personal or family life. You will probably end up developing a good amount of your own communication tools rather than license third party collaboration software. You may be surprised how soon you miss working in an office environment.
- haploid 16y agoThis is a good post, but I would take issue with the following: "You are likely to gain weight." It is fairly trivial to stock your cabinets and refrigerator at home with healthy food options. Contrast this with an office environment. Between the morning donuts, the snack bins, the beer kegs, the pizza delivered for meetings, and the endless birthday cakes - sweet lord, the birthday cakes! - it's far more likely that you'll gain weight there than at home.
- brndnhy 16y agoMmm. Office Food. Thankfully I avoided that anyway. In a WFH situation, it's actually the lack of exercise or commute that I'm talking about. Walking or biking to work and walking with co-workers to and from lunch several times a week is healthy. One has to make up for these lost opportunities by exercising more simply for the sake of exercising. The social element of work has a lot of advantages. WFH took me from riding/walking 20 miles per week to near zero. It's taken a lot of discipline and time to duplicate that.
- shasta 16y agoWhy do you associate commuting to work with exercise? Not commuting means extra time for exercise.
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- spedsal 16y agoI am not sure of the costs/hardware involved in running this software, but I am in a distance ed. computer science program, and we have had great success (team software engineering projects) utilizing Adobe's Breeze meeting software, hosted through my university: http://www.adobe.com/resources/breeze/ http://www.adobe.com/resources/breeze/
- spedsal 16y agoMy apologies.. it's now called Adobe Connect: http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html
- MenaMena123 16y agoThe advantages of working at home are great until something goes at work like.... How long you were working? The company I worked for never realized how much time it took me to do this design work and I'd get calls the next day asking why out of 10 designs I only turned in 9 and why I was still working on the last one? In reality each design should of taken a day for about 2 of them. Also, when it came time for layoffs it was easier for them to let the people at home go. No face to look at of explain anything too. They told me a few times I was about to be let go, but the never did and let others go. I ended up quitting and still trying for my own big win. :)
- tsotha 16y ago>Also, when it came time for layoffs it was easier for them to let the people at home go. I think this is the biggest drawback. If you start at the company as a wfh person, or you transition to it and do it long enough, nobody in the office can put a face to your name. Outside of your immediate group, they don't know what you do. You're just a name on a chart. "Hey, look, without that box the chart is a little more balanced!" In every company I've worked where wfh was tried (starting about 15 years ago), the wfh people were always the first to go when there was layoffs.
- gte910h 16y agoI think people need to get better about communicating about their jobs in general. Sounds like you weren't telling them how long it took you to do this stuff.
- kemayo 16y agoThe layoffs thing was sort-of addressed in the article as being a benefit of being 100% remote. Because there's no "core team" in an office, there's no group of second class citizens working from home to be quietly fired. The issue with how much time things take is one of the more difficult aspects of it. It's ultimately a communications issue, though. If you're in an office then you don't have to explicitly communicate about it; people can see if you're putting in ridiculous hours on a project. If you're at home and putting in the same hours then they can't be expected to know unless you tell them somehow.
- oldpond 16y agoPayroll is the big thing stopping me from growing my team with work-from-homers. What if a member of the team is from another country? Do members submit their time each week, or are they all salaried? Trust is key in these situations too. Do you monitor code commits? Numbers of lines submitted each week? I worked from home when I was with IBM, and I always put in more hours than they paid me for. I would like to see more articles on how to make this work.
- modoc 16y agoTrust is key no matter where they work. With a small company if you can't trust someone to be as productive as you need them to be (regardless of if you're looking over their shoulder or not) you probably shouldn't hire them. The exception to that I guess is people who just don't work well remotely. But the whole comment about monitoring code commits just seems nutty to me. My company is remote, and it works because I trust everyone to do a good job. I wouldn't hire someone I didn't trust.
- gte910h 16y ago>Trust is key in these situations too No it's not. Do they perform? Are their numbers out of whack? => They keep job. Do they not perform? => They lose job. Why are you paying for asstime anyhow? Pay for results, not work.
- kemayo 16y agoThat's where the expectations system comes in. Are they meeting their expectations? Then they're doing as much work as they're supposed to. Not meeting them? Then there's a problem, either with them or with the expectations. If they're meeting expectations and you feel they're not working enough, then that's not their fault; it's the fault of the people setting expectations.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- flubble 16y agoOur company is distributed in a pretty similar way: 11 people in five different countries and in eight different cities. For us IRC is our life line, and we regularly use skype. We meet twice per year with the whole team, each time at another location. There are hardly any serious communication problems, nothing worst than I experienced in a previous job where all were in the same building. You learn to read between the lines when you are all day hanging out on IRC together, potential problems are probably easier to spot this way than IRL. At least for us it works :)
- technomancy 16y ago> Pair programming or a scrum, for instance, just aren't the same without colocation. This actually works great for us, but only because everyone uses Emacs. Running over SSH and tmux is a huge win.
- slackerIII 16y agoWhat do you guys do with tmux? (as opposed to screen)
- technomancy 16y agotmux's permissions model is a lot better, but the other huge win is that it resizes to the smallest screen. With screen we would always have to shuffle around so the person with the smallest screen was the first to join each window; it was a huge drag. The better key bindings and config files are just gravy.
- ChuckMcM 16y agoI would like you to think about the question "Why is talking on your cell phone when you drive 'bad', but talking to the person in the passenger seat 'ok'?" I submit that because the person on your cell phone doesn't have the same physical context as you, they don't know they need to shut up for a moment while you try to avoid a three-way with an overly aggressive BMW trying to split lanes. There is a certain amount of 'shared context' that isn't part of the discussion. Now programming isn't the same of course, and working at home when your single is different than working at home when your married which is much different than working at home when you have kids. Ever data driven, Google documented that people who had kids and worked from home had their productivity plummet between 2PM and 8PM. Is that bad? probably not, can you plan for it? sure. If you're managing a team, you can get a sense for how overloaded someone is at work, when they are working at home it is hard to keep your employees from burning themselves out. (Some people literally don't know when to stop working) By the same token a group meeting can be a great place to rapidly resolve a bunch of problems and to air a bunch of issues. On the phone you can't tell that someone is wincing when another team member is estimating 6 weeks for some effort, you can't know if they think that is aggressive or weak and why they think that, the conversation never comes up. Finally, if the overall percentage of your conversations are in email, rather than speaking, you add to the distraction issues facing people rather than letting them work smoothly. Bottom line, working from home has its place, but the value of being in the same space has its benefits too.
- travisp 16y ago>Ever data driven, Google documented that people who had kids and worked from home had their productivity plummet between 2PM and 8PM. Interesting. Do you have a link to any of this information that Google collected?
- ChuckMcM 16y agoSadly no. Sometimes they will publish a paper or make a blog entry about some learning they have developed but unless they do it stays buried inside their data collection containment vessel.
- kalleboo 16y agotap tap tap also made a blog post on working as a distributed team, focusing on the tools used to keep everyone in sync http://taptaptap.com/blog/tools-for-effective-iphone-app-development/ http://taptaptap.com/blog/tools-for-effective-iphone-app-dev... (shameless plug disclaimer: I work for them. That said, it's on-topic and a good overview)
- lizzard 16y agoThis description of process made me think this would be a nice place to work. Really sensible!
- mswen 16y agoI have been working from home for the past 12 years. Some was for a company with about 1000 employees, with about 5% working from home. The second was with a company of about 100 employees again with about 5% WFH. Now I am working for a start-up where the founder has decided that for now everyone will work from home. Although - I traveled frequently including back to HQ in the previous jobs I always felt a bit out of the flow of the office relationships. It is nice to be in a situation where the WFH is the norm. If we succeed in some substantial way I expect that the founder will establish a physical office in the greater Boston area - but I know from talking with my co-workers who are in that area they will not be very willing to put a significant commute back into their daily schedule. I suspect it will end up being an office for the founder, a big conference room for group work and some flexible open office workspace that people share on a rotating or as needed basis.
- whatusername 16y agoThe Oatmeal's take on working from Home: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home
- Stormbringer 16y agoMinor nitpick: Scrum pre-dates Agile. If you want to go backwards in time and start adding in other methodologies under the Agile umbrella, you need to add RAD and JAD, which VB programmers (and others) were doing back in the mid 90s. I secretly roll my eyes whenever I'm working with an organization that claims to have developed their own custom Agile process, because 9 times out of 10 it turns out to be just RAD, aka Agile without the silly/braindead/religious bits.
- togasystems 16y agoOnly problem working from is the damn cat.
- kin 16y agoAt some of the big companies I've worked for in industry, there is such a segregation between cubicles and closed office doors that I find my remote side projects much more productive and efficient.