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Warning, anecdotal data ahead: I would not want to work under remote conditions again. In my career I have worked mainly under "startup conditions". At Apple on

Warning, anecdotal data ahead: I would not want to work under remote conditions again. In my career I have worked mainly under "startup conditions". At Apple on iPhone, everyone lived in the same place and worked non stop on the product, same as when I left to start a company. On my second company, I had many remote workers. The reality I experienced is that there was at least a 2-3x slowdown. When people are on different time zones, what used to take 5 minutes can become a 1 day turnaround through email and waiting for the other person to be up. Perhaps it works under certain scales, but when you're trying to be nimble it's just one more needlessly complex factor. What ended up happening is everyone got on a in between sleep schedule which was pretty bad for everyone's outside of work life.

mahyarm 12y ago
How different are the time zones? What frustrates me about remote workers is they cluster around eastern europe or india/china with main offices in the USA. They're all hugely different time zones. I think remote workers who are in the same time zone area as the main office, say north or south america, might work better. But I don't know because I haven't had a chance to work on that kind of team.
voidlogic 12y ago
Both working in and managing distributed teams is a skill that needs to be learned and homed. In comparison to my experiences, it seems like the distributed team you worked on was highly dysfunctional. I think I distributed startup spanning more the a handful of adjacent timezones is probably a mistake. Task assignment need to be done in a way that is cognizant of the people/timezone interdependencies. Even a non-startup might find it useful to break the various teams up by clusters of close timezones so that the regular work-flows don't experience this kind of lag.
ryanSrich 12y ago
I'm not sure when you worked remotely but I can tell you remote work in 2014 is much much different. First off, using email internally for communication makes no sense. If you're a truly distributed team[1] you use teamspeak, or hangouts, or slack, or IRC, or anything other than email. Second there are no radically different timezones within the US. If you're on the east coast you work most days from 10 - 6, if you're on the west coast you work most days from 7 - 3. Third if you're working on something pressing with your distributed team you schedule some time together to work later. If you're on the east coast you may have some nights during a sprint where you're wrapping up at 9pm or 10pm. Fourth no matter where your team is located if you have members in different US (or even international) timezones you want at least 4 hours during the day spent together (employees are really only performing at the top of their game for a fraction of the day anyway [2]). [1] A truly distributed team is one that supports remote workers via communication and culture as much as they do their local employees. [2] http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunchmode/econ-hours-productivity.html http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunch...
- ryanSrich 12y ago
  Continue to downvote me but please at least reply with a comment as to why you disagree.

mahyarm 12y ago

How different are the time zones? What frustrates me about remote workers is they cluster around eastern europe or india/china with main offices in the USA. They're all hugely different time zones. I think remote workers who are in the same time zone area as the main office, say north or south america, might work better. But I don't know because I haven't had a chance to work on that kind of team.

voidlogic 12y ago

Both working in and managing distributed teams is a skill that needs to be learned and homed. In comparison to my experiences, it seems like the distributed team you worked on was highly dysfunctional. I think I distributed startup spanning more the a handful of adjacent timezones is probably a mistake. Task assignment need to be done in a way that is cognizant of the people/timezone interdependencies. Even a non-startup might find it useful to break the various teams up by clusters of close timezones so that the regular work-flows don't experience this kind of lag.

ryanSrich 12y ago

I'm not sure when you worked remotely but I can tell you remote work in 2014 is much much different. First off, using email internally for communication makes no sense. If you're a truly distributed team[1] you use teamspeak, or hangouts, or slack, or IRC, or anything other than email. Second there are no radically different timezones within the US. If you're on the east coast you work most days from 10 - 6, if you're on the west coast you work most days from 7 - 3. Third if you're working on something pressing with your distributed team you schedule some time together to work later. If you're on the east coast you may have some nights during a sprint where you're wrapping up at 9pm or 10pm. Fourth no matter where your team is located if you have members in different US (or even international) timezones you want at least 4 hours during the day spent together (employees are really only performing at the top of their game for a fraction of the day anyway [2]). [1] A truly distributed team is one that supports remote workers via communication and culture as much as they do their local employees. [2] http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunchmode/econ-hours-productivity.html http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunch...

ryanSrich 12y ago
Continue to downvote me but please at least reply with a comment as to why you disagree.