10 ms·

Building Remote Teams for Startups

154 points by bndr 5y ago

axiosgunnar 5y ago
> In my opinion, a decentralized, remote workforce is the future of the digital economy. This is based on the wonky assumption that this: > There will always be people who abuse the system, abuse your trust and try to game the mechanics for their benefit. […] A remote gig is not a good fit for these kinds of people. are just some extreme outliers. However, we were just yesterday having a discussion on HN about „how to work two or more remote jobs at the same time and game the system“ Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at odds with human instincts?
- oDot 5y ago
  Also, remote just doesn't work for some people. This should be decided on a per-company basis
  - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    And being in the office doesn't work well for others. Those people have had (practically) no choice in the matter for all of time. Perhaps it's okay to try a little of the opposite scenario and see how it plays out.
    - oDot 5y ago
      Sure, I am a great advocate of remote work and that's how I work and worked (mostly). We just need to recognize that it's not for everybody
  - k__ 5y ago
    All but the smallest companies were already remote by having multiple offices. Companies that had problems to grow out of that early phase struggled in the past and will struggle with that in times of remote work. The only thing that remote work changes is to move that problem more to the beginning of a companies lifecycle. This should be seen as a chance and not a problem.
    - oDot 5y ago
      Remote doesn't really refer to the geography, but the asynchronous workflow. In the manner, many of those companies are far from remote.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    A lot of good would come from being able to personality search companies, especially by career level.
- youerbt 5y ago
  > Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at odds with human instincts? Seems like office-first, 9 to 5 economy is at odds with human instincts, if you have to physically keep humans from "gaming the system".
  - axiosgunnar 5y ago
    In that sense, taxation is against human instincts, if you have to force people to contribute to welfare payments. And yet we still do it.
    - gumby 5y ago
      Taxes pay for far more than “welfare payments” unless you expand your definition of “welfare” to include the general welfare (functioning roads etc).
oDot 5y ago
I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and in my experience there are companies which tried to work the same way remotely and got the wrong impression by doing that. I'm not as confident as the author that so many companies are onboard with remote because of their past couple of years. It's more likely they go the remote way because of employee pressure. [0] https://www.emergencyremote.com https://www.emergencyremote.com
raviisoccupied 5y ago
The point around transparency is so important. I see so many issues that could be solved by just having discussions 'in public' on open Slack channels, with thought processes and outcomes available for all (or more) to see and potentially be a part of.
- k__ 5y ago
  Public and asynchronous. If you have more than two chatty people in Slack, nobody finds anything anymore.
hnuser847 5y ago
When I’ve asked friends and coworkers how they like remote work, the answer depends on how comfortable they feel being candid with me. Publicly everyone says they’re more productive being remote. Privately, people admit that their productivity has cratered, being home is very distracting, and the lack of separation between work and home life makes both realms more difficult. I definitely empathize with the answers I’ve heard. I like convenience of not having to spend hours commuting back and the forth, and being home so I can help my wife take care of our five month old baby. But if I’m being totally honest, my productivity is pretty poor compared to what it was when everybody worked in person from the same office.
- jb1991 5y ago
  The key factor is what your home environment is like. If you have kids, then very possibly you can be a lot more productive at an office. Likewise if you live in a small place and don't have a comfortable, dedicated space to work in.
- moltar 5y ago
  Remote != home. Home _is_ distracting, unless you have black belt concentration ability, and will power. For a long time I’ve worked from a coworking place near my house. Before that, when I wasn’t earning as much, I’d work from cafes. Some days when the weather was especially nasty I chose to stay home and work from home. Now I have a kid, and I’m forced to work from home due to corona, and my productivity definitely suffers. But I’m being extra aggressively defensive for my work space, and that helps!
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Remote != home. While technically true, I have yet to talk to a remote candidate or employee who doesn’t work from home. We had one candidate who wanted us to pay for a monthly remote office for them, but it was curiously expensive for some reason and he had other problems that ended the interview process early so I never followed up on it. So basically, remote should be assumed to be at home.
blackhaz 5y ago
Running a remote-only company for 19 years. This is a very nice guide. Still can't figure out what holds us all together.
- alexslobodnik 5y ago
  Did your company start remote from day one? What were some of your painful lessons you wished you learned sooner?
  - blackhaz 5y ago
    From day one it was only me. I was working from anywhere, so I guess that means yes, it was remote from the start. Current pain points we are still trying to figure out: - Gathering the whole team effectively and periodically (once a year or so). - People speaking different languages, so everyone must switch to English when the whole team gathers, which degrades the communication flow a little - only a small percentage are native speakers. This requires good team-building activities. Still trying to figure out what activities would excite the whole team without breaking the bank. - Disseminating our "corporate culture" - supposes daily human office interaction. Having everyone in an online chat helps a lot. - Taking care of pension schemes, as everyone is scattered around the globe, with different systems, expenditure levels, etc. - Having a system that shows who's at the desk, who is on a vacation, and so on. Our service business needs real-time operations, so we need to rely on people coming in at work in the morning and staying full-time. Things we wish we would have done sooner: - Identified a jurisdiction and settled down at some place, call it an HQ. A company has to have a physical home where it banks and pays tax, even if it is 100% remote. An Accountant and a person with a PoA from the Director should be present there physically all the time to interact with authorities and the bank. - This was in the original article, but I wish we would have introduced the tradition of online meetings with webcams on sooner. May sound silly, but this helps avoid turning into a bunch of cave warriors and keeping personal relationships alive. - Introduced a single office closure dates document spanning multiple countries to accommodate for different holiday schedules. I'd say the most important lesson of all is having the right people on the ground to handle relationships with local authorities and the bank. We can all choose to be nomads, but our business would not have survived if we weren't lucky to find a great Accountant and Director's Assistant who live in our jurisdiction, and a person on our "nomadic team" to handle that relationship.
yeldarb 5y ago
I think anyone who says remote is strictly better is fooling themselves. There are definitely down-sides. We’ve been doing a lot to try to bring back the benefits of being in-person while maintaining the flexibility of being remote. Wrote about our specific tactics here: https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-not-distant/ https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-not-distant/
- ipaddr 5y ago
  "Friday we cap off the week by eating lunch together over Zoom" How awful. I think you are trying to take the benefits of less social activity inspired remote workplaces and adding in forced. some social interaction. I would like to see this type of activity stopped.
  - yeldarb 5y ago
    None of this is sacred, and if the team wants to change or eliminate things, we’re open to it and re-evaluate regularly. This is a tradition that has stayed with the company since the very earliest days when we were in YC. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it, and it’s something I know many on the team (including myself) look forward to each week. That said, it’s not one size fits all. The culture probably isn’t for everyone; hopefully, being open about how we operate helps people decide whether it’s the ideal environment for them.
jasfi 5y ago
Some thoughts on this: - A different environment can improve creativity, but the effect is obviously limited. - If you have a difficult/long commute then that's a plus to remove it. - If you're alone at home you could get lonely really quickly.
nfriedly 5y ago
I've been remote for over 10 years, and this article mostly rings true. The employer has to put extra effort into communication and documentation. But that ends up being good for everyone - even in hybrid companies we're not everyone is remote. I think my current employer, FullStory, gets a lot of this right. Even before they went fully distributed, they were really good at documenting things - from PTO policies to postmortems on every outage we've ever had. The onboarding process is the best I've ever seen. > There is no Pair-Programming, That's just not true. I do frequent pair programming, it's just over a screen sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the person I'm pairing with. There's a million tools you can use for this. The other thing I'll say, is that as a remote employee, having a dedicated quiet space to work in can be really beneficial. Especially if you have young children at home. Usually that means a spare bedroom, where you can shut the door. For a couple of years after my daughter was born, I actually rented a small private office that was a short bike ride from my house. I didn't go there every single day, but the days that I did were definitely my most productive ones during that time period. It was really the best of all worlds from my perspective.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > I do frequent pair programming, it's just over a screen sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the person I'm pairing with If anything, pair programming with a good headset and good quality audio is better than in person. 100% audio clarity and no external noises.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > The employer has to put extra effort into communication and documentation. Not just the employer. The employees also need to put extra effort into their own communication and documentation. This needs to be actively mentored to the employees and included as part of performance management with clear expectations. A common mistake for first-time remote companies or managers is to think that the managers alone can make up for the communication deficits inherent to remote work. Not so. It’s everyone’s job. Managers should be setting examples and mentoring everyone though.
  - 5y ago
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Good article. Having a lot of experience managing remote teams, I wanted to expand on this point: > Try to focus on the employees who thrive in such environments rather than those few bad apples. You can’t let the bad apples define the work experience for everyone, but you do need to identify them and remove them as fast as possible so they don’t poison the well. One thing I didn’t realize at first was that remote work attracts bad apples at a much higher rate than in-person work. There’s an idea that remote jobs are an easy way to get away with doing less work, so you’ll be flooded with applicants who read books like “The Four Hour Workweek” and think your remote job is their ticket to traveling the world while they answer occasional emails from their phones. Or more commonly, a ticket to working a few hours (or less!) per day while they try to convince their boss that the task is just harder than it looks. Good performance management is important in any job, but it’s even more critical in remote work. If you let remote slackers thrive at your company, the good employees will notice. They’ll quickly burn out after working normal amounts plus also picking up the tasks that aren’t being done by the remote slackers. Resentment grows quickly and the good employees will be leaving quickly if let the remote slackers coast without consequences. I actually favor engineers-turned-managers for remote management positions over managers with non-engineer backgrounds for this reason. Former engineers are much better at spotting when someone is lying about the complexity of coding tasks.
- pengwing 5y ago
  Let me expand on that point: "Don't accidentally throw out good apples with the bad ones because you are looking at the wrong metrics." What I mean is: Bad apples are real, but don't ever do time-tracking or fast response testing in an effort to identify them. There are some excellent apples who will get your 8h-day deliverables done in 2-4h. Don't ever establish any system to find them. If you have a problem with them, you are the problem. Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for deliverables.
  - codegeek 5y ago
    Work is not all about deadlines. It also requires discipline to be present for meetings (no matter how much you hate them), be available to solve problems (sometimes immediately), collaborate with other team members and many other things. It is called "Team work" for a reason. Good developers can get away with a lot of things for sure especially if they produce code but as someone who runs teams, it is not enough. I would rather work with someone who cares about how their work impacts the overall team vs just them working in silo and happy enough coz they hit their deadlines.
l5870uoo9y 5y ago
From the developer perspective the most enjoyable remote work I have done, has been when I did larger projects (weeks to month duration) with the primary responsibility (choose stack and libraries) and with the customer concerned with the result, not the onboarding, cultural alignment with company values, day-to-day instructions, scrum etc. The latter is just expendable (micro) management noise.
fasteddie31003 5y ago
Onboarding is much more important in remote work. I actually left my Engineering job at a large YC backed company a month ago to focus on an onboarding/documentation idea that I came up with while seeing smart employees not being able to get up-to-speed. We would just throw them high level confluence docs without any context. They said they read the documentation, but without context they really had no idea what it meant. https://www.gainknowhow.com https://www.gainknowhow.com uses a skill dependency tree kinda like the game Civilization to incrementally get employees up-to-speed.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> However, they probably need a stricter environment to function correctly, more robust control over their work – meaning they thrive when someone is looking over their shoulder. A remote gig is not a good fit for these kinds of people. There's a lot more of those folks than you might think. We have a fairly "skewed" sample set, with geeks (especially the ones that frequent HN). A lot of us love to work, and we'll do it; no matter the environment. Naturally, we tend to thrive in environments that reduce interruptions, and remove tangential stressors. Other types of industries may not have a workforce with the same motivation. Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is not necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant part of the curriculum. It's never been an issue, for me. As far as managers that need to have people at hand to bully? Unfortunately, they are learning to adapt, and have discovered that they can be just as bad, over Zoom, as in person. Worse, even.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is not necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant part of the curriculum. How did they teach this?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Strict attendance. Strict schedule. Behavioral rules. Dress code. Inflexible deadlines, etc. Tough gig, but just like a workplace.
anyfactor 5y ago
Very good article. Echoes most things I have been looking for. But I would like to add some things as an offshore dev. It is darn hard to build a remote team unless you have a thorough understanding of what needs to be done and how it should be done. My opinion is that if you are hiring people remotely you should be operationally skilled to understand their effort, struggle and deadlines. BE EMPATHATIC. If you are running a remote team and you follow the mantra of "hire slow, fire fast" good luck keeping your employees. Make your decisions by getting a second opinion from the employees mentor. For the feeling of belonging, I would say send your employees merch or an old laptop or something that shows that they are part of the team. I say give people very small bonuses but that is a whole thing. The "thank you"s you say to the other guy on an hourly basis, maybe give a bonus or something on the 10th Thank You, like a small small bonus. Thank yous over chat sound generic. In a super objective straightforward world of remote work money is the convenient way to show appreciation....here I go ranting again. For pair programming, use VS Code live share with Google Meets. If you and your team is comfortable with it set up a period of time where all of you guys are working together over a group video chat like streamers do. I personally would love seeing my fellow coworker working on something halfway across the world. If your work environment is super feature-execution driven, having a "fun" slack channel is meaningless. Office noises almost never happen in remote work environment as the employers is paying by the hour. But it is important IMO. But I don't think anyone out there is any employer out there would say, "let's have a weekly virtual meeting where we exclusively don't talk about work, but I will pay you guys anyway; We can drink and talk about stuff".
synergy20 5y ago
Some ideas to 'manage' remote-work: when you're working, always turn on the camera but in fuzzy mode, i.e. nobody see your real facial expression but knows you're there most of the time. make technical document a personal performance review item. make a system for all to fill out their daily progress, everyone does it before the day is called off.
- EricDeb 5y ago
  can't managers just look at github/commits? I feel like that would be enough. Who cares when the work is done as long as people are responsive when they need to be.
snicker7 5y ago
“Fix-it Fridays” are a great idea, and something that should be adopted beyond remote teams.
xyzzy21 5y ago
I wouldn't say this is a "startup stage" scenario - once you have things as well documented as described you have either: 1) a late stage, nearly non-startup, or 2) you aren't really addressing anything innovative - you are just like any other existent company doing a project; the "startup" appellation isn't valid in the traditional Silicon Valley Tech Startup sense but you are no different than Starbucks opening a new location.
jeandejean 5y ago
I had to work from home fulltime like everybody else. I liked it at first, after a few months however I hated it. I put on weight, I missed my colleagues and being a manager of 2d zoom faces is extremely different from managing real people. Not to mention all the energy lost on misunderstandings or lack of time to properly convey communication that takes a simple glance at each other in real life. I'm far from an exception or a bad apple as the article puts it. Remote work is definitely a flexibility and fulltime option that makes sense, a new string to our bow of accommodating the workforce. But it cannot be all, we need offices, I don't want to be alone at home with 2d zoom faces, I want humans. If there are people that like it, good for them, but heck I don't, and I can assure you I'm not alone.

154 points by bndr 5y ago

> In my opinion, a decentralized, remote workforce is the future of the digital economy. This is based on the wonky assumption that this: > There will always be people who abuse the system, abuse your trust and try to game the mechanics for their benefit. […] A remote gig is not a good fit for these kinds of people. are just some extreme outliers. However, we were just yesterday having a discussion on HN about „how to work two or more remote jobs at the same time and game the system“ Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at odds with human instincts?

oDot 5y ago
Also, remote just doesn't work for some people. This should be decided on a per-company basis
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  And being in the office doesn't work well for others. Those people have had (practically) no choice in the matter for all of time. Perhaps it's okay to try a little of the opposite scenario and see how it plays out.
  - oDot 5y ago
    Sure, I am a great advocate of remote work and that's how I work and worked (mostly). We just need to recognize that it's not for everybody
- k__ 5y ago
  All but the smallest companies were already remote by having multiple offices. Companies that had problems to grow out of that early phase struggled in the past and will struggle with that in times of remote work. The only thing that remote work changes is to move that problem more to the beginning of a companies lifecycle. This should be seen as a chance and not a problem.
  - oDot 5y ago
    Remote doesn't really refer to the geography, but the asynchronous workflow. In the manner, many of those companies are far from remote.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  A lot of good would come from being able to personality search companies, especially by career level.
youerbt 5y ago
> Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at odds with human instincts? Seems like office-first, 9 to 5 economy is at odds with human instincts, if you have to physically keep humans from "gaming the system".
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  In that sense, taxation is against human instincts, if you have to force people to contribute to welfare payments. And yet we still do it.
  - gumby 5y ago
    Taxes pay for far more than “welfare payments” unless you expand your definition of “welfare” to include the general welfare (functioning roads etc).

oDot 5y ago

I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and in my experience there are companies which tried to work the same way remotely and got the wrong impression by doing that. I'm not as confident as the author that so many companies are onboard with remote because of their past couple of years. It's more likely they go the remote way because of employee pressure. [0] https://www.emergencyremote.com https://www.emergencyremote.com

raviisoccupied 5y ago

The point around transparency is so important. I see so many issues that could be solved by just having discussions 'in public' on open Slack channels, with thought processes and outcomes available for all (or more) to see and potentially be a part of.

k__ 5y ago
Public and asynchronous. If you have more than two chatty people in Slack, nobody finds anything anymore.

hnuser847 5y ago

When I’ve asked friends and coworkers how they like remote work, the answer depends on how comfortable they feel being candid with me. Publicly everyone says they’re more productive being remote. Privately, people admit that their productivity has cratered, being home is very distracting, and the lack of separation between work and home life makes both realms more difficult. I definitely empathize with the answers I’ve heard. I like convenience of not having to spend hours commuting back and the forth, and being home so I can help my wife take care of our five month old baby. But if I’m being totally honest, my productivity is pretty poor compared to what it was when everybody worked in person from the same office.

jb1991 5y ago
The key factor is what your home environment is like. If you have kids, then very possibly you can be a lot more productive at an office. Likewise if you live in a small place and don't have a comfortable, dedicated space to work in.
moltar 5y ago
Remote != home. Home _is_ distracting, unless you have black belt concentration ability, and will power. For a long time I’ve worked from a coworking place near my house. Before that, when I wasn’t earning as much, I’d work from cafes. Some days when the weather was especially nasty I chose to stay home and work from home. Now I have a kid, and I’m forced to work from home due to corona, and my productivity definitely suffers. But I’m being extra aggressively defensive for my work space, and that helps!
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Remote != home. While technically true, I have yet to talk to a remote candidate or employee who doesn’t work from home. We had one candidate who wanted us to pay for a monthly remote office for them, but it was curiously expensive for some reason and he had other problems that ended the interview process early so I never followed up on it. So basically, remote should be assumed to be at home.

blackhaz 5y ago

Running a remote-only company for 19 years. This is a very nice guide. Still can't figure out what holds us all together.

alexslobodnik 5y ago
Did your company start remote from day one? What were some of your painful lessons you wished you learned sooner?
- blackhaz 5y ago
  From day one it was only me. I was working from anywhere, so I guess that means yes, it was remote from the start. Current pain points we are still trying to figure out: - Gathering the whole team effectively and periodically (once a year or so). - People speaking different languages, so everyone must switch to English when the whole team gathers, which degrades the communication flow a little - only a small percentage are native speakers. This requires good team-building activities. Still trying to figure out what activities would excite the whole team without breaking the bank. - Disseminating our "corporate culture" - supposes daily human office interaction. Having everyone in an online chat helps a lot. - Taking care of pension schemes, as everyone is scattered around the globe, with different systems, expenditure levels, etc. - Having a system that shows who's at the desk, who is on a vacation, and so on. Our service business needs real-time operations, so we need to rely on people coming in at work in the morning and staying full-time. Things we wish we would have done sooner: - Identified a jurisdiction and settled down at some place, call it an HQ. A company has to have a physical home where it banks and pays tax, even if it is 100% remote. An Accountant and a person with a PoA from the Director should be present there physically all the time to interact with authorities and the bank. - This was in the original article, but I wish we would have introduced the tradition of online meetings with webcams on sooner. May sound silly, but this helps avoid turning into a bunch of cave warriors and keeping personal relationships alive. - Introduced a single office closure dates document spanning multiple countries to accommodate for different holiday schedules. I'd say the most important lesson of all is having the right people on the ground to handle relationships with local authorities and the bank. We can all choose to be nomads, but our business would not have survived if we weren't lucky to find a great Accountant and Director's Assistant who live in our jurisdiction, and a person on our "nomadic team" to handle that relationship.

yeldarb 5y ago

I think anyone who says remote is strictly better is fooling themselves. There are definitely down-sides. We’ve been doing a lot to try to bring back the benefits of being in-person while maintaining the flexibility of being remote. Wrote about our specific tactics here: https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-not-distant/ https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-not-distant/

ipaddr 5y ago
"Friday we cap off the week by eating lunch together over Zoom" How awful. I think you are trying to take the benefits of less social activity inspired remote workplaces and adding in forced. some social interaction. I would like to see this type of activity stopped.
- yeldarb 5y ago
  None of this is sacred, and if the team wants to change or eliminate things, we’re open to it and re-evaluate regularly. This is a tradition that has stayed with the company since the very earliest days when we were in YC. I’ve never heard anyone complain about it, and it’s something I know many on the team (including myself) look forward to each week. That said, it’s not one size fits all. The culture probably isn’t for everyone; hopefully, being open about how we operate helps people decide whether it’s the ideal environment for them.

jasfi 5y ago

Some thoughts on this: - A different environment can improve creativity, but the effect is obviously limited. - If you have a difficult/long commute then that's a plus to remove it. - If you're alone at home you could get lonely really quickly.

nfriedly 5y ago

I've been remote for over 10 years, and this article mostly rings true. The employer has to put extra effort into communication and documentation. But that ends up being good for everyone - even in hybrid companies we're not everyone is remote. I think my current employer, FullStory, gets a lot of this right. Even before they went fully distributed, they were really good at documenting things - from PTO policies to postmortems on every outage we've ever had. The onboarding process is the best I've ever seen. > There is no Pair-Programming, That's just not true. I do frequent pair programming, it's just over a screen sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the person I'm pairing with. There's a million tools you can use for this. The other thing I'll say, is that as a remote employee, having a dedicated quiet space to work in can be really beneficial. Especially if you have young children at home. Usually that means a spare bedroom, where you can shut the door. For a couple of years after my daughter was born, I actually rented a small private office that was a short bike ride from my house. I didn't go there every single day, but the days that I did were definitely my most productive ones during that time period. It was really the best of all worlds from my perspective.

goodpoint 5y ago
> I do frequent pair programming, it's just over a screen sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the person I'm pairing with If anything, pair programming with a good headset and good quality audio is better than in person. 100% audio clarity and no external noises.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The employer has to put extra effort into communication and documentation. Not just the employer. The employees also need to put extra effort into their own communication and documentation. This needs to be actively mentored to the employees and included as part of performance management with clear expectations. A common mistake for first-time remote companies or managers is to think that the managers alone can make up for the communication deficits inherent to remote work. Not so. It’s everyone’s job. Managers should be setting examples and mentoring everyone though.
- 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Good article. Having a lot of experience managing remote teams, I wanted to expand on this point: > Try to focus on the employees who thrive in such environments rather than those few bad apples. You can’t let the bad apples define the work experience for everyone, but you do need to identify them and remove them as fast as possible so they don’t poison the well. One thing I didn’t realize at first was that remote work attracts bad apples at a much higher rate than in-person work. There’s an idea that remote jobs are an easy way to get away with doing less work, so you’ll be flooded with applicants who read books like “The Four Hour Workweek” and think your remote job is their ticket to traveling the world while they answer occasional emails from their phones. Or more commonly, a ticket to working a few hours (or less!) per day while they try to convince their boss that the task is just harder than it looks. Good performance management is important in any job, but it’s even more critical in remote work. If you let remote slackers thrive at your company, the good employees will notice. They’ll quickly burn out after working normal amounts plus also picking up the tasks that aren’t being done by the remote slackers. Resentment grows quickly and the good employees will be leaving quickly if let the remote slackers coast without consequences. I actually favor engineers-turned-managers for remote management positions over managers with non-engineer backgrounds for this reason. Former engineers are much better at spotting when someone is lying about the complexity of coding tasks.

pengwing 5y ago
Let me expand on that point: "Don't accidentally throw out good apples with the bad ones because you are looking at the wrong metrics." What I mean is: Bad apples are real, but don't ever do time-tracking or fast response testing in an effort to identify them. There are some excellent apples who will get your 8h-day deliverables done in 2-4h. Don't ever establish any system to find them. If you have a problem with them, you are the problem. Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for deliverables.
- codegeek 5y ago
  Work is not all about deadlines. It also requires discipline to be present for meetings (no matter how much you hate them), be available to solve problems (sometimes immediately), collaborate with other team members and many other things. It is called "Team work" for a reason. Good developers can get away with a lot of things for sure especially if they produce code but as someone who runs teams, it is not enough. I would rather work with someone who cares about how their work impacts the overall team vs just them working in silo and happy enough coz they hit their deadlines.

l5870uoo9y 5y ago

From the developer perspective the most enjoyable remote work I have done, has been when I did larger projects (weeks to month duration) with the primary responsibility (choose stack and libraries) and with the customer concerned with the result, not the onboarding, cultural alignment with company values, day-to-day instructions, scrum etc. The latter is just expendable (micro) management noise.

fasteddie31003 5y ago

Onboarding is much more important in remote work. I actually left my Engineering job at a large YC backed company a month ago to focus on an onboarding/documentation idea that I came up with while seeing smart employees not being able to get up-to-speed. We would just throw them high level confluence docs without any context. They said they read the documentation, but without context they really had no idea what it meant. https://www.gainknowhow.com https://www.gainknowhow.com uses a skill dependency tree kinda like the game Civilization to incrementally get employees up-to-speed.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

> However, they probably need a stricter environment to function correctly, more robust control over their work – meaning they thrive when someone is looking over their shoulder. A remote gig is not a good fit for these kinds of people. There's a lot more of those folks than you might think. We have a fairly "skewed" sample set, with geeks (especially the ones that frequent HN). A lot of us love to work, and we'll do it; no matter the environment. Naturally, we tend to thrive in environments that reduce interruptions, and remove tangential stressors. Other types of industries may not have a workforce with the same motivation. Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is not necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant part of the curriculum. It's never been an issue, for me. As far as managers that need to have people at hand to bully? Unfortunately, they are learning to adapt, and have discovered that they can be just as bad, over Zoom, as in person. Worse, even.

MattGaiser 5y ago
> Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is not necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant part of the curriculum. How did they teach this?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Strict attendance. Strict schedule. Behavioral rules. Dress code. Inflexible deadlines, etc. Tough gig, but just like a workplace.

anyfactor 5y ago

Very good article. Echoes most things I have been looking for. But I would like to add some things as an offshore dev. It is darn hard to build a remote team unless you have a thorough understanding of what needs to be done and how it should be done. My opinion is that if you are hiring people remotely you should be operationally skilled to understand their effort, struggle and deadlines. BE EMPATHATIC. If you are running a remote team and you follow the mantra of "hire slow, fire fast" good luck keeping your employees. Make your decisions by getting a second opinion from the employees mentor. For the feeling of belonging, I would say send your employees merch or an old laptop or something that shows that they are part of the team. I say give people very small bonuses but that is a whole thing. The "thank you"s you say to the other guy on an hourly basis, maybe give a bonus or something on the 10th Thank You, like a small small bonus. Thank yous over chat sound generic. In a super objective straightforward world of remote work money is the convenient way to show appreciation....here I go ranting again. For pair programming, use VS Code live share with Google Meets. If you and your team is comfortable with it set up a period of time where all of you guys are working together over a group video chat like streamers do. I personally would love seeing my fellow coworker working on something halfway across the world. If your work environment is super feature-execution driven, having a "fun" slack channel is meaningless. Office noises almost never happen in remote work environment as the employers is paying by the hour. But it is important IMO. But I don't think anyone out there is any employer out there would say, "let's have a weekly virtual meeting where we exclusively don't talk about work, but I will pay you guys anyway; We can drink and talk about stuff".

synergy20 5y ago

Some ideas to 'manage' remote-work: when you're working, always turn on the camera but in fuzzy mode, i.e. nobody see your real facial expression but knows you're there most of the time. make technical document a personal performance review item. make a system for all to fill out their daily progress, everyone does it before the day is called off.

EricDeb 5y ago
can't managers just look at github/commits? I feel like that would be enough. Who cares when the work is done as long as people are responsive when they need to be.

snicker7 5y ago

“Fix-it Fridays” are a great idea, and something that should be adopted beyond remote teams.

xyzzy21 5y ago

I wouldn't say this is a "startup stage" scenario - once you have things as well documented as described you have either: 1) a late stage, nearly non-startup, or 2) you aren't really addressing anything innovative - you are just like any other existent company doing a project; the "startup" appellation isn't valid in the traditional Silicon Valley Tech Startup sense but you are no different than Starbucks opening a new location.

jeandejean 5y ago

I had to work from home fulltime like everybody else. I liked it at first, after a few months however I hated it. I put on weight, I missed my colleagues and being a manager of 2d zoom faces is extremely different from managing real people. Not to mention all the energy lost on misunderstandings or lack of time to properly convey communication that takes a simple glance at each other in real life. I'm far from an exception or a bad apple as the article puts it. Remote work is definitely a flexibility and fulltime option that makes sense, a new string to our bow of accommodating the workforce. But it cannot be all, we need offices, I don't want to be alone at home with 2d zoom faces, I want humans. If there are people that like it, good for them, but heck I don't, and I can assure you I'm not alone.