7 ms·

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 remot

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!
  - DanielBMarkham 15y ago
    Fair point. I over-generalized as well. Just note that I am all in favor of remote work. The trick is reproducing those teams that kick ass. I've seen a lot of configurations, and from what I've seen it usually doesn't work that well. The dream is awesome, and it's the future. It's the damn execution that's tough. The trick in addressing technology development is to choose the right level of generalization. At some point, you're going to be communicating in leaky abstractions no matter what you say. My overall critique of the article was that the few paragraphs the author provided wasn't deep enough and led to a false impression, not that remote work is somehow unworkable. I could easily post some HN click-bait like "SOPA is the Devil!" and watch the votes climb. What would be tough to do -- and much more useful -- is to provide some kind of analysis where both sides were presented, along with some possible solutions. The first kind of article is a waste of my Saturday morning. The second kind gets me to thinking some. I like that a lot better.
  - projectileboy 15y ago
    But the Linux community didn't appear overnight. It's grown very slowly over twenty years.
matwood 15y ago
I reluctantly have to agree with you. I have worked from home for the last 2+ years, and at first thought it was the greatest thing ever. Next month I'm taking a new job where I will be going to an office again. I'm actually excited about going to an office and interacting with my peers. IMHO the key is the team and the employer. At my current company software development is a side item that mostly looked on as a necessary evil. In general I don't want to interact with anyone at the office. The new company is a small startup software company with lots of smart software people. The excitement of building cool things feels great, and is something that I think is hard to get across remotely.
JoeAltmaier 15y ago
I think you're behind the technology curve here. The giveaway was 'even with phone or video conversations" No remote team need be use phones - there are now headset collaboration tools that are lightyears more effective for erasing the distance bias and making remote teams work almost as if they were in the same office. In fact, they can be better. In my home office I can take off my headset when I need an hour of concentration.
- damncabbage 15y ago
  With devs split between local and remote workers, it depends a lot on the office setup, unfortunately. A previous office I've worked at had rows of benches (a common setup, at least for us over here in Australia). It wouldn't have been feasible for a local guy to talk to a remote dev with a headset with that setup. We had local guys working on a project pre-book and crowd into conference rooms to talk with the remote guys in India. Definitely a little sub-optimal. (The place was Yahoo!, which may explain a few things.)
  - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
    Can't visualize. What situation prevents you from plugging a headset into your laptop? Was it a privacy issue? Anyway our 'local guys' in Mt View are all in the same room, and are almost always headset-on and available. It takes some discipline, sure.
    - damncabbage 15y ago
      Less privacy, more not wanting to annoy your neighbours sitting a meter away either side. (No music playing, which amplifies the negative effects of one-sided phone nattering.)
      - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
        Dang. Sounds pretty crowded. It might actually be better to send the folks home, and provide them all with headsets - at least they could collaborate with one another!
ldar15 15y ago
"so much emphasis on looping in the remote people" You mean "the team"? "screwing around with the video camera, trying out this video service, etc, etc." A team of programmers and you don't have this sorted by day 3? Are you going to tell me you really tried to make it work and failed? Is it possible that, deep down, you didn't really want it to work? "ended up going with a contracting company" oh. And don't say it's too hard to interview remote people. I once got a job at a local company, but they still flew me to their head office to check me out face to face. "there's no one to have a beer with after work and talk about the latest coding issue, problem, point of interest, socialize" There's lots of people. They just don't work with me.

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!
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  Fair point. I over-generalized as well. Just note that I am all in favor of remote work. The trick is reproducing those teams that kick ass. I've seen a lot of configurations, and from what I've seen it usually doesn't work that well. The dream is awesome, and it's the future. It's the damn execution that's tough. The trick in addressing technology development is to choose the right level of generalization. At some point, you're going to be communicating in leaky abstractions no matter what you say. My overall critique of the article was that the few paragraphs the author provided wasn't deep enough and led to a false impression, not that remote work is somehow unworkable. I could easily post some HN click-bait like "SOPA is the Devil!" and watch the votes climb. What would be tough to do -- and much more useful -- is to provide some kind of analysis where both sides were presented, along with some possible solutions. The first kind of article is a waste of my Saturday morning. The second kind gets me to thinking some. I like that a lot better.
- projectileboy 15y ago
  But the Linux community didn't appear overnight. It's grown very slowly over twenty years.

matwood 15y ago

I reluctantly have to agree with you. I have worked from home for the last 2+ years, and at first thought it was the greatest thing ever. Next month I'm taking a new job where I will be going to an office again. I'm actually excited about going to an office and interacting with my peers. IMHO the key is the team and the employer. At my current company software development is a side item that mostly looked on as a necessary evil. In general I don't want to interact with anyone at the office. The new company is a small startup software company with lots of smart software people. The excitement of building cool things feels great, and is something that I think is hard to get across remotely.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

I think you're behind the technology curve here. The giveaway was 'even with phone or video conversations" No remote team need be use phones - there are now headset collaboration tools that are lightyears more effective for erasing the distance bias and making remote teams work almost as if they were in the same office. In fact, they can be better. In my home office I can take off my headset when I need an hour of concentration.

damncabbage 15y ago
With devs split between local and remote workers, it depends a lot on the office setup, unfortunately. A previous office I've worked at had rows of benches (a common setup, at least for us over here in Australia). It wouldn't have been feasible for a local guy to talk to a remote dev with a headset with that setup. We had local guys working on a project pre-book and crowd into conference rooms to talk with the remote guys in India. Definitely a little sub-optimal. (The place was Yahoo!, which may explain a few things.)
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Can't visualize. What situation prevents you from plugging a headset into your laptop? Was it a privacy issue? Anyway our 'local guys' in Mt View are all in the same room, and are almost always headset-on and available. It takes some discipline, sure.
  - damncabbage 15y ago
    Less privacy, more not wanting to annoy your neighbours sitting a meter away either side. (No music playing, which amplifies the negative effects of one-sided phone nattering.)
    - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
      Dang. Sounds pretty crowded. It might actually be better to send the folks home, and provide them all with headsets - at least they could collaborate with one another!

ldar15 15y ago

"so much emphasis on looping in the remote people" You mean "the team"? "screwing around with the video camera, trying out this video service, etc, etc." A team of programmers and you don't have this sorted by day 3? Are you going to tell me you really tried to make it work and failed? Is it possible that, deep down, you didn't really want it to work? "ended up going with a contracting company" oh. And don't say it's too hard to interview remote people. I once got a job at a local company, but they still flew me to their head office to check me out face to face. "there's no one to have a beer with after work and talk about the latest coding issue, problem, point of interest, socialize" There's lots of people. They just don't work with me.