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I think it's the opposite, remote workers are not reliable teammates. When we need ad hoc help from a remote engineer, we need to grab a 30 minute slot on their

I think it's the opposite, remote workers are not reliable teammates. When we need ad hoc help from a remote engineer, we need to grab a 30 minute slot on their calendar, or we need to send them a long async email or DM chain. Eventually the conversation slows down, and they start responding once a day. When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me. More remote-more slow.

lolinder 2y ago
What you're describing is exactly the kind of problematic culture difference that I'm warning about. This is what I said earlier: > because the organization's culture stays synchronous and in-person-oriented Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that. It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work. > When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me. Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  > Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that. > It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work. This is wishful thinking. Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things. In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project, which is the most important part, and in many cases senior engineers are on the critical path. But hey, if you're able to be productive at scale with remote work, guess you'll have a large pool of talent to draw from, so I'm hoping to see many successful companies replace FAANG. > Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office). Yes, this is what YOU want. It's not for the benefit of the company, no matter how remote people try to frame it. But hey, if that's my only choice, then we should hire top talent in Bangalore or Warsaw instead of remote mid talent from high cost areas.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > Yes, this is what YOU want. Precisely. I don't want to work for you, you don't want me to work for you, so it's a win-win: I'll keep doing good work for a company that appreciates what I can do and is happy to give me the flexibility that I need to do it well. You keep hiring people who don't mind being interrupted by a boss who values their physical presence over all else. Everyone's happy!
    - zeroCalories 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    > Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things. This sounds like a project management failure. One of the cardinal rules of the remote programs I run is: Never let the critical path be blocked by one person having to physically do some synchronous task. If Task X requires Person Y to approve it by Date Z, then you obtain that approval asynchronously, waaaaay before Date Z, where you would otherwise become blocked. > In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project I mean, I think that's what you're getting at here, so design your business processes just like you'd design a multi-threaded program: such that there are no locks and mutexes.
    - zeroCalories 2y ago
      1. Management is hard and failure is common. Now what? Just let the projects fail? 2. You can't always parallelize work, and even if you can, that doesn't mean it will be faster/more efficient
rybosworld 2y ago
That sounds... terrible. Having to constantly put out fires is always a sign of larger issues, especially in an engineering context.
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  It's not always a fire. Small issues or questions stack up if I need to wait 30 minutes for a reply.
  - rybosworld 2y ago
    The point still stands. If you feel you need immediate answers the moment you have a question, there's a larger issue. When an employee's in a meeting and not at their desk, what do you do?
    - zeroCalories 2y ago
      No it doesn't. You can't plan for every contingency. If they're not at desk, I'll wait there. The point isn't that the project will fail if I don't get my solution right now. The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail.
      - rybosworld 2y ago
        > The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail That's a figment of your imagination.
rwmj 2y ago
We have a chat system which most people are on most of the day. If I want to talk to someone I ping them on there. We might arrange a video call, but mostly it's sorted out on chat. Email is also used for things which are not time critical and/or require more detailed explanation and discussion.
- vundercind 2y ago
  All I can figure from how some people react to being asked to type out their requests or otherwise interact over messaging rather than turning everything into a voice conversation, is that some folks, for whatever reason, find writing and maybe also reading extremely unpleasant. Poor typists? Just kinda bad at reading and writing so it requires a lot of effort rather than feeling as natural and easy as talking? Something else? Not sure.
  - salawat 2y ago
    Putting things in writing is anathema to the sociopath or socially savvy manipulator. Writing leaves paper trail. You can't ask for unscrupulous things with impunity, or utilize fast talk or other manipulation techniques without being completely transparent.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - bryan_w 2y ago
    Some people just find it quicker to be able to point at a thing and ask "What does that do?" VS using the tools to do it via computers. Some would say that's an issue with the tools, but the tools aren't ever going to get better if the WFH people don't acknowledge the deficiency of the current system.
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  To be honest, I hate chats. In the past I just had to worry about emails, and they probably weren't that important if they were emails, but now I have to split my attention onto chats because we have remote workers that need help. If they were in office, they could just come ask me a question when its important, and I could focus on my work otherwise. Still doesn't stop people from randomly just not replying when pinged.
arkh 2y ago
When you get your car serviced, do you stay near the mechanic to check how the work is going every minute?
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  No, but when I'm in a car crash I hope I don't have to schedule my ambulance or doctor a week in advance.
amerkhalid 2y ago
> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me. Wow, this seems like a horrible way to manage your people. A decent engineer will not accept this kind of treatment, remote or not. They will quickly move to better managed environments and you will get stuck with subpar engineers. I never had a boss who did this. Even when I worked in office, all my managers were respectful and almost always they scheduled meetings ahead of time even when they needed to ask minor questions. Only time they would swing by my desk would be if it was truly an emergency (rare) or if they they just wanted to chit chat.
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  You have it backwards. I'm not a manager, I'm an IC. I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product. If the alternative is that I need to spend half my day spinning on a reply, then I hope you get managed out.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Oh, this information changes a lot. I don't know if you're in a place to accept feedback right now but here's some just in case: you need to fix your attitude fast or you won't last long at any company, remote or not. If you treat your coworkers with anything approximating the dismissive, demanding, and entitled comments you've been leaving here you are making yourself a lot of enemies at work, and if you're not the boss you won't get away with that forever.
    - zeroCalories 2y ago
      I'm much nicer in person :)
      - amerkhalid 2y ago
        That's good to know. But just because everyone is in the office, doesn't mean you will get help. In our industry, sadly, there are very few companies with good onboarding/mentoring programs. I have seen new bright engineers who think their task is the most important task at the company and they constantly disrupt others eventually get ignored by everyone. I have been there, I was one of them, luckily, I had good mentors who taught me how to work with others without being disruptive.
erik_seaberg 2y ago
Each time you do this, you're forcing someone to forget whatever he was in the middle of doing. In the best case, your interruption might be for a much more urgent project, but often it won't. > A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. - https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
paleotrope 2y ago
"I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me." What is going on in your organization?

lolinder 2y ago

What you're describing is exactly the kind of problematic culture difference that I'm warning about. This is what I said earlier: > because the organization's culture stays synchronous and in-person-oriented Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that. It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work. > When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me. Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office).

zeroCalories 2y ago
> Asynchronous does not mean slow, but it is different and requires structuring your work differently. Remote works much better asynchronously, but at an organization that has too few remote employees will never learn to do that. > It's not that you're doing something wrong or that they are, it's that your organization is designed to be incompatible with remote workers. If you're not willing to adapt, then you're absolutely on the right track by phasing out remote, but don't take your anecdotes from working in an organization that refused to change as evidence that remote doesn't work. This is wishful thinking. Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things. In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project, which is the most important part, and in many cases senior engineers are on the critical path. But hey, if you're able to be productive at scale with remote work, guess you'll have a large pool of talent to draw from, so I'm hoping to see many successful companies replace FAANG. > Slight tangent, but this is exactly why a lot of people like myself will never go back into an office. I don't want to be paid to be at someone's beck and call whenever they want to interrupt me, I want to be given a large chunk of work that I can work on independently without interruption unless I'm specifically designated to be on call as part of a regular rotation (at which point you can interrupt me just as well on slack as you could in the office). Yes, this is what YOU want. It's not for the benefit of the company, no matter how remote people try to frame it. But hey, if that's my only choice, then we should hire top talent in Bangalore or Warsaw instead of remote mid talent from high cost areas.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Yes, this is what YOU want. Precisely. I don't want to work for you, you don't want me to work for you, so it's a win-win: I'll keep doing good work for a company that appreciates what I can do and is happy to give me the flexibility that I need to do it well. You keep hiring people who don't mind being interrupted by a boss who values their physical presence over all else. Everyone's happy!
  - zeroCalories 2y ago
    [flagged]
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > Not all work can be done asynchronously, and often the most important work is important because it's a blocker for other things. This sounds like a project management failure. One of the cardinal rules of the remote programs I run is: Never let the critical path be blocked by one person having to physically do some synchronous task. If Task X requires Person Y to approve it by Date Z, then you obtain that approval asynchronously, waaaaay before Date Z, where you would otherwise become blocked. > In practice this kind of mindset simply increases the critical path of the project I mean, I think that's what you're getting at here, so design your business processes just like you'd design a multi-threaded program: such that there are no locks and mutexes.
  - zeroCalories 2y ago
    1. Management is hard and failure is common. Now what? Just let the projects fail? 2. You can't always parallelize work, and even if you can, that doesn't mean it will be faster/more efficient

rybosworld 2y ago

That sounds... terrible. Having to constantly put out fires is always a sign of larger issues, especially in an engineering context.

zeroCalories 2y ago
It's not always a fire. Small issues or questions stack up if I need to wait 30 minutes for a reply.
- rybosworld 2y ago
  The point still stands. If you feel you need immediate answers the moment you have a question, there's a larger issue. When an employee's in a meeting and not at their desk, what do you do?
  - zeroCalories 2y ago
    No it doesn't. You can't plan for every contingency. If they're not at desk, I'll wait there. The point isn't that the project will fail if I don't get my solution right now. The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail.
    - rybosworld 2y ago
      > The problem is that having you remote, on the whole, will make it fail That's a figment of your imagination.

rwmj 2y ago

We have a chat system which most people are on most of the day. If I want to talk to someone I ping them on there. We might arrange a video call, but mostly it's sorted out on chat. Email is also used for things which are not time critical and/or require more detailed explanation and discussion.

vundercind 2y ago
All I can figure from how some people react to being asked to type out their requests or otherwise interact over messaging rather than turning everything into a voice conversation, is that some folks, for whatever reason, find writing and maybe also reading extremely unpleasant. Poor typists? Just kinda bad at reading and writing so it requires a lot of effort rather than feeling as natural and easy as talking? Something else? Not sure.
- salawat 2y ago
  Putting things in writing is anathema to the sociopath or socially savvy manipulator. Writing leaves paper trail. You can't ask for unscrupulous things with impunity, or utilize fast talk or other manipulation techniques without being completely transparent.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- bryan_w 2y ago
  Some people just find it quicker to be able to point at a thing and ask "What does that do?" VS using the tools to do it via computers. Some would say that's an issue with the tools, but the tools aren't ever going to get better if the WFH people don't acknowledge the deficiency of the current system.
zeroCalories 2y ago
To be honest, I hate chats. In the past I just had to worry about emails, and they probably weren't that important if they were emails, but now I have to split my attention onto chats because we have remote workers that need help. If they were in office, they could just come ask me a question when its important, and I could focus on my work otherwise. Still doesn't stop people from randomly just not replying when pinged.

arkh 2y ago

When you get your car serviced, do you stay near the mechanic to check how the work is going every minute?

zeroCalories 2y ago
No, but when I'm in a car crash I hope I don't have to schedule my ambulance or doctor a week in advance.

amerkhalid 2y ago

> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me. Wow, this seems like a horrible way to manage your people. A decent engineer will not accept this kind of treatment, remote or not. They will quickly move to better managed environments and you will get stuck with subpar engineers. I never had a boss who did this. Even when I worked in office, all my managers were respectful and almost always they scheduled meetings ahead of time even when they needed to ask minor questions. Only time they would swing by my desk would be if it was truly an emergency (rare) or if they they just wanted to chit chat.

zeroCalories 2y ago
You have it backwards. I'm not a manager, I'm an IC. I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product. If the alternative is that I need to spend half my day spinning on a reply, then I hope you get managed out.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Oh, this information changes a lot. I don't know if you're in a place to accept feedback right now but here's some just in case: you need to fix your attitude fast or you won't last long at any company, remote or not. If you treat your coworkers with anything approximating the dismissive, demanding, and entitled comments you've been leaving here you are making yourself a lot of enemies at work, and if you're not the boss you won't get away with that forever.
  - zeroCalories 2y ago
    I'm much nicer in person :)
    - amerkhalid 2y ago
      That's good to know. But just because everyone is in the office, doesn't mean you will get help. In our industry, sadly, there are very few companies with good onboarding/mentoring programs. I have seen new bright engineers who think their task is the most important task at the company and they constantly disrupt others eventually get ignored by everyone. I have been there, I was one of them, luckily, I had good mentors who taught me how to work with others without being disruptive.

erik_seaberg 2y ago

Each time you do this, you're forcing someone to forget whatever he was in the middle of doing. In the best case, your interruption might be for a much more urgent project, but often it won't. > A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. - https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

paleotrope 2y ago

"I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me." What is going on in your organization?