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If you believe that you are less effective as a manager of a remote team than a office one, that's a manager problem not a location one Managing a team remotel

by pauby 3y ago

If you believe that you are less effective as a manager of a remote team than a office one, that's a manager problem not a location one Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done. Don't force your team back to the office because you find it easier to manage them. I say this as somebody who manages a wholly remote team from across the world, 5 countries and timezones.

sshine 3y ago
I work in a hardware startup. I can feel the difference between sitting in my office and in the workshop. The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless. I experienced the same in a crypto startup where you similarly have highly specialised skill sets that need to be transferred to “mortal programmers” like me. Sitting at home is great for concentration, but you lose the synergies.
- piva00 3y ago
  I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101, not synergy of being around each other. Having a good culture around replying people needing help in a timely fashion (instead of letting it slide for days) is important. To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help. The culture of communication needs to change when people work remotely, that's the main difference. It's nice because now you can't just interrupt people with a tap on the shoulder, you need to ask for their time to interrupt someone.
  - vincnetas 3y ago
    What about a brave suggestion to make all work chat communication public to all employees. This would allow you to just randomly come across interesting conversations (tags, keywords, etc..) your coworkers have without inviting you. If on the other hand someone wants their communication explicitly private, there could be a toggle in chat app to enable that. Like you don't discuss sensitive topics near the coffee machine and just move to a meeting room. So public by default, private by choice.
    - ahtihn 3y ago
      No this is a terrible idea. Spoken conversations are different to chats. For one the very fact that they're not searchable after the fact makes everyone more relaxed and not worry so much about saying something wrong that could get back to them later.
      - Sai_ 3y ago
        For another, spoken conversations are ephemeral but also point in time. Archived chats need to then be cross-referenced with time and date to check if those chats are still relevant. If partially relevant, which parts can or must be excised?
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      Nice idea. I would never talk to any of my coworkers again.
  - frant-hartm 3y ago
    >To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine The way to get these is to basically ban private conversations. Have everything as a thread in Slack or somewhere, create topic channels where people can actually join these conversations
    - pydry 3y ago
      Banning private conversations gets you fewer conversations. It's intimidating to talk in front of a lot of people. Even moreso without the trust built up from a bunch of in person interactions. It would help if there were an easier way to convert a short 1:1 chat into a public thread with a consent click on each side though. If there were better communication tools than slack I think I'd enjoy WFH more but I find that the commonly used tools dehumanize the process - there's 0 adjustments (like this one) to accomodate psychological safety and the tools are built around transactionality.
    - talkmess 3y ago
      You want to get more conversations by banning conversations? That makes no sense. We are not machines that convert money (or food/coffee) into code. Social contexts matter, there are personalities behind each face. If you understand the context of your co-workers then it's easier to understand online communication (since most non-verbal communication that happens in person is lost over online channels). Meeting in person sometimes just makes online communication more effective.
      - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
        It makes perfect sense. Often people will default to DMs for things, which makes it appear like no one is chatting and isolates these casual chats to 1:1 DMs. If you encourage these kind of conversations to happen in channels (Public or private), other people can jump into the conversation. I've seen the difference it makes when everything is done in public channels instead of DMs. Everything feels more lively and you interact with your team a lot more. Everything in DMs feels isolating.
  - sneak 3y ago
    > I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101 Most people are super duper slow typers. Remote is less efficient unless most/all of your staff can touch type at a high rate of speed. I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned.
    - someweirdperson 3y ago
      > I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned. Do you require formal touch typing explicitly, or a certain minimum wpm (how fast?), or both? Do you include iportant charcters (for coding) in the test?
      - sneak 3y ago
        typing speed for coding is irrelevant. the bottleneck with coding is not data entry. the important thing is that they can type at a high rate of speed. i personally type at around 120wpm which is excessive, but anyone who doesn't type 40-50wpm is obviously not sufficiently skilled as a remote worker.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - novok 3y ago
      IMO if speed is really an issue then whisper can take care of that. It's pretty good and fast.
      - sneak 3y ago
        So far, we have not seen that. People opt for meetings where they can speak versus using tools to become better at communicating via text.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help. Sometimes I think remote workers could use a new kind of watercooler. Maybe an online game everyone can drop into and play for bit while communicating over voice and chat? I guess not a lot of companies would be happy to install a bunch of time wasting network games, but I've worked on teams that ended up doing that while in the office anyway and it was great for getting to know people and talking about random things. Productivity obsessed people might hate it, but is hanging out in a FPS or MMO any different than standing around distracting others talking about sports with your buddy for 40 minutes every afternoon? Virtual workers need virtual spaces to gather at and a reason to want to go there.
    - yunwal 3y ago
      Generally part of why I stop by the water cooler or whatever is also giving my eyes a rest from the screen and stretching my legs.
      - autoexec 3y ago
        Good point, but working at home still affords people that opportunity, and I find it easier and more comfortable to do that in my home too
  - sshine 3y ago
    > you can still clarify assumptions via chat Yes, at cost to latency, bandwidth and meeting time (you don’t as easily make 30 second video calls as you nag the person across the monitor). > conversations about topics tangentially related Not just that. Conversations about topics that are the responsibility of your colleagues but you still need to understand and challenge. > communication needs to change when people work remotely It’s totally possible, but requires a level of written clarity that few programmers can bother. FOSS is fully remote for the most, and it depends on a lot of textual protocols. The more your job is cut out, the more runway your employer has, the less important you need quick communication. In any R&D, being present is really beneficial. And office chatter is at the same time insanely annoying. Stand ups that drag into half hours, “let’s break everyone’s flow for a group announcement”, people who wanna smalltalk. Best of both worlds is a mixture, when the circumstances permit it. Wearing headphones and avoiding eye contact does wonders — my boss really picks up when I don’t want to talk.
- achow 3y ago
  It comes down to what kind of problems one is trying to solve. Innovation, 0 to 1 product stage (even 1-10 ones) is not conducive to remote. Whereas 'steady state' companies, where things are streamlined and most is about execution remote can work - no wonder call centers have gone and staying remote. Similarly for people - young employees in 0-1 or 1-10 career stage cannot thrive in remote.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  > The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless. Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting on the wealth and mental health of employees, and on the planet?
  - blq10 3y ago
    This is quite the framing. The company gets paid for producing human value to customers, and unless you're willing to take a pay cut to work remote (oh, you aren't? I see.) the cost there is dominated by employee wages, taxes, social safety net (as meagre as it is here in the US). Sure, the office costs nonzero dollars and so does commuting - but framing it as morality is misguided. A company can o ly seek to produce customer value in a capital efficient manner, it is up to us (the customer) to value things correctly. Are you willing to do the work to drop Google services because they want to work from the office and do all that bad stuff? If you aren't, making people work from the office is the easy choice, their product gets marginally better for very low marginal costs.
    - offices 3y ago
      >A company can o ly seek to produce customer value in a capital efficient manner, it is up to us (the customer) to value things correctly. This is not how businesses act in reality.
    - oraphalous 3y ago
      The didn't frame it as morality - they framed it as an economic and social costs. There is nothing in your response that convinces me that those costs are worth it.
  - podgib 3y ago
    > Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting on the wealth and mental health of employees, and on the planet? That's very context specific. In many cities, employees commuting by public transport to a central location, rather than all individually heating/cooling their houses, is a plus for the planet and wealth of employees. For many people (including me) it's also good for mental health.
underdeserver 3y ago
> Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done. Managing a team, remotely or otherwise, is not "easily done". If you find it easy you're either strongly underestimating your abilities or not doing your job right.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Devasta 3y ago
  He is talking about the difference in difficulty of local vs remote, not the difficulty of managing full stop. And he is right, managing remotely is a minimal change. I've been managing and working with people remotely for years, as has everyone who deals with coworkers not in the same office as they are. It doesn't matter to me if they are in an office in another country or in their jammies at home in that same country, they are thousands of miles away from me.
cauch 3y ago
So I would not say "that's a manager problem": that's everyone problem, everyone needs to change their way of working and communicating. The manager, but also the person being managed (unfortunately, a common dev mentality is to blame everyone else first)
wepple 3y ago
> I say this as somebody who manages a wholly remote team from across the world, 5 countries and timezones. Doesn’t this partly imply you wouldn’t have good data to compare performance of remote vs local?

by pauby 3y ago

sshine 3y ago

I work in a hardware startup. I can feel the difference between sitting in my office and in the workshop. The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless. I experienced the same in a crypto startup where you similarly have highly specialised skill sets that need to be transferred to “mortal programmers” like me. Sitting at home is great for concentration, but you lose the synergies.

piva00 3y ago
I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101, not synergy of being around each other. Having a good culture around replying people needing help in a timely fashion (instead of letting it slide for days) is important. To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help. The culture of communication needs to change when people work remotely, that's the main difference. It's nice because now you can't just interrupt people with a tap on the shoulder, you need to ask for their time to interrupt someone.
- vincnetas 3y ago
  What about a brave suggestion to make all work chat communication public to all employees. This would allow you to just randomly come across interesting conversations (tags, keywords, etc..) your coworkers have without inviting you. If on the other hand someone wants their communication explicitly private, there could be a toggle in chat app to enable that. Like you don't discuss sensitive topics near the coffee machine and just move to a meeting room. So public by default, private by choice.
  - ahtihn 3y ago
    No this is a terrible idea. Spoken conversations are different to chats. For one the very fact that they're not searchable after the fact makes everyone more relaxed and not worry so much about saying something wrong that could get back to them later.
    - Sai_ 3y ago
      For another, spoken conversations are ephemeral but also point in time. Archived chats need to then be cross-referenced with time and date to check if those chats are still relevant. If partially relevant, which parts can or must be excised?
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Nice idea. I would never talk to any of my coworkers again.
- frant-hartm 3y ago
  >To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine The way to get these is to basically ban private conversations. Have everything as a thread in Slack or somewhere, create topic channels where people can actually join these conversations
  - pydry 3y ago
    Banning private conversations gets you fewer conversations. It's intimidating to talk in front of a lot of people. Even moreso without the trust built up from a bunch of in person interactions. It would help if there were an easier way to convert a short 1:1 chat into a public thread with a consent click on each side though. If there were better communication tools than slack I think I'd enjoy WFH more but I find that the commonly used tools dehumanize the process - there's 0 adjustments (like this one) to accomodate psychological safety and the tools are built around transactionality.
  - talkmess 3y ago
    You want to get more conversations by banning conversations? That makes no sense. We are not machines that convert money (or food/coffee) into code. Social contexts matter, there are personalities behind each face. If you understand the context of your co-workers then it's easier to understand online communication (since most non-verbal communication that happens in person is lost over online channels). Meeting in person sometimes just makes online communication more effective.
    - ZephyrBlu 3y ago
      It makes perfect sense. Often people will default to DMs for things, which makes it appear like no one is chatting and isolates these casual chats to 1:1 DMs. If you encourage these kind of conversations to happen in channels (Public or private), other people can jump into the conversation. I've seen the difference it makes when everything is done in public channels instead of DMs. Everything feels more lively and you interact with your team a lot more. Everything in DMs feels isolating.
- sneak 3y ago
  > I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101 Most people are super duper slow typers. Remote is less efficient unless most/all of your staff can touch type at a high rate of speed. I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned.
  - someweirdperson 3y ago
    > I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned. Do you require formal touch typing explicitly, or a certain minimum wpm (how fast?), or both? Do you include iportant charcters (for coding) in the test?
    - sneak 3y ago
      typing speed for coding is irrelevant. the bottleneck with coding is not data entry. the important thing is that they can type at a high rate of speed. i personally type at around 120wpm which is excessive, but anyone who doesn't type 40-50wpm is obviously not sufficiently skilled as a remote worker.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - novok 3y ago
    IMO if speed is really an issue then whisper can take care of that. It's pretty good and fast.
    - sneak 3y ago
      So far, we have not seen that. People opt for meetings where they can speak versus using tools to become better at communicating via text.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help. Sometimes I think remote workers could use a new kind of watercooler. Maybe an online game everyone can drop into and play for bit while communicating over voice and chat? I guess not a lot of companies would be happy to install a bunch of time wasting network games, but I've worked on teams that ended up doing that while in the office anyway and it was great for getting to know people and talking about random things. Productivity obsessed people might hate it, but is hanging out in a FPS or MMO any different than standing around distracting others talking about sports with your buddy for 40 minutes every afternoon? Virtual workers need virtual spaces to gather at and a reason to want to go there.
  - yunwal 3y ago
    Generally part of why I stop by the water cooler or whatever is also giving my eyes a rest from the screen and stretching my legs.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      Good point, but working at home still affords people that opportunity, and I find it easier and more comfortable to do that in my home too
- sshine 3y ago
  > you can still clarify assumptions via chat Yes, at cost to latency, bandwidth and meeting time (you don’t as easily make 30 second video calls as you nag the person across the monitor). > conversations about topics tangentially related Not just that. Conversations about topics that are the responsibility of your colleagues but you still need to understand and challenge. > communication needs to change when people work remotely It’s totally possible, but requires a level of written clarity that few programmers can bother. FOSS is fully remote for the most, and it depends on a lot of textual protocols. The more your job is cut out, the more runway your employer has, the less important you need quick communication. In any R&D, being present is really beneficial. And office chatter is at the same time insanely annoying. Stand ups that drag into half hours, “let’s break everyone’s flow for a group announcement”, people who wanna smalltalk. Best of both worlds is a mixture, when the circumstances permit it. Wearing headphones and avoiding eye contact does wonders — my boss really picks up when I don’t want to talk.
achow 3y ago
It comes down to what kind of problems one is trying to solve. Innovation, 0 to 1 product stage (even 1-10 ones) is not conducive to remote. Whereas 'steady state' companies, where things are streamlined and most is about execution remote can work - no wonder call centers have gone and staying remote. Similarly for people - young employees in 0-1 or 1-10 career stage cannot thrive in remote.
bluescrn 3y ago
> The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless. Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting on the wealth and mental health of employees, and on the planet?
- blq10 3y ago
  This is quite the framing. The company gets paid for producing human value to customers, and unless you're willing to take a pay cut to work remote (oh, you aren't? I see.) the cost there is dominated by employee wages, taxes, social safety net (as meagre as it is here in the US). Sure, the office costs nonzero dollars and so does commuting - but framing it as morality is misguided. A company can o ly seek to produce customer value in a capital efficient manner, it is up to us (the customer) to value things correctly. Are you willing to do the work to drop Google services because they want to work from the office and do all that bad stuff? If you aren't, making people work from the office is the easy choice, their product gets marginally better for very low marginal costs.
  - offices 3y ago
    >A company can o ly seek to produce customer value in a capital efficient manner, it is up to us (the customer) to value things correctly. This is not how businesses act in reality.
  - oraphalous 3y ago
    The didn't frame it as morality - they framed it as an economic and social costs. There is nothing in your response that convinces me that those costs are worth it.
- podgib 3y ago
  > Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting on the wealth and mental health of employees, and on the planet? That's very context specific. In many cities, employees commuting by public transport to a central location, rather than all individually heating/cooling their houses, is a plus for the planet and wealth of employees. For many people (including me) it's also good for mental health.

underdeserver 3y ago

> Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done. Managing a team, remotely or otherwise, is not "easily done". If you find it easy you're either strongly underestimating your abilities or not doing your job right.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Devasta 3y ago
He is talking about the difference in difficulty of local vs remote, not the difficulty of managing full stop. And he is right, managing remotely is a minimal change. I've been managing and working with people remotely for years, as has everyone who deals with coworkers not in the same office as they are. It doesn't matter to me if they are in an office in another country or in their jammies at home in that same country, they are thousands of miles away from me.

cauch 3y ago

So I would not say "that's a manager problem": that's everyone problem, everyone needs to change their way of working and communicating. The manager, but also the person being managed (unfortunately, a common dev mentality is to blame everyone else first)

wepple 3y ago

> I say this as somebody who manages a wholly remote team from across the world, 5 countries and timezones. Doesn’t this partly imply you wouldn’t have good data to compare performance of remote vs local?