[HN Gopher] Building Remote Teams for Startups
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Building Remote Teams for Startups
Author : bndr
Score : 128 points
Date : 2021-12-24 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vadimkravcenko.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vadimkravcenko.com)
| hnuser847 wrote:
| When I've asked friends and coworkers how they like remote work,
| the answer depends on how comfortable they feel being candid with
| me. Publicly everyone says they're more productive being remote.
| Privately, people admit that their productivity has cratered,
| being home is very distracting, and the lack of separation
| between work and home life makes both realms more difficult.
|
| I definitely empathize with the answers I've heard. I like
| convenience of not having to spend hours commuting back and the
| forth, and being home so I can help my wife take care of our five
| month old baby. But if I'm being totally honest, my productivity
| is pretty poor compared to what it was when everybody worked in
| person from the same office.
| jb1991 wrote:
| The key factor is what your home environment is like. If you
| have kids, then very possibly you can be a lot more productive
| at an office. Likewise if you live in a small place and don't
| have a comfortable, dedicated space to work in.
| thraxil wrote:
| I've worked remotely for almost eight years now. Much of that
| from home; the last couple from a small office space that I
| rent down the street from home. I worked in open plan offices
| for about 15 years prior to going remote.
|
| Both situations are a mixed bag. There are productive days and
| heavily distracted days in a shared office and there are
| productive and not so productive days working remotely. Working
| remotely but not from home is the easy winner for me in terms
| of overall productivity with a much higher percentage of
| productive days. Working from home (before the pandemic, when
| my partner _also_ started working from home) was still
| significantly better than working in an open plan office,
| though it did take me the first couple years to work out that I
| had to be _very_ strict about keeping a separation (work
| machine gets turned off at 5pm and no work email can reach me
| outside working hours). When the pandemic hit and my partner
| started working from home as well (and she 's a university
| professor so it was a lot of loud video calls while she taught
| her classes), my productivity crashed (but also, pandemic
| stress). If your home is distracting than, yeah, your
| productivity is going to crater. But the same is really true
| for something like an open plan office (I used to get most of
| my work done by going in extremely early so I could have two
| productive hours a day before everyone else showed up).
| Lhiw wrote:
| smoe wrote:
| Personally I enjoy going to the office most days, even thought
| I don't have to. And know plenty people that do as well.
|
| What I hope comes out of all these pandemic adjustments, is
| more diversity in work modalities to choose from instead only
| one or the other. That remote employers and employees get
| better working that way and that on-site/hybrid employees put
| more effort into making themselves more attractive. E.g.
| instead of having one massive, packed HQ everyone has to
| commute to, have smaller and more quieter spaces scattered
| around, having rules on not allowing taking calls on desk,
| etc..
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I think that companies will need to diverge on whether they
| are remote or whether they are in office. I did hybrid for a
| while at my last company and it amounted to people being in
| the office most days just taking Zoom calls at their desks.
|
| That is not satisfying to anyone.
| moltar wrote:
| Remote != home.
|
| Home _is_ distracting, unless you have black belt concentration
| ability, and will power.
|
| For a long time I've worked from a coworking place near my
| house.
|
| Before that, when I wasn't earning as much, I'd work from
| cafes.
|
| Some days when the weather was especially nasty I chose to stay
| home and work from home.
|
| Now I have a kid, and I'm forced to work from home due to
| corona, and my productivity definitely suffers. But I'm being
| extra aggressively defensive for my work space, and that helps!
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Remote != home.
|
| While technically true, I have yet to talk to a remote
| candidate or employee who doesn't work from home.
|
| We had one candidate who wanted us to pay for a monthly
| remote office for them, but it was curiously expensive for
| some reason and he had other problems that ended the
| interview process early so I never followed up on it.
|
| So basically, remote should be assumed to be at home.
| bradfa wrote:
| Just as another data point, I work remotely and I have an
| office about 3 miles from my house. It makes separation of
| work and life MUCH easier.
|
| I realize this isn't normal but it is a much better way of
| working for me. I think if others could get past paying
| rent to work remotely that they would generally agree, too.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| My team is distributed, I work out of a coworking space
| less than a mile from my house (15 minute walk). It's made
| my mental/emotional state so much better (not to mention
| how much more productive I am).
|
| We offer all employees the choice to work from home or rent
| a coworking space, and in either case we cover the cost
| (home office setup, or coworking cost).
|
| I think what most people don't understand is what we went
| through with covid isn't normal remote work. In normal
| circumstances, you can work from a coworking space. And you
| can have an active social life. Etc. Etc. Your kids aren't
| stuck at home with you. Covid forced a version of remote
| work that was much worse.
| closeparen wrote:
| Coworking space is rather a big-city amenity, while the point
| of remote working for many people is to avoid big cities.
| slotrans wrote:
| I am vastly less productive working from home. Many of my
| friends will (privately, as you say) confess to the same.
|
| I keep seeing this narrative that the pandemic forced everyone
| to try remote work and surprise! productivity went up. I
| really, really doubt it.
|
| What actually happened is that you had sufficient
| organizational momentum to keep things going. Your rate of
| actual creative work (big new stuff launched, etc) has almost
| certainly cratered. Your new employees are all struggling. If
| you've had a spike in turnover, the company as a whole is
| probably struggling. But it's invisible, because you can't keep
| your finger on the cultural pulse of the company without an
| office for that culture to manifest in.
| paperskull wrote:
| I'd like to chime in with my anecdotal counter example from
| my big corporate workplace. A colleague recently created some
| graphs showing commits over time, confluence pages
| created/updated, tickets fixed, ticket turnaround time, code
| reviews given, and number of features released. All of these
| metrics made a sharp improvement as soon as our WFH policy
| came into effect and have kept its pace for the last 1.5
| years. While this might not be the experience at every
| workplace, as far as I can tell, my workplace seems to have
| greatly benefitted from more remote work.
| learc83 wrote:
| I'd be very careful how much you read into this because it's
| begging for confirmation bias.
|
| There's also a difference between working remotely and being
| thrown into working remotely at the last minute during a
| pandemic with no prior experience. I've been remote for the
| last 10 years and the vast majority of problems you mentioned
| get better over time if you work at it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Good article. Having a lot of experience managing remote teams, I
| wanted to expand on this point:
|
| > Try to focus on the employees who thrive in such environments
| rather than those few bad apples.
|
| You can't let the bad apples define the work experience for
| everyone, but you do need to identify them and remove them as
| fast as possible so they don't poison the well.
|
| One thing I didn't realize at first was that remote work attracts
| bad apples at a much higher rate than in-person work. There's an
| idea that remote jobs are an easy way to get away with doing less
| work, so you'll be flooded with applicants who read books like
| "The Four Hour Workweek" and think your remote job is their
| ticket to traveling the world while they answer occasional emails
| from their phones. Or more commonly, a ticket to working a few
| hours (or less!) per day while they try to convince their boss
| that the task is just harder than it looks.
|
| Good performance management is important in any job, but it's
| even more critical in remote work. If you let remote slackers
| thrive at your company, the good employees will notice. They'll
| quickly burn out after working normal amounts plus also picking
| up the tasks that aren't being done by the remote slackers.
| Resentment grows quickly and the good employees will be leaving
| quickly if let the remote slackers coast without consequences.
|
| I actually favor engineers-turned-managers for remote management
| positions over managers with non-engineer backgrounds for this
| reason. Former engineers are much better at spotting when someone
| is lying about the complexity of coding tasks.
| pengwing wrote:
| Let me expand on that point: "Don't accidentally throw out good
| apples with the bad ones because you are looking at the wrong
| metrics."
|
| What I mean is: Bad apples are real, but don't ever do time-
| tracking or fast response testing in an effort to identify
| them. There are some excellent apples who will get your 8h-day
| deliverables done in 2-4h. Don't ever establish any system to
| find them. If you have a problem with them, you are the
| problem.
|
| Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for
| deliverables.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The thing is: Some of the worst remote workers are actually
| the best at _appearing_ always online. They'll go out of
| their way to remind everyone that they were "working" at 8PM
| or on a weekend because they need to compensate for the lack
| of actual work done.
|
| One of the worst remote work offenders I ever dealt with had
| a routine of doing things every Saturday morning that would
| ping the team: Lots of Slack "@channel" questions. Lots of
| name tags in Slack to generate pings. Some e-mails with
| unnecessarily huge recipient lists. If someone had only
| measured time online or number of Slack messages sent, this
| guy would have been at the top of the list.
|
| But it was all a show. It was all low-effort, high-volume
| content designed to give the impression of working hard, and
| it only came in short bursts. Anyone paying attention knew he
| wasn't delivering much but he was generating huge fanfare
| over tiny things he did.
|
| So yes, focusing too much on perceived hours worked or
| activity in Slack or e-mail is one of the worst ways to do
| performance management.
|
| > Kick people based on repeatedly violating the deadline for
| deliverables.
|
| This is the other game they play: Come sprint planning time,
| they'll invest huge effort in exaggerating how long a task
| will take. Then they'll go to great lengths to find ways to
| be "blocked and waiting on so and so" during the week.
| Eventually they'll push their deadline back so far that
| hitting it is trivially easy.
|
| Which is why it's important to have managers who can spot
| these exaggerations and investigate the actual code and
| deliverables when they arrive. Engineers are good at spotting
| when someone has been lying about effort, but managers
| without engineering backgrounds can often (but not always) be
| fooled by charismatic remote workers.
| civilized wrote:
| All of these things have in-office parallels that
| experienced workers have seen plenty of. Why is it that
| remote workers are especially suspect?
|
| What exactly do people think here? That being able to look
| over a worker's shoulder at their computer screen a few
| times a day makes the difference between effective in-
| office management and remote slackerdom?
|
| If that's all managers do, they can be replaced with
| spyware that measures how much time the worker is typing in
| VSCode each week. It'll be easy to game but will STILL work
| way better than the manager.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Why is it that remote workers are especially suspect?
|
| Because it's not difficult to get hired into two remote
| jobs.
|
| It is, however, impossible to be in two physical offices
| at the same time.
|
| Being in office is not a free pass to ignore performance
| management. Obviously if you're not paying attention to
| deliverables then your in-office employees could be doing
| nothing as well.
|
| But remote jobs are a magnet for people trying to abuse
| the system (by riding the coattails of their actually
| productive coworkers).
|
| > If that's all managers do, they can be replaced with
| spyware that measures how much time the worker is typing
| in VSCode each week.
|
| I think you misunderstood my comment. I specifically said
| that measuring hours active at a keyboard or activity in
| Slack is the _worst_ way to try to do performance
| management.
| civilized wrote:
| > I think you misunderstood my comment. I specifically
| said that measuring hours active at a keyboard or
| activity in Slack is the worst way to try to do
| performance management.
|
| You say that, but then you advocate for butts-in-chairs
| (BIC) as a critical performance management practice that
| can't be replicated in the remote model and therefore
| shows the weakness of the remote model.
|
| If BIC is so critical to performance management, spyware
| will do a way better job.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The amount of people holding two remote jobs for more
| than a few months without burning out approaches zero
| pretty quickly.
|
| In person positions are a magnet for people abusing the
| system by not being productive. People will feel
| justified to chit-chat as long as everyone can see them,
| they will organize meetings or volunteer work hours put
| on bakeathons. They will meet people in higher positions
| in these social settings and leverage their relationship
| for better position often with more success than someone
| productive.
|
| Productive workers are seen as resources. Non productive
| social climbers will always leap over the productive.
|
| Non-productive socializers remote or in person will
| always be holding you back.
|
| The remote double job close to being burned out with no
| time for socializing is the least of your concerns if
| they even exist.
| lmarcos wrote:
| > Engineers are good at spotting when someone has been
| lying about effort, but managers without engineering
| backgrounds can often (but not always) be fooled by
| charismatic remote workers.
|
| Then hire better managers. Really, if a manager cannot spot
| remote slackers, then that manager is doing a poor job.
| zerocount wrote:
| You're one of those micro-managers that wants to keep
| metrics on all engineers. You presume all engineers are
| fucking the company until you witness them giving their all
| for the 'team.' You want a bunch of robot cogs that do
| exactly what you say, when you say.
|
| Your whole outlook is 'someone is screwing around, we need
| more or better managers, preferably one that's been an
| engineer so he/she can more easily root these people out.'
|
| You're the reason I hate managers.
| code_biologist wrote:
| Are you and I reading the same comment? PragmaticPulp
| talked about measuring people by their true deliverables
| -- not on whether they act like cogs or "give it their
| all".
| codegeek wrote:
| Work is not all about deadlines. It also requires discipline
| to be present for meetings (no matter how much you hate
| them), be available to solve problems (sometimes
| immediately), collaborate with other team members and many
| other things. It is called "Team work" for a reason. Good
| developers can get away with a lot of things for sure
| especially if they produce code but as someone who runs
| teams, it is not enough. I would rather work with someone who
| cares about how their work impacts the overall team vs just
| them working in silo and happy enough coz they hit their
| deadlines.
| zerocount wrote:
| Yes, it is about the deadlines. That's what keeps me
| getting a paycheck, which is the reason I'm working. What
| you describe as teamwork is just every day development
| activity. There is no discipline to attending a meeting
| when the meeting is mandatory.
|
| I can always spot someone who 'runs teams' by the way they
| prioritize the company and piss on the workers in the name
| of the customer and 'teamwork.'
|
| This is why you can't trust a manager. You can't seperate
| their nose from the company's ass.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I've never been at a company where deadlines are what
| keeps people getting a paycheck. Overall output is what
| kept the paychecks flowing. Deadlines are an artificial
| construct in most cases and in most of the remaining
| they're just a way to synchronize work. If a feature
| comes out today or in a week or a month has little
| difference in the vast majority of cases. If you get 1 or
| 5 or 10 features out this month has a difference.
| codegeek wrote:
| "piss on the workers". I made no such remark anywhere in
| my comment. You can prioritize the company and still take
| care of the employees. It is not a zero sum game but
| hating on managers is obviously a cool thing to do.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Deadlines are also the wrong metric to measure people with
| unless you're a contracting/consulting shop.
| codegeek wrote:
| Seriously. This talk of "deadlines are everything" is such
| bullshit. In my company, I am looking for people who care
| about their work, first and foremost. They enjoy what they
| do. Sometimes, deadlines are needed, sure. But it is mostly
| about growing as an individual and learning how to work in
| collaboration. What good are deadlines if you churn out
| crap output ?
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| As someone who is involved in both engineering and management
| - in my experience 8h days do not exist.
|
| Are there just isn't an environment allowing for eight hours
| of deep work without interruptions, emails, meetings, chats
| etc.
|
| And even if eight hours of deep work were possible, the
| cognitive load the programming tends to lead to exhaustion
| within 4 to 6 hours max.
|
| I don't expect more from myself or others.
| zerocount wrote:
| This actually makes sense. No need for the big survellance
| net.
| kache_ wrote:
| >managers who weren't former engineers
|
| woah, those exist?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Yep! There's an entire school of thought that management and
| engineering are so entirely different that managers don't
| need to have an engineering background.
|
| I personally disagree, but I have a friend who insists that
| the best engineering managers are those who come from
| professional management backgrounds (project management, then
| people management usually) instead of engineering
| backgrounds.
| zerocount wrote:
| There's also a school of thought that managers are not
| necessary. I'm a big fan of it.
| code_biologist wrote:
| That only scales up to a certain degree. There are some
| really good examples of holacracy failing to live up to
| hype in the software world:
|
| * HN discussion of holacracy at Valve:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512866
|
| * Holacracy and the mirage of the boss-less workplace:
| Lessons from the failures at Github, Medium & Buffer:
| https://medium.com/battle-room/holacracy-and-the-mirage-
| of-t...
|
| There's also a classic essay, "The Tyranny of
| Structurelessness", that is about parts of the feminist
| movement but directly applies to holacracy at companies.
|
| If you're anti-manager, a small or single person company
| or consultancy can be great.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I worked at one of these companies, actually.
|
| It was actually a lot of fun and very productive when it
| was a small team of people who knew and respected each
| other.
|
| Scaled up to a bigger company, it turned into the
| nastiest political nightmare I've ever seen.
|
| The "no managers" thing is also an illusion. There's
| always someone who can fire people or give them raises.
| Those people become the de facto managers even if they
| have some different title.
|
| Employees are extremely good at picking up on who they
| need to impress to get raises and promotions, even if you
| try to pretend that they aren't managers.
| paranorman wrote:
| Google was a fan of it, too. You should look into project
| oxygen.
| codegeek wrote:
| Well said. There also are websites that are openly encouraging
| working 2 full time remote jobs concurrently/at the same time.
| I don't want to name those here but wow.
| afandian wrote:
| Not sure if I missed the joke here but a recent thread here
| had a fair amount of discussion about working two jobs,
| putting in minimum hours, and calling that 'full time'.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If you read the posts in that blog the guy is barely holding
| in to positions for a few weeks. You are better off going for
| the best paying position rather than trying to manage two
| poorly paid positions.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Obligatory question here: how are you tuning how you screen for
| bad apples in your technical interview pre-hire to make sure
| that over time you have less and less bad apples? Also, what
| level of scale is your remote eng organization operating at?
|
| Having also had a lot of experience managing remote teams (and
| to be a little bit hyperbolic for the sake of making a point),
| saying that remote work attracts "bad apples" at a much higher
| rate than in-person work seems like a cop out to excuse poor
| screening hygiene.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think the applicant pool has a higher concentration of <
| _any given negative_ > than the employee pool.
|
| I posit that people with negative factors tend to
| apply/interview more per job start and probably have shorter
| average tenures [due to getting fired/managed out or quitting
| because they're not getting their needs met].
|
| We just experienced a 20-month disruption that caused certain
| previously latent negatives to be newly and massively
| amplified. Life's also been harder than usual on many(most?)
| people. I'd be somewhat shocked if those negatives didn't get
| concentrated into the applicant pool as well. To a hiring
| manager, that would be nearly indistinguishable from "remote
| work attracts bad apples at a higher rate".
|
| I'm quite pro-remote and think it's going to end up overall
| wonderful that the tech world was forced into this massive,
| synchronized pre/post test. I also see employees who did well
| in the in-office structure struggle in the higher-discipline
| required remote model. Those employees are probably best
| served to return to in-office work.
| snicker7 wrote:
| For software engineering, four hours of actual work per day is
| probably average even on-site.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Yes, but communications, meetings, and being available to
| answer questions are also part of the job description.
|
| The more someone becomes unavailable for communications,
| knowledge sharing, and meetings, the more work they create
| for their teammates and managers who have to compensate by
| tracking everything down, re-hashing missed meetings, re-
| communicating things that should have been covered the first
| time and so on.
|
| It's not enough to just write four hours of code every day
| and then disconnect, even if the average coder is also only
| writing four hours of code.
| nanidin wrote:
| It sounds like you are describing a work culture that
| relies heavily on synchronous communication to make
| progress. These don't work well for companies that want to
| have remote workers and treat them as first class citizens.
|
| The solution is to find ways to knowledgeshare that don't
| require everyone's attention at the same time - like a well
| maintained wiki, or recorded knowledge sharing sessions.
|
| Consensus building may well require synchronous
| communication, and it should be made clear to remote
| workers which meetings are cruft and which are important.
| This can be accomplished by publishing meeting agendas and
| goals prior to the actual meeting.
|
| I think at the end of the day it is important to recognize
| that different people work differently and accommodations
| have to be made for all sides to contribute effectively. By
| that I mean some people need to sit in a meeting with a
| person that is presenting slides to learn, but someone else
| might pick up the same material via one paragraph and a
| diagram + access to the code, and someone else might work
| better with a whiteboard presentation.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| For office workers in general, 3 is typical.
|
| https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-
| aver...
|
| Has held true at all 7 jobs I have ever had.
| DrammBA wrote:
| I'm always amazed when people claim they work more than that
| a day. Between meetings, context switching, and social
| interactions, I pat myself on the back if I manage to work a
| total of 4 hours.
| idiocratic wrote:
| I don't understand how you don't count meetings and context
| switching as part of work hours. You're helping others,
| making decisions, etc. It's not that what's not coding is
| not work.
| anyfactor wrote:
| Very good article. Echoes most things I have been looking for.
| But I would like to add some things as an offshore dev.
|
| It is darn hard to build a remote team unless you have a thorough
| understanding of what needs to be done and how it should be done.
| My opinion is that if you are hiring people remotely you should
| be operationally skilled to understand their effort, struggle and
| deadlines. BE EMPATHATIC. If you are running a remote team and
| you follow the mantra of "hire slow, fire fast" good luck keeping
| your employees. Make your decisions by getting a second opinion
| from the employees mentor.
|
| For the feeling of belonging, I would say send your employees
| merch or an old laptop or something that shows that they are part
| of the team. I say give people very small bonuses but that is a
| whole thing. The "thank you"s you say to the other guy on an
| hourly basis, maybe give a bonus or something on the 10th Thank
| You, like a small small bonus. Thank yous over chat sound
| generic. In a super objective straightforward world of remote
| work money is the convenient way to show appreciation....here I
| go ranting again.
|
| For pair programming, use VS Code live share with Google Meets.
| If you and your team is comfortable with it set up a period of
| time where all of you guys are working together over a group
| video chat like streamers do. I personally would love seeing my
| fellow coworker working on something halfway across the world.
|
| If your work environment is super feature-execution driven,
| having a "fun" slack channel is meaningless. Office noises almost
| never happen in remote work environment as the employers is
| paying by the hour. But it is important IMO. But I don't think
| anyone out there is any employer out there would say, "let's have
| a weekly virtual meeting where we exclusively don't talk about
| work, but I will pay you guys anyway; We can drink and talk about
| stuff".
| blackhaz wrote:
| Running a remote-only company for 19 years. This is a very nice
| guide. Still can't figure out what holds us all together.
| synergy20 wrote:
| Some ideas to 'manage' remote-work: when you're
| working, always turn on the camera but in fuzzy mode, i.e. nobody
| see your real facial expression but knows you're there most of
| the time. make technical document a personal performance
| review item. make a system for all to fill out their
| daily progress, everyone does it before the day is called off.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| From the developer perspective the most enjoyable remote work I
| have done, has been when I did larger projects (weeks to month
| duration) with the primary responsibility (choose stack and
| libraries) and with the customer concerned with the result, not
| the onboarding, cultural alignment with company values, day-to-
| day instructions, scrum etc. The latter is just expendable
| (micro) management noise.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| Onboarding is much more important in remote work. I actually left
| my Engineering job at a large YC backed company a month ago to
| focus on an onboarding/documentation idea that I came up with
| while seeing smart employees not being able to get up-to-speed.
| We would just throw them high level confluence docs without any
| context. They said they read the documentation, but without
| context they really had no idea what it meant.
| https://www.gainknowhow.com uses a skill dependency tree kinda
| like the game Civilization to incrementally get employees up-to-
| speed.
| yeldarb wrote:
| I think anyone who says remote is strictly better is fooling
| themselves. There are definitely down-sides.
|
| We've been doing a lot to try to bring back the benefits of being
| in-person while maintaining the flexibility of being remote.
|
| Wrote about our specific tactics here:
| https://blog.roboflow.com/remote-not-distant/
| ipaddr wrote:
| "Friday we cap off the week by eating lunch together over Zoom"
|
| How awful. I think you are trying to take the benefits of less
| social activity inspired remote workplaces and adding in
| forced. some social interaction. I would like to see this type
| of activity stopped.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> However, they probably need a stricter environment to function
| correctly, more robust control over their work - meaning they
| thrive when someone is looking over their shoulder. A remote gig
| is not a good fit for these kinds of people._
|
| There's a lot more of those folks than you might think. We have a
| fairly "skewed" sample set, with geeks (especially the ones that
| frequent HN).
|
| A lot of us _love_ to work, and we 'll do it; no matter the
| environment. Naturally, we tend to thrive in environments that
| reduce interruptions, and remove tangential stressors.
|
| Other types of industries may not have a workforce with the same
| motivation. Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is
| not necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a
| vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant
| part of the curriculum. It's never been an issue, for me.
|
| As far as managers that need to have people at hand to bully?
| Unfortunately, they are learning to adapt, and have discovered
| that they can be just as bad, over Zoom, as in person. Worse,
| even.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Also, personal self-discipline is crucial. That is not
| necessarily something they teach in college. I attended a
| vocational school, where that kind of thing was a significant
| part of the curriculum.
|
| How did they teach this?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Strict attendance. Strict schedule. Behavioral rules. Dress
| code. Inflexible deadlines, etc.
|
| Tough gig, but just like a workplace.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| > In my opinion, a decentralized, remote workforce is the future
| of the digital economy.
|
| This is based on the wonky assumption that this:
|
| > There will always be people who abuse the system, abuse your
| trust and try to game the mechanics for their benefit. [...] A
| remote gig is not a good fit for these kinds of people.
|
| are just some extreme outliers.
|
| However, we were just yesterday having a discussion on HN about
| ,,how to work two or more remote jobs at the same time and game
| the system"
|
| Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at odds
| with human instincts?
| oDot wrote:
| Also, remote just doesn't work for some people. This should be
| decided on a per-company basis
| MattGaiser wrote:
| A lot of good would come from being able to personality
| search companies, especially by career level.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| And being in the office doesn't work well for others. Those
| people have had (practically) no choice in the matter for all
| of time.
|
| Perhaps it's okay to try a little of the opposite scenario
| and see how it plays out.
| oDot wrote:
| Sure, I am a great advocate of remote work and that's how I
| work and worked (mostly).
|
| We just need to recognize that it's not for everybody
| k__ wrote:
| All but the smallest companies were already remote by having
| multiple offices.
|
| Companies that had problems to grow out of that early phase
| struggled in the past and will struggle with that in times of
| remote work. The only thing that remote work changes is to
| move that problem more to the beginning of a companies
| lifecycle. This should be seen as a chance and not a problem.
| oDot wrote:
| Remote doesn't really refer to the geography, but the
| asynchronous workflow. In the manner, many of those
| companies are far from remote.
| youerbt wrote:
| > Is a remote-first economy perhaps a system fundamentally at
| odds with human instincts?
|
| Seems like office-first, 9 to 5 economy is at odds with human
| instincts, if you have to physically keep humans from "gaming
| the system".
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| In that sense, taxation is against human instincts, if you
| have to force people to contribute to welfare payments.
|
| And yet we still do it.
| gumby wrote:
| Taxes pay for far more than "welfare payments" unless you
| expand your definition of "welfare" to include the general
| welfare (functioning roads etc).
| jasfi wrote:
| Some thoughts on this:
|
| - A different environment can improve creativity, but the effect
| is obviously limited.
|
| - If you have a difficult/long commute then that's a plus to
| remove it.
|
| - If you're alone at home you could get lonely really quickly.
| oDot wrote:
| I wrote Emergency Remote[0], and in my experience there are
| companies which tried to work the same way remotely and got the
| wrong impression by doing that.
|
| I'm not as confident as the author that so many companies are
| onboard with remote because of their past couple of years. It's
| more likely they go the remote way because of employee pressure.
|
| [0] https://www.emergencyremote.com
| nfriedly wrote:
| I've been remote for over 10 years, and this article mostly rings
| true. The employer has to put extra effort into communication and
| documentation. But that ends up being good for everyone - even in
| hybrid companies we're not everyone is remote.
|
| I think my current employer, FullStory, gets a lot of this right.
| Even before they went fully distributed, they were really good at
| documenting things - from PTO policies to postmortems on every
| outage we've ever had. The onboarding process is the best I've
| ever seen.
|
| > There is no Pair-Programming,
|
| That's just not true. I do frequent pair programming, it's just
| over a screen sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the
| person I'm pairing with. There's a million tools you can use for
| this.
|
| The other thing I'll say, is that as a remote employee, having a
| dedicated quiet space to work in can be really beneficial.
| Especially if you have young children at home. Usually that means
| a spare bedroom, where you can shut the door.
|
| For a couple of years after my daughter was born, I actually
| rented a small private office that was a short bike ride from my
| house. I didn't go there every single day, but the days that I
| did were definitely my most productive ones during that time
| period. It was really the best of all worlds from my perspective.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > The employer has to put extra effort into communication and
| documentation.
|
| Not just the employer. The employees also need to put extra
| effort into their own communication and documentation. This
| needs to be actively mentored to the employees and included as
| part of performance management with clear expectations.
|
| A common mistake for first-time remote companies or managers is
| to think that the managers alone can make up for the
| communication deficits inherent to remote work. Not so. It's
| everyone's job. Managers should be setting examples and
| mentoring everyone though.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Yeah, that's a fair point. Everyone has to put in the effort.
|
| My thinking was that the employer has to make it part of the
| duties of the employees, and, more importantly, ensure
| employees have the time, tools, etc. available to do it.
|
| E.g, when there's an outage, an entire day of someone's time
| might be spent writing up the post-mortem.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > I do frequent pair programming, it's just over a screen
| sharing / video call rather than sitting beside the person I'm
| pairing with
|
| If anything, pair programming with a good headset and good
| quality audio is better than in person.
|
| 100% audio clarity and no external noises.
| raviisoccupied wrote:
| The point around transparency is so important. I see so many
| issues that could be solved by just having discussions 'in
| public' on open Slack channels, with thought processes and
| outcomes available for all (or more) to see and potentially be a
| part of.
| k__ wrote:
| Public and asynchronous.
|
| If you have more than two chatty people in Slack, nobody finds
| anything anymore.
| snicker7 wrote:
| "Fix-it Fridays" are a great idea, and something that should be
| adopted beyond remote teams.
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