7 ms·

My Biggest Takeaway on 37Signals’s New Book on Remote Work

81 points by jasonshen 13y ago

LukeWalsh 13y ago
I had a software internship after my freshman year of college that lead in to working remotely while at school for the next 9 months. I learned as much from that as I have from any internship, and it allowed me to optimize my time. I would go whole weeks without working, and then spend an entire weekend moving my project forward. I completely agree that our generation will change the way we think about the structure of our "work week."
- alabut 13y ago
  The millennial thing might be a distraction from the main point about the benefits of remote work. Some of the biggest taskmaster startup CEOs I've worked for were twenty somethings, whereas I have other friends in their 30's that have been working remotely for years. YMMV. The best part about working remote is that it requires good teamwork because nothing will get done without solid communication, whereas colocated teams often skimp on process because they assume they'll make it up via adhoc meetings instead.
CaveTech 13y ago
My workplace is kind of a weird fusion between old and new; Our development side basically functions like a start-up, but development isn't our core business. While our office does allow things like remote work, my manager is definitely has the mentality that if I'm not at work by 9AM sharp, I'm slacking off and unprepared. I've also caught a decent amount of flack for not always bring a pen and paper to meetings, as a lot of people seem dumbfounded that there's other ways of taking notes. I guess my main point is that traditional businesses still have a ton of tradition and norms pressed against them by older generations. Sometimes I have to keep up an absurd charade to keep clients or managers happy, even though they provide no value, and sometimes even waste my time.
michaelt 13y ago
One of the things I'm wary about, as someone who has a first-world standard of living, is that if my employers think my job can be done over the internet from 50 miles away, they think it can be done over the internet from 5,000 miles away in some country with lower costs of living. Those of you who work remotely: How do you differentiate yourself, in the employment market, from people in asia, eastern europe etc?
- bennyg 13y ago
  I think it comes down to a couple tangible, measurable metrics: language barriers and time of work barriers (ie you send an employee an email and the reply back at 2am your time). Then, I think anecdotally, quality of work is another perceived advantage for not going with the complete outsourcing route.
- jasonshen 13y ago
  I think it really depends on the kind of work you do. Part of the reason why remote working is great is economic - you have to prove you are a better programmer/designer/marketer/support person compared to anyone in the world with an internet connection. A big part of why a firm might choose a US/Western worker is communication style and understanding of cultural norms, though that is changing too.
- contingencies 13y ago
  Differentation: skills, demonstrable experience (across multiple markets), previously successful experience remote working, communicative capacity, cultural comprehension. Financial competition: charge less than 9-to-5ers, but live outside of the western spendzone (ie. Asia, Eastern Europe, etc.). This allows you to take equity-linked packages without sacrificing quality of life (or indeed, with higher net quality of life).
- keithwarren 13y ago
  For me it has to go beyond programming. When you hire me to help automate some process or improve some system, you are going to get a good programmer but you are also going to get someone who seeks to deeply understand your business and find ways to improve beyond what you put in front of me. If 'outsource' to someone in another part of the world your need for a detailed specification is much higher, your need to mitigate communications risks are much higher. Something I have trouble putting into words but I know from experience is there - when I am working on some process I try to understand it deeply and ask questions that are often more business related than technical. Technology is a means to solving business challenges and you have to be part analyst and part developer to approach problems that way. A coder across the world who needs a very detailed spec will almost never give you that benefit.
DigitalSea 13y ago
I think companies need to move past the whole "no remote working allowed" thing. Old style management coupled with fear of procrastination are two reasons many companies don't embrace remote working. If you have proper management and metrics in place, it's easy to ensure remote workers are hitting targets and putting hours in; source control, time management, Google Hangouts/Skype for meetings, email. There is no excuse. Marissa Meyer seems to be stuck in the old world of IT thinking herself. While she's taken Yahoo! to a better place because of her leadership, Yahoo! have lost a fair share of remote talent because of the rules she put in place banning remote working. Tonnes of companies embrace it (Github for one) and it opens up your recruitment opportunities 100 fold. The only downside of remote workers is that they are separate from the core physical team, so they don't nearly get close to enough opportunities to partake in social bonding and that rapport you establish with your co-workers getting to physically speak to them in the office and eat lunch with them. Remote working means you are detached from the company culture which depending on the place could either be a good or bad thing. If a job is just a job to you and you are good at what you do, then this is hardly an issue.
- robotys 13y ago
  In case of Marissa Mayers, i think the ban of remote working is more towards trimming their workforce from poisonious group of remote workers that did not perform. They just suck the money out of Yahoo, and many of them are. I assume remote working will be unbanned in near future if the condition allowed.
- RogerL 13y ago
  "core physical team" What is that, in the context of remote work? I worked remotely for 3 years at my last job. The lead lived half way across the country from HQ, as did I, and as did the lead QA. More importantly, we regularly traveled for different installations and tests, so today to talk to Joe you were calling Texas, but week he'd be in NM, and so on. Meanwhile you were on your own rotation. I perhaps exaggerate the amount of travel, as there were plenty of times where most people were at HQ except for the permanent remote workers, but the larger point is that it had to work with no core team in one place, because many times during the year there was no such beast. It works.
jusben1369 13y ago
I still want to see a good argument against the startup notion that you have to all come together and work as a team. That a close knit group of 5 - 50 people in a startup in one location has a competitive advantage (via constant facetime) than a remotely built comparable startup. Every year the Bay Area becomes more insanely expensive yet young devs and entrepreneurs still flock there in droves.
- lowboy 13y ago
  Work can be done remotely, but it's the extra-curricular stuff where geography counts. In-person networking, the ability to go to meetups, talks, conferences, etc.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- fishtoaster 13y ago
  Even if you start from the premise that, for a given developer, that developer contributes more locally than remotely, there's still a pretty good argument for remote work: talent pool. You can have a fair-to-middling programmer in the bay area locally, or the best programmer in all of Michigan remotely. What you lose by not having people locally you gain by having better people, in theory. This applies to any locale as well. If you limit your search to only those people within driving distance of your office, you're almost guaranteed to get a lower caliber dev than if you were able to hire any dev in the world.
  - wensing 13y ago
    Most web apps are not that difficult to program. What needs the most innovation in a startup is the business model. Communicating that locally is hard enough. Remote? No thank you.
    - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
      Just a couple of points: First, web apps aren't that difficult, it is true. But that doesn't stop web app startup founders from demanding only the best of the best data structure/algorithmic programmers. Second, web apps are not even close to being the only kind of programming, suitable for remote work or not.
general_failure 13y ago
It feels like we are focusing on the wrong things. It's not just about getting things done. It's about having fun doing it. I cannot be happy working remotely. I have worked alone for many years and I went back to proper employment because I missed work place. I like working closely with like minded people. I like dropping by people's offices and thinking out loud about ideas and discussing on whiteboard. I like the energy of doing together. I currently work in a team which is spread over 5 countries. It's honestly quite miserable. I hate all the communication overhead and constantly irritated when I cannot reach people in person in 2-3 hours.
chrissnell 13y ago
I'm not a huge fan of remote work and I'll tell you why. First, though, I'll tell you that I'm currently working remote for an SFO startup and before that, I spent six years working remote for a large cloud provider based in Texas. Before all of that, I was an on-site worker for the first 14 years of my career. I don't like remote work. It's not because I'm not efficient or don't get shit done (I am and I do). My chief complaint about remote work is how it socially isolates the worker. No matter how many Google Hangouts or morning standups you do, you are losing out on a huge part of the social experience of working onsite. One of the greatest things about working around smart people is the chit-chat that you get by working right next to them. I'm talking about the conversations you have on the way to lunch or standing around the soda fountain. This stuff is spontaneous and fast-flowing and it's precious. As much as I wish this could be replicated over IRC or IM, it just doesn't happen that way. There's something magical about the conversation from four geeks riding together in a car on the way to lunch. The other aspect to social isolation is personal happiness and the desire that most of us have to be in the presence of others. Over the last six years of working remote, I've gotten really tired of being alone all the time. Working from a busy coffee shop helps, but you're still not chit-chatting and you have to contend with shitty Internet connections and poor security (pack up your laptop to use the restroom, etc). Working remote is not all that it's cracked up to be. It took me several years of actually doing it to realize this. I love my job at this awesome company but if I could work onsite and still have my family here with me, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
- jasonshen 13y ago
  I've never done remote so I'm totally asking because I'm curious: have you ever tried working at a co-working space?
  - chrissnell 13y ago
    That's a good question. Yes, I've been wanting to do this for a while but I've not found one in my city (Tacoma, WA) that meets my needs. We do have one and when I toured it on a Tuesday in the early afternoon, it was almost deserted. Definitely not the social place that I want. It might be worth taking the train to Seattle on occasion to work at one of the great co-working places there, which are more focused on startups, new tech, etc.
MichaelTieso 13y ago
After working remotely for several years, I actually look forward to going back into the office and connecting with others. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if a co-working space was available to me but I find that I really need people around me to communicate and interact with every so often.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Sukotto 13y ago
Lately I've been thinking a lot about finding remote work and have just posted an Ask HN about it. Would love to hear about people's experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709601
jrochkind1 13y ago
The author's "biggest takeaway" is "The shift to remote work will be driven by Millenials"... and the author actually thinks they're recommending the book?
poulsbohemian 13y ago
I have nominally been a remote worker since 2006 - during some of that I've been a road warrior, the past two years I've been predominantly at home. I've hired and managed dozens of remote workers as well. To me the big advantages are: 1) Good talent exists everywhere, so why limit where I can hire them? 2) I have better equipment and working conditions at my home office than any employer or customer site I've ever works at - thus, I am more productive. I find cubicles and florescent lights, along with the constant disruptions of offices to be killers on productivity. I recognize that many people want that environment, but I really don't. My social life is outside the office as well, so I can't even speak to that as being a boost of an office environment. Your milage might vary, but for me, I won't ever work in a centralize office environment or ask others to if I can avoid it. When I travel to meet with customers, honestly I'm repulsed by the lack of productivity I see in the face time that is suppose to be a bolster. For example, when you aren't face-to-face for hours at a time, it forces you to be more diligent at good communication and choosing the right channel for communication. When you know you can just lean over the cube wall or invite people to a conference room, you are more likely to kill an hour of their day wasting time.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bitL 13y ago
I am firmly in the camp of remote work lovers. It allowed me to travel around the world while working on world-class engineering and mathematical problems, make artistic movies from my travel, compose trendy music, get influences from outstanding random people I met, collaborate, have unexpected fun, experience different cultures. And this all while I am one of the fastest developers of my company, solving some of the most difficult problems that come (inventive and creative problems, not CRUD). Internal communication can be handled easily if people understand and trust each other. The unearned mistrust targeted towards high performers and envy of less competent managers/coworkers is what is killing corporations nowadays, not remote work. I love to work alone (on deep analytical problems) as well as love to collaborate with others in person or over Internet (putting pieces together and having fun creating) - location doesn't matter nowadays anymore and if it matters to you, you might end up behind the times as you won't be attractive to many people, some of them invaluable.
MarkMc 13y ago
"In today’s economy, the quest for talent is so great that organizations can no longer afford to merely look at individuals co-located in their physical presence" Is that true? Isn't it more important for the talent pool to have a high ratio of good to bad applicants? If I add 'you can work remotely' to a job description will it mean I have to wade through twice as many poor applicants before I find a good one?
h2s 13y ago
When the first line of your article contains an Amazon referral link to buy the book and make you a quick buck, how is anybody expected to take your subsequent glowing praise of the book's contents seriously? Ending the post with a quick disclaimer doesn't mitigate this loss of credibility.
- karlmdavis 13y ago
  Using that logic, how could you possibly take the book itself seriously, since the publisher isn't just giving it away for free?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
henrik_w 13y ago
"I remember working on a number of student groups at Stanford where we might have had meetings once a week for an hour or two where we’d talk about what needed to get done, and then actually did the work on our own..." It sounds like the weekly meetings were in person, which makes sense. When you figure out what to do, and maybe how to do it, face-to-face is very valuable. In software development, there is a lot of this kind of decision-making. Actually implementing what you have decided doesn't require collaboration as much, so then remote is fine.

81 points by jasonshen 13y ago

I had a software internship after my freshman year of college that lead in to working remotely while at school for the next 9 months. I learned as much from that as I have from any internship, and it allowed me to optimize my time. I would go whole weeks without working, and then spend an entire weekend moving my project forward. I completely agree that our generation will change the way we think about the structure of our "work week."

alabut 13y ago
The millennial thing might be a distraction from the main point about the benefits of remote work. Some of the biggest taskmaster startup CEOs I've worked for were twenty somethings, whereas I have other friends in their 30's that have been working remotely for years. YMMV. The best part about working remote is that it requires good teamwork because nothing will get done without solid communication, whereas colocated teams often skimp on process because they assume they'll make it up via adhoc meetings instead.

CaveTech 13y ago

My workplace is kind of a weird fusion between old and new; Our development side basically functions like a start-up, but development isn't our core business. While our office does allow things like remote work, my manager is definitely has the mentality that if I'm not at work by 9AM sharp, I'm slacking off and unprepared. I've also caught a decent amount of flack for not always bring a pen and paper to meetings, as a lot of people seem dumbfounded that there's other ways of taking notes. I guess my main point is that traditional businesses still have a ton of tradition and norms pressed against them by older generations. Sometimes I have to keep up an absurd charade to keep clients or managers happy, even though they provide no value, and sometimes even waste my time.

michaelt 13y ago

One of the things I'm wary about, as someone who has a first-world standard of living, is that if my employers think my job can be done over the internet from 50 miles away, they think it can be done over the internet from 5,000 miles away in some country with lower costs of living. Those of you who work remotely: How do you differentiate yourself, in the employment market, from people in asia, eastern europe etc?

bennyg 13y ago
I think it comes down to a couple tangible, measurable metrics: language barriers and time of work barriers (ie you send an employee an email and the reply back at 2am your time). Then, I think anecdotally, quality of work is another perceived advantage for not going with the complete outsourcing route.
jasonshen 13y ago
I think it really depends on the kind of work you do. Part of the reason why remote working is great is economic - you have to prove you are a better programmer/designer/marketer/support person compared to anyone in the world with an internet connection. A big part of why a firm might choose a US/Western worker is communication style and understanding of cultural norms, though that is changing too.
contingencies 13y ago
Differentation: skills, demonstrable experience (across multiple markets), previously successful experience remote working, communicative capacity, cultural comprehension. Financial competition: charge less than 9-to-5ers, but live outside of the western spendzone (ie. Asia, Eastern Europe, etc.). This allows you to take equity-linked packages without sacrificing quality of life (or indeed, with higher net quality of life).
keithwarren 13y ago
For me it has to go beyond programming. When you hire me to help automate some process or improve some system, you are going to get a good programmer but you are also going to get someone who seeks to deeply understand your business and find ways to improve beyond what you put in front of me. If 'outsource' to someone in another part of the world your need for a detailed specification is much higher, your need to mitigate communications risks are much higher. Something I have trouble putting into words but I know from experience is there - when I am working on some process I try to understand it deeply and ask questions that are often more business related than technical. Technology is a means to solving business challenges and you have to be part analyst and part developer to approach problems that way. A coder across the world who needs a very detailed spec will almost never give you that benefit.

DigitalSea 13y ago

I think companies need to move past the whole "no remote working allowed" thing. Old style management coupled with fear of procrastination are two reasons many companies don't embrace remote working. If you have proper management and metrics in place, it's easy to ensure remote workers are hitting targets and putting hours in; source control, time management, Google Hangouts/Skype for meetings, email. There is no excuse. Marissa Meyer seems to be stuck in the old world of IT thinking herself. While she's taken Yahoo! to a better place because of her leadership, Yahoo! have lost a fair share of remote talent because of the rules she put in place banning remote working. Tonnes of companies embrace it (Github for one) and it opens up your recruitment opportunities 100 fold. The only downside of remote workers is that they are separate from the core physical team, so they don't nearly get close to enough opportunities to partake in social bonding and that rapport you establish with your co-workers getting to physically speak to them in the office and eat lunch with them. Remote working means you are detached from the company culture which depending on the place could either be a good or bad thing. If a job is just a job to you and you are good at what you do, then this is hardly an issue.

robotys 13y ago
In case of Marissa Mayers, i think the ban of remote working is more towards trimming their workforce from poisonious group of remote workers that did not perform. They just suck the money out of Yahoo, and many of them are. I assume remote working will be unbanned in near future if the condition allowed.
RogerL 13y ago
"core physical team" What is that, in the context of remote work? I worked remotely for 3 years at my last job. The lead lived half way across the country from HQ, as did I, and as did the lead QA. More importantly, we regularly traveled for different installations and tests, so today to talk to Joe you were calling Texas, but week he'd be in NM, and so on. Meanwhile you were on your own rotation. I perhaps exaggerate the amount of travel, as there were plenty of times where most people were at HQ except for the permanent remote workers, but the larger point is that it had to work with no core team in one place, because many times during the year there was no such beast. It works.

jusben1369 13y ago

I still want to see a good argument against the startup notion that you have to all come together and work as a team. That a close knit group of 5 - 50 people in a startup in one location has a competitive advantage (via constant facetime) than a remotely built comparable startup. Every year the Bay Area becomes more insanely expensive yet young devs and entrepreneurs still flock there in droves.

lowboy 13y ago
Work can be done remotely, but it's the extra-curricular stuff where geography counts. In-person networking, the ability to go to meetups, talks, conferences, etc.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
fishtoaster 13y ago
Even if you start from the premise that, for a given developer, that developer contributes more locally than remotely, there's still a pretty good argument for remote work: talent pool. You can have a fair-to-middling programmer in the bay area locally, or the best programmer in all of Michigan remotely. What you lose by not having people locally you gain by having better people, in theory. This applies to any locale as well. If you limit your search to only those people within driving distance of your office, you're almost guaranteed to get a lower caliber dev than if you were able to hire any dev in the world.
- wensing 13y ago
  Most web apps are not that difficult to program. What needs the most innovation in a startup is the business model. Communicating that locally is hard enough. Remote? No thank you.
  - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
    Just a couple of points: First, web apps aren't that difficult, it is true. But that doesn't stop web app startup founders from demanding only the best of the best data structure/algorithmic programmers. Second, web apps are not even close to being the only kind of programming, suitable for remote work or not.

general_failure 13y ago

It feels like we are focusing on the wrong things. It's not just about getting things done. It's about having fun doing it. I cannot be happy working remotely. I have worked alone for many years and I went back to proper employment because I missed work place. I like working closely with like minded people. I like dropping by people's offices and thinking out loud about ideas and discussing on whiteboard. I like the energy of doing together. I currently work in a team which is spread over 5 countries. It's honestly quite miserable. I hate all the communication overhead and constantly irritated when I cannot reach people in person in 2-3 hours.

chrissnell 13y ago

I'm not a huge fan of remote work and I'll tell you why. First, though, I'll tell you that I'm currently working remote for an SFO startup and before that, I spent six years working remote for a large cloud provider based in Texas. Before all of that, I was an on-site worker for the first 14 years of my career. I don't like remote work. It's not because I'm not efficient or don't get shit done (I am and I do). My chief complaint about remote work is how it socially isolates the worker. No matter how many Google Hangouts or morning standups you do, you are losing out on a huge part of the social experience of working onsite. One of the greatest things about working around smart people is the chit-chat that you get by working right next to them. I'm talking about the conversations you have on the way to lunch or standing around the soda fountain. This stuff is spontaneous and fast-flowing and it's precious. As much as I wish this could be replicated over IRC or IM, it just doesn't happen that way. There's something magical about the conversation from four geeks riding together in a car on the way to lunch. The other aspect to social isolation is personal happiness and the desire that most of us have to be in the presence of others. Over the last six years of working remote, I've gotten really tired of being alone all the time. Working from a busy coffee shop helps, but you're still not chit-chatting and you have to contend with shitty Internet connections and poor security (pack up your laptop to use the restroom, etc). Working remote is not all that it's cracked up to be. It took me several years of actually doing it to realize this. I love my job at this awesome company but if I could work onsite and still have my family here with me, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

jasonshen 13y ago
I've never done remote so I'm totally asking because I'm curious: have you ever tried working at a co-working space?
- chrissnell 13y ago
  That's a good question. Yes, I've been wanting to do this for a while but I've not found one in my city (Tacoma, WA) that meets my needs. We do have one and when I toured it on a Tuesday in the early afternoon, it was almost deserted. Definitely not the social place that I want. It might be worth taking the train to Seattle on occasion to work at one of the great co-working places there, which are more focused on startups, new tech, etc.

MichaelTieso 13y ago

After working remotely for several years, I actually look forward to going back into the office and connecting with others. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if a co-working space was available to me but I find that I really need people around me to communicate and interact with every so often.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Sukotto 13y ago

Lately I've been thinking a lot about finding remote work and have just posted an Ask HN about it. Would love to hear about people's experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6709601

jrochkind1 13y ago

The author's "biggest takeaway" is "The shift to remote work will be driven by Millenials"... and the author actually thinks they're recommending the book?

poulsbohemian 13y ago

I have nominally been a remote worker since 2006 - during some of that I've been a road warrior, the past two years I've been predominantly at home. I've hired and managed dozens of remote workers as well. To me the big advantages are: 1) Good talent exists everywhere, so why limit where I can hire them? 2) I have better equipment and working conditions at my home office than any employer or customer site I've ever works at - thus, I am more productive. I find cubicles and florescent lights, along with the constant disruptions of offices to be killers on productivity. I recognize that many people want that environment, but I really don't. My social life is outside the office as well, so I can't even speak to that as being a boost of an office environment. Your milage might vary, but for me, I won't ever work in a centralize office environment or ask others to if I can avoid it. When I travel to meet with customers, honestly I'm repulsed by the lack of productivity I see in the face time that is suppose to be a bolster. For example, when you aren't face-to-face for hours at a time, it forces you to be more diligent at good communication and choosing the right channel for communication. When you know you can just lean over the cube wall or invite people to a conference room, you are more likely to kill an hour of their day wasting time.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bitL 13y ago

I am firmly in the camp of remote work lovers. It allowed me to travel around the world while working on world-class engineering and mathematical problems, make artistic movies from my travel, compose trendy music, get influences from outstanding random people I met, collaborate, have unexpected fun, experience different cultures. And this all while I am one of the fastest developers of my company, solving some of the most difficult problems that come (inventive and creative problems, not CRUD). Internal communication can be handled easily if people understand and trust each other. The unearned mistrust targeted towards high performers and envy of less competent managers/coworkers is what is killing corporations nowadays, not remote work. I love to work alone (on deep analytical problems) as well as love to collaborate with others in person or over Internet (putting pieces together and having fun creating) - location doesn't matter nowadays anymore and if it matters to you, you might end up behind the times as you won't be attractive to many people, some of them invaluable.

MarkMc 13y ago

"In today’s economy, the quest for talent is so great that organizations can no longer afford to merely look at individuals co-located in their physical presence" Is that true? Isn't it more important for the talent pool to have a high ratio of good to bad applicants? If I add 'you can work remotely' to a job description will it mean I have to wade through twice as many poor applicants before I find a good one?

h2s 13y ago

When the first line of your article contains an Amazon referral link to buy the book and make you a quick buck, how is anybody expected to take your subsequent glowing praise of the book's contents seriously? Ending the post with a quick disclaimer doesn't mitigate this loss of credibility.

karlmdavis 13y ago
Using that logic, how could you possibly take the book itself seriously, since the publisher isn't just giving it away for free?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

henrik_w 13y ago

"I remember working on a number of student groups at Stanford where we might have had meetings once a week for an hour or two where we’d talk about what needed to get done, and then actually did the work on our own..." It sounds like the weekly meetings were in person, which makes sense. When you figure out what to do, and maybe how to do it, face-to-face is very valuable. In software development, there is a lot of this kind of decision-making. Actually implementing what you have decided doesn't require collaboration as much, so then remote is fine.