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37signals Works Remotely [video]

285 points by wlll 13y ago

bwilliams 13y ago
As someone who has worked remotely for most of their career (which isn't very long since I am young) I can definitely say that working from home has a lot of negatives as well. I've ended up thinking that remote working is for people who are traveling a lot or people with a family they would like to stay at home and spend time with.
- fredoliveira 13y ago
  I've been working remotely for a while now, after running a consultancy out of an office for a few years. Personally, I think it boils down to whether you trust the people you work with, and you create the necessary conditions for them to excel regardless of where they are. It really shouldn't matter where you are, even though face-to-face time is indeed important from time to time. I'd love to know what pain-points you found.
  - bwilliams 13y ago
    I just saw DHH post this, http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3658-cabin-fever http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3658-cabin-fever and it explains a bit. Sometimes motivation can be hard. Especially since you have no "real" coworkers and you're sitting around the house all day. Often times going out and working at a coffee shop can help but it's not always viable. It also doesn't help that I'm in a pretty isolated and mostly tourist area of Florida where there are seemingly no other developers or dev companies and most certainly no co-working spots here.
- bnycum 13y ago
  Not really. I'm glad I get to see my daughter grow up while working at home, but it's so much more than that. I don't have to deal with office politics or anything like that. Last office I worked at had a somewhat dress code, I'm glad I can now wear shorts. There is no impromptu meetings, and no annoying coworker stopping by my office at horrible times. I set my own schedule around when I'm most productive. I've worked at home for 4 years now and wouldn't go back to an office job without at least a $20k raise.
  - csomar 13y ago
    * Not really. I'm glad I get to see my daughter grow up while working at home * Have you tried working with home without a family? I'm getting good gigs but they are all remote. It's has been a rough time since I socialize really little.
    - dgabriel 13y ago
      Are there any co-working spaces near you?
      - enjo 13y ago
        Co-working is an absolute godsend for remote work. It's like an office, but better! You can pop-in and out without the pressure that your actual coworkers put on you to be visible during "office hours". Even if you only spend an hour or two a day at your co-working desk, being able to get out and interact with humans (on your terms) is an amazing thing.
      - csomar 13y ago
        No. There is no night life either.
    - bnycum 13y ago
      Yep, my daughter is only 2 and my wife worked before she was born. So for 2 years I worked at home alone, though I have 2 dogs. It was weird being alone all day, but I got so much more accomplished. Getting out for lunch helped me a lot, and taking my dogs out. Even just a stroll around the block can help a ton.
- ithkuil 13y ago
  One target that is overlooked very often are people who cannot relocate to another country, for example because his partner cannot/doesn't want to leave his/her job or lower their quality of life by going into a country away from family (e.g. children and availability of grand parents nearby, friends, connections, language, ...). It's not only you. For example, in today's equal opportunities world, is hard to ask a woman to leave everything to follow his partner, yet it was something we took for granted a few years back, and modeled our expectations of what you can expect from an employee. I.e. not being able to move because of family doesn't necessarily equate to wanting to spend more time than normal with the family. There is a huge market of highly talented people that are unwilling to move into the country (or part of the country) where you choose to set up your business. Remote working has it's costs, but it can be offset by a larger pool of experienced and enthusiast candidates.
speg 13y ago
I think working from home at will would be the best of both worlds. Come in when you want to collaborate in person, stay at home when you need to work undisturbed.
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  For the last ten years I've been working from home two days a week and commuting to the office for the other three. Works well for me.
alecsmart1 13y ago
I honestly don't know how this works. I mean it's really very difficult to get someone to work remotely with the same dedication and passion. I find collaboration extremely difficult. I mean if there are 5 rockstars working on a project, then sure, remote working will do fine. But if we talk about a decent workforce, there is a lot of handholding required. I don't know how it's possible remotely.
- xal 13y ago
  It works great if everyone in the company is hugely accomplished and if the product of the company is in essentially permanent use by everyone who works there.
  - speg 13y ago
    What is Shopify's policy on working remotely?
    - xal 13y ago
      Depends on the kind of work. Engineers and Designers generally work as teams on location.
- fredoliveira 13y ago
  Dedication and passion are most definitely not tied to where you are. If you're unhappy with your job, you won't be passionate; you won't be dedicated. You'll be miserable, looking at the clock, regardless of where the clock is. If you need handholding, you're hiring and working with B-players. Not everyone is going to be able to hold its own initially, but after a few weeks on a team, you should be independent enough that people don't need to look over your shoulder.
  - allsystemsgo 13y ago
    I disagree. Most new employees need some sort of on boarding. When you join a new project, you'll need some sort of on boarding. Usually there's one or maybe two tech leads, and then a handful of junior devs. It's part of the companies responsibility to train them up. This isn't to say they're not dedicated or passionate, but when you're putting in 60 hour weeks bug fixing or implementing small features here and there, you run out of time to go read some books about your development language of choice. New employees ask lots of questions their first 6 months or so. It's just the way it is.
resca79 13y ago
Work remotely it's good when also the big percentage of company people works remotely. Anyway, I buy the book
- grdvnl 13y ago
  Agreed. Having a big percentage of company working remotely sets up a workflow among all team members that is conducive to remote work. Whereas, when some parts of a team are working remotely, including where teams get created/dismantled for short projects every couple of months coming up with a workflow becomes difficult. That said, I work remotely and I have been productive as ever.
dangero 13y ago
I'm kind of interested in the meta story around this remote campaign. Assuming 37 signals is doing this book at least partially for money, they're making a play relating to a trend using themselves as the model of what works. Is the target audience employees who work remote or want to, or is the target market managers who need to understand remote employees?
- mylons 13y ago
  my intuition says that managers tend to not like remote employees, where as employees tend to like working remotely. or at the very least, having the option
- bjacobso 13y ago
  I suspect they have a yet to be announced product which is targeted to teams working remotely. They are slowly building authority for why and how working remotely works.
  - dangero 13y ago
    This is a very interesting take. If true, the book is not the product. They don't care how well the book sells. They care that you and I know they wrote a book on the topic and so therefore, they are the authority.
  - tommoor 13y ago
    Definitely possible... they also have a whole suite of products that are aligned with remote workers already though ;)
- justinsteele 13y ago
  I'm both - so I pre ordered the book a month ago.
- codemac 13y ago
  A lot of the tools they sell access to are extremely useful.. if you work remotely.
- 13y ago
5vforest 13y ago
Some people enjoy working remotely, others enjoy going into a specific workplace. Not sure why this is such a contentious argument every time.
- loteck 13y ago
  Here's one reason we recently experienced: Many people in our company like the flexibility of choosing to work remotely or in the office. However, when we on-boarded a new hire recently, he struggled with this level of flexibility. He took advantage of it in unprofessional ways. When confronted, he indicated that he might do better if he was always working in the office with the rest of the team. Management suddenly made it a requirement for everyone to come into the office. This had severe and immediate impacts on morale and on employees' focus on the mission. Some people need to work in an office. Some people need to work remotely. Some people can be flexible. The reason it's so contentious is because it is hard to accommodate all 3 of those types. So far, the solution is to alienate at least 1 of those 3 types. Hopefully the contention will result in progress.
joekrill 13y ago
I would love to hear more about how various companies handle this logistically. Like how they allow access to company data and resources. I'm assuming simply using VPNs is the standard? Where I work they make it so unbelievably painful and difficult to work remotely. You have to jump through a million hoops. It's a financial company, and generally "compliance" gets the blame for this. But I wonder how much of it is just plain paranoia. Do a lot of companies worry about things like leaking source code? Or client/customer data? Or do most companies put much more trust in their employees?
- jkaljundi 13y ago
  Don't most companies already anyway use web-based SaaS solutions, so no VPN's needed except for legacy systems?
  - famousactress 13y ago
    VPN still comes up.. Things like test-environments, analytics databases, etc. It's easy enough to do in the cloud though.
  - bdavisx 13y ago
    Many large companies will not trust their data to an outside company under any circumstances. They will put the SaaS solution on their intranet only accessible locally or thru a VPN. If the SaaS company isn't willing to do this, then they won't sell to these companies. This can be a valid choice for the SaaS company as long as they can find enough other customers to make them profitable.
    - pit 13y ago
      Or, the data is hosted externally, but you can only access it through your company's VPN.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - mhurron 13y ago
dsleno 13y ago
Thanks to Yahoo's crackdown, I think working at home has gotten a bum rap lately. I work at home, and so do my 4 employees. It can let you build a great a lifestyle, and help small businesses hire talent where ever they can find it. In my case, I traded the city for a modest home on a beautiful lake in rural Minnesota. It also lets me be near my autistic son who attends online public school (school at home is another digression, but off topic). Yes, there are challenges, like deciding if today is a shave day or not. All kidding aside, working at home is tool that great companies with great employees can wield effectively to obtain excellent results and acquire talent they can't find locally. Companies, like Yahoo, that don't understand this are not great companies and probably never will be. Long live working at home!
- laureny 13y ago
  It comes with downsides as well in the sense that it's a very rare privilege. If your company decides one day to let you go , cancel work-at-home privileges or simply goes under, your life is going to suddenly become much, much harder, especially in the case of people who, like you, took this opportunity to move to a very isolated area.
  - Homunculiheaded 13y ago
    I live in an area with pretty much 0 worthwhile tech jobs. I've been working remote for a while now and done so with 3 very different organizations doing very different types of work (plain old software dev to machine learning research), and I've personally found this not to be a "very rare privilege" at all. Currently about 9% of the jobs on Stack overflow careers are remote, and if you look carefully you can find a very wide range of work. I find the remote space is rapidly advancing and expanding. The tools are getting much better, and the diversity of companies offering remote work is as well. It's definitely sustainable to choose to work only remotely, and even if I were to move to a city with better tech jobs I would have a hard time going back to full-time working in an office.
- corresation 13y ago
  We shouldn't specifically criticize Yahoo, or read too much into it: It was (and may still be) a completely dysfunctional company where, it seems, a lot of employees had simply accepted the slow ride into obscurity, where relevance came only "by default" (I still can't believe that Yahoo is the most visited website). Mayer essentially hit the reset button to regroup and figure things out again, and she has specifically talked about her action having little to do with actual remote work, and more to do with trying to get the organization back on track. Sucks for the employees of Yahoo, but, to put it bluntly, they were the employees of Yahoo. So long as you work for someone else, they get to make those decisions. And her action then kicked off many others to read way too much into it, usually to springboard off for their own interests. Mediocre managers who have no clue what their charges are doing, and can only manage suffering, for instance, all cheered and forwarded and linked.
corry 13y ago
The merits of remote work aside, you have to hand it to 37signals for masterful marketing. They have a set of beliefs that they tell powerful stories about, in various mediums, to people who already believe or want to believe these same beliefs. And in this context they also offer products that make things like remote work collaboration easier. But you're not even bothered by that, because they are clearly experts at doing this well (they wrote a book about it and are doing it themselves) so it all just fits together. It's thought-leadership in a very practical way. A lot of good lessons to be learnt.
- loceng 13y ago
  If the book goes into useful and functioning ways to come to such a . However, there could be some caveats to take into account relating to the type of people who'd be attracted to work on the products that 37signals follows. I'm curious if having a distributed / de-centralized team is possible. I can understand the values and would love to see if it's possible within my own scope of plans - though it's a lot of directed effort and wasteful if it ends up not working.
avenger123 13y ago
I love that 37signals is doing this. The big question is how much does this scale? I hope this is addressed in the new book. Having less than 50 employees allows the flexibility of doing many things differently. I would argue that this is one of them. I don't know what the magical number is for size of a company where working remotely becomes a negative investment. The bias with 37signals is very strong. They actively seek talent and find people that are not only able to work remotely but enjoy doing so. It also works well to have staff that can work 24 hours across time zones. How relevant is this to a company with 1000 employees that is not technology related? I can't really answer that definitely but to say that based on my experience, not too much.
- rimantas 13y ago
  MySQL AB worked this way with and it worked quite well (very well, imho). 70% of the staff worked remotely. IRC and company meetings helped a lot. I met my boss after 5 months in the company and that was not the record :) Mårten Mickos' interview about this: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/ http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/ BTW, if anoyone is looking for remote iOS/RoR developer drop me a line ;)
keiferski 13y ago
This is a bit of a meta comment, but: I find it interesting how DHH's Danish accent has faded significantly. I remember watching the "rails video" years ago wherein he's got a pretty pronounced accent. He could almost pass for American in this remote working video.
millerm 13y ago
I'm jealous. I have yearned for this type of work for years and I haven't been able to find it. I loathe the commute to an office. I don't want to pay the price of living in a "tech city". I'm even tired of wasting money on clothes for an office as I am a 41 year old jeans and t-shirt kind of guy. Some people just don't have the discipline of not being constantly supervised and have that "must be at the office to be productive" thought pattern. I am not a 9 to 5 person (and most companies have changed it to "you must be a 8 to 5 person"). There is just too much time and money wasted by going to someone's office if you don't need to. I was the only iOS developer at my previous employer. I barely had to collaborate with the business as much as you might think. Most of our communication was done via email, wikis and bug tracking tools. I couldn't understand why I had to be there. It was basically just an obstacle I had to overcome very damn day. I'm currently searching for new work and so many positions are downtown (Atlanta, in my case). I just won't deal with 1 hour commutes. Gridlock is just a horrible place to waste one's life.
- vailripper 13y ago
  If I can plug my company - http://www.surgeforward.com/ http://www.surgeforward.com/ We're 100% remote, and work hard to keep things fun. I'd encourage you to apply.
  - millerm 13y ago
    I'll check it out, thanks!
- dangero 13y ago
  I was in your shoes, and I know your pain. It's the awful pain of knowing that you live in a time where you could work from everywhere, and yet, YOU are the person who is still stuck in an office almost the entire daylight of your week and when you're not in the office, you're sitting in traffic. You're living a near industrial era life in a post tech world. You know in 100 years they will write in the history books about the tech generation that sat at desks in front of a screen typing 8+ hours a day with no windows. You feel you're literally watching your short life wither away while other people are sitting on the beach in Thailand with a Macbook Air under their umbrella. Let me explain how I personally got out of this situation: I became a software consultant. For sure, it's not something you can become overnight, because you need clients, but it's a good way to get out quickly versus the ivory tower of starting your own profitable product offering. Heck, 37 signals and Fog Creek started out as consulting firms.
babarock 13y ago
I might start working remotely full-time in a few months, so I would like to hear about some of its downsides. Can you share stories of remote working that didn't go as wonderfully as described in this (promotional) video?
- Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  I have two remote workers in my team. The two downsides from what I've seen / heard: * They miss the casual social interaction * If, like us you're in an environment where some people home work but most don't you can find some ways of working can disadvantage home workers - standups are a good example - for remote workers to really be part of it you need the board to either be visible by camera (or virtualised) and you need good audio so they can hear and be heard On the last point: home working requires the company to invest money and time in working out how to get the best from the home workers. Be wary about anyone who allows it having not done this.
- famousactress 13y ago
  I don't have any bad stories, but in retrospect (after three years remote) I do have some advice: - Give yourself a dedicated space (very preferably behind a door that closes if you don't live alone) - Give it a few weeks. It takes getting used to, so avoid entertaining "This just isn't working out" feelings for a while. Took me a bit to get used to the quiet for one thing! - Be social! Visit the office when you can, don't be afraid to talk about not-work in chat rooms, etc. Office chit-chat and lunches together have value, they enrich your relationship with colleagues and keep humanity levels high in work debates. I find I can find myself with shorter patience if I haven't been "hanging out" with coworkers for a while. - Work for a remote team. Being the one-remote-guy on a team is a challenge. Remote working works best when the team is committed to working asynchronously, when the chat-room is the office, etc. The last bit is key. Most of the stories I've heard about it not working out had a lot more to do with the team not actually being committed to remote working than some fundamental flaw in remoteness.
  - owenmarshall 13y ago
    >Give yourself a dedicated space (very preferably behind a door that closes if you don't live alone) IMO, this is one of the best pieces of advice you can give. This is also one of the things that I got very wrong for a while. Don't work where you decompress. Don't decompress where you work. Otherwise the two start blending together and both suffer. If your living situation isn't suited for a dedicated workspace, don't fall in the trap of working from your couch or kitchen table every day. I've had days where I worked from a coffee shop in the morning, drove to a park and sat under a tree when I could work completely offline, and finished the evening at a pub typing over a pint or two. And I still accomplished more than the days I'd sit on my couch and "work" while marathoning Star Trek.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
The effectiveness of remote working is directly connected to the office environment, company culture, and processes. The initial transition to remote working is especially hard - you require infrastructural and organisational changes to accommodate remote workers, and there's an up-front cost (not just financial) to that that dissuades getting started. I previously worked in an environment that had a culture of face-to-face meetings, informal chats and the like, and it really would have required a total change in culture to implement frequent remote working. By contrast, about 25% of my current engineering colleagues frequently work from home - we've got Google Hangouts and the appropriate equipment and infrastructure to pull it off. There are real upsides and downsides though - obviously a remote worker saves on a commute, but they do tend to miss out on the more social aspects of an office. Like, "Let's go get lunch," or "It's Matt's birthday, let's all have some cake." Those are definitely some of the perks of working with pleasant colleagues.
AtTheLast 13y ago
I like how 37signals promotes a solid work life balance. They also do a really good job of telling stories.
nakovet 13y ago
Kobo link to pre-order is giving 404. =(
misiti3780 13y ago
I work remotely most days a week (and sometimes for a week at a time). I love it. I agree with everything in that video - the only problem I deal with these days is the constant fear of it coming to and end at some point :)
cs702 13y ago
When it comes to finding the best way to organize a business, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. My own experience is that working remotely is a viable and even desirable option for many but not all businesses -- it depends on the nature of the work, and on the kinds of interactions people must have with others inside and outside the company for the business to be successful. For example, individuals engaged in highly creative multi-disciplinary endeavors -- like the writers, artists, and technicians who together make a Pixar film -- seem to produce great results when they are regularly interacting with each other face-to-face. Steve Jobs, in fact, forced a redesign of Pixar's headquarters to promote face-to-face encounters and unplanned collaborations.[1] -- [1] http://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-and-the-legacy-of-steve-jobs/ http://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-and...
- cgh 13y ago
  Yes, of course it's a case by case thing. But for a lot of software development work, which is sort of the point of this story, working remotely is quite appropriate. Nobody likes to commute and happy programmers are productive programmers, in my experience.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>My own experience is that working remotely is a viable and even desirable option for many but not all businesses -- it depends on the nature of the work, and on the kinds of interactions people must have with others inside and outside the company for the business to be successful. Of course. The problem is that many (most?) companies will not even consider the possibility that remote work would be suitable for their employees because they have a fundamental lack of trust for those employees. Furthermore, they are managed by baby boomers who still believe in outdated mantras like "show up early and leave late to show your dedication." I'd say that 20 years from now remote work will have become the norm, at least in software.
bchjam 13y ago
I've worked entirely remotely for multiple years in 2 separate cases. I prefer loosely coupled teams and remote structure works well for this. My main problem is when I need to interact with office culture. People in large conference rooms with a shitty speaker in the middle of it. When more than one person talks at once, it all becomes totally inaudible. Accents also become much harder to discern under the fuzzy sound quality that this kind of environment produces. I never have these problems with predominantly remote teams. How to bridge that culture gap? Does the office world just need better speaker phones?
- ubercore 13y ago
  We're a team that's partially remote, and partially in an office. One tactic that's worked well is instead of forcing the co-located members of a team around a conference phone, we have everyone join a google hangout from their individual computers. It puts everyone on the same footing, and helps deal with sound quality. You just have to sometimes ask people to upgrade their mics so they don't pick up too much room noise and cause echoes.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- cpeterso 13y ago
  Video conferencing (whether it's Google Hangouts, WebRTC, or something fancier) malees a huge difference. Seeing the people you're talking with makes the conversation much more personal and gives you visual cues about what people are saying and when it's your turn to speak.
varelse 13y ago
In my experience, remote working is incredibly fulfilling and successful if you know and trust your co-workers. I ran a small software company for 8 years this way. We synced once a week, and performed seamless code merges because we respected API boundaries. Once I entered Silicon Valley, I learned that the above is the exception rather than the rule. And I think that's where all the horror stories arise. For I no longer get to choose my co-workers, and there's all sorts of pointy-haired edicts that come down the pipe from various Peter Principals(tm) inflicting their view of reality upon the collective they oversee. Just forget trying to run a remote team this way - it's incurably broken - and from this perspective, I agree with Marissa Mayer's tough choice to eliminate telecommuting as an option. Sadly, this movement is wreaking havoc on the daily commutes of everyone here. My own solution however has been to seek work where I'm an IC and I have someone immediately above me covering my back. That's hard to find, and you're going to be perceived as a job hopper during the hunt, but it's worth the temporary downside IMO. Or even better, just start your own shop with people you trust...
- jaggederest 13y ago
  > Or even better, just start your own shop with people you trust... I really, really wish I could do this. I feel like there needs to be some sort of guild structure for programming that would enable this.
adrianhoward 13y ago
Here's a link to a previous HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145358 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145358 where I mentioned some of the research on the different efficiencies between co-located and distributed teams. If anybody has links to research (rather than anecdote) around the topic I'd love to have additions Especially any that show distributed teams performing to the same levels (or better) than co-located ones. Thanks ;-)
vowelless 13y ago
How do you on-board new employees?
stumm 13y ago
They seem to flip back and forth about remote working. Less than 3 years ago: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2838-were-relocating-everyone-to-chicago http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2838-were-relocating-everyone...
- ubercore 13y ago
  Check the date on that post. (it's an april fools joke)
- polyfractal 13y ago
  That was an April Fool's joke (posted on April 1st). And even if the date wasn't the first...the whole article reads like an over-the-top satire.
- ndonnellan 13y ago
  Perhaps note the date and extreme sarcasm? "Change is never easy. But we’re willing to do whatever it takes to be the most efficient company we can be. Now please excuse us, we’re off to get more productive. And secure. And dressed the same."
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Gravityloss 13y ago
I find people doing remote work constantly missing big parts of information that is passed around verbally and doing extra work / being less efficient because of this. We already use chat rooms, individual chats, tickets, video conferencing, email, dashboards, whatever. But sometimes the bandwidth of just sitting with someone and looking at a problem together is so much higher that you can solve big issues in a very short time. I think some psychologists could study this, it's right up their alley - what is lacking in remote co-operation devices. I personally think it's partly that you need to see what the other person is looking at and also you must be able to observe their body language. A way to do "Look here, this is important in about 0.1 seconds." But I have no evidence.
- snorkel 13y ago
  Agree. Remote works well for teams of developers that can be heads-down for days working on one product or one component with few external dependencies to coordinate, but for teams that have many different responsilities and need to stay in pace with other teams then you can't beat being all in same physical location.
- wlk 13y ago
  I can address first of the issues you have mentioned: I have worked both in situations when whole company is working remotely or only one/two people of out dozen were. In the second case, those people were very often left out of the most communication that was happening in the office, and for them it must have been not very good situation to be in. There was no general plan for handling this situation and trying to include them in meetings and decision making process. But when whole company is working remotely, the situation is completely different, everyone is at the same level, and you really can make it work.
funkattack 13y ago
What I don't understand about the working remote discussion ist, that it only goes half way. It seems to be a discussion like: Lets work remote but keep everything else the same. Lets keep the company, lets keep bosses, lets collegues, lets keep meetings lets keep the chat at the coffee machine. Working remotely, as I understand it, means, that you have to transform the company employer relationship in a way that it works using rather abstract or technical infrastructure or interface. The company has to know or to learn, and define, what kind of services or deliverable it can expect from its employees. Also the employee has to learn how to present his service or deliverables in a way that they get noticed and impress someone very far away. It is sort of an bidirectional API that both have to serve and use. My question now is, what is the reason for a company to have employees if the service they need is so well defined and could be offered by anyone capeable of serving that API? Why have employes if you can have contractors? The same question holds for the employees, if capable of offering that service in such a well defined way, why not turn into a company themselves and offer that service to anyone willing to pay?
triaged 13y ago
I went from working in an office, to working remotely for the same company. While there were certainly benefits, I experienced a few downsides that also drove me crazy. As a product manager, I was in the sticky situation of needing to coordinate with a bunch of different people, and hit certain deadlines that the rest of the company may or may not have aligned with. I felt like I lost much my day-to-day ability to get-shit-done, especially as I was competing for time & resources with other projects. I also found it easier to stop caring as much, since the emotions & passion weren't as readily communicated remotely. Definitely some personal shortcoming in there as well, but, there's definitely issues to watch for if working remotely.
taude 13y ago
I've never been able to find remote work. A lot of it might have to do with my various roles in engineering. But I think a lot of it is east-coast business culture. But also, from talking to a lot of Silicon Valley friends, they don't have much work from home either....unless you're a sales rep, sales engineer, or a consultant who likely has to spend most of the time on-sight (away from corp office)... One thing I'm hoping to accomplish at my new company is a culture of work-hard/play-hard remote workers. Those who want to live in say mountain towns, but who want a real career as they get older...I'd not even have a problem with the idea of a "Powder Day" and they don't login until noon. WIth the right happy workers...
chollida1 13y ago
In my experience remote work, works best when everyone is remote. That way all the remote worker issues have to be sorted out, or atleast thought of by day one. When remote work starts to fall apart is when there is a dedicated office where 75% of the team works. In these cases the remote workers miss the critical "Let's grab a room meetings" where decisions are made. I think the reason is that its much easier to make decisions with people when you can see them face to face rather than in group chat.
tslathrow 13y ago
37signals is a black swan for a lot of things. To be noted, but not as the basis for a new world order. Anecdotal evidence of my own: - Stop thinking about labor in a capital-intensive business - I can't do a damn thing with collaboration without a real whiteboard - I don't work well with too much technology. - Time zones make things tricky: half of "our" team is in Europe, but deals with a different group of companies. FTSE vs NYSE trading hours make things difficult. - The one work-from-home person on "our" team was let go due to inconsistent quality of output - Living in a city is a part of work/life balance for pretty much anyone under age 30 --tslathrow
henrik_w 13y ago
An overwhelming majority of the people in this thread seem to favor working from home. Does anybody miss face-to-face time? I work in an office, and not a day goes by without face-to-face discussions with my co-workers. I find these discussions really helpful, and often we end up drawing on a white-board. I've worked with remote developers (via video) before, and it didn't come close to the interactions I have in-person with people at the office. Would be interesting to hear some comments from remote developers. Related (from a blog post of mine): http://henrikwarne.com/2013/04/02/programmer-productivity-interruptions-meetings-and-working-remotely/ http://henrikwarne.com/2013/04/02/programmer-productivity-in...
- beat 13y ago
  The correct amount of face time - both out of necessity and out of comfort - is a difficult problem. I worked for a while in a "Facebook style" office, where we were pair programming. No walls, no privacy, all of our desks faced forward except the lead, who faced us, like a schoolteacher. I found it extremely uncomfortable. And I'm a people person! On the other hand, zero face time is problematic in other ways. Even 37signals has an all-employee get-together a couple of times a year (read back through svn, they describe this).
  - henrik_w 13y ago
    I've seen this about all-employee get-together too. But when only a couple of times a year it seems purely social, not for getting actual work done. For me, the in-person collaboration takes place pretty much every day.
JaretManuel 13y ago
37Signals nailed it. I have been working remote for FormAssembly for almost a year and it is amazing in many respects. We're hiring strong PHP dev's. www.veerwest.com/jobs <-- The Makers of FormAssembly.
krakensden 13y ago
I was impressed by the breadth of lovingly photographed coffee preparation methods. Chemex, standard pourovers, moka pots, espresso, the all-American drip machine.
agentultra 13y ago
I'm a remote worker at the moment. I love it. I can take a break when I need to and be in my comfortable space. I don't have a commute. I can open my door and see my daughter when I go downstairs for a coffee. I can take a walk to the local coffee shop and sit down with the other freelancers and remote workers and catch up on local happenings. If I need a break or I'm done for the day I'm not just watching the clock and waiting for a few other people to leave first. I contribute regularly to open source projects and so I know what it takes to collaborate remotely. We're experimenting with sqwiggle, screenhero, and use github and pivotal. We email each other constantly keeping the teams up to date. We have a VPN and use our ssh-keys for as much as we can. It works really well and I think the tools have come a long way. It's good to see that the world we were promised in the 60's is finally coming to fruition.
- ericbieller 13y ago
  I love it too! I think you hit on a really important point. Working from home drastically improves quality of life since you're able to interact more with people you care about. It also helps you develop more of a passion for your work when you're not being micromanaged. Helps you to feel more free and in control. Great that you're trying out Sqwiggle. I'm actually one of the co-founders so please let me know if there's anything we can do to improve your experience. Also any feedback you have is super helpful!
  - agentultra 13y ago
    I've already sent in a few suggestions! Sqwiggle is great. :)
wiradikusuma 13y ago
Hi guys, just wondering if anyone with remote work experience (either as employee or employer) can shed some light on these issues: * How about same-time communication? E.g. I need to discuss things with my designer, oh wait, he's gardening at the moment, or he works at night. * How do you know when to start/stop your day? E.g. In "normal" office, it's usually 9 to 5. * How do you schedule projects? Fixed time simplifies scheduling ("This project is 5 man-days"). * Who pays for supporting equipments (desk, LCD, internet, nice coffee) if I work from home? * Specific to 37signals: How did they make the video? Did the video guy traveled to each and every employee in the video to tape them?
- wlk 13y ago
  A lot of that, especially points 1-3 depend on if you work with other people synchronously or asynchronously. At my current job we all try to work as much synchronously as possible, so there is no real difference from any other "office job", except everyone is in different location (we all are in roughly the same timezone), and we don't have to commute. We focus on trying to keep sanity, and keep working hours (my experience is that it helps a lot when working remotely) For shops that allow/ or just work asynchronously, other arrangements need to be made to allow that. Usually more and more stuff is written and stored, so everyone can join and leave any moment. There is a similar book being worked on by other ruby-remote working company: Arkency, http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/arkency-survival-guide-to-effective-programming/ http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/arkency-survival-guide-to-ef...
- zem 13y ago
  same-time communication: you schedule a time to do it. send them an email, say i would like to discuss the following issues, when is good for you. at the very most you'll need to do something else for a few hours till then. start/stop: if you find time a useful way to plan things, just set yourself a "work time" and stick to it. it might require a bit of self-discipline that office work doesn't, but after a while you'll get used to thinking of that block of time as work. the nice bit is that it can be, e.g. 7-12, siesta, 3-5 if you prefer that to a straight 9-5. schedule: you can still plan things out in man-days. people are responsible for arranging their time so that they put in that much work; it just doesn't need to be 9-5 every day. supporting equipment: there are companies that will let you expense some of your equipment and internet bills; others see providing your own equipment as a tradeoff for not having to come in to the office.
deleted 13y ago
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dkural 13y ago
I used to 100% believe in this, but came to appreciate people interacting face-to-face. There is a reason that great artists, philosophical circles, mathematicians etc. come in clusters of excellence. People feed off of each other. This can benefit start-ups as well. Facebook, drop-box, etc. and many other startups worked & lived in the same house in early days. I'm not saying this is a balanced lifestyle - won't be able to do drip coffee bike ride gardening and whatever other hipster stuff 37signals does as much perhaps. I do a genomics start-up, with two offices, one in Europe, one on the East Coast. #1 wishlist item is only if there was a way the two offices could be physically together. Remote works as well as a long-distance relationship. It may work in a mature environment, 5-10 years into your relationship. Not Day #1. Start-ups battle many odds, remote is not one you want to tackle from the get go.
kreek 13y ago
One thing I was surprised by, I like pair programming better when it's remote. You get the code right in front of you and you talk to the voice in your head (phones).
31reasons 13y ago
Can we build a list of Companies that have more than 50% of their workforce working remotely ?
droope 13y ago
look at you make me hate my job so much! :@
tomkin 13y ago
I'm not sure I will play the absolute devil's advocate card here, but I do think that there is a downside to this idea. I live in a mid-sized, industry-legacy Canadian city, where tech has become part of the new economy. And these new tech companies hire locally - and eat locally, and invest their time into building a local tech scene. If remote working were to become a common theme in tech, would this not fly in the face of community building in its simplest terms? Would the Bay Area have the same community today if this brand of telecommuting were available in the 80s, 90s?
tommoor 13y ago
If you work remotely we're building a real-time communication app just for you in Sqwiggle (https://www.sqwiggle.com https://www.sqwiggle.com). Would love for anyone to try it and offer honest feedback, we'll listen to it all day long :) If you're a developer and want to work remotely, we're backed by great investors and hiring! We also use the latest tech like WebRTC for our video conferencing.
GoldfishCRM 13y ago
Even when my fellow coworkers sitt next to me I skype with them instead of talking. Makes it much easier to not be interupted by talk all the time.
orware 13y ago
I have a full-time day job but took an offer working part-time remotely for a Joomla Extensions Developer named Joomlatools late last year and did that for a few months in my spare time. The only bummer for me was that I was a contracted employee so basically I was paid for the hours I worked (my full-time job is salaried so it's nice to know I'm going to expect X dollars each month) and since I was doing it in my free time it started to get difficult to balance the extra work time with family time since I ended up no longer having much free time. If a company offered a $90,000+/yr salary + health and retirement benefits to work remotely then I think a lot more people might be interested, but in some cases (when you're working simply as a remote contractor) that's definitely not nearly as good.
lgomezma 13y ago
In my case it's also about location. I am a Spaniard working in the Netherlands for a few years now, paying high rents and being far from family and friends. I could live in Greece (where my wife is from and where we have a fully paid house) but unfortunately there are almost no tech-related jobs there. As a web developer almost 100% of what I do on a daily basis could be done remotely. I wonder if remote work could be the solution for thousands of people like me who have to leave their countries just to find a job.

285 points by wlll 13y ago

As someone who has worked remotely for most of their career (which isn't very long since I am young) I can definitely say that working from home has a lot of negatives as well. I've ended up thinking that remote working is for people who are traveling a lot or people with a family they would like to stay at home and spend time with.

fredoliveira 13y ago
I've been working remotely for a while now, after running a consultancy out of an office for a few years. Personally, I think it boils down to whether you trust the people you work with, and you create the necessary conditions for them to excel regardless of where they are. It really shouldn't matter where you are, even though face-to-face time is indeed important from time to time. I'd love to know what pain-points you found.
- bwilliams 13y ago
  I just saw DHH post this, http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3658-cabin-fever http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3658-cabin-fever and it explains a bit. Sometimes motivation can be hard. Especially since you have no "real" coworkers and you're sitting around the house all day. Often times going out and working at a coffee shop can help but it's not always viable. It also doesn't help that I'm in a pretty isolated and mostly tourist area of Florida where there are seemingly no other developers or dev companies and most certainly no co-working spots here.
bnycum 13y ago
Not really. I'm glad I get to see my daughter grow up while working at home, but it's so much more than that. I don't have to deal with office politics or anything like that. Last office I worked at had a somewhat dress code, I'm glad I can now wear shorts. There is no impromptu meetings, and no annoying coworker stopping by my office at horrible times. I set my own schedule around when I'm most productive. I've worked at home for 4 years now and wouldn't go back to an office job without at least a $20k raise.
- csomar 13y ago
  * Not really. I'm glad I get to see my daughter grow up while working at home * Have you tried working with home without a family? I'm getting good gigs but they are all remote. It's has been a rough time since I socialize really little.
  - dgabriel 13y ago
    Are there any co-working spaces near you?
    - enjo 13y ago
      Co-working is an absolute godsend for remote work. It's like an office, but better! You can pop-in and out without the pressure that your actual coworkers put on you to be visible during "office hours". Even if you only spend an hour or two a day at your co-working desk, being able to get out and interact with humans (on your terms) is an amazing thing.
    - csomar 13y ago
      No. There is no night life either.
  - bnycum 13y ago
    Yep, my daughter is only 2 and my wife worked before she was born. So for 2 years I worked at home alone, though I have 2 dogs. It was weird being alone all day, but I got so much more accomplished. Getting out for lunch helped me a lot, and taking my dogs out. Even just a stroll around the block can help a ton.
ithkuil 13y ago
One target that is overlooked very often are people who cannot relocate to another country, for example because his partner cannot/doesn't want to leave his/her job or lower their quality of life by going into a country away from family (e.g. children and availability of grand parents nearby, friends, connections, language, ...). It's not only you. For example, in today's equal opportunities world, is hard to ask a woman to leave everything to follow his partner, yet it was something we took for granted a few years back, and modeled our expectations of what you can expect from an employee. I.e. not being able to move because of family doesn't necessarily equate to wanting to spend more time than normal with the family. There is a huge market of highly talented people that are unwilling to move into the country (or part of the country) where you choose to set up your business. Remote working has it's costs, but it can be offset by a larger pool of experienced and enthusiast candidates.

speg 13y ago

I think working from home at will would be the best of both worlds. Come in when you want to collaborate in person, stay at home when you need to work undisturbed.

andyjohnson0 13y ago
For the last ten years I've been working from home two days a week and commuting to the office for the other three. Works well for me.

alecsmart1 13y ago

I honestly don't know how this works. I mean it's really very difficult to get someone to work remotely with the same dedication and passion. I find collaboration extremely difficult. I mean if there are 5 rockstars working on a project, then sure, remote working will do fine. But if we talk about a decent workforce, there is a lot of handholding required. I don't know how it's possible remotely.

xal 13y ago
It works great if everyone in the company is hugely accomplished and if the product of the company is in essentially permanent use by everyone who works there.
- speg 13y ago
  What is Shopify's policy on working remotely?
  - xal 13y ago
    Depends on the kind of work. Engineers and Designers generally work as teams on location.
fredoliveira 13y ago
Dedication and passion are most definitely not tied to where you are. If you're unhappy with your job, you won't be passionate; you won't be dedicated. You'll be miserable, looking at the clock, regardless of where the clock is. If you need handholding, you're hiring and working with B-players. Not everyone is going to be able to hold its own initially, but after a few weeks on a team, you should be independent enough that people don't need to look over your shoulder.
- allsystemsgo 13y ago
  I disagree. Most new employees need some sort of on boarding. When you join a new project, you'll need some sort of on boarding. Usually there's one or maybe two tech leads, and then a handful of junior devs. It's part of the companies responsibility to train them up. This isn't to say they're not dedicated or passionate, but when you're putting in 60 hour weeks bug fixing or implementing small features here and there, you run out of time to go read some books about your development language of choice. New employees ask lots of questions their first 6 months or so. It's just the way it is.

resca79 13y ago

Work remotely it's good when also the big percentage of company people works remotely. Anyway, I buy the book

grdvnl 13y ago
Agreed. Having a big percentage of company working remotely sets up a workflow among all team members that is conducive to remote work. Whereas, when some parts of a team are working remotely, including where teams get created/dismantled for short projects every couple of months coming up with a workflow becomes difficult. That said, I work remotely and I have been productive as ever.

dangero 13y ago

I'm kind of interested in the meta story around this remote campaign. Assuming 37 signals is doing this book at least partially for money, they're making a play relating to a trend using themselves as the model of what works. Is the target audience employees who work remote or want to, or is the target market managers who need to understand remote employees?

mylons 13y ago
my intuition says that managers tend to not like remote employees, where as employees tend to like working remotely. or at the very least, having the option
bjacobso 13y ago
I suspect they have a yet to be announced product which is targeted to teams working remotely. They are slowly building authority for why and how working remotely works.
- dangero 13y ago
  This is a very interesting take. If true, the book is not the product. They don't care how well the book sells. They care that you and I know they wrote a book on the topic and so therefore, they are the authority.
- tommoor 13y ago
  Definitely possible... they also have a whole suite of products that are aligned with remote workers already though ;)
justinsteele 13y ago
I'm both - so I pre ordered the book a month ago.
codemac 13y ago
A lot of the tools they sell access to are extremely useful.. if you work remotely.
13y ago

5vforest 13y ago

Some people enjoy working remotely, others enjoy going into a specific workplace. Not sure why this is such a contentious argument every time.

loteck 13y ago
Here's one reason we recently experienced: Many people in our company like the flexibility of choosing to work remotely or in the office. However, when we on-boarded a new hire recently, he struggled with this level of flexibility. He took advantage of it in unprofessional ways. When confronted, he indicated that he might do better if he was always working in the office with the rest of the team. Management suddenly made it a requirement for everyone to come into the office. This had severe and immediate impacts on morale and on employees' focus on the mission. Some people need to work in an office. Some people need to work remotely. Some people can be flexible. The reason it's so contentious is because it is hard to accommodate all 3 of those types. So far, the solution is to alienate at least 1 of those 3 types. Hopefully the contention will result in progress.

joekrill 13y ago

I would love to hear more about how various companies handle this logistically. Like how they allow access to company data and resources. I'm assuming simply using VPNs is the standard? Where I work they make it so unbelievably painful and difficult to work remotely. You have to jump through a million hoops. It's a financial company, and generally "compliance" gets the blame for this. But I wonder how much of it is just plain paranoia. Do a lot of companies worry about things like leaking source code? Or client/customer data? Or do most companies put much more trust in their employees?

jkaljundi 13y ago
Don't most companies already anyway use web-based SaaS solutions, so no VPN's needed except for legacy systems?
- famousactress 13y ago
  VPN still comes up.. Things like test-environments, analytics databases, etc. It's easy enough to do in the cloud though.
- bdavisx 13y ago
  Many large companies will not trust their data to an outside company under any circumstances. They will put the SaaS solution on their intranet only accessible locally or thru a VPN. If the SaaS company isn't willing to do this, then they won't sell to these companies. This can be a valid choice for the SaaS company as long as they can find enough other customers to make them profitable.
  - pit 13y ago
    Or, the data is hosted externally, but you can only access it through your company's VPN.
- deleted 13y ago
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- mhurron 13y ago

dsleno 13y ago

Thanks to Yahoo's crackdown, I think working at home has gotten a bum rap lately. I work at home, and so do my 4 employees. It can let you build a great a lifestyle, and help small businesses hire talent where ever they can find it. In my case, I traded the city for a modest home on a beautiful lake in rural Minnesota. It also lets me be near my autistic son who attends online public school (school at home is another digression, but off topic). Yes, there are challenges, like deciding if today is a shave day or not. All kidding aside, working at home is tool that great companies with great employees can wield effectively to obtain excellent results and acquire talent they can't find locally. Companies, like Yahoo, that don't understand this are not great companies and probably never will be. Long live working at home!

laureny 13y ago
It comes with downsides as well in the sense that it's a very rare privilege. If your company decides one day to let you go , cancel work-at-home privileges or simply goes under, your life is going to suddenly become much, much harder, especially in the case of people who, like you, took this opportunity to move to a very isolated area.
- Homunculiheaded 13y ago
  I live in an area with pretty much 0 worthwhile tech jobs. I've been working remote for a while now and done so with 3 very different organizations doing very different types of work (plain old software dev to machine learning research), and I've personally found this not to be a "very rare privilege" at all. Currently about 9% of the jobs on Stack overflow careers are remote, and if you look carefully you can find a very wide range of work. I find the remote space is rapidly advancing and expanding. The tools are getting much better, and the diversity of companies offering remote work is as well. It's definitely sustainable to choose to work only remotely, and even if I were to move to a city with better tech jobs I would have a hard time going back to full-time working in an office.
corresation 13y ago
We shouldn't specifically criticize Yahoo, or read too much into it: It was (and may still be) a completely dysfunctional company where, it seems, a lot of employees had simply accepted the slow ride into obscurity, where relevance came only "by default" (I still can't believe that Yahoo is the most visited website). Mayer essentially hit the reset button to regroup and figure things out again, and she has specifically talked about her action having little to do with actual remote work, and more to do with trying to get the organization back on track. Sucks for the employees of Yahoo, but, to put it bluntly, they were the employees of Yahoo. So long as you work for someone else, they get to make those decisions. And her action then kicked off many others to read way too much into it, usually to springboard off for their own interests. Mediocre managers who have no clue what their charges are doing, and can only manage suffering, for instance, all cheered and forwarded and linked.

corry 13y ago

The merits of remote work aside, you have to hand it to 37signals for masterful marketing. They have a set of beliefs that they tell powerful stories about, in various mediums, to people who already believe or want to believe these same beliefs. And in this context they also offer products that make things like remote work collaboration easier. But you're not even bothered by that, because they are clearly experts at doing this well (they wrote a book about it and are doing it themselves) so it all just fits together. It's thought-leadership in a very practical way. A lot of good lessons to be learnt.

loceng 13y ago
If the book goes into useful and functioning ways to come to such a . However, there could be some caveats to take into account relating to the type of people who'd be attracted to work on the products that 37signals follows. I'm curious if having a distributed / de-centralized team is possible. I can understand the values and would love to see if it's possible within my own scope of plans - though it's a lot of directed effort and wasteful if it ends up not working.

avenger123 13y ago

I love that 37signals is doing this. The big question is how much does this scale? I hope this is addressed in the new book. Having less than 50 employees allows the flexibility of doing many things differently. I would argue that this is one of them. I don't know what the magical number is for size of a company where working remotely becomes a negative investment. The bias with 37signals is very strong. They actively seek talent and find people that are not only able to work remotely but enjoy doing so. It also works well to have staff that can work 24 hours across time zones. How relevant is this to a company with 1000 employees that is not technology related? I can't really answer that definitely but to say that based on my experience, not too much.

rimantas 13y ago
MySQL AB worked this way with and it worked quite well (very well, imho). 70% of the staff worked remotely. IRC and company meetings helped a lot. I met my boss after 5 months in the company and that was not the record :) Mårten Mickos' interview about this: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/ http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/ BTW, if anoyone is looking for remote iOS/RoR developer drop me a line ;)

keiferski 13y ago

This is a bit of a meta comment, but: I find it interesting how DHH's Danish accent has faded significantly. I remember watching the "rails video" years ago wherein he's got a pretty pronounced accent. He could almost pass for American in this remote working video.

millerm 13y ago

I'm jealous. I have yearned for this type of work for years and I haven't been able to find it. I loathe the commute to an office. I don't want to pay the price of living in a "tech city". I'm even tired of wasting money on clothes for an office as I am a 41 year old jeans and t-shirt kind of guy. Some people just don't have the discipline of not being constantly supervised and have that "must be at the office to be productive" thought pattern. I am not a 9 to 5 person (and most companies have changed it to "you must be a 8 to 5 person"). There is just too much time and money wasted by going to someone's office if you don't need to. I was the only iOS developer at my previous employer. I barely had to collaborate with the business as much as you might think. Most of our communication was done via email, wikis and bug tracking tools. I couldn't understand why I had to be there. It was basically just an obstacle I had to overcome very damn day. I'm currently searching for new work and so many positions are downtown (Atlanta, in my case). I just won't deal with 1 hour commutes. Gridlock is just a horrible place to waste one's life.

vailripper 13y ago
If I can plug my company - http://www.surgeforward.com/ http://www.surgeforward.com/ We're 100% remote, and work hard to keep things fun. I'd encourage you to apply.
- millerm 13y ago
  I'll check it out, thanks!
dangero 13y ago
I was in your shoes, and I know your pain. It's the awful pain of knowing that you live in a time where you could work from everywhere, and yet, YOU are the person who is still stuck in an office almost the entire daylight of your week and when you're not in the office, you're sitting in traffic. You're living a near industrial era life in a post tech world. You know in 100 years they will write in the history books about the tech generation that sat at desks in front of a screen typing 8+ hours a day with no windows. You feel you're literally watching your short life wither away while other people are sitting on the beach in Thailand with a Macbook Air under their umbrella. Let me explain how I personally got out of this situation: I became a software consultant. For sure, it's not something you can become overnight, because you need clients, but it's a good way to get out quickly versus the ivory tower of starting your own profitable product offering. Heck, 37 signals and Fog Creek started out as consulting firms.

babarock 13y ago

I might start working remotely full-time in a few months, so I would like to hear about some of its downsides. Can you share stories of remote working that didn't go as wonderfully as described in this (promotional) video?

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
I have two remote workers in my team. The two downsides from what I've seen / heard: * They miss the casual social interaction * If, like us you're in an environment where some people home work but most don't you can find some ways of working can disadvantage home workers - standups are a good example - for remote workers to really be part of it you need the board to either be visible by camera (or virtualised) and you need good audio so they can hear and be heard On the last point: home working requires the company to invest money and time in working out how to get the best from the home workers. Be wary about anyone who allows it having not done this.
famousactress 13y ago
I don't have any bad stories, but in retrospect (after three years remote) I do have some advice: - Give yourself a dedicated space (very preferably behind a door that closes if you don't live alone) - Give it a few weeks. It takes getting used to, so avoid entertaining "This just isn't working out" feelings for a while. Took me a bit to get used to the quiet for one thing! - Be social! Visit the office when you can, don't be afraid to talk about not-work in chat rooms, etc. Office chit-chat and lunches together have value, they enrich your relationship with colleagues and keep humanity levels high in work debates. I find I can find myself with shorter patience if I haven't been "hanging out" with coworkers for a while. - Work for a remote team. Being the one-remote-guy on a team is a challenge. Remote working works best when the team is committed to working asynchronously, when the chat-room is the office, etc. The last bit is key. Most of the stories I've heard about it not working out had a lot more to do with the team not actually being committed to remote working than some fundamental flaw in remoteness.
- owenmarshall 13y ago
  >Give yourself a dedicated space (very preferably behind a door that closes if you don't live alone) IMO, this is one of the best pieces of advice you can give. This is also one of the things that I got very wrong for a while. Don't work where you decompress. Don't decompress where you work. Otherwise the two start blending together and both suffer. If your living situation isn't suited for a dedicated workspace, don't fall in the trap of working from your couch or kitchen table every day. I've had days where I worked from a coffee shop in the morning, drove to a park and sat under a tree when I could work completely offline, and finished the evening at a pub typing over a pint or two. And I still accomplished more than the days I'd sit on my couch and "work" while marathoning Star Trek.

matthewmacleod 13y ago

The effectiveness of remote working is directly connected to the office environment, company culture, and processes. The initial transition to remote working is especially hard - you require infrastructural and organisational changes to accommodate remote workers, and there's an up-front cost (not just financial) to that that dissuades getting started. I previously worked in an environment that had a culture of face-to-face meetings, informal chats and the like, and it really would have required a total change in culture to implement frequent remote working. By contrast, about 25% of my current engineering colleagues frequently work from home - we've got Google Hangouts and the appropriate equipment and infrastructure to pull it off. There are real upsides and downsides though - obviously a remote worker saves on a commute, but they do tend to miss out on the more social aspects of an office. Like, "Let's go get lunch," or "It's Matt's birthday, let's all have some cake." Those are definitely some of the perks of working with pleasant colleagues.

AtTheLast 13y ago

I like how 37signals promotes a solid work life balance. They also do a really good job of telling stories.

nakovet 13y ago

Kobo link to pre-order is giving 404. =(

misiti3780 13y ago

I work remotely most days a week (and sometimes for a week at a time). I love it. I agree with everything in that video - the only problem I deal with these days is the constant fear of it coming to and end at some point :)

cs702 13y ago

When it comes to finding the best way to organize a business, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. My own experience is that working remotely is a viable and even desirable option for many but not all businesses -- it depends on the nature of the work, and on the kinds of interactions people must have with others inside and outside the company for the business to be successful. For example, individuals engaged in highly creative multi-disciplinary endeavors -- like the writers, artists, and technicians who together make a Pixar film -- seem to produce great results when they are regularly interacting with each other face-to-face. Steve Jobs, in fact, forced a redesign of Pixar's headquarters to promote face-to-face encounters and unplanned collaborations.[1] -- [1] http://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-and-the-legacy-of-steve-jobs/ http://officesnapshots.com/2012/07/16/pixar-headquarters-and...

cgh 13y ago
Yes, of course it's a case by case thing. But for a lot of software development work, which is sort of the point of this story, working remotely is quite appropriate. Nobody likes to commute and happy programmers are productive programmers, in my experience.
enraged_camel 13y ago
>>My own experience is that working remotely is a viable and even desirable option for many but not all businesses -- it depends on the nature of the work, and on the kinds of interactions people must have with others inside and outside the company for the business to be successful. Of course. The problem is that many (most?) companies will not even consider the possibility that remote work would be suitable for their employees because they have a fundamental lack of trust for those employees. Furthermore, they are managed by baby boomers who still believe in outdated mantras like "show up early and leave late to show your dedication." I'd say that 20 years from now remote work will have become the norm, at least in software.

bchjam 13y ago

I've worked entirely remotely for multiple years in 2 separate cases. I prefer loosely coupled teams and remote structure works well for this. My main problem is when I need to interact with office culture. People in large conference rooms with a shitty speaker in the middle of it. When more than one person talks at once, it all becomes totally inaudible. Accents also become much harder to discern under the fuzzy sound quality that this kind of environment produces. I never have these problems with predominantly remote teams. How to bridge that culture gap? Does the office world just need better speaker phones?

ubercore 13y ago
We're a team that's partially remote, and partially in an office. One tactic that's worked well is instead of forcing the co-located members of a team around a conference phone, we have everyone join a google hangout from their individual computers. It puts everyone on the same footing, and helps deal with sound quality. You just have to sometimes ask people to upgrade their mics so they don't pick up too much room noise and cause echoes.
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cpeterso 13y ago
Video conferencing (whether it's Google Hangouts, WebRTC, or something fancier) malees a huge difference. Seeing the people you're talking with makes the conversation much more personal and gives you visual cues about what people are saying and when it's your turn to speak.

varelse 13y ago

In my experience, remote working is incredibly fulfilling and successful if you know and trust your co-workers. I ran a small software company for 8 years this way. We synced once a week, and performed seamless code merges because we respected API boundaries. Once I entered Silicon Valley, I learned that the above is the exception rather than the rule. And I think that's where all the horror stories arise. For I no longer get to choose my co-workers, and there's all sorts of pointy-haired edicts that come down the pipe from various Peter Principals(tm) inflicting their view of reality upon the collective they oversee. Just forget trying to run a remote team this way - it's incurably broken - and from this perspective, I agree with Marissa Mayer's tough choice to eliminate telecommuting as an option. Sadly, this movement is wreaking havoc on the daily commutes of everyone here. My own solution however has been to seek work where I'm an IC and I have someone immediately above me covering my back. That's hard to find, and you're going to be perceived as a job hopper during the hunt, but it's worth the temporary downside IMO. Or even better, just start your own shop with people you trust...

jaggederest 13y ago
> Or even better, just start your own shop with people you trust... I really, really wish I could do this. I feel like there needs to be some sort of guild structure for programming that would enable this.

adrianhoward 13y ago

Here's a link to a previous HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145358 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145358 where I mentioned some of the research on the different efficiencies between co-located and distributed teams. If anybody has links to research (rather than anecdote) around the topic I'd love to have additions Especially any that show distributed teams performing to the same levels (or better) than co-located ones. Thanks ;-)

vowelless 13y ago

How do you on-board new employees?

stumm 13y ago

They seem to flip back and forth about remote working. Less than 3 years ago: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2838-were-relocating-everyone-to-chicago http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2838-were-relocating-everyone...

ubercore 13y ago
Check the date on that post. (it's an april fools joke)
polyfractal 13y ago
That was an April Fool's joke (posted on April 1st). And even if the date wasn't the first...the whole article reads like an over-the-top satire.
ndonnellan 13y ago
Perhaps note the date and extreme sarcasm? "Change is never easy. But we’re willing to do whatever it takes to be the most efficient company we can be. Now please excuse us, we’re off to get more productive. And secure. And dressed the same."
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Gravityloss 13y ago

I find people doing remote work constantly missing big parts of information that is passed around verbally and doing extra work / being less efficient because of this. We already use chat rooms, individual chats, tickets, video conferencing, email, dashboards, whatever. But sometimes the bandwidth of just sitting with someone and looking at a problem together is so much higher that you can solve big issues in a very short time. I think some psychologists could study this, it's right up their alley - what is lacking in remote co-operation devices. I personally think it's partly that you need to see what the other person is looking at and also you must be able to observe their body language. A way to do "Look here, this is important in about 0.1 seconds." But I have no evidence.

snorkel 13y ago
Agree. Remote works well for teams of developers that can be heads-down for days working on one product or one component with few external dependencies to coordinate, but for teams that have many different responsilities and need to stay in pace with other teams then you can't beat being all in same physical location.
wlk 13y ago
I can address first of the issues you have mentioned: I have worked both in situations when whole company is working remotely or only one/two people of out dozen were. In the second case, those people were very often left out of the most communication that was happening in the office, and for them it must have been not very good situation to be in. There was no general plan for handling this situation and trying to include them in meetings and decision making process. But when whole company is working remotely, the situation is completely different, everyone is at the same level, and you really can make it work.

funkattack 13y ago

What I don't understand about the working remote discussion ist, that it only goes half way. It seems to be a discussion like: Lets work remote but keep everything else the same. Lets keep the company, lets keep bosses, lets collegues, lets keep meetings lets keep the chat at the coffee machine. Working remotely, as I understand it, means, that you have to transform the company employer relationship in a way that it works using rather abstract or technical infrastructure or interface. The company has to know or to learn, and define, what kind of services or deliverable it can expect from its employees. Also the employee has to learn how to present his service or deliverables in a way that they get noticed and impress someone very far away. It is sort of an bidirectional API that both have to serve and use. My question now is, what is the reason for a company to have employees if the service they need is so well defined and could be offered by anyone capeable of serving that API? Why have employes if you can have contractors? The same question holds for the employees, if capable of offering that service in such a well defined way, why not turn into a company themselves and offer that service to anyone willing to pay?

triaged 13y ago

I went from working in an office, to working remotely for the same company. While there were certainly benefits, I experienced a few downsides that also drove me crazy. As a product manager, I was in the sticky situation of needing to coordinate with a bunch of different people, and hit certain deadlines that the rest of the company may or may not have aligned with. I felt like I lost much my day-to-day ability to get-shit-done, especially as I was competing for time & resources with other projects. I also found it easier to stop caring as much, since the emotions & passion weren't as readily communicated remotely. Definitely some personal shortcoming in there as well, but, there's definitely issues to watch for if working remotely.

taude 13y ago

I've never been able to find remote work. A lot of it might have to do with my various roles in engineering. But I think a lot of it is east-coast business culture. But also, from talking to a lot of Silicon Valley friends, they don't have much work from home either....unless you're a sales rep, sales engineer, or a consultant who likely has to spend most of the time on-sight (away from corp office)... One thing I'm hoping to accomplish at my new company is a culture of work-hard/play-hard remote workers. Those who want to live in say mountain towns, but who want a real career as they get older...I'd not even have a problem with the idea of a "Powder Day" and they don't login until noon. WIth the right happy workers...

chollida1 13y ago

In my experience remote work, works best when everyone is remote. That way all the remote worker issues have to be sorted out, or atleast thought of by day one. When remote work starts to fall apart is when there is a dedicated office where 75% of the team works. In these cases the remote workers miss the critical "Let's grab a room meetings" where decisions are made. I think the reason is that its much easier to make decisions with people when you can see them face to face rather than in group chat.

tslathrow 13y ago

37signals is a black swan for a lot of things. To be noted, but not as the basis for a new world order. Anecdotal evidence of my own: - Stop thinking about labor in a capital-intensive business - I can't do a damn thing with collaboration without a real whiteboard - I don't work well with too much technology. - Time zones make things tricky: half of "our" team is in Europe, but deals with a different group of companies. FTSE vs NYSE trading hours make things difficult. - The one work-from-home person on "our" team was let go due to inconsistent quality of output - Living in a city is a part of work/life balance for pretty much anyone under age 30 --tslathrow

henrik_w 13y ago

An overwhelming majority of the people in this thread seem to favor working from home. Does anybody miss face-to-face time? I work in an office, and not a day goes by without face-to-face discussions with my co-workers. I find these discussions really helpful, and often we end up drawing on a white-board. I've worked with remote developers (via video) before, and it didn't come close to the interactions I have in-person with people at the office. Would be interesting to hear some comments from remote developers. Related (from a blog post of mine): http://henrikwarne.com/2013/04/02/programmer-productivity-interruptions-meetings-and-working-remotely/ http://henrikwarne.com/2013/04/02/programmer-productivity-in...

beat 13y ago
The correct amount of face time - both out of necessity and out of comfort - is a difficult problem. I worked for a while in a "Facebook style" office, where we were pair programming. No walls, no privacy, all of our desks faced forward except the lead, who faced us, like a schoolteacher. I found it extremely uncomfortable. And I'm a people person! On the other hand, zero face time is problematic in other ways. Even 37signals has an all-employee get-together a couple of times a year (read back through svn, they describe this).
- henrik_w 13y ago
  I've seen this about all-employee get-together too. But when only a couple of times a year it seems purely social, not for getting actual work done. For me, the in-person collaboration takes place pretty much every day.

JaretManuel 13y ago

37Signals nailed it. I have been working remote for FormAssembly for almost a year and it is amazing in many respects. We're hiring strong PHP dev's. www.veerwest.com/jobs <-- The Makers of FormAssembly.

krakensden 13y ago

I was impressed by the breadth of lovingly photographed coffee preparation methods. Chemex, standard pourovers, moka pots, espresso, the all-American drip machine.

agentultra 13y ago

I'm a remote worker at the moment. I love it. I can take a break when I need to and be in my comfortable space. I don't have a commute. I can open my door and see my daughter when I go downstairs for a coffee. I can take a walk to the local coffee shop and sit down with the other freelancers and remote workers and catch up on local happenings. If I need a break or I'm done for the day I'm not just watching the clock and waiting for a few other people to leave first. I contribute regularly to open source projects and so I know what it takes to collaborate remotely. We're experimenting with sqwiggle, screenhero, and use github and pivotal. We email each other constantly keeping the teams up to date. We have a VPN and use our ssh-keys for as much as we can. It works really well and I think the tools have come a long way. It's good to see that the world we were promised in the 60's is finally coming to fruition.

ericbieller 13y ago
I love it too! I think you hit on a really important point. Working from home drastically improves quality of life since you're able to interact more with people you care about. It also helps you develop more of a passion for your work when you're not being micromanaged. Helps you to feel more free and in control. Great that you're trying out Sqwiggle. I'm actually one of the co-founders so please let me know if there's anything we can do to improve your experience. Also any feedback you have is super helpful!
- agentultra 13y ago
  I've already sent in a few suggestions! Sqwiggle is great. :)

wiradikusuma 13y ago

Hi guys, just wondering if anyone with remote work experience (either as employee or employer) can shed some light on these issues: * How about same-time communication? E.g. I need to discuss things with my designer, oh wait, he's gardening at the moment, or he works at night. * How do you know when to start/stop your day? E.g. In "normal" office, it's usually 9 to 5. * How do you schedule projects? Fixed time simplifies scheduling ("This project is 5 man-days"). * Who pays for supporting equipments (desk, LCD, internet, nice coffee) if I work from home? * Specific to 37signals: How did they make the video? Did the video guy traveled to each and every employee in the video to tape them?

wlk 13y ago
A lot of that, especially points 1-3 depend on if you work with other people synchronously or asynchronously. At my current job we all try to work as much synchronously as possible, so there is no real difference from any other "office job", except everyone is in different location (we all are in roughly the same timezone), and we don't have to commute. We focus on trying to keep sanity, and keep working hours (my experience is that it helps a lot when working remotely) For shops that allow/ or just work asynchronously, other arrangements need to be made to allow that. Usually more and more stuff is written and stored, so everyone can join and leave any moment. There is a similar book being worked on by other ruby-remote working company: Arkency, http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/arkency-survival-guide-to-effective-programming/ http://blog.arkency.com/2013/09/arkency-survival-guide-to-ef...
zem 13y ago
same-time communication: you schedule a time to do it. send them an email, say i would like to discuss the following issues, when is good for you. at the very most you'll need to do something else for a few hours till then. start/stop: if you find time a useful way to plan things, just set yourself a "work time" and stick to it. it might require a bit of self-discipline that office work doesn't, but after a while you'll get used to thinking of that block of time as work. the nice bit is that it can be, e.g. 7-12, siesta, 3-5 if you prefer that to a straight 9-5. schedule: you can still plan things out in man-days. people are responsible for arranging their time so that they put in that much work; it just doesn't need to be 9-5 every day. supporting equipment: there are companies that will let you expense some of your equipment and internet bills; others see providing your own equipment as a tradeoff for not having to come in to the office.

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dkural 13y ago

I used to 100% believe in this, but came to appreciate people interacting face-to-face. There is a reason that great artists, philosophical circles, mathematicians etc. come in clusters of excellence. People feed off of each other. This can benefit start-ups as well. Facebook, drop-box, etc. and many other startups worked & lived in the same house in early days. I'm not saying this is a balanced lifestyle - won't be able to do drip coffee bike ride gardening and whatever other hipster stuff 37signals does as much perhaps. I do a genomics start-up, with two offices, one in Europe, one on the East Coast. #1 wishlist item is only if there was a way the two offices could be physically together. Remote works as well as a long-distance relationship. It may work in a mature environment, 5-10 years into your relationship. Not Day #1. Start-ups battle many odds, remote is not one you want to tackle from the get go.

kreek 13y ago

One thing I was surprised by, I like pair programming better when it's remote. You get the code right in front of you and you talk to the voice in your head (phones).

31reasons 13y ago

Can we build a list of Companies that have more than 50% of their workforce working remotely ?

droope 13y ago

look at you make me hate my job so much! :@

tomkin 13y ago

I'm not sure I will play the absolute devil's advocate card here, but I do think that there is a downside to this idea. I live in a mid-sized, industry-legacy Canadian city, where tech has become part of the new economy. And these new tech companies hire locally - and eat locally, and invest their time into building a local tech scene. If remote working were to become a common theme in tech, would this not fly in the face of community building in its simplest terms? Would the Bay Area have the same community today if this brand of telecommuting were available in the 80s, 90s?

tommoor 13y ago

If you work remotely we're building a real-time communication app just for you in Sqwiggle (https://www.sqwiggle.com https://www.sqwiggle.com). Would love for anyone to try it and offer honest feedback, we'll listen to it all day long :) If you're a developer and want to work remotely, we're backed by great investors and hiring! We also use the latest tech like WebRTC for our video conferencing.

GoldfishCRM 13y ago

Even when my fellow coworkers sitt next to me I skype with them instead of talking. Makes it much easier to not be interupted by talk all the time.

orware 13y ago

I have a full-time day job but took an offer working part-time remotely for a Joomla Extensions Developer named Joomlatools late last year and did that for a few months in my spare time. The only bummer for me was that I was a contracted employee so basically I was paid for the hours I worked (my full-time job is salaried so it's nice to know I'm going to expect X dollars each month) and since I was doing it in my free time it started to get difficult to balance the extra work time with family time since I ended up no longer having much free time. If a company offered a $90,000+/yr salary + health and retirement benefits to work remotely then I think a lot more people might be interested, but in some cases (when you're working simply as a remote contractor) that's definitely not nearly as good.

lgomezma 13y ago

In my case it's also about location. I am a Spaniard working in the Netherlands for a few years now, paying high rents and being far from family and friends. I could live in Greece (where my wife is from and where we have a fully paid house) but unfortunately there are almost no tech-related jobs there. As a web developer almost 100% of what I do on a daily basis could be done remotely. I wonder if remote work could be the solution for thousands of people like me who have to leave their countries just to find a job.