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There are patterns and practices that make working remotely possible: document with context, clear pull requests, share your intent more deliberately, written s
by bertil 5y ago
There are patterns and practices that make working remotely possible: document with context, clear pull requests, share your intent more deliberately, written stand-ups, give meetings detailed agendas, etc. Those are good habits when you share an office, but they can easily be complemented by sharing the same workspace and whiteboards.
Many teams had to discover those practices during the pandemic; companies that didn’t adopt them effectively likely lost a lot of people to frustration or apparent underperformance. After two years, many people have had the time to find places where those practices are understood and practiced, or at least have met people who know they can be.
The half that thought those were impossible or unlikely discovered it was possible, even enjoyable way of working.
There are still people, many of them my friends, who know and practice those deliberate communication patterns and who still prefer an office—–in particular for small start-ups. In some cases, those make more sense. But they are now a minority.
Other companies haven’t transitioned because they never really tried; many blamed the circumstances for the increasing disfunction of their teams, rather than learn and adapt. With some team members remaining remote, or contagious, unavailable, companies that have not adopted at least some learnings from the forced isolation can now seem very frustrating places to work. Fewer people are going to defend what they increasingly see as a suboptimal system.
I don’t think that the breakdown is as strict as you say. I think that many people have had the opportunity to see the benefits not of remote, but of a way of working that doesn’t rely on the crutch of an office. Some do it well, but a few still prefer the ease of interactions——a minority that typically don’t have time to comment here. Many haven’t learnt but won‘t comment either, because they don’t know what good should look like anymore.
- mark_l_watson 5y ago+1 good idea: written standups.
- 21723 5y ago+2 better idea: no standups.
- tomrod 5y agoI prefer M-Th standups, hardstop at 15 minutes, with a weekly owner that rotates. That way I can get quick heads up and plan to ask others for assistance, as needed. Get all the shouldertaps done quickly.
- bamboozled 5y agoWe did written standups for about 2 months, they just died, everyone stopped doing them. I think discipline is important, but I can also see how they must not have been adding enough value for them to remain a thing.
- ipaddr 5y agoI love the idea.. daily is often too much or not enough. Blogs are written whenever something needs to be said.
- sarchertech 5y agoWe've recently switched to written standups with threads organized by sprint goals. It's worked out fantastically so far.
- faitswulff 5y agoSlack threads? I'd be interested to hear more about how this works on your team.
- sarchertech 5y agoYes every morning someone posts a comment for each sprint goal, and people post updates in the comment threads. It would be nice if we had bot to automate posting the original comments, but we haven’t got around to that yet.
- faitswulff 5y agoThis sounds like it might work nicely with zulip's topics feature (explained in the carousel on the homepage: https://zulip.com/ https://zulip.com/)
- timr 5y ago> Many teams had to discover those practices during the pandemic; companies that didn’t adopt them effectively likely lost a lot of people to frustration or apparent underperformance. After two years, many people have had the time to find places where those practices are understood and practiced, or at least have met people who know they can be. I feel like the real story is something like this: a lot of people on HN are folks who have a highly introverted nature and work in jobs that demand extensive quiet time. Also, most are pontificating on the internet, but still haven't returned to the office. They have almost completely forgotten the velocity achievable when a team works together. Can you overcome the limitations of remote work with better, more intentional documentation? Yes, to an extent. But my experience is that once you go back to working as a group, you'll re-discover that in-person communication has orders of magnitude more bandwidth. And if you have those best practices in place and work in an office together, you're even more efficient. I don't hate remote work -- I do it myself, sometimes -- but nothing works as well as in-person communication. I forsee a future where most companies embrace a hybrid schedule, but demand in-person attendance on a regular basis.
- Andys 5y agoTheres truth here but it only really applies to people who have trouble doing effective group work over the Internet. Other people seem to be wired differently.
- timr 5y agoMaybe some people are better at it than others, but my core point is that most people are worse at it than they think they are. And for those who have the most limited work experience...well, they don't really have much of a comparison, do they? I'm not terribly surprised that they might claim they're uniquely qualified to do it... In other words, remote work is a lot like multi-tasking. People swear that they're uniquely good at that, too, and insist that it's only the old farts who can't get with the new trends.
- scarface74 5y agoOne man’s “collaboration” is another man’s constant interruption and having to deal with a loud open office.