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> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?" taking a step back, this is such a

> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?" taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?

eganist 6y ago
> taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. Why?
- asah 6y ago
  +1 - it's often best to organize "knowledge workers" by function/capability/project rather than geography/culture/etc. (I've been managed distributed teams for 25yrs)
- eigenket 6y ago
  I (in the CEST time zone) am currently collaborating with a colleague who lives in Australia, because academics often don't get to choose where they end up. Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the useful time in the day down to like 3 hours at most, and even that results in at least one of us working very unsociable hours. Remote work I like, I'm very happy working from home and can do so fairly productively, but timezones are a big issue. My example is with two people working in two timezones, if you've got a bunch of people working in different timezones (the person above mentioned 5!) it can quickly become very messy.
  - lstodd 6y ago
    When I played EVE Online long ago, we had 1/3rd of people from east coast, 1/6th from west coast, 1/3rd from Europe and the rest from Australia, we came up with pretty efficient framework. It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that. If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all. All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.
    - eigenket 6y ago
      I think this comment is coming from a very different place to my experience. Academic work is much less predictable than the sort of work you seem to be talking about. Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening. Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Australia is hard if you're not in Asia. 8hr time differences are doable, but super annoying. I used to do Asia in the morning and California in the evening, and that's really tough. A lot more work than you think can be done remotely though, especially if you can get people together 2-3 times per year. You need good people, but then you always did. The market is less competitive in a lot of places, which means that you can get much better people than you could otherwise afford. That being said, it is much much much less effective for mentoring and training junior people, which is a massive concern for full remote.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    In my experience (and it's probably partly because it's what I'm used to), working between US East Coast and Europe--so about 6 hours difference--works pretty well. And many of the teams I work with are distributed that way. It starts to get harder if you bring in the US West Coast and/or APAC.
chronicsunshine 6y ago
Most major corporations have teams of mixed offshore and onshore developers. If it was okay to have the offshore part of the team working from outside the office before the pandemic, I don't see why onshore developers wouldn't deserve the same treatment now.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  It's not even a case of onshore vs offshore, companies that manufacture physical things and have even a shred of vertical integration have always done this. The corporate office is in a different state than the manufacturing facility which is in a different state from the R&D facility which is in a different state than that company that used to be your contractor that you acquired a decade ago, etc. etc. And they've managed to do this successfully even before video chat and email, some of them since before the telephone.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

eganist 6y ago

> taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. Why?

asah 6y ago
+1 - it's often best to organize "knowledge workers" by function/capability/project rather than geography/culture/etc. (I've been managed distributed teams for 25yrs)
eigenket 6y ago
I (in the CEST time zone) am currently collaborating with a colleague who lives in Australia, because academics often don't get to choose where they end up. Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the useful time in the day down to like 3 hours at most, and even that results in at least one of us working very unsociable hours. Remote work I like, I'm very happy working from home and can do so fairly productively, but timezones are a big issue. My example is with two people working in two timezones, if you've got a bunch of people working in different timezones (the person above mentioned 5!) it can quickly become very messy.
- lstodd 6y ago
  When I played EVE Online long ago, we had 1/3rd of people from east coast, 1/6th from west coast, 1/3rd from Europe and the rest from Australia, we came up with pretty efficient framework. It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that. If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all. All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.
  - eigenket 6y ago
    I think this comment is coming from a very different place to my experience. Academic work is much less predictable than the sort of work you seem to be talking about. Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening. Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Australia is hard if you're not in Asia. 8hr time differences are doable, but super annoying. I used to do Asia in the morning and California in the evening, and that's really tough. A lot more work than you think can be done remotely though, especially if you can get people together 2-3 times per year. You need good people, but then you always did. The market is less competitive in a lot of places, which means that you can get much better people than you could otherwise afford. That being said, it is much much much less effective for mentoring and training junior people, which is a massive concern for full remote.
- ghaff 6y ago
  In my experience (and it's probably partly because it's what I'm used to), working between US East Coast and Europe--so about 6 hours difference--works pretty well. And many of the teams I work with are distributed that way. It starts to get harder if you bring in the US West Coast and/or APAC.

chronicsunshine 6y ago

Most major corporations have teams of mixed offshore and onshore developers. If it was okay to have the offshore part of the team working from outside the office before the pandemic, I don't see why onshore developers wouldn't deserve the same treatment now.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
It's not even a case of onshore vs offshore, companies that manufacture physical things and have even a shred of vertical integration have always done this. The corporate office is in a different state than the manufacturing facility which is in a different state from the R&D facility which is in a different state than that company that used to be your contractor that you acquired a decade ago, etc. etc. And they've managed to do this successfully even before video chat and email, some of them since before the telephone.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]