11 ms·

Lessons from seven years of remote work

99 points by thcipriani 5y ago

markus_zhang 5y ago
Asynchronous communication does improve my communication skills by a few notches. Back in my early career days I tend to ask permission to ask a question but it quickly turns into a very bad thing when the time is doubled.
- k__ 5y ago
  Yes, I became more explicit, always try to remove as much ambiguity as possible.
Brajeshwar 5y ago
I had worked remotely for clients such as Disney, Macromedia, STARZ, Obeo, Pearson, Ultrashock, etc. My communications were exclusively emails, sometimes punctuated with scheduled IMs. Skype did helped when it came out. The Timezone difference was indeed a blessing for me. I adopted and used checklist and/or bullet communication with most of my emails. I worked when my clients were sleeping on the other side of the world; when they woke up my emails will be asking questions and answering/update from the previous work. When I woke up and ready to work, I have the details/feedbacks from the clients. It did came with its limitations and was harder in the beginning. Besides many lessons learnt, one of the best and most effective was communicate, communicate, and over-communicate.
- beckingz 5y ago
  One of the best experiences of my career was working with an Indian offshore team. 80% of the time they would have a full day's iteration ready for review overnight. It was magical, except when we were imprecise in which case a full night's work was wasted.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    Oh god, working with an offshore team in India... one of the least productive projects in my life. I think they were all brought in by their lead Suresh, who they all relied on to run interference for them. Target the new API? Talk to Suresh. Follow up on how an issue was resolved? Talk to Suresh. Ask someone on the team a question? Not without Suresh in the room. And then Suresh would throw a ton of obstructions in your path. New API? We will require multiple days of in-person training. Issue not resolved satisfactorily? Let's do multiple rounds of revisions on a new triage protocol. Schedule a call with Suresh? He'll be free in 2-3 days. Anything, absolutely anything at all having to do with interacting with the offshore team took a least a week.
legerdemain 5y ago
What's really been killing us is that there are two of us working from home, and we ideally need two separate home offices in our one-bedroom apartment. Two standing desks, two office chairs, multiple monitors. Ideally, not facing into each other's webcams or with direct sunlight falling on someone's workstation for much of the day. This has really eaten into the satisfaction of remote work for us. Either one of us has a crappy, cramped workstation, or we have simultaneous video calls, or one of us gets to stare into the afternoon sun for two hours each day.
- jclulow 5y ago
  It isn't an absolute fix, but there are some window tinting kits on Amazon that are relatively cheap and don't permanently damage the windows. Might be worth a try! I have in the last made good use of cardboard to block out unhelpful sun exposure as well in a pinch.
  - edrxty 5y ago
    Fair warning, if you want enough tint to make direct line of sight with the sun bearable, you're looking at welding shade 14 or so. Better to just tape up some cardboard
    - kube-system 5y ago
      I know it’s a bit old fashioned, but I use blinds or curtains.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    The office I until very recently occupied (now exclusively wfh) had that problem, I just taped a large whiteboard to the window frame. That nicely solved it.
- pieterhg 5y ago
  Get a new desk that doesn't face the sun?
legerdemain 5y ago
My experience working for a Bay Area company during the pandemic: - No one uses email. Literally no one. The only things I get from email is automated notifications and meeting invites. - Everyone uses Slack synchronously. I get multiple pings per hour. Sometimes I have to carry on 2-3 conversations in real time, simultaneously. - Everyone says they hate meetings, but they schedule them compulsively anyway. - Absolutely nothing is in writing: not meeting outcomes, not project plans, not reported issues. Messages in our Slack expire automatically after 60 days, so there is no written record of anything either.
- xkqd 5y ago
  I gotta say, our Slack messages are retained for so long I don’t even know what our Slack expiry is set to. This makes our Slack our single best repository of information available, far more likely to yield useful results than Confluence or searching old emails.
  - cm2012 5y ago
    Companies that delete slack messages automatically shoot themselves in the foot. Whatever legal exposure you reduce is vastly outweighed by the convenience factor.
    - slyall 5y ago
      The companies might night be deleting slack messages automatically. They might just be on the free plan which only shows the most recent 10,000 messages.
      - legerdemain 5y ago
        A company that's a going concern has money to pay for Slack. We have maximum data retention requirements of a legal nature, so we are deleting Slack messages with fully conscious intention.
    - KronisLV 5y ago
geocrasher 5y ago
The post hit on some of the main points that I used to teach folks who were working remotely for the first time. The main point that resonated with me was asking good questions via IM. Bad examples: Hey, do you have a minute? Hey how's it going? I have a question for you. Have you heard of $x? Good example: Hey there! I hope you're well. How's your dog holding up since he had that run in with the porcupine? I didn't even know you had those in Barbados. Anyway, I have a question regarding $thing. I ran into an issue with $thing and it looks to be related to $otherthing. But when I googled $thing, I got results for $completelydifferentthing. I'm not sure where I'm going wrong. Can you help set me straight? Here's every detail I can think of you needing: This is especially important in various cultures where some people feel it is rude to have a conversation without first checking on somebody's welfare or talking about the weather. That's great in some settings, but when you're working from home, it's instant messenger hell.
- WelcomeShorty 5y ago
  Interesting example, but for me it is the exact opposite. Please be brief and to the point, I do not care if you (pretend) to care about my dog.
  - kolbusa 5y ago
    Skip the dog part, but please please please try put as much details in the first IM as opposed to starting with 'hey'.
    - InvaderFizz 5y ago
      And please, please, do not start with "Hi Name", send that, then proceed to spend the next five minutes typing your message. It is just fine to lead with hi, as long as it arrives at the same time as everything else.
    - roydivision 5y ago
      I reply with this link when people do that to me : https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/ They learn quickly.
ilaksh 5y ago
Dealing with the other party's poor communication and sometimes lack of engagement has been the most challenging thing for me over the course of say ten plus years of remote work, mostly for individuals. The secret really is choosing good clients and having good project management. But even if it's a good client, sometimes people are just busy. The ideal thing is that you have a group of normal people who can log in and respond in a chat room or GitHub issues once or twice a day or so. Sometimes it makes more sense to just do a phone call or voice meeting. For many people, especially non-technical that is just much easier, and you may get more out of it. But I have found that some people just are not good at communicating over email, or in a chat room, etc. They can't really focus properly without being in a meeting. Again, non-developers (usually). You might consider just dropping those clients. But for me, I like to try to give each project I start a good chance of success, at least from a technical perspective. So sometimes that means the only working channel is a phone call and I get it once a week. Sometimes that's enough. If its other programmers then you would need to fire them probably.
kulikalov 5y ago
I've been working remotely my whole career. Here is my 5 cents: > Timezones suck. I wish this section was as simple as saying: use UTC for everything, but it’s never that easy. Use Google Calendar (or similar). It converts timezones seemingly. You can see other participants schedules right when scheduling a new event, if they have "public availability" enabled. huh... I was expecting this post to be longer. It ends kinda abruptly.
legerdemain 5y ago
Remote work is kind of tough if you're a junior employee. You probably don't own a house yet, you don't have a "spare room." Your desk probably faces the bed you sleep in. You probably don't leave your bedroom much over the course of a day. You might put cardboard over the window to block out the sun. You're basically living in a prison cell at this point.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  On the plus side, wfh allows you to move to an area where you probably can have that spare room. It's the people that get caught out by moving to the city to live close to work and then having to work from home that have a real problem, especially if they and their s.o. are both suddenly working from home. A studio apartment can work for two if it is just to spend time after work and to sleep. But it really doesn't work if you have to spend the whole day there working with two people as well.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    We both have family nearby, moving away from them to a remote LCOL area for the sake of work sounds dumb.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Lots of people move because of work. If you have family nearby then that is what constrains you, not the work... And that's the right priority but for a lot of people that would count as a luxury.
      - legerdemain 5y ago
        So far, my experience with remote work is people telling me to accept a worse outcome and like it, because it's somehow better in their minds in some idealized noble way.
        jacquesm 5y ago
smackeyacky 5y ago
Some good suggestions there, especially around buying good quality keyboards and chairs. As for the communications thing, some places have gone completely toxic during the last couple of years. I was dragged back to work a short contract for an old employer earlier this year and the amount of bullying via those stupid apps like slack, jira and ms teams was mind blowing. Managers pulling stupid stunts like opening half a dozen jira things against a poor drone 10 minutes before a stand up meeting, deliberately using side channels during a meeting to coordinate dog piles, the toxic nature of it had me noping out of there. I was lucky in that I could have used the money but decided I didn't need it that bad. I would rather be broke than be involved in that bullshit.
huksley 5y ago
So, no calendar app which works right for multiple time zones and distributed teams and removes anxiety of planning events properly?

99 points by thcipriani 5y ago

Asynchronous communication does improve my communication skills by a few notches. Back in my early career days I tend to ask permission to ask a question but it quickly turns into a very bad thing when the time is doubled.

k__ 5y ago
Yes, I became more explicit, always try to remove as much ambiguity as possible.

Brajeshwar 5y ago

I had worked remotely for clients such as Disney, Macromedia, STARZ, Obeo, Pearson, Ultrashock, etc. My communications were exclusively emails, sometimes punctuated with scheduled IMs. Skype did helped when it came out. The Timezone difference was indeed a blessing for me. I adopted and used checklist and/or bullet communication with most of my emails. I worked when my clients were sleeping on the other side of the world; when they woke up my emails will be asking questions and answering/update from the previous work. When I woke up and ready to work, I have the details/feedbacks from the clients. It did came with its limitations and was harder in the beginning. Besides many lessons learnt, one of the best and most effective was communicate, communicate, and over-communicate.

beckingz 5y ago
One of the best experiences of my career was working with an Indian offshore team. 80% of the time they would have a full day's iteration ready for review overnight. It was magical, except when we were imprecise in which case a full night's work was wasted.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  Oh god, working with an offshore team in India... one of the least productive projects in my life. I think they were all brought in by their lead Suresh, who they all relied on to run interference for them. Target the new API? Talk to Suresh. Follow up on how an issue was resolved? Talk to Suresh. Ask someone on the team a question? Not without Suresh in the room. And then Suresh would throw a ton of obstructions in your path. New API? We will require multiple days of in-person training. Issue not resolved satisfactorily? Let's do multiple rounds of revisions on a new triage protocol. Schedule a call with Suresh? He'll be free in 2-3 days. Anything, absolutely anything at all having to do with interacting with the offshore team took a least a week.

legerdemain 5y ago

What's really been killing us is that there are two of us working from home, and we ideally need two separate home offices in our one-bedroom apartment. Two standing desks, two office chairs, multiple monitors. Ideally, not facing into each other's webcams or with direct sunlight falling on someone's workstation for much of the day. This has really eaten into the satisfaction of remote work for us. Either one of us has a crappy, cramped workstation, or we have simultaneous video calls, or one of us gets to stare into the afternoon sun for two hours each day.

jclulow 5y ago
It isn't an absolute fix, but there are some window tinting kits on Amazon that are relatively cheap and don't permanently damage the windows. Might be worth a try! I have in the last made good use of cardboard to block out unhelpful sun exposure as well in a pinch.
- edrxty 5y ago
  Fair warning, if you want enough tint to make direct line of sight with the sun bearable, you're looking at welding shade 14 or so. Better to just tape up some cardboard
  - kube-system 5y ago
    I know it’s a bit old fashioned, but I use blinds or curtains.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  The office I until very recently occupied (now exclusively wfh) had that problem, I just taped a large whiteboard to the window frame. That nicely solved it.
pieterhg 5y ago
Get a new desk that doesn't face the sun?

legerdemain 5y ago

My experience working for a Bay Area company during the pandemic: - No one uses email. Literally no one. The only things I get from email is automated notifications and meeting invites. - Everyone uses Slack synchronously. I get multiple pings per hour. Sometimes I have to carry on 2-3 conversations in real time, simultaneously. - Everyone says they hate meetings, but they schedule them compulsively anyway. - Absolutely nothing is in writing: not meeting outcomes, not project plans, not reported issues. Messages in our Slack expire automatically after 60 days, so there is no written record of anything either.

xkqd 5y ago
I gotta say, our Slack messages are retained for so long I don’t even know what our Slack expiry is set to. This makes our Slack our single best repository of information available, far more likely to yield useful results than Confluence or searching old emails.
- cm2012 5y ago
  Companies that delete slack messages automatically shoot themselves in the foot. Whatever legal exposure you reduce is vastly outweighed by the convenience factor.
  - slyall 5y ago
    The companies might night be deleting slack messages automatically. They might just be on the free plan which only shows the most recent 10,000 messages.
    - legerdemain 5y ago
      A company that's a going concern has money to pay for Slack. We have maximum data retention requirements of a legal nature, so we are deleting Slack messages with fully conscious intention.
  - KronisLV 5y ago

geocrasher 5y ago

The post hit on some of the main points that I used to teach folks who were working remotely for the first time. The main point that resonated with me was asking good questions via IM. Bad examples: Hey, do you have a minute? Hey how's it going? I have a question for you. Have you heard of $x? Good example: Hey there! I hope you're well. How's your dog holding up since he had that run in with the porcupine? I didn't even know you had those in Barbados. Anyway, I have a question regarding $thing. I ran into an issue with $thing and it looks to be related to $otherthing. But when I googled $thing, I got results for $completelydifferentthing. I'm not sure where I'm going wrong. Can you help set me straight? Here's every detail I can think of you needing: This is especially important in various cultures where some people feel it is rude to have a conversation without first checking on somebody's welfare or talking about the weather. That's great in some settings, but when you're working from home, it's instant messenger hell.

WelcomeShorty 5y ago
Interesting example, but for me it is the exact opposite. Please be brief and to the point, I do not care if you (pretend) to care about my dog.
- kolbusa 5y ago
  Skip the dog part, but please please please try put as much details in the first IM as opposed to starting with 'hey'.
  - InvaderFizz 5y ago
    And please, please, do not start with "Hi Name", send that, then proceed to spend the next five minutes typing your message. It is just fine to lead with hi, as long as it arrives at the same time as everything else.
  - roydivision 5y ago
    I reply with this link when people do that to me : https://nohello.net/ https://nohello.net/ They learn quickly.

ilaksh 5y ago

Dealing with the other party's poor communication and sometimes lack of engagement has been the most challenging thing for me over the course of say ten plus years of remote work, mostly for individuals. The secret really is choosing good clients and having good project management. But even if it's a good client, sometimes people are just busy. The ideal thing is that you have a group of normal people who can log in and respond in a chat room or GitHub issues once or twice a day or so. Sometimes it makes more sense to just do a phone call or voice meeting. For many people, especially non-technical that is just much easier, and you may get more out of it. But I have found that some people just are not good at communicating over email, or in a chat room, etc. They can't really focus properly without being in a meeting. Again, non-developers (usually). You might consider just dropping those clients. But for me, I like to try to give each project I start a good chance of success, at least from a technical perspective. So sometimes that means the only working channel is a phone call and I get it once a week. Sometimes that's enough. If its other programmers then you would need to fire them probably.

kulikalov 5y ago

I've been working remotely my whole career. Here is my 5 cents: > Timezones suck. I wish this section was as simple as saying: use UTC for everything, but it’s never that easy. Use Google Calendar (or similar). It converts timezones seemingly. You can see other participants schedules right when scheduling a new event, if they have "public availability" enabled. huh... I was expecting this post to be longer. It ends kinda abruptly.

legerdemain 5y ago

Remote work is kind of tough if you're a junior employee. You probably don't own a house yet, you don't have a "spare room." Your desk probably faces the bed you sleep in. You probably don't leave your bedroom much over the course of a day. You might put cardboard over the window to block out the sun. You're basically living in a prison cell at this point.

jacquesm 5y ago
On the plus side, wfh allows you to move to an area where you probably can have that spare room. It's the people that get caught out by moving to the city to live close to work and then having to work from home that have a real problem, especially if they and their s.o. are both suddenly working from home. A studio apartment can work for two if it is just to spend time after work and to sleep. But it really doesn't work if you have to spend the whole day there working with two people as well.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  We both have family nearby, moving away from them to a remote LCOL area for the sake of work sounds dumb.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Lots of people move because of work. If you have family nearby then that is what constrains you, not the work... And that's the right priority but for a lot of people that would count as a luxury.
    - legerdemain 5y ago
      So far, my experience with remote work is people telling me to accept a worse outcome and like it, because it's somehow better in their minds in some idealized noble way.
      - jacquesm 5y ago

smackeyacky 5y ago

Some good suggestions there, especially around buying good quality keyboards and chairs. As for the communications thing, some places have gone completely toxic during the last couple of years. I was dragged back to work a short contract for an old employer earlier this year and the amount of bullying via those stupid apps like slack, jira and ms teams was mind blowing. Managers pulling stupid stunts like opening half a dozen jira things against a poor drone 10 minutes before a stand up meeting, deliberately using side channels during a meeting to coordinate dog piles, the toxic nature of it had me noping out of there. I was lucky in that I could have used the money but decided I didn't need it that bad. I would rather be broke than be involved in that bullshit.

huksley 5y ago

So, no calendar app which works right for multiple time zones and distributed teams and removes anxiety of planning events properly?