3 ms·

What kind of support infrastructure are you talking about? I work remotely a couple days a week and we have several full-time remote workers on my team. We se

by Simucal 14y ago

What kind of support infrastructure are you talking about? I work remotely a couple days a week and we have several full-time remote workers on my team. We setup a Webex meetings for every meeting and we all have webcams. Besides that, we will informally use Google Hangouts to chat with each other. I'm just curious what we could do beyond that to support the remote people.

btilly 14y ago
Have a ticketing system. Use it religiously. Have online chat options (gmail is good). Use it religiously. Include remotes in conference calls. Do it religiously. Have key discussions in email, or at least summarized there, instead of just in person. Do it religiously. In short, make sure that everything is accessible for people who weren't there. And keep the habit going always.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  Wrote this up but it didn't seem to post before... Treat the remote workers as if they are local deaf workers. How would you accommodate a deaf co-worker? You'd write down a hell of a lot more stuff in emails, documents, wikis, blogs, etc. There's huge value in written documentation - and keeping it up to date - that goes well beyond the immediate "get stuff done ASAP!" needs. Every time a new person comes in to the team, they have a record of documentation, mailing list archives to sort through, revisions of docs to learn from, etc. Somehow all the same tools and techniques that make collaborative development possible and popular in the open source world tend to get shunned in corporate cubes.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Gmail is good but it is not sufficient Learn with the open source people, they've been doing this for "centuries" (ok, for decades) Use irc The biggest advantage that no other (common) system has mimicked is simple: chat rooms. But it's not chat rooms, it's because they are: Easy to identify Free to create Easy to participate in several rooms Irc can be used by bots easily (this is very useful)
  - btilly 14y ago
    Jabber can serve the same purpose as irc. But my experience is that irc tends to not like people sitting behind certain kinds of firewalls, and I personally avoid it. Anyways the point is moot - I don't use either. Gmail is good enough for my purposes.
- maxwell 14y ago
  I've been working remotely on asset tracking software+hardware for a little over a year with an exclusively remote team. This is exactly what we do. A few of us are in Maine, we've all met in person, and configurations of us get together every so often, but we all work from home. We try to refer to code exclusively by commit hash, and issues exclusively by ticket number. Commit messages often refer to tickets, and our ticketing system provides notes on dev progress and further commentary on (sets of) commits. We use email for archive-worthy discussion and Skype for instant messaging and calls. We have a weekly ~1 hour dev meeting. (And we're fully insulated from direct customer interaction, with wonderful management and (on-site/in-the-field) ops people, who enable us to concentrate on design, implementation, and process.)

by Simucal 14y ago

btilly 14y ago

Have a ticketing system. Use it religiously. Have online chat options (gmail is good). Use it religiously. Include remotes in conference calls. Do it religiously. Have key discussions in email, or at least summarized there, instead of just in person. Do it religiously. In short, make sure that everything is accessible for people who weren't there. And keep the habit going always.

mgkimsal 14y ago
Wrote this up but it didn't seem to post before... Treat the remote workers as if they are local deaf workers. How would you accommodate a deaf co-worker? You'd write down a hell of a lot more stuff in emails, documents, wikis, blogs, etc. There's huge value in written documentation - and keeping it up to date - that goes well beyond the immediate "get stuff done ASAP!" needs. Every time a new person comes in to the team, they have a record of documentation, mailing list archives to sort through, revisions of docs to learn from, etc. Somehow all the same tools and techniques that make collaborative development possible and popular in the open source world tend to get shunned in corporate cubes.
raverbashing 14y ago
Gmail is good but it is not sufficient Learn with the open source people, they've been doing this for "centuries" (ok, for decades) Use irc The biggest advantage that no other (common) system has mimicked is simple: chat rooms. But it's not chat rooms, it's because they are: Easy to identify Free to create Easy to participate in several rooms Irc can be used by bots easily (this is very useful)
- btilly 14y ago
  Jabber can serve the same purpose as irc. But my experience is that irc tends to not like people sitting behind certain kinds of firewalls, and I personally avoid it. Anyways the point is moot - I don't use either. Gmail is good enough for my purposes.
maxwell 14y ago
I've been working remotely on asset tracking software+hardware for a little over a year with an exclusively remote team. This is exactly what we do. A few of us are in Maine, we've all met in person, and configurations of us get together every so often, but we all work from home. We try to refer to code exclusively by commit hash, and issues exclusively by ticket number. Commit messages often refer to tickets, and our ticketing system provides notes on dev progress and further commentary on (sets of) commits. We use email for archive-worthy discussion and Skype for instant messaging and calls. We have a weekly ~1 hour dev meeting. (And we're fully insulated from direct customer interaction, with wonderful management and (on-site/in-the-field) ops people, who enable us to concentrate on design, implementation, and process.)