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It is no surprise to me - I have been 100% remote my entire IT career (decades), almost always working with 100% onsite people. With lots of newly-minted remot

by ejb999 5y ago

It is no surprise to me - I have been 100% remote my entire IT career (decades), almost always working with 100% onsite people. With lots of newly-minted remote workers I have seen HUGE drops in accountability and performance, including many, many folks who just seem to 'disappear' for hours and days at a time, and nobody knows that they are doing. Yes, you can be unproductive in the office - but the temptation and opportunities to do next to nothing on a daily basis are too big a temptation for many people, and becomes a nightmare for the people that are supposed to manage the slackers. Some people are just as productive at home, some people are more productive, but in my experience, the number of people that have become unproductive outweighs the benefit of the relatively smaller number of people who either stay the same, or are more productive. It's unfortunate, but if you have ever had to manage large numbers of people, you know not all folks will work just as hard when nobody is watching.

BergTheBold 5y ago
My company has let at least a couple people go since the start of the pandemic - people who would just disappear for hours, would spend hours/days working with very little to show. I'm curious - do you think that time management is a learned skill? Is working from home biased towards people who are inherently better at managing time? When the pandemic started we had a drop off on productivity as a whole, but we've since improved and have reached levels at least equal to where they were 2 or 2.5 years ago.
- ejb999 5y ago
  I don't think it is just about time management - all skills can be learned - but sadly there are a non-trivial percent of people in any organization who will simply get away with anything they think they can. These people, for the most part, aren't any better when forced to work onsite - but it is harder for them to hide from their managers and co-workers.
- afarrell 5y ago
  > Do you think time management is a learned skill? Time management is mostly about emotion management. For example, procrastinating on asking for help overcoming a roadblock on is often a symptom of fear of appearing stupid or annoying. In-person interactions often help smooth over these sorts of problems. For example: If you are having lunch with someone, it is easier to trust him to be non-judgemental about you running into a package management error.
- tra3 5y ago
  > people who would just disappear for hours, would spend hours/days working with very little to show. Were they productive in the office? It feels like "being in the office" is a form of productivity. You didn't actually have to do very much as long you were visible.
  - khyryk 5y ago
    We went from people disappearing at Starbucks to people disappearing on Slack.
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  you sure they weren't working 2 jobs?
  - ejb999 5y ago
    I suspect several were.
- codegeek 5y ago
  Working remotely is not just about time management. It requires a level of discipline and most importantly, Integrity and Honesty. Unfortunately, some people take advantage of the situation and try to game it. I have hired many people over the years including remotely and I have some of our best employees that work remotely (I never worry about them) and some real bad apples who were outright liars and cheats.
codegeek 5y ago
The challenge with remote work is that it requires more discipline and the ones that can truly work remotely are totally worth it but it does attract bad apples who frankly won't do anything (they wouldn't be a good fit in office as well but it is a lot harder to hide in office) In our team, we have some great remote workers but I had my share of some real bad ones including outright liars. I am very careful if hiring fully remote because frankly, it sets the barrier high and you need to demonstrate that you are dependable to do shit on your own. One person was most likely working 2 jobs concurrently even though I cannot prove it for sure. However, they did not deliver a single thing in 3 weeks and were hired as a senior 10+ PM. When asked why, I was told that I am "too much". Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time.
- znpy 5y ago
  > Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time. in fairness tough, i do that too sometimes, but it's because i'm in the middle of something and i don't want to lose the focus. when i see the slack notification if it's not about an outage or something similar, i try to finish the thing i'm doing (or at least reach a state where i can commit to git) and then reply. and by the way, remote work should exploit asynchronicity. forcing people to always reply within 15 seconds is going to burn them out (and would do the same in an office)
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  I purposely respond with a delay (~15 min) to IM messages to not encourage the expectation that you’ll get an immediate response, otherwise I’ll never get anything done with constant interruptions. Boundaries are important, and when set, must be enforced. Unless it’s an emergency, an IM doesn’t require an immediate response, and I'm unsure how anyone would get focus work done with an expectation of <5 minute responses to IMs consistently.
- nikonyrh 5y ago
  "Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time." I thought that was really good, I was expecting more like 30 - 60 min delay on average. That chat isn't real-time communication afterall, personally I have all notifications turned off. Well for us it is very rare that your progress would be blocked by not having a question answered, that is why we (try to) have well-specified tasks and daily meetups in the morning.
ironmagma 5y ago
The work either gets done or it doesn't... how is this so hard for managers to observe?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Manager of remote teams here. Like any sane manager, I don’t pick an arbitrary bucket of tasks at the beginning of each week and declare “Finish these by Friday” and not care if it takes 10 or 100 hours. Instead, we work with the team to do things like sprint planning with input from the team’s velocity. We target a reasonable workload assuming people are at their desks for a normal workday amount of time. The problem is that for some people, individual velocity plummets when they go remote. Their estimates skyrocket because they either know their productivity is down or they think it will be easier to get away with if nobody can physically see them. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone as I have some great remote teams, but I’ve also churned through some otherwise good engineers who were great in office but admitted that they just couldn’t focus at home. Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork. We work around it and plan it in, but it’s another reminder that remote is hard for even the good remote workers. Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous. More often than not, people have to work together on things and be available to answer questions, fix things, or otherwise stay in the loop with updates. When people are disappearing for hours every day during the team’s core working time, this all gets slowed down immensely. I don’t care if two people who work together agree to work together at 3AM or noon, but the teams have to be present and available to cowork on things.
  - slavapestov 5y ago
    > Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork. Why?
    - ejb999 5y ago
      Use your imagination, maybe you can figure it out.
  - 5y ago
slavapestov 5y ago
> Yes, you can be unproductive in the office - but the temptation and opportunities to do next to nothing on a daily basis are too big a temptation for many people, and becomes a nightmare for the people that are supposed to manage the slackers. It seems if you have a large number of employees who are unable or unwilling to do their job, asking everyone to work from the office isn't the optimal solution to the problem.
Xenoamorphous 5y ago
How has being remote in a non-remote first company affected your career?

by ejb999 5y ago

BergTheBold 5y ago

My company has let at least a couple people go since the start of the pandemic - people who would just disappear for hours, would spend hours/days working with very little to show. I'm curious - do you think that time management is a learned skill? Is working from home biased towards people who are inherently better at managing time? When the pandemic started we had a drop off on productivity as a whole, but we've since improved and have reached levels at least equal to where they were 2 or 2.5 years ago.

ejb999 5y ago
I don't think it is just about time management - all skills can be learned - but sadly there are a non-trivial percent of people in any organization who will simply get away with anything they think they can. These people, for the most part, aren't any better when forced to work onsite - but it is harder for them to hide from their managers and co-workers.
afarrell 5y ago
> Do you think time management is a learned skill? Time management is mostly about emotion management. For example, procrastinating on asking for help overcoming a roadblock on is often a symptom of fear of appearing stupid or annoying. In-person interactions often help smooth over these sorts of problems. For example: If you are having lunch with someone, it is easier to trust him to be non-judgemental about you running into a package management error.
tra3 5y ago
> people who would just disappear for hours, would spend hours/days working with very little to show. Were they productive in the office? It feels like "being in the office" is a form of productivity. You didn't actually have to do very much as long you were visible.
- khyryk 5y ago
  We went from people disappearing at Starbucks to people disappearing on Slack.
strikelaserclaw 5y ago
you sure they weren't working 2 jobs?
- ejb999 5y ago
  I suspect several were.
codegeek 5y ago
Working remotely is not just about time management. It requires a level of discipline and most importantly, Integrity and Honesty. Unfortunately, some people take advantage of the situation and try to game it. I have hired many people over the years including remotely and I have some of our best employees that work remotely (I never worry about them) and some real bad apples who were outright liars and cheats.

codegeek 5y ago

The challenge with remote work is that it requires more discipline and the ones that can truly work remotely are totally worth it but it does attract bad apples who frankly won't do anything (they wouldn't be a good fit in office as well but it is a lot harder to hide in office) In our team, we have some great remote workers but I had my share of some real bad ones including outright liars. I am very careful if hiring fully remote because frankly, it sets the barrier high and you need to demonstrate that you are dependable to do shit on your own. One person was most likely working 2 jobs concurrently even though I cannot prove it for sure. However, they did not deliver a single thing in 3 weeks and were hired as a senior 10+ PM. When asked why, I was told that I am "too much". Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time.

znpy 5y ago
> Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time. in fairness tough, i do that too sometimes, but it's because i'm in the middle of something and i don't want to lose the focus. when i see the slack notification if it's not about an outage or something similar, i try to finish the thing i'm doing (or at least reach a state where i can commit to git) and then reply. and by the way, remote work should exploit asynchronicity. forcing people to always reply within 15 seconds is going to burn them out (and would do the same in an office)
toomuchtodo 5y ago
I purposely respond with a delay (~15 min) to IM messages to not encourage the expectation that you’ll get an immediate response, otherwise I’ll never get anything done with constant interruptions. Boundaries are important, and when set, must be enforced. Unless it’s an emergency, an IM doesn’t require an immediate response, and I'm unsure how anyone would get focus work done with an expectation of <5 minute responses to IMs consistently.
nikonyrh 5y ago
"Whenever we will message on slack asking a question, they would respond 10-15 mins later almost 90% of the time." I thought that was really good, I was expecting more like 30 - 60 min delay on average. That chat isn't real-time communication afterall, personally I have all notifications turned off. Well for us it is very rare that your progress would be blocked by not having a question answered, that is why we (try to) have well-specified tasks and daily meetups in the morning.

ironmagma 5y ago

The work either gets done or it doesn't... how is this so hard for managers to observe?

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Manager of remote teams here. Like any sane manager, I don’t pick an arbitrary bucket of tasks at the beginning of each week and declare “Finish these by Friday” and not care if it takes 10 or 100 hours. Instead, we work with the team to do things like sprint planning with input from the team’s velocity. We target a reasonable workload assuming people are at their desks for a normal workday amount of time. The problem is that for some people, individual velocity plummets when they go remote. Their estimates skyrocket because they either know their productivity is down or they think it will be easier to get away with if nobody can physically see them. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone as I have some great remote teams, but I’ve also churned through some otherwise good engineers who were great in office but admitted that they just couldn’t focus at home. Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork. We work around it and plan it in, but it’s another reminder that remote is hard for even the good remote workers. Finally, not everyone’s work is 100% isolated and asynchronous. More often than not, people have to work together on things and be available to answer questions, fix things, or otherwise stay in the loop with updates. When people are disappearing for hours every day during the team’s core working time, this all gets slowed down immensely. I don’t care if two people who work together agree to work together at 3AM or noon, but the teams have to be present and available to cowork on things.
- slavapestov 5y ago
  > Also, if you have anyone WFH with school age children then velocity drops come summer time like clockwork. Why?
  - ejb999 5y ago
    Use your imagination, maybe you can figure it out.
- 5y ago

slavapestov 5y ago

> Yes, you can be unproductive in the office - but the temptation and opportunities to do next to nothing on a daily basis are too big a temptation for many people, and becomes a nightmare for the people that are supposed to manage the slackers. It seems if you have a large number of employees who are unable or unwilling to do their job, asking everyone to work from the office isn't the optimal solution to the problem.

Xenoamorphous 5y ago

How has being remote in a non-remote first company affected your career?