7 ms·

There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon. My personal experience has been that WFH

There are a lot of companies making remote work work for them, and for a lot of people's lifestyles it's a huge boon. My personal experience has been that WFH has lead to an absolute grinding halt in productivity that requires any form of collaboration. A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours and any video conferencing is usually scheduled for later in the week, instead of in 20 minutes. I know a lot of people here really like the idea of several hours worth of undisturbed work, but my (again, personal) experience is that that leads to a much lower overall productivity for a team compared to one where people can easily interrupt each other to get unblocked. The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely. Instead we were all set free, and when the first iteration didn't work out it's back to the office for everyone.

xakahnx 4y ago
Have you tried calling people on the phone? This is the remote-work equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder. It's equally helpful for companies that have multiple offices where you need to collaborate with someone not physical near you
- sokoloff 4y ago
  The absolute best way to not reach me is by cell phone call. If you’re not my wife or kids, use any of the text mediums, but I’m not picking up an unscheduled call (and if you’re not already in contacts, it won’t even ring).
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Why?
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      My (personal) phone exists for my convenience and utility, not everyone else’s. I won’t answer 30 calls a day asking about my car warranty, credit card offers, insurance solicitations, and the “I’m your assigned staffing consultant and already working with some of your colleagues…” bullshit time-wasting calls just to save you a few minutes and allow you to also interrupt me. If you’re a colleague, we have slack, email, zoom, and you can look up my number and text me on my private cell number. If that’s not enough, I’m sorry.
      - xakahnx 4y ago
        My company provides me a work phone with a separate phone number. This is where I get pages and urgent or intentionally disruptive calls/messages
  - hhh 4y ago
    parents focus would be something like on Teams, a work-centric platform where generally people are online while working or are required to be online.
  - dubcanada 4y ago
    Ya instead you should be at an office so I can just walk over and bug you face to face instead.
    - yuliyp 4y ago
      In-person people tend to at least see "oh s/he's super-focused on something, I should probably not interrupt them if it's not important"
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    I have told everyone they can call me at any time on my personal device. I don't own a company phone. I was last called 5 years ago because I broke something 2 days before and no one else could work it out. We got to this state because there's a culture of that being the absolute last resort. If someone has to call you then you need to look at the people round you and the situation you're in and the processes and documentation and make it so that people don't need to call you.
    - Macha 4y ago
      Yeah no, I've seen the operations team call each other, even outside working hours, for non-urgent matters that could 100% have waited. Some people just view it as the most active form of communication and get to it.
prepend 4y ago
I use teams and zoom and frequently interact with team members. It’s pretty great.
whateveracct 4y ago
I have deep collaborative conversations via DM all the time. If anything it's better because it's written.
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  This is actually not great, because everyone else doesn't benefit, because it's in a DM that nobody else can see. In an office people near by will benefit too by being in earshot.
  - lfx 4y ago
    But you can copy all of the contents to tickets, emails, etc. All is not lost.
  - chank 4y ago
    Don't know about you, but I generally don't speak loud enough that people outside the conversation generally overhear things. Also, word-of-mouth is a absolute horrible strategy to make sure things are shared across a team.
- u801e 4y ago
  I've done the same in chat rooms where everyone on the team can read if they want to, even if the conversation is limited to me and another individual.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    Yeah I think there's a place for both honestly. The place I work at encourages using a channel. But when it's deep and freeform, I think DMs is better. Sartre's Look and all that.
blindriver 4y ago
I worked for a company that invested heavily in remote, literally everyone was remote. Even with that type of focus, it was the most unproductive I've ever been because you would never be able to contact anyone in a timely way. It was the most frustrated I had ever been. I now work at a company where I am remote, but my coworkers work in an office. Just by having everyone in the office makes it easier to contact someone on chat. But even then I am only about half as productive as I would be if I were completely in the office. Put me down as someone that believes 1 to 2 days remote work a week is convenient but I would much rather be in the office.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  How did where someone was sitting affect their availability to respond? I ask because I have a very old memory of reading that anything more than 70 walking paces away was a phone call or an email. I've seen that distant shrink over the years and I have seen people wuse electronic communication if someone is 3 ft away. I could think of several causes for unavailability but I'm not going to speculate when you can simply answer.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely There are multiple billion dollar companies that have been full remote for years and their strategies are public. This hybrid stuff with 3 days in office will be worse than full remote or 100% in office. My guess is it's just a way to get rid of people without having to do more official layoffs most people who complain about not being productive with remote work are basically trying to work exactly the same way as they would in office. Processes need to be documented and when to use different channels for communication need to be defined
Ancalagon 4y ago
My biggest gripe with this more-productive-in-office take is that for the last 6 years all of my teams have been distributed (by the company). So those gaps in between replies still exist, now I'm just sitting in an office instead of at home. Edit: To further my rant. This distributed teamwork was occurring long before covid as well. Half my team at an insurance company was based in 2 other offices in Florida and in Chicago when I was on the west coast.
- harshalizee 4y ago
  Yup, exactly same situation here. My company jumped on the bandwagon to hire a lot of remote workers, some in different time zones even. Now some meetings are at awkward times for everyone involved. 8AM meetings, 5-6PM meeting, etc. 7AM-10AM for deep work was my go to sweet spot before everyone clamoring for meetings and slack during the day. Now it's just more meetings that could've been an email.
rosywoozlechan 4y ago
Remote work is really rough with junior engineers. I'm trying really hard to help people but it comes in PR comments and scheduled zoom meetings instead of how it came for me, conversations over lunch, someone standing over my chair when I ask them for quick help. It's been so hard to scale people up. If I were a junior engineer I'd want return to office, but they seem to be the least likely to want it, because they've never had to come into an office before.
- noisenotsignal 4y ago
  As long as you have shared hours for collaboration, this still seems achievable. The “standing over a chair thing” is just a ping, call, and screenshare away. I’ve been both a new grad and mentor to interns and entry/mid level hires all throughout the remote era. On one hand, a junior can learn equally well by being proactive about asking for help or getting mentorship. On the other hand, experienced engineers can be more proactive about checking the status of their mentees. We don’t get to physically see others get frustrated or stuck, but good communication ensures that we can detect when people are stuck almost as well as when in person. An interesting side effect - when we do get lunch in person, we don’t have to talk about work! By then they’re already unblocked :)
  - un_montagnard 4y ago
    Screenshare isn't the same thing as taking over the keyboard.
    - noisenotsignal 4y ago
      You should not be taking over the keyboard!! If you are typing, they are not learning, they are spectating. If there’s something that’s just annoying and not super relevant, like a command they don’t know, you can paste it in the chat. In the absolute worst case (I’ve done this ONCE in 3 years), I’ve used VSCode Live Share [0]. I’m sure you can probably use GitHub Codespaces too now. [0] - https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share
dom96 4y ago
It sounds like the issues you are facing are more to do with the specific people and their attitude towards collaboration than with WFH specifically. You either don't need a response immediately, or if it's important to you or the business then you should be calling the person that has the info you need. Even outside WFH this isn't solved. There are many distributed teams out there, you need to come up with a way to work with those that are on the other side of the earth to you.
chank 4y ago
So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed. I can definitely agree that if your company doesn't set an expectation of how remote/hybrid work will be conducted then there will always be some people who are overly laissez-faire with it. My own opinion is that remote work should be conducted mostly the same as if you were in the office. You're just not sitting in the same building anymore. Everyone should keep sensible hours that are close to the same hours of your team and be generally available. Seems to have worked so well for my company that they've begun closing down physical offices.
- librish 4y ago
  "So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed." I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.
  - aaomidi 4y ago
    A very works on my system take. If you interrupt me it takes me hours to get back on speed.
    - librish 4y ago
      What do you work on and what % of the day do you work on tasks that complex? Hours is an incredibly long time. I'm not against people blocking off specific time when dealing with an especially gnarly bug or planning out a major feature, but for day-to-day tasks the cost of an interruption is usually a "right, where was I" once it's over.
  - chank 4y ago
    > I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone. There's no actual evidence of that being true though. It's very much your personal take on it as you've said. I'm also hesitant to ask that if your work relies so much on being able to interrupt your coworkers at a moments notice is that evidence of other issues. Not having power to make decisions on the direction of your work? Poor documentation? Dare I say lack of confidence and/or ability to do your (not you specifically) own job? Seems to me the whole case against remote/hybrid boils down to certain peoples feelings about how they feel comfortable working. Not any actual statistical proof on the matter.
adoxyz 4y ago
Remote work, when done correctly can be amazing. Most employers I've been with the last 6 years have been remote first and my personal experience has been very positive. My team, even those not in the same timezone, had a pretty good overlap on working hours. Communication via Slack/Zoom/Meet was near instantaneous. We got together once or twice a year at an offsite. I also think it depends on the type of work you do, your team, and personal discipline. Not everyone is suited for remote work. So I hate blanket statements of "WFH is the future" or "WFH is the worst thing ever." Remote work requires trust from management, but also personal discipline from remote employees. Some absolutely abuse it. Some companies are just not setup for remote work. And some jobs, even if possible remotely, aren't well suited for it. But yes I agree with your last point, guidance is necessary on how to work remotely.
neilv 4y ago
Sounds like you experienced a particular company's flavor of WFH, which sounds mostly worse than all the ones I have. I've also seen situations that start to go bad like you describe, but in some cases we were able to nudge it back. For example, someone tries to schedule a meeting for a week away, so you push for a quick ad hoc call in a few minutes instead. (Not that different than in-person, when someone says "let's schedule a meeting".) I've also seen experiments in WFH communication and team-building that aren't done well. For example, starting Monday morning with a ineffective all-hands that, rather than getting people on the same page and energized, sucks the life out of any refreshed start of the workweek. (Again, similar to if you'd herded everyone in-person into a large physical room, for the same content and delivery, only in-person is poorer view and harder to hear.) Also, in the worst situations I'm aware of, it wouldn't matter much whether the people were in-person. You might figure out more quickly that there's a problem, or where the problem is originating, but that's not been the hardest part. What in-person is best at is humanizing/personalizing people and forming bonds easily, with all the little cues that we've known since the '80s aren't conveyed as well through computers, and still aren't. (Well, for many people; other people are less comfortable in some in-person contexts, for various reasons, and tend to be more comfortable and themselves in other modalities.) There's also the occasional high-bandwidth highly-interactive collaborative design, but there's no reason most of that can't happen mostly WFH when your timezones overlap and you have good tools (e.g., effective shared whiteboarding/diagramming that's actually better than a physical whiteboard). Personally, my ideal is WFH, but being in-town or an easy commute away, for occasional high-value in-person interaction. With in-person emphasis on humanizing/personalizing/bonding (but naturally; I've seen these done in well-intentioned but miserable ways that people just try to get through, and it can be counterproductive).
unxdfa 4y ago
Sounds like you don't know how to do it. Most people don't because this was thrown at them immediately and the structure of the company wasn't aligned around it. I'm on a fully remote team and have been for over a decade. We do not have those problems. We are vastly more productive than the rest of the company as a rule. Some things we do: 1. We have a daily morning zoom meeting where everyone goes round in a rota and tells us what they did yesterday and what they intend to do today and if there are any blockers or problems, call them out and we discuss. On Mondays this is longer so we look at goals and objectives of the team. We talk about non work stuff too. We're humans! 2. As the team manager, anyone is always free to bug me on slack and I will always respond within a couple of minutes. I will either help them to deal with the problem or find someone else on the team to help out who knows more than I do. Or I can help them get someone from an external team on the problem. I delegate this to someone else when I am rarely not around. 3. Have a team get together every Friday for an hour where we talk about anything work or otherwise related. 4. We have a team Q/A channel. Non urgent questions are asked on there and anyone is free to pick up something as and when they have a few moments. This is used for things like sanity checks, code reviews as well. 5. People are expected to ignore Slack for an hour or more at a time but must always answer calls in zoom (unless you're having a shit, gone to lunch, dealing with the kids, gone to the shop to get a coffee, whatever just call back when you're done). That's about it.
rumdonut 4y ago
This was exactly confirmed by an internal study at the company I work for. Engineers that depend on collaboration suffered a significant drop in output artifacts. Those being largely junior or mid-level engineers. Staff engineers actually did better, although ironically they tend to be the ones coming into the office consistently (anecdotally). One of the most surprising takeaways was that while engineers in the office more often claimed they felt less productive in the office than at home, in-office engineers tended to have higher productivity and WFH engineers when the actual numbers were examined.
bsg75 4y ago
> A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours Fire them. One hard rule I have for my team is not being responsive on IM for extended periods is treated the same as not showing up for work. If people need to be taught how to work remotely, or anywhere for that matter, then the company has the wrong people, or maybe interns who need such training.
- harshalizee 4y ago
  So no one can do any sort of deep work in your team. Should definitely mention that in interviews for potential candidates to spot red flags.
  - bsg75 4y ago
    If “deep work” means can’t function as a team member and communicate in a timely and professional manner, like we all did when working in an office was more common, yes I let them know.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
Yea, let's interrupt our developers every 20 minutes because the PM needs a question answered. 'Hey, how are you?' And then nothing. OMG he takes forever to reply on Slack.

xakahnx 4y ago

Have you tried calling people on the phone? This is the remote-work equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder. It's equally helpful for companies that have multiple offices where you need to collaborate with someone not physical near you

sokoloff 4y ago
The absolute best way to not reach me is by cell phone call. If you’re not my wife or kids, use any of the text mediums, but I’m not picking up an unscheduled call (and if you’re not already in contacts, it won’t even ring).
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Why?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    My (personal) phone exists for my convenience and utility, not everyone else’s. I won’t answer 30 calls a day asking about my car warranty, credit card offers, insurance solicitations, and the “I’m your assigned staffing consultant and already working with some of your colleagues…” bullshit time-wasting calls just to save you a few minutes and allow you to also interrupt me. If you’re a colleague, we have slack, email, zoom, and you can look up my number and text me on my private cell number. If that’s not enough, I’m sorry.
    - xakahnx 4y ago
      My company provides me a work phone with a separate phone number. This is where I get pages and urgent or intentionally disruptive calls/messages
- hhh 4y ago
  parents focus would be something like on Teams, a work-centric platform where generally people are online while working or are required to be online.
- dubcanada 4y ago
  Ya instead you should be at an office so I can just walk over and bug you face to face instead.
  - yuliyp 4y ago
    In-person people tend to at least see "oh s/he's super-focused on something, I should probably not interrupt them if it's not important"
- unxdfa 4y ago
  I have told everyone they can call me at any time on my personal device. I don't own a company phone. I was last called 5 years ago because I broke something 2 days before and no one else could work it out. We got to this state because there's a culture of that being the absolute last resort. If someone has to call you then you need to look at the people round you and the situation you're in and the processes and documentation and make it so that people don't need to call you.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Yeah no, I've seen the operations team call each other, even outside working hours, for non-urgent matters that could 100% have waited. Some people just view it as the most active form of communication and get to it.

prepend 4y ago

I use teams and zoom and frequently interact with team members. It’s pretty great.

whateveracct 4y ago

I have deep collaborative conversations via DM all the time. If anything it's better because it's written.

rosywoozlechan 4y ago
This is actually not great, because everyone else doesn't benefit, because it's in a DM that nobody else can see. In an office people near by will benefit too by being in earshot.
- lfx 4y ago
  But you can copy all of the contents to tickets, emails, etc. All is not lost.
- chank 4y ago
  Don't know about you, but I generally don't speak loud enough that people outside the conversation generally overhear things. Also, word-of-mouth is a absolute horrible strategy to make sure things are shared across a team.
u801e 4y ago
I've done the same in chat rooms where everyone on the team can read if they want to, even if the conversation is limited to me and another individual.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  Yeah I think there's a place for both honestly. The place I work at encourages using a channel. But when it's deep and freeform, I think DMs is better. Sartre's Look and all that.

blindriver 4y ago

I worked for a company that invested heavily in remote, literally everyone was remote. Even with that type of focus, it was the most unproductive I've ever been because you would never be able to contact anyone in a timely way. It was the most frustrated I had ever been. I now work at a company where I am remote, but my coworkers work in an office. Just by having everyone in the office makes it easier to contact someone on chat. But even then I am only about half as productive as I would be if I were completely in the office. Put me down as someone that believes 1 to 2 days remote work a week is convenient but I would much rather be in the office.

readthenotes1 4y ago
How did where someone was sitting affect their availability to respond? I ask because I have a very old memory of reading that anything more than 70 walking paces away was a phone call or an email. I've seen that distant shrink over the years and I have seen people wuse electronic communication if someone is 3 ft away. I could think of several causes for unavailability but I'm not going to speculate when you can simply answer.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>The biggest surprise to me is that it feels like there wasn't very much guidance or mandates on _how_ to work remotely There are multiple billion dollar companies that have been full remote for years and their strategies are public. This hybrid stuff with 3 days in office will be worse than full remote or 100% in office. My guess is it's just a way to get rid of people without having to do more official layoffs most people who complain about not being productive with remote work are basically trying to work exactly the same way as they would in office. Processes need to be documented and when to use different channels for communication need to be defined

Ancalagon 4y ago

My biggest gripe with this more-productive-in-office take is that for the last 6 years all of my teams have been distributed (by the company). So those gaps in between replies still exist, now I'm just sitting in an office instead of at home. Edit: To further my rant. This distributed teamwork was occurring long before covid as well. Half my team at an insurance company was based in 2 other offices in Florida and in Chicago when I was on the west coast.

harshalizee 4y ago
Yup, exactly same situation here. My company jumped on the bandwagon to hire a lot of remote workers, some in different time zones even. Now some meetings are at awkward times for everyone involved. 8AM meetings, 5-6PM meeting, etc. 7AM-10AM for deep work was my go to sweet spot before everyone clamoring for meetings and slack during the day. Now it's just more meetings that could've been an email.

rosywoozlechan 4y ago

Remote work is really rough with junior engineers. I'm trying really hard to help people but it comes in PR comments and scheduled zoom meetings instead of how it came for me, conversations over lunch, someone standing over my chair when I ask them for quick help. It's been so hard to scale people up. If I were a junior engineer I'd want return to office, but they seem to be the least likely to want it, because they've never had to come into an office before.

noisenotsignal 4y ago
As long as you have shared hours for collaboration, this still seems achievable. The “standing over a chair thing” is just a ping, call, and screenshare away. I’ve been both a new grad and mentor to interns and entry/mid level hires all throughout the remote era. On one hand, a junior can learn equally well by being proactive about asking for help or getting mentorship. On the other hand, experienced engineers can be more proactive about checking the status of their mentees. We don’t get to physically see others get frustrated or stuck, but good communication ensures that we can detect when people are stuck almost as well as when in person. An interesting side effect - when we do get lunch in person, we don’t have to talk about work! By then they’re already unblocked :)
- un_montagnard 4y ago
  Screenshare isn't the same thing as taking over the keyboard.
  - noisenotsignal 4y ago
    You should not be taking over the keyboard!! If you are typing, they are not learning, they are spectating. If there’s something that’s just annoying and not super relevant, like a command they don’t know, you can paste it in the chat. In the absolute worst case (I’ve done this ONCE in 3 years), I’ve used VSCode Live Share [0]. I’m sure you can probably use GitHub Codespaces too now. [0] - https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share

dom96 4y ago

It sounds like the issues you are facing are more to do with the specific people and their attitude towards collaboration than with WFH specifically. You either don't need a response immediately, or if it's important to you or the business then you should be calling the person that has the info you need. Even outside WFH this isn't solved. There are many distributed teams out there, you need to come up with a way to work with those that are on the other side of the earth to you.

chank 4y ago

So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed. I can definitely agree that if your company doesn't set an expectation of how remote/hybrid work will be conducted then there will always be some people who are overly laissez-faire with it. My own opinion is that remote work should be conducted mostly the same as if you were in the office. You're just not sitting in the same building anymore. Everyone should keep sensible hours that are close to the same hours of your team and be generally available. Seems to have worked so well for my company that they've begun closing down physical offices.

librish 4y ago
"So you're saying that your ability to get work done is dependent on forcing time with your co-workers on your schedule instead of theirs? This would be rude even if in the office. I've had the complete opposite experience of being able to get co-workers to respond in chat and jump onto meetings when needed." I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone.
- aaomidi 4y ago
  A very works on my system take. If you interrupt me it takes me hours to get back on speed.
  - librish 4y ago
    What do you work on and what % of the day do you work on tasks that complex? Hours is an incredibly long time. I'm not against people blocking off specific time when dealing with an especially gnarly bug or planning out a major feature, but for day-to-day tasks the cost of an interruption is usually a "right, where was I" once it's over.
- chank 4y ago
  > I'm saying on average, everyone's ability to get stuff done is higher if everyone can interrupt everyone. There's no actual evidence of that being true though. It's very much your personal take on it as you've said. I'm also hesitant to ask that if your work relies so much on being able to interrupt your coworkers at a moments notice is that evidence of other issues. Not having power to make decisions on the direction of your work? Poor documentation? Dare I say lack of confidence and/or ability to do your (not you specifically) own job? Seems to me the whole case against remote/hybrid boils down to certain peoples feelings about how they feel comfortable working. Not any actual statistical proof on the matter.

adoxyz 4y ago

Remote work, when done correctly can be amazing. Most employers I've been with the last 6 years have been remote first and my personal experience has been very positive. My team, even those not in the same timezone, had a pretty good overlap on working hours. Communication via Slack/Zoom/Meet was near instantaneous. We got together once or twice a year at an offsite. I also think it depends on the type of work you do, your team, and personal discipline. Not everyone is suited for remote work. So I hate blanket statements of "WFH is the future" or "WFH is the worst thing ever." Remote work requires trust from management, but also personal discipline from remote employees. Some absolutely abuse it. Some companies are just not setup for remote work. And some jobs, even if possible remotely, aren't well suited for it. But yes I agree with your last point, guidance is necessary on how to work remotely.

neilv 4y ago

Sounds like you experienced a particular company's flavor of WFH, which sounds mostly worse than all the ones I have. I've also seen situations that start to go bad like you describe, but in some cases we were able to nudge it back. For example, someone tries to schedule a meeting for a week away, so you push for a quick ad hoc call in a few minutes instead. (Not that different than in-person, when someone says "let's schedule a meeting".) I've also seen experiments in WFH communication and team-building that aren't done well. For example, starting Monday morning with a ineffective all-hands that, rather than getting people on the same page and energized, sucks the life out of any refreshed start of the workweek. (Again, similar to if you'd herded everyone in-person into a large physical room, for the same content and delivery, only in-person is poorer view and harder to hear.) Also, in the worst situations I'm aware of, it wouldn't matter much whether the people were in-person. You might figure out more quickly that there's a problem, or where the problem is originating, but that's not been the hardest part. What in-person is best at is humanizing/personalizing people and forming bonds easily, with all the little cues that we've known since the '80s aren't conveyed as well through computers, and still aren't. (Well, for many people; other people are less comfortable in some in-person contexts, for various reasons, and tend to be more comfortable and themselves in other modalities.) There's also the occasional high-bandwidth highly-interactive collaborative design, but there's no reason most of that can't happen mostly WFH when your timezones overlap and you have good tools (e.g., effective shared whiteboarding/diagramming that's actually better than a physical whiteboard). Personally, my ideal is WFH, but being in-town or an easy commute away, for occasional high-value in-person interaction. With in-person emphasis on humanizing/personalizing/bonding (but naturally; I've seen these done in well-intentioned but miserable ways that people just try to get through, and it can be counterproductive).

unxdfa 4y ago

Sounds like you don't know how to do it. Most people don't because this was thrown at them immediately and the structure of the company wasn't aligned around it. I'm on a fully remote team and have been for over a decade. We do not have those problems. We are vastly more productive than the rest of the company as a rule. Some things we do: 1. We have a daily morning zoom meeting where everyone goes round in a rota and tells us what they did yesterday and what they intend to do today and if there are any blockers or problems, call them out and we discuss. On Mondays this is longer so we look at goals and objectives of the team. We talk about non work stuff too. We're humans! 2. As the team manager, anyone is always free to bug me on slack and I will always respond within a couple of minutes. I will either help them to deal with the problem or find someone else on the team to help out who knows more than I do. Or I can help them get someone from an external team on the problem. I delegate this to someone else when I am rarely not around. 3. Have a team get together every Friday for an hour where we talk about anything work or otherwise related. 4. We have a team Q/A channel. Non urgent questions are asked on there and anyone is free to pick up something as and when they have a few moments. This is used for things like sanity checks, code reviews as well. 5. People are expected to ignore Slack for an hour or more at a time but must always answer calls in zoom (unless you're having a shit, gone to lunch, dealing with the kids, gone to the shop to get a coffee, whatever just call back when you're done). That's about it.

rumdonut 4y ago

This was exactly confirmed by an internal study at the company I work for. Engineers that depend on collaboration suffered a significant drop in output artifacts. Those being largely junior or mid-level engineers. Staff engineers actually did better, although ironically they tend to be the ones coming into the office consistently (anecdotally). One of the most surprising takeaways was that while engineers in the office more often claimed they felt less productive in the office than at home, in-office engineers tended to have higher productivity and WFH engineers when the actual numbers were examined.

bsg75 4y ago

> A lot of people will often not respond to Slack for several hours Fire them. One hard rule I have for my team is not being responsive on IM for extended periods is treated the same as not showing up for work. If people need to be taught how to work remotely, or anywhere for that matter, then the company has the wrong people, or maybe interns who need such training.

harshalizee 4y ago
So no one can do any sort of deep work in your team. Should definitely mention that in interviews for potential candidates to spot red flags.
- bsg75 4y ago
  If “deep work” means can’t function as a team member and communicate in a timely and professional manner, like we all did when working in an office was more common, yes I let them know.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

Yea, let's interrupt our developers every 20 minutes because the PM needs a question answered. 'Hey, how are you?' And then nothing. OMG he takes forever to reply on Slack.