I usually appreciate a good semantic argument, but not really sure what it adds in this context? I think the root of every conversation on "remote", "distributed", or "agile" working is not how it's perceived from a nomenclature perspective, but that it's something that has to be open to everyone. You need to work somewhere where the default is non-location, only-core-hours specific, otherwise it falls down.
Am fortunate to work in a place that offers "agile" working (it's not a developer focused environment, so that word isn't loaded for us). You go where you need to to get the job done, within a set of core hours work how you need to. You can work from home independently for days or weeks on end, or you can turn up to a desk every day, or you can collaborate in a meeting room, on Skype, or in a cafe.
We have an HQ, but not enough desks for everyone to turn up every day, so there's an expectation of being fluid in how you work. Every meeting has a video conference link, and very few decisions are made by the proverbial watercooler. It takes time and discipline to make it work, but that's spread by default and expected across the entire workforce.
As a long time remote worker, I've found that what seems like a hair-splitty difference can actually be a deep insight into the company's culture, and how it will affect your work experience.
Distributed teams develop a culture of communication that does not rely on frequent face-to-face contact. I personally suspect that they tend to be even more productive than completely co-located teams, because, based on a sample size of one, I've seen that the communication methods they develop will require fewer person-hours to share more information at higher fidelity.
"Remote" tends to imply a large chunk of the team is co-located, and one or more of the members are not. My experience here is that the remote people tend to not get the memo, or people fail to invite them to meetings because they don't want to bother with the conference room's videoconferencing equipment, or they do invite the remote folks but then the first 15 minutes of the meeting is devoted to figuring out how to work the Polycom system, etc.
I had the pleasure of working on a distributed team that became a team with remote workers as a result of being acquired by a company that decided to only hire new people to work in their home office. It was impressive how quickly things fell apart after that.
(Edit: This isn't to say that P's team isn't working well with a flexible approach, but it sounds like there's a big difference between it and many other non-distributed teams that have remote work: Everyone is in it together.)
It seems a bit more like a rebranding to me. The name matters when deep understanding does not. When the major employers in your industry turn aside from "remote work", because their management culture can't make it work for them, there may be strategic value in saying "We don't have remote workers; we have a distributed team."
It's a way of distancing yourself from the failures of companies that tried remote without actually committing to it. You signal that you're all in on remote, and structure your leases such that moving back to co-location is impractical, at the least.
You have to do that, because no one in their right mind will believe that they are valued equally when the company has 90 co-located employees and 10 remote employees. No, this is not the "remote work" you may have been burned by before. This is different. This actually works.
I think it's only worth having the semantic argument, in this case, because of the established equity (whether negative or positive) of the term "remote". There are a lot of implications that go along with that word and, as someone who's struggling to get the rest of my organization to adopt this paradigm shift, my team gets a bad rap from people because we're all branded as "millennials" (in a very negative sense) simply because we're able to perform and do all of our work fluidly. We don't have requirements that people have to work from the office or work remotely so everyone has the choice to do whatever works for them. Some people prefer coming into the office because it's less distracting and others "need" that mental separation from their home life and that's fine. For others in our org, though, there's this negative perception that surrounds it as if there's no accountability and that we're all just too lazy or unmotivated to actually come into the office or, worse yet, that we're all somehow afraid of face-to-face interaction. People seem to think that you lose interpersonal connection with people when "remote" work is part of the strategy so I think framing this as "distributed" work is really just to try and remove the way the work is done from people's (mostly older, non-agile people) perceptions of what they think is actually happening.
- If you're single, working at an office is good for you. Surround yourself with people who share a common interest. Yeah, it's work, but I'm sure you'll meet people who have similar interests outside of work. Go share a 2 bedroom apartment with someone else in downtown and enjoy the social life.
- If you're married (or even with kids), remote work is what you should be looking for so that you take away the bad energy you collect at the office and you don't bring it back home. You can spend more time with your family which is what matters the most. The bad energy includes a long commute to get to work since you can't afford living next to the office. Competitive environment and politics. Dress code, loud open space environments where you can't get anything done, constant distraction, having to fake working 8h straight sitting in front of a screen while anyone can look over your shoulders. You need to be able to afford a bigger home to host your family so you need to move far from your office.
You can get flexibility in both, not only remotely. As long as you're not forced to commute more than 30 min to work, usually Tech giants are flexible companies in terms of hours, etc.
The primary difficulties i have with remote work are linked:
1. I usually wind up alphabetizing my socks at some point.
2. a lack of face to face contact and the setting of being in my own space keeps me in a semi-permanent doubt/guilt cycle about my work quality and how my effort and reponsiveness is being perceived.
Working remotely does NOT mean working from home. I rent an office locally to resolve this issue (my company happens to pay for it), but the bottom line is, I don't like merging my personal life with my professional life so I avoid that.
The second issue is a personal one, and not exclusive to those that work remotely.
I’ve been working remotely for just a few months shy of 5 years. I’ve moved from coast to coast in that time. I’ve held 4 different positions in the same company. The _only_ thing that has worked for #2 is relying less on Slack and email and more on phone calls. It completely eliminates the guilt factor. I encourage everyone on my team to be more open to phone calls during the day. No real work gets done on slack. Call each other.
It helps if everyone's work is public and planned ahead of time. That way everyone knows what you're supposed to be accomplishing and they also know whether it is being accomplished. There should be no room for doubt about quality if the work is peer reviewed.
If having alphabetized socks keeps you happier in your space, then that's a good thing, right? :)
That's funny as it's the exact opposite of the problem I have. When I'm in an office I feel:
1. Totally unable to take care of home chores and errands. Often falling way behind on organizational or personal administrative tasks.
2. Fully exploited by my work place. I know I don't need 8 hours a day to be very productive. If I'm not working from home on my own schedule, I feel taken advantage of.
not being snarky here, maybe consider a therapist? both of those are in-your-head type problems.
in fact, in general, maybe a regular therapy session should be considered a standard part of remote work. in-office we all use our coworkers as a social support network whether we mean to or not, so it makes sense that many of us would need an alternative to help cover that gap.
I'm not even saying that it'd be a good thing (replacing a dozen interpersonal relationships with one) but its a hedge.
I know what you mean, what works for me is going to a coworking location every so often. There i get some social contact with other professionals and it really helps. As for boredom, that's something i really have to stay on top of carefully. If I don't watch it, i'll end up creating work for myself and then when a bunch of regular work comes my way i'm overwhelmed.
I'm currently suffering a similar situation. My entire team are co-located and I work remotely. The timezone difference means there's no overlap unless I move my hours around. This leads to split shifts or longer working days. I also have to attend these meetings otherwise the lack of face-to-face means I lose out on a lot of updates.
Due to other aspects of my personal life I feel like my mind is completely spiralling into a black hole. Lack of seeing my team/manager day to day means they won't see this happening, and I also find it difficult to bring up due to limited contact time between my manager and I.
If anyone has any experience of suggestions, I couldn't be more open to them right now.
>2. a lack of face to face contact and the setting of being in my own space keeps me in a semi-permanent doubt/guilt cycle about my work quality and how my effort and reponsiveness is being perceived.
This seems like a personal issue rather than an issue with the concept of working from home. For me, personally, I don't care about when/how people work as long as they're delivering on what I'm asking from them. I may just be extremely fortunate that my team is very responsive but I never have issues with being available for my team or them being available for me and that kind of negates any kind of guilt cycle there could be.
The most annoying thing about the tech giants that askew remote is that they also choose to locate themselves in the most expensive cities in the country.
If someone who's created that much value is not able to afford an area then it's insulting that tech giants expect us to move there (or have a 2 hour commute to somewhere affordable).
There's this terrible myth that I want to kill; that software engineering is a well-paid field. That's a lie.
Here's something pharmacists, account managers, farmers can afford: 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom houses near where they work.
We can't. We're asked to live in apartments in Jersey and commute 45 minutes to Manhattan every day.
Or we work remotely and are expected to take a smaller wage, where the company can't wait to get big enough so that it can force us all to move.
As somebody who is currently working remotely, I think this is a decent take. A distributed culture can definitely get better results than a remote one. But there's something in the section on collaboration I want to take issue with:
> Product Management is mostly about consistent execution of plans, not painting high-level visions.
It's a common view that software developers are an output device, like a printer. You tell them what to build by sending them very detailed instructions. They follow the instructions to the letter, and their work is judged by compliance. Perfection is perfectly conforming to some one else's plan.
I think this is bunk. It might have made a little sense when releases were every 18 months to 3 years. But in an age where companies are releasing dozens of times per day [1], it's foolish. Perfectly following a plan means you believe nobody will learn anything during the time it takes to follow the plan. But if you are releasing early and often, you can learn a ton from users. You can be much more innovative and much more effective than competition.
That only happens, though, if you treat team members not as rote plan-followers but as creative professionals who are deep collaborators. Where vision isn't something a few HiPPOs hammer out in exclusive twice-annual sessions, but where everyone constantly participates and refines it. If a company's process has already shut down collaboration, then of course the difficulties of remote collaboration aren't a problem. The challenge -- still unsolved, I think -- is how to maintain both a high level of collaboration and fast iteration without having to have everyone together.
I absolutely detest every single aspect of remote work. Every time my coworkers or I wfh (and all companies I worked were very lax as to when you can wfh) small, tiny communication problems start occurring that bite us in the future. I find it easier to motivate myself in the office, with people, free snacks/food. I don't think slack/hangouts is a replacement for face-to-face conversation. I cannot even imagine working remote full time. It's not just that I don't trust myself, I don't trust other people too.
Remote working might not be for everybody.. and that is okay. There are plenty of people who cannot make themselves go to the gym on their own, they won't travel alone, etc. And plenty of people who do.
> It's not just that I don't trust myself, I don't trust other people too.
This sentiment seems to say that you don't trust your colleagues in general, and that doesn't really make a difference remote or at the job. There are plenty of "chair warmers" at every office...
What is the difference of working remotely and working in office with your headphones on, only using slack to communicate? I know several places like that.
I’ve worked full time remotely for the last 6 months it’s been absolutely wondrous. I would hate to have to commute and go back to an office.
This is currently the main impediment to a remote (distributed) organization I'm sure. I'm however also convinced it's a problem that will eventually be overcome, as savings/benefits of a distributed organization become evident while broadband infrastructure continues to penetrate the remotest (and cheapest) of places, and as new generations becomes accustomed to it. FWIW.
You are getting a barrage of comments telling you that you are the problem, so let me just say I completely agree with you.
I have multiple colleagues who just casually disappear from the office (sorry, "work from home") for days to weeks and it's beyond irritating and disruptive to the rest of us.
Maybe I’m just a grouch in general, but I pray for a time when we have sufficient data available that this ceaseless and monotonous drone of posts about whether remote work is the best thing since sliced bread or if it’s the 7th sign of the apocalypse can just all be replaced by “here are the data and there are some pretty clear conclusions that answer questions X, Y, and Z”.
Anyone who knows more about this than I do, are we close to that day?
Since, I suspect the answer tends tobe driven by the culture of an organisation, and within individual teams within it, and by the proclivities of individual workers, I fear you may be waiting a long time.
Data would be nice. Open source projects have been studied to some extent looking for communication patterns but, of course, they're probably not representative. The bottom line is that it's going to vary a lot by company culture, what a group does (right now), what type of project is it, historical happenstance, individual preference, etc. I've worked more remote than not for well over a decade but it has varied for a variety of reasons. I've also known people in very similar roles who just preferred to come into the office.
I'm convinced it's possible for a business to work in a distributed manner, but I think there are certain business scenarios (and/or persons' personality types/collaboration styles) where it's problematic. Anecdote:
I've been in two startups, one working remotely ("distributed") and one working in the room with the CEO.
The degree of situational awareness was very different.
When I was sitting 5 feet from the CEO, I knew the company was in the tank and in grave danger of going under. We turned it around.
When I was remote, based on the daily/weekly phone calls I knew the project I was working on was in trouble and way behind, but had no idea till the CEO drove up to meet me that he and the other execs had no salary for 3 months and the company was out of money. (They found a buyer for a pittance within a year to save face.)
I had a sense of urgency in both cases... but the urgency was different when in-person. And the awareness was WAY different.
Yeah, this is actually a really good point and I didn't notice it before - "remote" is a relative word and implies there is a place that you're not which is considered the center of action.
But whatever word is used.. maybe it won't matter for that much longer? I think another thing that will be interesting to watch is if/how quickly the extra word "remote"/"distributed"/etc disappears because it becomes redundant or outmoded.
Think of the internet: every service on the internet was once "e-{service}". Over time that mostly just became "service", because the fact you are on the internet is now assumed, and doesn't have to be qualified. Indeed, if you're not on the internet that might be the thing you have to qualify now.
Will we see job listings in 10-15 years with "Engineer (Colocated Office)"?
"...That said, I just don’t encounter the need for deep strategy and vision-setting sessions with cross-functional teams of my colleagues on a frequent basis. ..."
And you won't, either.
I think this is very simple. Either you are a distributed team working on digital artifacts that live primarily online .... or you are a cross-functional team trying to creatively solve a problem for somebody.
If you know what you're doing, the solution is locked in, and all you're accomplishing by showing up somewhere is moving cards around on a wall? Stay home. If you don't know what you're doing -- requirements are in flux, the customer can't decide, the project is high-risk/high-stress, etc? Show up where the other people are.
And it doesn't have to be one way or the other. I've worked great projects where we all co-located, got into a groove, then finished it up from home -- only to repeat when the next big hunk of problems showed up.
So many of these tech essays seem to based on turning the contrast way up, insisting that the answer must be X or Y, then defending it. Why can't it be both? Seeing success in teams working both ways, wouldn't the more logical position be that in some cases each has its advantages?
Remote (or distributed, as article is advocating to call it) work will not fit everyone's style. It requires certain level of self discipline and recognition that the one needs to develop certain habits in order to be able to efficiently deliver work while doing this remotely.
What I noticed is that in early days of my startup when I was working remotely I was able to contribute much more than now, when I'm required to work from the (open plan) office. Working remotely gives flexibility on work hours (i.e. I could do normal 9-5 and then in the evening I usually checked in to add some extra but I could do that as I did not have to wake up early in the morning in order to commute to the office).
Working remotely makes it more challenging (for some) to resist temptation to procrastinate. And also it requires leaders to understand how to measure the output (although, of course, leaders need to understand that despite the fact where does the worker deliver their work from).
That floating header on the site is amazingly annoying.
Reading, and scrolling down a bit on the mouse, so the content I'm reading reaches the top of the page. Maybe a second after I stop scrolling, boom, suddenly the header re-appears out of nowhere and covers right what I'm reading. I actually gave up reading the content, not because I wasn't interested, but because that damn header kept hiding the content.
Remote work is fine if you dont mind being pigeon holed into one range of tasks, paid well relative to your cost of living, have no career advancement, and want to wear whatever you want at work.
I've ran a distributed company for about 6 years now.
We started as a conventional company located in San Francisco.
For some context - we're https://www.datastreamer.io ... we provide data feeds around blogs, news, and social media to search engines, and data analytics companies. We have about a petabyte of content in our index now.
Our SF location was SWEET. Downtown. 100 year old building. Brick walls, super nice place - until they tore it down to build the new Transbay terminal.
Long story short but at that point we decided to give distributed work a try.
Back then there weren't many companies doing it but I decided to embrace the benefits of it in terms of what it could do for my company.
This isn't discussed often but there are actually PERKS to distributed work.
If your team is in different timezones. This means you can coordinate ops so that if there's an emergency no one actually has to wake up.
This has massive long term implications for morale and hiring!
You can now hire ops people and tell them that they never have to be woken up in the middle of the night.
We will often have issues with data indexing of sites at odd hours. We can't control when a site being indexed breaks so it can happen at unusual times. Usually at 5AM when I'm sleeping.
One downside is that each country has its own hurdles for hiring.
My advice is find 2-4 countries (including your own) that are close to your timezone. You will have banking, political, and infrastructure issues so limiting the number of distinct countries you work with reduces your risk.
We prefer the US, Poland, Germany, Spain, and Brazil.
It definitely takes some re-thinking in terms of tools. Lots of video conferencing. Lots of slack. Lots of email. Lots of Github issues.
I think it's worth it though.
Also, don't rule out being a hybrid company. If you have a central office (or offices) you can have the benefits of both worlds.
I wrote something similar over the weekend about how remote teams are great for people on a maker's schedule, but people on a manager's schedule tend to dislike it.
I think finding this balance is the crux of the remote work experience. Meetings are necessary, but where is the line drawn? Collaboration is important, but do you need to have whiteboarding sessions to get things done?
The article looks at the benefits of distributed computing and makes the case that similar benefits could apply to distributed working (eg. scalability). Then it is only fair that we also look at other aspects of distributed systems and try to identify constraints on this model. I can think of:
1. Just because a system is distributed does not mean you have a lot of very small machines (eg. a system with 10 machines each with 1MB RAM will beat one with 1000 machines each with 10KB RAM). Similarly, having 5-10 distributed offices could net all the benefits mentioned in the article while avoiding costs of having 500 employees working from home/wework/...
2. Just because your system is distributed, you don't locate one machine on each continent. Machines are still arranged in proximity and having cross datacenter communication significantly erodes performance. Similarly, having distributed offices in far away timezones (eg. US west coast and India) imposes tremendous costs on collaboration. Having office in nearby timezones would be much better (eg. Seattle, Denver, SF). One particular case where far-away timezones help is ease of having 24-hour oncall support.
3. Different machine profile in your system, or different composition of your clusters, makes it harder to tune the system for performance or quality. Similarly, having employees in vastly different jurisdictions would mean you have additional costs on compliance / regulations / etc.
4. When you are prototyping or bootstrapping a new product, you do that quickly over a small setup (one machine). Similarly, it might make sense to bootstrap your startup in your garage (or a single city) until it is ready to scale.
Working remotely for many years is the greatest perk for me, this is the only thing keeping me at this job... To booth, the team I am managing is across the country, so no point going to the office anyway - I only go few time a year to pickup my boss to go for lunch/informal chat...
It is possible but takes the right team. Lots of people are perfect for it. It really depends on the lifestyle you live. If you are running it you have to replace people pretty quick if it doesn't work out and you'll probably end up with a pretty good team. When I was young I started out contracting remotely from home. That blows if you don't have some reasonable guarantee of steady hours. It can get hard to enjoy free time when your home is your office and you are hungry for work. If I was ever going to go back to hit or miss income I'd only do fixed price projects with nailed down scopes.
[+] [-] wastedhours|7 years ago|reply
Am fortunate to work in a place that offers "agile" working (it's not a developer focused environment, so that word isn't loaded for us). You go where you need to to get the job done, within a set of core hours work how you need to. You can work from home independently for days or weeks on end, or you can turn up to a desk every day, or you can collaborate in a meeting room, on Skype, or in a cafe.
We have an HQ, but not enough desks for everyone to turn up every day, so there's an expectation of being fluid in how you work. Every meeting has a video conference link, and very few decisions are made by the proverbial watercooler. It takes time and discipline to make it work, but that's spread by default and expected across the entire workforce.
[+] [-] bunderbunder|7 years ago|reply
Distributed teams develop a culture of communication that does not rely on frequent face-to-face contact. I personally suspect that they tend to be even more productive than completely co-located teams, because, based on a sample size of one, I've seen that the communication methods they develop will require fewer person-hours to share more information at higher fidelity.
"Remote" tends to imply a large chunk of the team is co-located, and one or more of the members are not. My experience here is that the remote people tend to not get the memo, or people fail to invite them to meetings because they don't want to bother with the conference room's videoconferencing equipment, or they do invite the remote folks but then the first 15 minutes of the meeting is devoted to figuring out how to work the Polycom system, etc.
I had the pleasure of working on a distributed team that became a team with remote workers as a result of being acquired by a company that decided to only hire new people to work in their home office. It was impressive how quickly things fell apart after that.
(Edit: This isn't to say that P's team isn't working well with a flexible approach, but it sounds like there's a big difference between it and many other non-distributed teams that have remote work: Everyone is in it together.)
[+] [-] logfromblammo|7 years ago|reply
It's a way of distancing yourself from the failures of companies that tried remote without actually committing to it. You signal that you're all in on remote, and structure your leases such that moving back to co-location is impractical, at the least.
You have to do that, because no one in their right mind will believe that they are valued equally when the company has 90 co-located employees and 10 remote employees. No, this is not the "remote work" you may have been burned by before. This is different. This actually works.
[+] [-] chrismeller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|7 years ago|reply
Management by musical chairs?
[+] [-] sk1pper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpkonofa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsvalley|7 years ago|reply
- If you're single, working at an office is good for you. Surround yourself with people who share a common interest. Yeah, it's work, but I'm sure you'll meet people who have similar interests outside of work. Go share a 2 bedroom apartment with someone else in downtown and enjoy the social life.
- If you're married (or even with kids), remote work is what you should be looking for so that you take away the bad energy you collect at the office and you don't bring it back home. You can spend more time with your family which is what matters the most. The bad energy includes a long commute to get to work since you can't afford living next to the office. Competitive environment and politics. Dress code, loud open space environments where you can't get anything done, constant distraction, having to fake working 8h straight sitting in front of a screen while anyone can look over your shoulders. You need to be able to afford a bigger home to host your family so you need to move far from your office.
You can get flexibility in both, not only remotely. As long as you're not forced to commute more than 30 min to work, usually Tech giants are flexible companies in terms of hours, etc.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|7 years ago|reply
1. I usually wind up alphabetizing my socks at some point.
2. a lack of face to face contact and the setting of being in my own space keeps me in a semi-permanent doubt/guilt cycle about my work quality and how my effort and reponsiveness is being perceived.
[+] [-] jhall1468|7 years ago|reply
The second issue is a personal one, and not exclusive to those that work remotely.
[+] [-] ryanSrich|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tejohnso|7 years ago|reply
If having alphabetized socks keeps you happier in your space, then that's a good thing, right? :)
[+] [-] malvosenior|7 years ago|reply
1. Totally unable to take care of home chores and errands. Often falling way behind on organizational or personal administrative tasks.
2. Fully exploited by my work place. I know I don't need 8 hours a day to be very productive. If I'm not working from home on my own schedule, I feel taken advantage of.
[+] [-] cagenut|7 years ago|reply
in fact, in general, maybe a regular therapy session should be considered a standard part of remote work. in-office we all use our coworkers as a social support network whether we mean to or not, so it makes sense that many of us would need an alternative to help cover that gap.
I'm not even saying that it'd be a good thing (replacing a dozen interpersonal relationships with one) but its a hedge.
[+] [-] xfitm3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shortoncash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arendtio|7 years ago|reply
I don't get it :-/ Can someone please explain what that is supposed to mean?
[+] [-] plodman|7 years ago|reply
Due to other aspects of my personal life I feel like my mind is completely spiralling into a black hole. Lack of seeing my team/manager day to day means they won't see this happening, and I also find it difficult to bring up due to limited contact time between my manager and I.
If anyone has any experience of suggestions, I couldn't be more open to them right now.
[+] [-] dpkonofa|7 years ago|reply
This seems like a personal issue rather than an issue with the concept of working from home. For me, personally, I don't care about when/how people work as long as they're delivering on what I'm asking from them. I may just be extremely fortunate that my team is very responsive but I never have issues with being available for my team or them being available for me and that kind of negates any kind of guilt cycle there could be.
[+] [-] otaviokz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Touche|7 years ago|reply
Here's a tweet today from the creator of Babel on how he is moving to the east bay because housing is more affordable. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1064252136349822977 .
If someone who's created that much value is not able to afford an area then it's insulting that tech giants expect us to move there (or have a 2 hour commute to somewhere affordable).
There's this terrible myth that I want to kill; that software engineering is a well-paid field. That's a lie.
Here's something pharmacists, account managers, farmers can afford: 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom houses near where they work.
We can't. We're asked to live in apartments in Jersey and commute 45 minutes to Manhattan every day.
Or we work remotely and are expected to take a smaller wage, where the company can't wait to get big enough so that it can force us all to move.
[+] [-] wpietri|7 years ago|reply
> Product Management is mostly about consistent execution of plans, not painting high-level visions.
It's a common view that software developers are an output device, like a printer. You tell them what to build by sending them very detailed instructions. They follow the instructions to the letter, and their work is judged by compliance. Perfection is perfectly conforming to some one else's plan.
I think this is bunk. It might have made a little sense when releases were every 18 months to 3 years. But in an age where companies are releasing dozens of times per day [1], it's foolish. Perfectly following a plan means you believe nobody will learn anything during the time it takes to follow the plan. But if you are releasing early and often, you can learn a ton from users. You can be much more innovative and much more effective than competition.
That only happens, though, if you treat team members not as rote plan-followers but as creative professionals who are deep collaborators. Where vision isn't something a few HiPPOs hammer out in exclusive twice-annual sessions, but where everyone constantly participates and refines it. If a company's process has already shut down collaboration, then of course the difficulties of remote collaboration aren't a problem. The challenge -- still unsolved, I think -- is how to maintain both a high level of collaboration and fast iteration without having to have everyone together.
[1] E.g., https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/03/etsy-deploy-50-times-a-da...
[+] [-] gnulinux|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Heliosmaster|7 years ago|reply
> It's not just that I don't trust myself, I don't trust other people too.
This sentiment seems to say that you don't trust your colleagues in general, and that doesn't really make a difference remote or at the job. There are plenty of "chair warmers" at every office...
[+] [-] intertextuality|7 years ago|reply
What is the difference of working remotely and working in office with your headphones on, only using slack to communicate? I know several places like that.
I’ve worked full time remotely for the last 6 months it’s been absolutely wondrous. I would hate to have to commute and go back to an office.
[+] [-] stareatgoats|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdimitar|7 years ago|reply
If so, that's unprofessional.
[+] [-] hassan_shaikley|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
Like?
[+] [-] criveros|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calcifer|7 years ago|reply
I have multiple colleagues who just casually disappear from the office (sorry, "work from home") for days to weeks and it's beyond irritating and disruptive to the rest of us.
[+] [-] davidmr|7 years ago|reply
Anyone who knows more about this than I do, are we close to that day?
[+] [-] Angostura|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterkelly|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gregw2|7 years ago|reply
I've been in two startups, one working remotely ("distributed") and one working in the room with the CEO.
The degree of situational awareness was very different.
When I was sitting 5 feet from the CEO, I knew the company was in the tank and in grave danger of going under. We turned it around.
When I was remote, based on the daily/weekly phone calls I knew the project I was working on was in trouble and way behind, but had no idea till the CEO drove up to meet me that he and the other execs had no salary for 3 months and the company was out of money. (They found a buyer for a pittance within a year to save face.)
I had a sense of urgency in both cases... but the urgency was different when in-person. And the awareness was WAY different.
[+] [-] davnicwil|7 years ago|reply
But whatever word is used.. maybe it won't matter for that much longer? I think another thing that will be interesting to watch is if/how quickly the extra word "remote"/"distributed"/etc disappears because it becomes redundant or outmoded.
Think of the internet: every service on the internet was once "e-{service}". Over time that mostly just became "service", because the fact you are on the internet is now assumed, and doesn't have to be qualified. Indeed, if you're not on the internet that might be the thing you have to qualify now.
Will we see job listings in 10-15 years with "Engineer (Colocated Office)"?
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|7 years ago|reply
And you won't, either.
I think this is very simple. Either you are a distributed team working on digital artifacts that live primarily online .... or you are a cross-functional team trying to creatively solve a problem for somebody.
If you know what you're doing, the solution is locked in, and all you're accomplishing by showing up somewhere is moving cards around on a wall? Stay home. If you don't know what you're doing -- requirements are in flux, the customer can't decide, the project is high-risk/high-stress, etc? Show up where the other people are.
And it doesn't have to be one way or the other. I've worked great projects where we all co-located, got into a groove, then finished it up from home -- only to repeat when the next big hunk of problems showed up.
So many of these tech essays seem to based on turning the contrast way up, insisting that the answer must be X or Y, then defending it. Why can't it be both? Seeing success in teams working both ways, wouldn't the more logical position be that in some cases each has its advantages?
[+] [-] pdimitar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramtatatam|7 years ago|reply
What I noticed is that in early days of my startup when I was working remotely I was able to contribute much more than now, when I'm required to work from the (open plan) office. Working remotely gives flexibility on work hours (i.e. I could do normal 9-5 and then in the evening I usually checked in to add some extra but I could do that as I did not have to wake up early in the morning in order to commute to the office).
Working remotely makes it more challenging (for some) to resist temptation to procrastinate. And also it requires leaders to understand how to measure the output (although, of course, leaders need to understand that despite the fact where does the worker deliver their work from).
[+] [-] Twirrim|7 years ago|reply
Reading, and scrolling down a bit on the mouse, so the content I'm reading reaches the top of the page. Maybe a second after I stop scrolling, boom, suddenly the header re-appears out of nowhere and covers right what I'm reading. I actually gave up reading the content, not because I wasn't interested, but because that damn header kept hiding the content.
[+] [-] chapium|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
We started as a conventional company located in San Francisco.
For some context - we're https://www.datastreamer.io ... we provide data feeds around blogs, news, and social media to search engines, and data analytics companies. We have about a petabyte of content in our index now.
Our SF location was SWEET. Downtown. 100 year old building. Brick walls, super nice place - until they tore it down to build the new Transbay terminal.
Long story short but at that point we decided to give distributed work a try.
Back then there weren't many companies doing it but I decided to embrace the benefits of it in terms of what it could do for my company.
This isn't discussed often but there are actually PERKS to distributed work.
If your team is in different timezones. This means you can coordinate ops so that if there's an emergency no one actually has to wake up.
This has massive long term implications for morale and hiring!
You can now hire ops people and tell them that they never have to be woken up in the middle of the night.
We will often have issues with data indexing of sites at odd hours. We can't control when a site being indexed breaks so it can happen at unusual times. Usually at 5AM when I'm sleeping.
One downside is that each country has its own hurdles for hiring.
My advice is find 2-4 countries (including your own) that are close to your timezone. You will have banking, political, and infrastructure issues so limiting the number of distinct countries you work with reduces your risk.
We prefer the US, Poland, Germany, Spain, and Brazil.
It definitely takes some re-thinking in terms of tools. Lots of video conferencing. Lots of slack. Lots of email. Lots of Github issues.
I think it's worth it though.
Also, don't rule out being a hybrid company. If you have a central office (or offices) you can have the benefits of both worlds.
[+] [-] lukethomas|7 years ago|reply
https://fridayfeedback.com/p/how-to-make-remote-work-more-co...
I think finding this balance is the crux of the remote work experience. Meetings are necessary, but where is the line drawn? Collaboration is important, but do you need to have whiteboarding sessions to get things done?
[+] [-] RestlessMind|7 years ago|reply
1. Just because a system is distributed does not mean you have a lot of very small machines (eg. a system with 10 machines each with 1MB RAM will beat one with 1000 machines each with 10KB RAM). Similarly, having 5-10 distributed offices could net all the benefits mentioned in the article while avoiding costs of having 500 employees working from home/wework/...
2. Just because your system is distributed, you don't locate one machine on each continent. Machines are still arranged in proximity and having cross datacenter communication significantly erodes performance. Similarly, having distributed offices in far away timezones (eg. US west coast and India) imposes tremendous costs on collaboration. Having office in nearby timezones would be much better (eg. Seattle, Denver, SF). One particular case where far-away timezones help is ease of having 24-hour oncall support.
3. Different machine profile in your system, or different composition of your clusters, makes it harder to tune the system for performance or quality. Similarly, having employees in vastly different jurisdictions would mean you have additional costs on compliance / regulations / etc.
4. When you are prototyping or bootstrapping a new product, you do that quickly over a small setup (one machine). Similarly, it might make sense to bootstrap your startup in your garage (or a single city) until it is ready to scale.
[+] [-] SirLJ|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascendantlogic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edoo|7 years ago|reply