10 ms·

Work for a remote culture

172 points by ScottWRobinson 11y ago

zkhalique 11y ago
I happen to agree. As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers motivated and executing on time. Any advice?
- TeamMCS 11y ago
  Isn't that just a pacing issue. If there's enough discrete work going through the pipe line then burn-downs (or if you're not traditionally agile, targets) should be pretty reflective of your output. You have to be careful, but I wonder if giving a developer access to their own progress/burndown would be an encouragement for those who arn't quite so self motivated.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  > As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers motivated and executing on time. The only time I've seen this to be a "problem" is when one of the following is true: A) Non-technical people are responsible for the estimates and/or have the ability to make changes to the requirements without understanding the complexity of the new requirements. B) They are stuck fixing bugs instead of doing new feature development due to technical debt. C) There is a serious communication problem. D) People want fixed, written in stone deadlines before the prototyping is done when things are still too fluid for anything resembling a good time estimate is possible. For instance, the only deadline I've majorly missed at my present workplace is the one project I told my boss was impractical, a terrible idea, and to please give it to someone else because I don't have the temperament to handle such requests. I'm sure some "business" person responsible for it considers it a "motivation and executing on time" problem despite the fact I basically said this was a terrible idea in front of the entire IT department in an official meeting with minutes being taken. Are you completely certain none of these 4 exist as an employer?
  - georgehotelling 11y ago
    A, B and D would be affecting on-site developers just as much as the remotes, but C (communication) is the thing that requires unique abilities for a remote worker. If either the worker or the company is not good at communicating, that will cause serious problems. Poor communication from the managers can easily cause poor motivation and execution problems from the workers. If a worker is not communicating blocks or reaching out for the help they need, that can also lead to those problems.
    - fweespeech 11y ago
      Yes but I don't agree "C" is a "unique" ability for remotes. Our operations/IT stuff always has someone who is technically remote due to business travel. I have a side project with volunteers working on it remotely as well. I don't see it as a separate problem. People either can communicate effectively via text/phone....or they can't. In an office environment, you still need that. About 50% of my stakeholders are "remote" as they work in other companies many miles away.
- allochthon 11y ago
  > As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers ... executing on time. There's something off about this -- it has the whiff of micromanagement or waterfall; perhaps I'm misreading your point. Far better than micromanagement is hiring good, trustworthy people and collaborating with them together on incrementally building something out.
  - 49531 11y ago
    I would echo this point, our remote team has hired good and bad and it's a lot more about the people and less about being remote. It does seem that remote works shines light on the core of a team members work ethic and productivity.
  - noarchy 11y ago
    It could also have the whiff of an "Agile" team that has a crisis every 2 or 3 weeks, due to routinely setting unrealistic sprint goals. No, this isn't supposed to happen, but I've seen it at more than one shop, that's for sure.
    - allochthon 11y ago
      Yes, indeed. "Agile" can have its share of manufactured crises, too.
    - jacques_chester 11y ago
      Scrum is not bijective with Agile.
  - curun1r 11y ago
    The motivational aspect is, in my experience, a consequence of working 100% from home. Spending that much time at home can make it hard for me to get stuff done. I'm perfectly capable of being productive when I work from home occasionally...possibly even more productive than I am when I'm in the office since I'm less distracted, but find that my productivity drops off considerably when I work predominantly from home. There's easy fixes for this--headphones, coffee shop Wi-Fi and a VPN connection work well for me--but I have to do something or I go stir crazy and can't get much done.
- tdumitrescu 11y ago
  Probably the answer is to have a non-technical manager _literally_ breathe down their necks, rather than over digital communication channels. /s i.e. I fail to see how this is a problem specific to remote work.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  How tight are your schedules? How much do you overcommit developer resources? How much do your salespeople promise that you can't realistically do? I just left a position where remote was impossible because of the workload. The office culture had strict hours, and developers were expected to work on new projects AND bug fix tickets at the same time. (They would tell the architect "You can use these 2 good developers this week" and then tell the developers "You can't work on the architect's project this week, you have to do bug fix tickets.") Essentially, a remote culture is a more laid-back culture. It's about herding the cats...not about herding cattle, or milking cats.
- Beached 11y ago
  You HAVE to have a very heavy heavy heavy hand in hiring. Hiring good is by far the best thing you can do, you could hiring the most brilliant coder in the world, but if he is a poor communicator and procrastinator, your SOL. For remote work, I look for hiring a personable motivated people, who are good at staying up on communication first, I can teach Tech, I don't want to teach someone to communicate or to stay on task. (This means they keep me informed by choice, not when I ask) Also, as the guy above me said, let them fail and dont over work them. Micro management is something that everyone has issues with, especially if your a new-ish manager, and especially if you are managing a remote team, and if you pile 45-50 hours of work on them in a 50 hour work week, they will become disinterested, and just show up put in the hours and leave without any regards to quality to deadlines.
- ryanSrich 11y ago
  > we've found it hard to always keep our developers motivated and executing on time. Any advice This isn't a remote problem. It's a hiring one. You need to hire better developers.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  When herding cats, it is better to carry a can opener than a cattle prod. While this is difficult for traditional management styles to grasp, it is most useful to just ignore the down times and instead do absolutely everything in your power to encourage the ultra-productive "flow" state to happen as often as possible. The necessary conditions will vary by developer. Some people thrive with regular teammate feedback. Others like to pull a lonely all-nighter. Some will do their best thinking on a treadmill or in the shower, then sit down and execute. Some perform work-related rituals, like the morning coffee ceremony. There is no single thing you can do, other than getting to know your co-workers. Once you know them well enough, it should be obvious what you need to do. It may well be that the best way to motivate one of your developers is to institute timelines, milestones, and deadlines, but another will just switch off the creativity and motivation because of the micromanagement, and they won't come back until well after you remove the artificial pressure. There's no magic bullet. Sorry.
- sankho 11y ago
  One thing I've never heard from a manager at an in office gig - "my team is ultra motivated and always, without fault, executes on time. No problems there!" My point being that with software development, even in an office, you'll still have to deal with lack of motivation and missing deadlines, and will never feel totally accomplished here. Working locations become a correlation, not a causation.
jasode 11y ago
>Companies that support remote workers and do it well seem to have a huge leg up on the competition. I'm a remote worker and I'm definitely spoiled by not having to deal with open office plans and disruptions. That said, I see no evidence that the article's statement is true. (I want it to be true, but that doesn't change the fact that so far, I see zero evidence that it is true.) You can't convince people with just rhetoric. Instead, show compelling examples of how Company-A-with-mostly-remote-workers is beating the pants off of the Company-B-with-onsite-workers. Show that RemoteWorkerCompany is 10x more innovative, delivers 10x faster, has 10x profits, etc etc. I suspect finding comparisons that control for other variables are hard to come up with. Nevertheless, that's what it's going to take to convince managers. A bunch of programmers writing a thousand essays on the "advantages" of remote workers is just preaching to people like me who happen to like working from home.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  Do you know of any blogging platform that beats Wordpress from 2005-2010? ;) After 2010, Tumblr was pretty big but it was really a different project. http://automattic.com/about/ http://automattic.com/about/ There is also that.
- HigginsNinja 11y ago
  True, maybe a good follow up to this would be some use case studies. It would be so easy to pick any given set of companies for my narrative though. I feel like that is just as dismissable.
  - joeax 11y ago
    37 Signals, Stack Exchange, Dell, IBM, I hear Microsoft has a few remote teams too. A lot of TC startups put "SF or remote" in their job ads. Go to Stack Exchange careers they place an emphasis on remote. On the flip side, there are a lot of companies that only make exceptions to hire remote workers, as in my case. But a bunch of my onsite counterparts prefer being onsite.
    - lukasm 11y ago
TeamMCS 11y ago
I love this idea and very much agree you end up with a much more modular, and proactive organisation with the right people. Owing to desk space issues, finance is moving more towards working-from-home. Honestly, in my next job I'd like to go 100% WFH - the amount of time saved from commuting is huge and, from an organisational perspective, if I get inspired over the weekend or the evening I'm much more likely just to get some bits and pieces done. Unfortunately there's still a lot of legacy managers and people who make the transition tricky. If you can start from the ground up, or at least foster it within teams that's great.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Yea, those "legacy managers"... always trying to harsh our mellow. That's surely the only thing getting in the way of the ideal 100% remote-work-everywhere nirvana. If remote working was really the slam-dunk productivity panacea that its supporters claim it is, then companies would be switching to it overnight to beat their "legacy" competitors. Shareholders would demand it! Soon, you'd have a hard time finding companies with physical offices. But that's not happening. Is it because of these old stodgy legacy managers, or could it be because there are major down sides to remote work that tend to get get glossed over by people singing its praises? What's more likely?
  - glogla 11y ago
    I don't think we can easily argue that "it this was good, people would have done it long time ago". Culture changes slowly, and people don't always make the best decisions.
    - ryandrake 11y ago
      The culture of "I want to make more money than my competitor" doesn't need to change. I can easily argue that if switching to remote work, in and of itself, were to produce clear, repeatable productivity gains that consistently outweighed the downsides, companies would switch to it very quickly.
Sawbones 11y ago
I would love to work for a remote company. I had partial remote work for awhile and wanted to just go full remote.
- HigginsNinja 11y ago
  http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Paylocity-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E29987_D_KO10,27.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Paylocity-Software-Engineer-...
- joeax 11y ago
  Someone shared this too: https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job
omouse 11y ago
I find that a remote culture is hard to build if half your office is remote and the other half is in the office.
- 49531 11y ago
  I currently work on a team that is about 50/50. For some reason it doesn't seem to create any issues. I think the reason is that the team has always had remote workers, so there was never a time where teams were 100% in office.
- HigginsNinja 11y ago
  We are approximately half remote actually. We just treat every interaction as if everyone were a remote employee. Obviously not EVERY reaction, but if that is the default, it's quite easy to sustain.
- fernandotakai 11y ago
  it can work as long as you don't treat the remote workers as second class citizens.
  - progmanal 11y ago
    On the other hand, it is annoying to be one of the people on site with a remote team in an environment where other divisions are not remote. In some cases you become the person that gets interrupted all the time while the remote workers get to be productive.
- Homunculiheaded 11y ago
  I've worked in this situation and it worked out great, and I've worked in this situation and it was terrible. There are a couple of things I would say are key: - Everyone has to use the same communication tools, ie everyone in the office has to be using Slack/Hipchat and regularly do hangouts with remote people - All meetings have to assume someone is going to be remote. It has to be burned into the culture that when you have a meeting a laptop is open and hangouts/gotomeeting/etc are running - Annual onsite is a must! I've been amazed how a few days of in person communication can form pretty deep bonds. Once that username has a face and some shared inside jokes they become human forever. Anyone more key on any team should also strive to make it out around quarterly. I think everyone has people they'd consider good friends that they only have met in person one or two times while attending a conference or visiting a far away friend, same goes for the office. - Let your local people work from home when it makes sense! Don't make your office people trudge through feet of snow while the remoters sip hot cocoa at home. In my experience most people working in the office actually like working in an office and most remoters like working remote. But, whenever possible, let the local people stay home if they need to wait for a package, take care of a sick kid, need some time to clear their head, the office is under construction etc. Even though it sounds like the smallest one, the chat one is actually one of bigger issues. If everyone is on Slack you'll find even people in the office start using it to communicate with people a few seats away for small stuff, sharing links, conversations you'd prefer to be quiet etc. And this eventually means that communicating with someone 10 ft and 10k miles away feels very similar.
49531 11y ago
I recently switched from a non-remote team to a remote one, and I can definitely echo these sentiments. The biggest difference I have seen is that merit seems to give more weight to a team member's position than politics.
pmikesell 11y ago
It doesn't have to be 100% one way or the other. I think the optimal solution might be something like 1 (or maybe 2) days per week in the office for planning and sync up, and then 3 days WFH. I'm sure it depends on the size or the organization and type of work being done (even depending on the type of software being written), but it's something that could be experimentally figure out.
- jon-wood 11y ago
  I currently do 2 days in the office, 2 at home, 1 off. While it is easier to have meetings while in the office it feels like most of the meetings I'm in could have just easily been a few emails, or shared Google Docs document which would better capture the process getting to any conclusions.
scottndecker 11y ago
The first four points are summarized in "Email is better than verbal communication." While email definitely has advantages, there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication. It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc. The last three points are much better (though I can't attest if they're true or not).
- boken 11y ago
  I agree with you. My experience with remote work has been touch-and-go, but it always helps when team members are mutually willing to communicate over the phone. Effective back-and-forth over email seems to be a rare skill. No matter how much time you put into refining a message, it is only ever one piece of a conversation. If there is more to say than just "Do this," or "I have done that"—if you need a back-and-forth—all email does is stretch the dialogue out. Answers come more slowly, and often as incompletely. And, as you say, tone is very hard to get right over email. I'm sure I've read at least a couple articles on HN about the tendency to read aggressiveness into concise emails.
  - frandroid 11y ago
    Email is simply not a conversation medium, and rarely even a discussion medium. It's a medium mostly useful to propagate information and meeting requests (where discussion happens).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ryanSrich 11y ago
  > there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication At the company I work for we use a combination of Slack and some video/voice tool (speak.io, hangouts, joinme, uberconf, teamspeak, etc. - we've used all of them) for any complex communication. Email is 100% external (customer) communication. > It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc While I don't think forming a bond with a co-worker is at all important you can supplement this with quarterly "work weeks" where everyone is in the same place working together 4-5 times per year. Also, I have to disagree that it's slower. Face to face communication often leads to wheel spinning and shooting the shit. Hardly anything gets done. Remote work is defined by communication, so it's much faster, and more effective.
dataker 11y ago
That's a broad statement: time-zones might make communication a lot harder and/or cultural differences(for other countries). Working in the U.S with someone from Australia or Asia is a lot harder than with someone down in Mexico or Canada.
dom96 11y ago
As someone who would be interested in working remotely, I have to ask: which companies would you say have a good remote culture?
- HigginsNinja 11y ago
  http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Paylocity-Software-Developer-Salaries-E29987_D_KO10,28.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Paylocity-Software-Developer...
- VLM 11y ago
  Which kind of companies? Big companies. Multinationals. Megacorporations. My coworkers in other states have no idea if I'm at home or work, and they have no idea where I am. Often enough I'm not sure what cities are involved much less office or home on on the road. This leads to a BIG social and cultural problem that it's director/vp privilege to have a boss/employee relationship across timezones, how dare those lowly scum cross timezones, next thing you know they'll be using the exec washroom, nobody under $250K/yr gets to work across state lines, etc. Also there's stealth WFH if everyone is expected to put in some hours while VPN in from home during emergencies, then weekly emergencies become BAU, then people are expected to VPN in when they're sick at home, next thing you know people are staying home and VPN in because they have a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, then people start going home after lunch and VPN in on a regular basis... You will save commute time money WRT rush hour slowdowns but you won't save many car-miles. Also look for professional, experienced managers. Noob managers will be lucky to achieve and measure trivial baby step metrics like "butt-hours in seats per week", although the pros will get stuff done without making graphs of tardiness infractions and dress code violations. There are numerous other advantages to working for professionals instead of amateur hour.
pcmaffey 11y ago
I've been a remote worker for almost 10 years. In fact, I hardly know what working in an office is like. I can say that remote working is not without its own set of challenges. Chief among them is the need for EXCELLENT communication skills. I've worked with supremely talented and previously successful teams that simply fall apart in a remote environment, because they don't understand the value of transparent communication. Working remotely, everyone relies almost entirely on the word of their coworkers, as its much more difficult for leaders/managers to get a feeling on their team. Like any successful team, it comes down to establishing trust. But with remote teams, there's much less margin for error.
andrewtbham 11y ago
My friend tony, that owns a startup called fleetio, made a compelling presentation about remote work and it's advantages. It also has lots of info on tools. http://www.slideshare.net/tonysummerville/tech-tools-for-building-and-managing-a-remote-culture http://www.slideshare.net/tonysummerville/tech-tools-for-bui...
andrewljohnson 11y ago
We've done both (office in Berkeley, but now two founders in Berkeley, and the other 7 or so around the US). A couple of points: a) It should be all remote, or all local. You ruin the fun for people if a chunk of the team if talking, and chat is dead. b) My co-founder/wife and I purposefully avoid shop talk, and keep it all in chat. c) Remote is a good life style for some people. We look for people who will be happy at home, people with lives and families, who don't need to meet friends to go out with and lovers at work. This fits our culture - we attract outdoors types, who like time to themselves. d) Some people are self-driven and make good remote workers. Some people need to be in an office and get constant nudging from physical social pressure (and their boss). e) Tools: weekly Google Hangout, frequent one-on-ones, Slack, Trello, Github - almost zero email.
- justonepost 11y ago
  a) Yep, I agree, all remote or all local. That's my experience as well. Mixing the two doesn't work very well at all. c/d) Yes, you definitely want mature people who understand what remote is all about. If you don't have that, it won't work. e) Zoom is pretty good. No email? Huh! That's a new wrinkle I haven't tried before.
  - andrewljohnson 11y ago
    There are very few things we want to email about that don't better fit in a Slack channel, or as a Trello card. Our Slack channels are: Dev, Comm, GIS, Recruiting, and Random We basically only email if an outside party sends us some big email to discuss.
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      Email tends to work better for things you want to archive. Especially if you're not actually paying for Slack.
  - gingerlime 11y ago
    Second time I see Zoom mentioned here, but never heard about it before. What's the benefits over Google Hangouts / Skype?
grumps 11y ago
They're are many downfalls with working remote. In the past year of being remote I've found that it can be very difficult to pick up on the attitude of a co-worker or boss. It also can make difficult conversations not go so well. People will also avoid having to have face to face conversations because they don't like confrontation. I like working remote, but I also think it's important that a "connection" be built with your co-workers and sometimes that just only partially happens over chat and hang outs.
copsarebastards 11y ago
Look, I get that working remotely is good for many workers, but let's admit that's why we're doing it instead of pretending it's about "getting a leg up on competition". > They prioritize communication and collaboration by necessity This is exactly what remote culture doesn’t do. A remote culture inherently has decided that being off-site is more important to them than being able to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily. > It is easy to reach out for help Easier than standing up and asking for help over the cubicle wall? No. I can see how the increased difficulty of communication could be arguably a better thing, but let’s not pretend it’s easier. > There is a lot less wasted communication This is true, but it’s balanced by the fact that the non-wasted communication costs a whole lot more. And I think it’s also an overstated claim: just because you can refer back to your communication doesn’t mean anyone actually can find the communications or actually does go back and refer to it. > There is a lot less posturing I can see how this is annoying, but I’m not sure how this relates to a claim of productivity. In the end, I’m not sure presenting ideas with logic is actually the best way to do things: often I’d rather just do what the best doers on the team suggest, with or without justification. The best plan is the one that gets the job done quickly and with quality, even if it’s one that’s hard to justify logically beforehand. Requiring logical justification for things means that you prioritize the talk of people who talk well over the intuition of people who are actually good at their jobs. It’s worth noting that posturing tends to be most effective for people who are respected by their teammates, which tends to correlate with being good at your job in technical fields. Posturing evolved as a behavior for a reason, and I’d not be so quick to discard it. Also, there’s an apparent contradiction between "Even if we are over-communicating, it is okay, because we aren't forcing a squadron of employees to sit in a meeting room pretending to be interested.” and "I have to believe that it has something to do with the fact that most of the effective communication is either written, or is done in large meetings where lots of people are watching.” Either your meetings are larger or they aren’t; don’t pick whichever fits the point you’re trying to make. > There is often a higher caliber of workers Uh, okay. If we’re allowed to make vague unjustified claims, I guess I can just counter with, “Remote work tends to lead to unhealthier workers because they don’t go outside”. > You get a huge portion of your life back This is also a pretty unjustified claim. When I worked from home I found that it was a lot harder to “turn off” when my workday was done. Citing commute times is a good justification for living near where you work, not necessarily for working remotely. I’m a 25 minute train ride from my work, and having an excuse to get up and go out is pretty good for me in general.
baby 11y ago
Curious about what the people at buffer think of this
discardorama 11y ago
I worked for a large company that had a somewhat flexible policy (if your manager allowed it, you could). I found that on the days I was working from home, I could get a lot more done. I was more relaxed, and highly productive. I didn't have to go through the morning ritual of chit-chat, coffee, etc. etc. Having said that: I also saw how it was being abused. There were some colleagues who were working side gigs while working remotely. If it's a highly specialized area, then it's hard for a manager to make sure you're pulling your weight. There were some stellar remote workers; and there were some total slackers. Just like with anything else in life, it's a mixed bag.
- joeax 11y ago
  > Having said that: I also saw how it was being abused. There are easy ways to ensure productivity. For example, using Skype and requiring offsite workers to be available (i.e. green status) throughout the day. If workers are not being productive at home it's management's fault for not laying out a culture and guidelines to ensure productivity.
gizi 11y ago
I've worked remotely for the last 10 years now. Existing businesses will probably stick to their existing practices until they die, while new startups which don't have too much baggage to drag around, may indeed see that the future is heavily biased in favour of working remote: - There is a higher caliber of workers worldwide than just next-doors (if the company is truly capable of distinguishing) - Some workers may conceivably even be cheaper (cheaper countries, but don't count too much on that for high calibre workers) - Part of their salary is that they get a huge portion of their life back (this has real cash value) - The tooling and overall technical management tends to be better, simply because it has to - Especially in an international context, both employer and employee avoid an impressive number of government regulations, including visas, work permits and so on. Even though an entirely remote company is more productive, I don't believe that existing on-site companies would be able to introduce it. I see them rather continuing to outsource while shrinking their head count year after year.
sulam 11y ago
The one quantitative thing I think you can say about companies with lots of remote workers is that they don't have to pay as much for engineers. Speaking as someone who lives in the Bay Area, that makes me less likely to work for such a company. Yes, I could move somewhere where the cost of living is lower, but I actually like it here, and I have yet to run across a company with a strong remote culture that doesn't use it as a cost-savings device (among other things).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pselbert 11y ago
I've been partially remote for the past 5 years, averaging 2-3 days a week in the office. During that time I've also had stints of being fully remote while overseas for a few months at a time. The fully remote time is vastly more productive, but could be very difficult regarding communication. The work environment wasn't designed to be remote-first, and this puts a strain on anybody who isn't in the office. In my experience remote all-the-way works wonderfully. Remote partially suffers around communication when the rest of the team doesn't emphasize asynchronous tools like chat/comments/email.
varelse 11y ago
I find that in the age of the open office, working remotely is the only time I'm really productive. I didn't mind working from an 8x8 cube, but my current tiny desk in a maze of desks, all alike, is the pits (cue some nimrod posturing about how this enhances agile/availability/WTFever). That said, I totally grok people who have a large social component to their dayjob seeing these things as a perk. I am not one of those people. I write code. It it isn't truly important, GO AWAY...
robohamburger 11y ago
As person who has spent half their career telecommuting and half in an open floor plan: it seems mostly like a series of trade offs. Being remote forces you to be more deliberate with communication. I tend to make more design docs and proposals than I think I otherwise would. Working in an open floor plan means you can randomly overhear things you are either passionate about or have expertise in and jump in. I suspect there is also an emotional and introvert/extrovert bit as well. Sometimes it is nice to be physically be around people working industriously on your same problem domain.

172 points by ScottWRobinson 11y ago

I happen to agree. As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers motivated and executing on time. Any advice?

TeamMCS 11y ago
Isn't that just a pacing issue. If there's enough discrete work going through the pipe line then burn-downs (or if you're not traditionally agile, targets) should be pretty reflective of your output. You have to be careful, but I wonder if giving a developer access to their own progress/burndown would be an encouragement for those who arn't quite so self motivated.
fweespeech 11y ago
> As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers motivated and executing on time. The only time I've seen this to be a "problem" is when one of the following is true: A) Non-technical people are responsible for the estimates and/or have the ability to make changes to the requirements without understanding the complexity of the new requirements. B) They are stuck fixing bugs instead of doing new feature development due to technical debt. C) There is a serious communication problem. D) People want fixed, written in stone deadlines before the prototyping is done when things are still too fluid for anything resembling a good time estimate is possible. For instance, the only deadline I've majorly missed at my present workplace is the one project I told my boss was impractical, a terrible idea, and to please give it to someone else because I don't have the temperament to handle such requests. I'm sure some "business" person responsible for it considers it a "motivation and executing on time" problem despite the fact I basically said this was a terrible idea in front of the entire IT department in an official meeting with minutes being taken. Are you completely certain none of these 4 exist as an employer?
- georgehotelling 11y ago
  A, B and D would be affecting on-site developers just as much as the remotes, but C (communication) is the thing that requires unique abilities for a remote worker. If either the worker or the company is not good at communicating, that will cause serious problems. Poor communication from the managers can easily cause poor motivation and execution problems from the workers. If a worker is not communicating blocks or reaching out for the help they need, that can also lead to those problems.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    Yes but I don't agree "C" is a "unique" ability for remotes. Our operations/IT stuff always has someone who is technically remote due to business travel. I have a side project with volunteers working on it remotely as well. I don't see it as a separate problem. People either can communicate effectively via text/phone....or they can't. In an office environment, you still need that. About 50% of my stakeholders are "remote" as they work in other companies many miles away.
allochthon 11y ago
> As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers ... executing on time. There's something off about this -- it has the whiff of micromanagement or waterfall; perhaps I'm misreading your point. Far better than micromanagement is hiring good, trustworthy people and collaborating with them together on incrementally building something out.
- 49531 11y ago
  I would echo this point, our remote team has hired good and bad and it's a lot more about the people and less about being remote. It does seem that remote works shines light on the core of a team members work ethic and productivity.
- noarchy 11y ago
  It could also have the whiff of an "Agile" team that has a crisis every 2 or 3 weeks, due to routinely setting unrealistic sprint goals. No, this isn't supposed to happen, but I've seen it at more than one shop, that's for sure.
  - allochthon 11y ago
    Yes, indeed. "Agile" can have its share of manufactured crises, too.
  - jacques_chester 11y ago
    Scrum is not bijective with Agile.
- curun1r 11y ago
  The motivational aspect is, in my experience, a consequence of working 100% from home. Spending that much time at home can make it hard for me to get stuff done. I'm perfectly capable of being productive when I work from home occasionally...possibly even more productive than I am when I'm in the office since I'm less distracted, but find that my productivity drops off considerably when I work predominantly from home. There's easy fixes for this--headphones, coffee shop Wi-Fi and a VPN connection work well for me--but I have to do something or I go stir crazy and can't get much done.
tdumitrescu 11y ago
Probably the answer is to have a non-technical manager _literally_ breathe down their necks, rather than over digital communication channels. /s i.e. I fail to see how this is a problem specific to remote work.
stephengillie 11y ago
How tight are your schedules? How much do you overcommit developer resources? How much do your salespeople promise that you can't realistically do? I just left a position where remote was impossible because of the workload. The office culture had strict hours, and developers were expected to work on new projects AND bug fix tickets at the same time. (They would tell the architect "You can use these 2 good developers this week" and then tell the developers "You can't work on the architect's project this week, you have to do bug fix tickets.") Essentially, a remote culture is a more laid-back culture. It's about herding the cats...not about herding cattle, or milking cats.
Beached 11y ago
You HAVE to have a very heavy heavy heavy hand in hiring. Hiring good is by far the best thing you can do, you could hiring the most brilliant coder in the world, but if he is a poor communicator and procrastinator, your SOL. For remote work, I look for hiring a personable motivated people, who are good at staying up on communication first, I can teach Tech, I don't want to teach someone to communicate or to stay on task. (This means they keep me informed by choice, not when I ask) Also, as the guy above me said, let them fail and dont over work them. Micro management is something that everyone has issues with, especially if your a new-ish manager, and especially if you are managing a remote team, and if you pile 45-50 hours of work on them in a 50 hour work week, they will become disinterested, and just show up put in the hours and leave without any regards to quality to deadlines.
ryanSrich 11y ago
> we've found it hard to always keep our developers motivated and executing on time. Any advice This isn't a remote problem. It's a hiring one. You need to hire better developers.
logfromblammo 11y ago
When herding cats, it is better to carry a can opener than a cattle prod. While this is difficult for traditional management styles to grasp, it is most useful to just ignore the down times and instead do absolutely everything in your power to encourage the ultra-productive "flow" state to happen as often as possible. The necessary conditions will vary by developer. Some people thrive with regular teammate feedback. Others like to pull a lonely all-nighter. Some will do their best thinking on a treadmill or in the shower, then sit down and execute. Some perform work-related rituals, like the morning coffee ceremony. There is no single thing you can do, other than getting to know your co-workers. Once you know them well enough, it should be obvious what you need to do. It may well be that the best way to motivate one of your developers is to institute timelines, milestones, and deadlines, but another will just switch off the creativity and motivation because of the micromanagement, and they won't come back until well after you remove the artificial pressure. There's no magic bullet. Sorry.
sankho 11y ago
One thing I've never heard from a manager at an in office gig - "my team is ultra motivated and always, without fault, executes on time. No problems there!" My point being that with software development, even in an office, you'll still have to deal with lack of motivation and missing deadlines, and will never feel totally accomplished here. Working locations become a correlation, not a causation.

jasode 11y ago

>Companies that support remote workers and do it well seem to have a huge leg up on the competition. I'm a remote worker and I'm definitely spoiled by not having to deal with open office plans and disruptions. That said, I see no evidence that the article's statement is true. (I want it to be true, but that doesn't change the fact that so far, I see zero evidence that it is true.) You can't convince people with just rhetoric. Instead, show compelling examples of how Company-A-with-mostly-remote-workers is beating the pants off of the Company-B-with-onsite-workers. Show that RemoteWorkerCompany is 10x more innovative, delivers 10x faster, has 10x profits, etc etc. I suspect finding comparisons that control for other variables are hard to come up with. Nevertheless, that's what it's going to take to convince managers. A bunch of programmers writing a thousand essays on the "advantages" of remote workers is just preaching to people like me who happen to like working from home.

fweespeech 11y ago
Do you know of any blogging platform that beats Wordpress from 2005-2010? ;) After 2010, Tumblr was pretty big but it was really a different project. http://automattic.com/about/ http://automattic.com/about/ There is also that.
HigginsNinja 11y ago
True, maybe a good follow up to this would be some use case studies. It would be so easy to pick any given set of companies for my narrative though. I feel like that is just as dismissable.
- joeax 11y ago
  37 Signals, Stack Exchange, Dell, IBM, I hear Microsoft has a few remote teams too. A lot of TC startups put "SF or remote" in their job ads. Go to Stack Exchange careers they place an emphasis on remote. On the flip side, there are a lot of companies that only make exceptions to hire remote workers, as in my case. But a bunch of my onsite counterparts prefer being onsite.
  - lukasm 11y ago

TeamMCS 11y ago

I love this idea and very much agree you end up with a much more modular, and proactive organisation with the right people. Owing to desk space issues, finance is moving more towards working-from-home. Honestly, in my next job I'd like to go 100% WFH - the amount of time saved from commuting is huge and, from an organisational perspective, if I get inspired over the weekend or the evening I'm much more likely just to get some bits and pieces done. Unfortunately there's still a lot of legacy managers and people who make the transition tricky. If you can start from the ground up, or at least foster it within teams that's great.

ryandrake 11y ago
Yea, those "legacy managers"... always trying to harsh our mellow. That's surely the only thing getting in the way of the ideal 100% remote-work-everywhere nirvana. If remote working was really the slam-dunk productivity panacea that its supporters claim it is, then companies would be switching to it overnight to beat their "legacy" competitors. Shareholders would demand it! Soon, you'd have a hard time finding companies with physical offices. But that's not happening. Is it because of these old stodgy legacy managers, or could it be because there are major down sides to remote work that tend to get get glossed over by people singing its praises? What's more likely?
- glogla 11y ago
  I don't think we can easily argue that "it this was good, people would have done it long time ago". Culture changes slowly, and people don't always make the best decisions.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    The culture of "I want to make more money than my competitor" doesn't need to change. I can easily argue that if switching to remote work, in and of itself, were to produce clear, repeatable productivity gains that consistently outweighed the downsides, companies would switch to it very quickly.

Sawbones 11y ago

I would love to work for a remote company. I had partial remote work for awhile and wanted to just go full remote.

HigginsNinja 11y ago
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Paylocity-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E29987_D_KO10,27.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Paylocity-Software-Engineer-...
joeax 11y ago
Someone shared this too: https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

omouse 11y ago

I find that a remote culture is hard to build if half your office is remote and the other half is in the office.

49531 11y ago
I currently work on a team that is about 50/50. For some reason it doesn't seem to create any issues. I think the reason is that the team has always had remote workers, so there was never a time where teams were 100% in office.
HigginsNinja 11y ago
We are approximately half remote actually. We just treat every interaction as if everyone were a remote employee. Obviously not EVERY reaction, but if that is the default, it's quite easy to sustain.
fernandotakai 11y ago
it can work as long as you don't treat the remote workers as second class citizens.
- progmanal 11y ago
  On the other hand, it is annoying to be one of the people on site with a remote team in an environment where other divisions are not remote. In some cases you become the person that gets interrupted all the time while the remote workers get to be productive.
Homunculiheaded 11y ago
I've worked in this situation and it worked out great, and I've worked in this situation and it was terrible. There are a couple of things I would say are key: - Everyone has to use the same communication tools, ie everyone in the office has to be using Slack/Hipchat and regularly do hangouts with remote people - All meetings have to assume someone is going to be remote. It has to be burned into the culture that when you have a meeting a laptop is open and hangouts/gotomeeting/etc are running - Annual onsite is a must! I've been amazed how a few days of in person communication can form pretty deep bonds. Once that username has a face and some shared inside jokes they become human forever. Anyone more key on any team should also strive to make it out around quarterly. I think everyone has people they'd consider good friends that they only have met in person one or two times while attending a conference or visiting a far away friend, same goes for the office. - Let your local people work from home when it makes sense! Don't make your office people trudge through feet of snow while the remoters sip hot cocoa at home. In my experience most people working in the office actually like working in an office and most remoters like working remote. But, whenever possible, let the local people stay home if they need to wait for a package, take care of a sick kid, need some time to clear their head, the office is under construction etc. Even though it sounds like the smallest one, the chat one is actually one of bigger issues. If everyone is on Slack you'll find even people in the office start using it to communicate with people a few seats away for small stuff, sharing links, conversations you'd prefer to be quiet etc. And this eventually means that communicating with someone 10 ft and 10k miles away feels very similar.

49531 11y ago

I recently switched from a non-remote team to a remote one, and I can definitely echo these sentiments. The biggest difference I have seen is that merit seems to give more weight to a team member's position than politics.

pmikesell 11y ago

It doesn't have to be 100% one way or the other. I think the optimal solution might be something like 1 (or maybe 2) days per week in the office for planning and sync up, and then 3 days WFH. I'm sure it depends on the size or the organization and type of work being done (even depending on the type of software being written), but it's something that could be experimentally figure out.

jon-wood 11y ago
I currently do 2 days in the office, 2 at home, 1 off. While it is easier to have meetings while in the office it feels like most of the meetings I'm in could have just easily been a few emails, or shared Google Docs document which would better capture the process getting to any conclusions.

scottndecker 11y ago

The first four points are summarized in "Email is better than verbal communication." While email definitely has advantages, there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication. It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc. The last three points are much better (though I can't attest if they're true or not).

boken 11y ago
I agree with you. My experience with remote work has been touch-and-go, but it always helps when team members are mutually willing to communicate over the phone. Effective back-and-forth over email seems to be a rare skill. No matter how much time you put into refining a message, it is only ever one piece of a conversation. If there is more to say than just "Do this," or "I have done that"—if you need a back-and-forth—all email does is stretch the dialogue out. Answers come more slowly, and often as incompletely. And, as you say, tone is very hard to get right over email. I'm sure I've read at least a couple articles on HN about the tendency to read aggressiveness into concise emails.
- frandroid 11y ago
  Email is simply not a conversation medium, and rarely even a discussion medium. It's a medium mostly useful to propagate information and meeting requests (where discussion happens).
deleted 11y ago
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ryanSrich 11y ago
> there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication At the company I work for we use a combination of Slack and some video/voice tool (speak.io, hangouts, joinme, uberconf, teamspeak, etc. - we've used all of them) for any complex communication. Email is 100% external (customer) communication. > It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc While I don't think forming a bond with a co-worker is at all important you can supplement this with quarterly "work weeks" where everyone is in the same place working together 4-5 times per year. Also, I have to disagree that it's slower. Face to face communication often leads to wheel spinning and shooting the shit. Hardly anything gets done. Remote work is defined by communication, so it's much faster, and more effective.

dataker 11y ago

That's a broad statement: time-zones might make communication a lot harder and/or cultural differences(for other countries). Working in the U.S with someone from Australia or Asia is a lot harder than with someone down in Mexico or Canada.

dom96 11y ago

As someone who would be interested in working remotely, I have to ask: which companies would you say have a good remote culture?

HigginsNinja 11y ago
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Paylocity-Software-Developer-Salaries-E29987_D_KO10,28.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Paylocity-Software-Developer...
VLM 11y ago
Which kind of companies? Big companies. Multinationals. Megacorporations. My coworkers in other states have no idea if I'm at home or work, and they have no idea where I am. Often enough I'm not sure what cities are involved much less office or home on on the road. This leads to a BIG social and cultural problem that it's director/vp privilege to have a boss/employee relationship across timezones, how dare those lowly scum cross timezones, next thing you know they'll be using the exec washroom, nobody under $250K/yr gets to work across state lines, etc. Also there's stealth WFH if everyone is expected to put in some hours while VPN in from home during emergencies, then weekly emergencies become BAU, then people are expected to VPN in when they're sick at home, next thing you know people are staying home and VPN in because they have a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, then people start going home after lunch and VPN in on a regular basis... You will save commute time money WRT rush hour slowdowns but you won't save many car-miles. Also look for professional, experienced managers. Noob managers will be lucky to achieve and measure trivial baby step metrics like "butt-hours in seats per week", although the pros will get stuff done without making graphs of tardiness infractions and dress code violations. There are numerous other advantages to working for professionals instead of amateur hour.

pcmaffey 11y ago

I've been a remote worker for almost 10 years. In fact, I hardly know what working in an office is like. I can say that remote working is not without its own set of challenges. Chief among them is the need for EXCELLENT communication skills. I've worked with supremely talented and previously successful teams that simply fall apart in a remote environment, because they don't understand the value of transparent communication. Working remotely, everyone relies almost entirely on the word of their coworkers, as its much more difficult for leaders/managers to get a feeling on their team. Like any successful team, it comes down to establishing trust. But with remote teams, there's much less margin for error.

andrewtbham 11y ago

My friend tony, that owns a startup called fleetio, made a compelling presentation about remote work and it's advantages. It also has lots of info on tools. http://www.slideshare.net/tonysummerville/tech-tools-for-building-and-managing-a-remote-culture http://www.slideshare.net/tonysummerville/tech-tools-for-bui...

andrewljohnson 11y ago

We've done both (office in Berkeley, but now two founders in Berkeley, and the other 7 or so around the US). A couple of points: a) It should be all remote, or all local. You ruin the fun for people if a chunk of the team if talking, and chat is dead. b) My co-founder/wife and I purposefully avoid shop talk, and keep it all in chat. c) Remote is a good life style for some people. We look for people who will be happy at home, people with lives and families, who don't need to meet friends to go out with and lovers at work. This fits our culture - we attract outdoors types, who like time to themselves. d) Some people are self-driven and make good remote workers. Some people need to be in an office and get constant nudging from physical social pressure (and their boss). e) Tools: weekly Google Hangout, frequent one-on-ones, Slack, Trello, Github - almost zero email.

justonepost 11y ago
a) Yep, I agree, all remote or all local. That's my experience as well. Mixing the two doesn't work very well at all. c/d) Yes, you definitely want mature people who understand what remote is all about. If you don't have that, it won't work. e) Zoom is pretty good. No email? Huh! That's a new wrinkle I haven't tried before.
- andrewljohnson 11y ago
  There are very few things we want to email about that don't better fit in a Slack channel, or as a Trello card. Our Slack channels are: Dev, Comm, GIS, Recruiting, and Random We basically only email if an outside party sends us some big email to discuss.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Email tends to work better for things you want to archive. Especially if you're not actually paying for Slack.
- gingerlime 11y ago
  Second time I see Zoom mentioned here, but never heard about it before. What's the benefits over Google Hangouts / Skype?

grumps 11y ago

They're are many downfalls with working remote. In the past year of being remote I've found that it can be very difficult to pick up on the attitude of a co-worker or boss. It also can make difficult conversations not go so well. People will also avoid having to have face to face conversations because they don't like confrontation. I like working remote, but I also think it's important that a "connection" be built with your co-workers and sometimes that just only partially happens over chat and hang outs.

copsarebastards 11y ago

Look, I get that working remotely is good for many workers, but let's admit that's why we're doing it instead of pretending it's about "getting a leg up on competition". > They prioritize communication and collaboration by necessity This is exactly what remote culture doesn’t do. A remote culture inherently has decided that being off-site is more important to them than being able to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily. > It is easy to reach out for help Easier than standing up and asking for help over the cubicle wall? No. I can see how the increased difficulty of communication could be arguably a better thing, but let’s not pretend it’s easier. > There is a lot less wasted communication This is true, but it’s balanced by the fact that the non-wasted communication costs a whole lot more. And I think it’s also an overstated claim: just because you can refer back to your communication doesn’t mean anyone actually can find the communications or actually does go back and refer to it. > There is a lot less posturing I can see how this is annoying, but I’m not sure how this relates to a claim of productivity. In the end, I’m not sure presenting ideas with logic is actually the best way to do things: often I’d rather just do what the best doers on the team suggest, with or without justification. The best plan is the one that gets the job done quickly and with quality, even if it’s one that’s hard to justify logically beforehand. Requiring logical justification for things means that you prioritize the talk of people who talk well over the intuition of people who are actually good at their jobs. It’s worth noting that posturing tends to be most effective for people who are respected by their teammates, which tends to correlate with being good at your job in technical fields. Posturing evolved as a behavior for a reason, and I’d not be so quick to discard it. Also, there’s an apparent contradiction between "Even if we are over-communicating, it is okay, because we aren't forcing a squadron of employees to sit in a meeting room pretending to be interested.” and "I have to believe that it has something to do with the fact that most of the effective communication is either written, or is done in large meetings where lots of people are watching.” Either your meetings are larger or they aren’t; don’t pick whichever fits the point you’re trying to make. > There is often a higher caliber of workers Uh, okay. If we’re allowed to make vague unjustified claims, I guess I can just counter with, “Remote work tends to lead to unhealthier workers because they don’t go outside”. > You get a huge portion of your life back This is also a pretty unjustified claim. When I worked from home I found that it was a lot harder to “turn off” when my workday was done. Citing commute times is a good justification for living near where you work, not necessarily for working remotely. I’m a 25 minute train ride from my work, and having an excuse to get up and go out is pretty good for me in general.

baby 11y ago

Curious about what the people at buffer think of this

discardorama 11y ago

I worked for a large company that had a somewhat flexible policy (if your manager allowed it, you could). I found that on the days I was working from home, I could get a lot more done. I was more relaxed, and highly productive. I didn't have to go through the morning ritual of chit-chat, coffee, etc. etc. Having said that: I also saw how it was being abused. There were some colleagues who were working side gigs while working remotely. If it's a highly specialized area, then it's hard for a manager to make sure you're pulling your weight. There were some stellar remote workers; and there were some total slackers. Just like with anything else in life, it's a mixed bag.

joeax 11y ago
> Having said that: I also saw how it was being abused. There are easy ways to ensure productivity. For example, using Skype and requiring offsite workers to be available (i.e. green status) throughout the day. If workers are not being productive at home it's management's fault for not laying out a culture and guidelines to ensure productivity.

gizi 11y ago

I've worked remotely for the last 10 years now. Existing businesses will probably stick to their existing practices until they die, while new startups which don't have too much baggage to drag around, may indeed see that the future is heavily biased in favour of working remote: - There is a higher caliber of workers worldwide than just next-doors (if the company is truly capable of distinguishing) - Some workers may conceivably even be cheaper (cheaper countries, but don't count too much on that for high calibre workers) - Part of their salary is that they get a huge portion of their life back (this has real cash value) - The tooling and overall technical management tends to be better, simply because it has to - Especially in an international context, both employer and employee avoid an impressive number of government regulations, including visas, work permits and so on. Even though an entirely remote company is more productive, I don't believe that existing on-site companies would be able to introduce it. I see them rather continuing to outsource while shrinking their head count year after year.

sulam 11y ago

The one quantitative thing I think you can say about companies with lots of remote workers is that they don't have to pay as much for engineers. Speaking as someone who lives in the Bay Area, that makes me less likely to work for such a company. Yes, I could move somewhere where the cost of living is lower, but I actually like it here, and I have yet to run across a company with a strong remote culture that doesn't use it as a cost-savings device (among other things).

deleted 11y ago

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pselbert 11y ago

I've been partially remote for the past 5 years, averaging 2-3 days a week in the office. During that time I've also had stints of being fully remote while overseas for a few months at a time. The fully remote time is vastly more productive, but could be very difficult regarding communication. The work environment wasn't designed to be remote-first, and this puts a strain on anybody who isn't in the office. In my experience remote all-the-way works wonderfully. Remote partially suffers around communication when the rest of the team doesn't emphasize asynchronous tools like chat/comments/email.

varelse 11y ago

I find that in the age of the open office, working remotely is the only time I'm really productive. I didn't mind working from an 8x8 cube, but my current tiny desk in a maze of desks, all alike, is the pits (cue some nimrod posturing about how this enhances agile/availability/WTFever). That said, I totally grok people who have a large social component to their dayjob seeing these things as a perk. I am not one of those people. I write code. It it isn't truly important, GO AWAY...

robohamburger 11y ago

As person who has spent half their career telecommuting and half in an open floor plan: it seems mostly like a series of trade offs. Being remote forces you to be more deliberate with communication. I tend to make more design docs and proposals than I think I otherwise would. Working in an open floor plan means you can randomly overhear things you are either passionate about or have expertise in and jump in. I suspect there is also an emotional and introvert/extrovert bit as well. Sometimes it is nice to be physically be around people working industriously on your same problem domain.