5 ms·

Okey dokey. I clicked on this thinking "hell yeah!" and stopped short of agreeing after reading it. Why? Because although I agree with the author, his argument

Okey dokey. I clicked on this thinking "hell yeah!" and stopped short of agreeing after reading it. Why? Because although I agree with the author, his argument is too shallow. Here's the thing: delegating to remote workers is going to be the critical skill of the first part of the 21st century, and it's not as simple as black and white. So it's not just "do it all the time" or "only use local help" It's much, much, much more complicated. I work with a lot of technology companies, and I've seen them kill perfectly good projects by poorly-configured remote worker configurations. If you don't know what you're doing, you're better off with 4 guys working in the same room than 40 guys working all over the world. See "The Mythical Man-Month" (http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Mythical-Man-Month.htm http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Mythical-Man-Month.htm) Technology labor is not fungible. The social dynamics of teams physically co-located can create powerful momentum. Serendipity is about 20 times harder to do over a telephone. "Get up to speed on remote working practices" contains a lot of nuance. For instance, I've seen teams fly in remote workers for the first few sprints of a project, then going "truly remote" once the rhythm and cadence was established. I've seen teams pair up with each pair working in a different location. I've seen teams work mirror configurations where they still paired up, but each pair was separated. Each of these setups (and many more) have their advantages and disadvantages. So yes, by all means, leverage the terrific talent and resources available to you around the world. But don't read a slogan and go running out to shoot your foot off. Take some time and figure out what kind of company you are, what kind of culture you have, and what kinds of projects you do. Then grow and evolve your remote working to fit in with that. Don't be the guy who already has the solution and is just looking for the problem. Remote working is the key to the new century, but it's nowhere as simple as flipping a light switch.

equalarrow 15y ago
I love the 37Signals guys and opinions, but this is where I greatly differ with them. Case in point. I worked at a place where at one point, everyone was remote but me. I could have been remote, and sometimes I like working from home or a cafe or wherever. But for team morale and even with phone or video conversations with the other devs, it became totally demotivating after a while. I was contracting with that company and joined years later as a ft employee. Engineering consisted of about half a dozen and we were growing. We started to notice that it was 'hard' to hire anyone local, so they just gave up (accepted maybe?) and ended up going with a contracting company and almost doubled the team with everyone new being offsite. Standups became something that was no longer fun because there was so much emphasis on looping in the remote people - screwing around with the video camera, trying out this video service, etc, etc. Come tomorrow (1/12), everyone at that place will be remote and they'll have lost pretty much all of the local devs for various reasons, me included. Building a team can be hard. But I don't buy the "we can't find anyone local" argument and if I was building a team, I want people local. It's definitely a programmers market right now, but if you want to hire local, then you have to go out and get creative - go to user groups, meetings, etc. It can be done and I've seen it both ways. Local, to me, is just hard to beat. I want people engaged with each other and don't want to have to Google+ someone on video every time I have a question for them. That said, I'm fine with some days a week where local people work remotely, but to have everyone or some 100% remote is not a good idea in my mind. You don't develop 'company culture' that way. If everyone's remote, there's no one to have a beer with after work and talk about the latest coding issue, problem, point of interest, socialize, or whatever. Guess that's just the difference with getting the work done vs. enjoying your work and the people you work with.
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  Yes. Agreed. Too many times we programmers view programming as if it is a transfer of bits over a wire somewhere. You shove a pizza under the door, email some requirements, and out pops a solution. It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time. You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen. The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM. I'd rather have 5 guys who weren't so smart all working together in an awesome team than 10 guys who were rocket scientists all plugged in remotely. Having said that, there are ways to get where everybody wants to go. Hire locally and then let folks work remotely from time to time. Hire people who have already worked closely together and have developed a great relationship. Hire in clusters, etc. I like 37Signals, but too many times much of their blogging and communication consists of "look how awesome we are!" I am all for people self-promoting, but this schtick starts to become annoying to me after a while. It sounds a bit like pandering and easy sophistry. Things are not that simple. We would not all be awesome if we worked like 37Signals and things would not be better if we all suddenly switched to remote workers overnight.
  - plinkplonk 15y ago
    "You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen. The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM." Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys. No, I am not saying that OS dev is the same as commercial dev, or even that what you are saying is essentially wrong. I am just challenging the absolute nature of "The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM." Plenty of "magic" does happen every day when people who know each other only by their irc handles or email ids work together on a codebase. Whether such activity can be harnessed to help a commercial dev effort is certainly debatable (and there are many good points on either side of the issuel), but the idea of confining "magic" in software dev to only dev teams working in the same room is somewhat dubious (imho, ymmv etc). That said, time to party here in Bangalore. Happy New Year, everyone!
kls 15y ago
I actually feel that it is pretty simple to set up a good remote structure and is as simple as good old fashion people skills. When I set up a project and on-board remote developers, the first thing I do is tell everyone, no video conferencing for a week. I do this to play a game, I then get the team together after a week and we play a game of describe your coworker. Of course hilarity ensues, as everyone build these crazy visualizations of what their other remote development counterparts look like, sometimes we will have the artists among the team sketch out the visualization on a shared screen. I also open a group chat on Skype for the project, where I kick of casual office conversation, I will usually post some interesting tech articles and kick up a discussion. From there the team dynamics tend to start growing organically. Sure these things may start organically in an office setting with no effort at all, but it does not take that much effort to seed it among an all remote team. Further some of the more introverted members of the team have expressed that they really like it because they feel more comfortable with the introductory exchanges not being face to face. I am a big proponent of remote teams, I can't say that I always was. I used to believe that they would never work because the team dynamic would not form. I was wrong and don't mind admitting that after being part of many teams that have resoundingly proved that my assumptions where wrong. Some of the most efficient teams that I have been on where all remote.
rwhitman 15y ago
I'd really like to hear more about your experience with the success and failure of remote team configurations.

equalarrow 15y ago

I love the 37Signals guys and opinions, but this is where I greatly differ with them. Case in point. I worked at a place where at one point, everyone was remote but me. I could have been remote, and sometimes I like working from home or a cafe or wherever. But for team morale and even with phone or video conversations with the other devs, it became totally demotivating after a while. I was contracting with that company and joined years later as a ft employee. Engineering consisted of about half a dozen and we were growing. We started to notice that it was 'hard' to hire anyone local, so they just gave up (accepted maybe?) and ended up going with a contracting company and almost doubled the team with everyone new being offsite. Standups became something that was no longer fun because there was so much emphasis on looping in the remote people - screwing around with the video camera, trying out this video service, etc, etc. Come tomorrow (1/12), everyone at that place will be remote and they'll have lost pretty much all of the local devs for various reasons, me included. Building a team can be hard. But I don't buy the "we can't find anyone local" argument and if I was building a team, I want people local. It's definitely a programmers market right now, but if you want to hire local, then you have to go out and get creative - go to user groups, meetings, etc. It can be done and I've seen it both ways. Local, to me, is just hard to beat. I want people engaged with each other and don't want to have to Google+ someone on video every time I have a question for them. That said, I'm fine with some days a week where local people work remotely, but to have everyone or some 100% remote is not a good idea in my mind. You don't develop 'company culture' that way. If everyone's remote, there's no one to have a beer with after work and talk about the latest coding issue, problem, point of interest, socialize, or whatever. Guess that's just the difference with getting the work done vs. enjoying your work and the people you work with.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago
Yes. Agreed. Too many times we programmers view programming as if it is a transfer of bits over a wire somewhere. You shove a pizza under the door, email some requirements, and out pops a solution. It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time. You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen. The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM. I'd rather have 5 guys who weren't so smart all working together in an awesome team than 10 guys who were rocket scientists all plugged in remotely. Having said that, there are ways to get where everybody wants to go. Hire locally and then let folks work remotely from time to time. Hire people who have already worked closely together and have developed a great relationship. Hire in clusters, etc. I like 37Signals, but too many times much of their blogging and communication consists of "look how awesome we are!" I am all for people self-promoting, but this schtick starts to become annoying to me after a while. It sounds a bit like pandering and easy sophistry. Things are not that simple. We would not all be awesome if we worked like 37Signals and things would not be better if we all suddenly switched to remote workers overnight.
- plinkplonk 15y ago
  "You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen. The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM." Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys. No, I am not saying that OS dev is the same as commercial dev, or even that what you are saying is essentially wrong. I am just challenging the absolute nature of "The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM." Plenty of "magic" does happen every day when people who know each other only by their irc handles or email ids work together on a codebase. Whether such activity can be harnessed to help a commercial dev effort is certainly debatable (and there are many good points on either side of the issuel), but the idea of confining "magic" in software dev to only dev teams working in the same room is somewhat dubious (imho, ymmv etc). That said, time to party here in Bangalore. Happy New Year, everyone!

kls 15y ago

I actually feel that it is pretty simple to set up a good remote structure and is as simple as good old fashion people skills. When I set up a project and on-board remote developers, the first thing I do is tell everyone, no video conferencing for a week. I do this to play a game, I then get the team together after a week and we play a game of describe your coworker. Of course hilarity ensues, as everyone build these crazy visualizations of what their other remote development counterparts look like, sometimes we will have the artists among the team sketch out the visualization on a shared screen. I also open a group chat on Skype for the project, where I kick of casual office conversation, I will usually post some interesting tech articles and kick up a discussion. From there the team dynamics tend to start growing organically. Sure these things may start organically in an office setting with no effort at all, but it does not take that much effort to seed it among an all remote team. Further some of the more introverted members of the team have expressed that they really like it because they feel more comfortable with the introductory exchanges not being face to face. I am a big proponent of remote teams, I can't say that I always was. I used to believe that they would never work because the team dynamic would not form. I was wrong and don't mind admitting that after being part of many teams that have resoundingly proved that my assumptions where wrong. Some of the most efficient teams that I have been on where all remote.

rwhitman 15y ago

I'd really like to hear more about your experience with the success and failure of remote team configurations.