The biggest challenge for me is that I'm starting to realize that people don't really get asynchronous communication as much as I thought they would.
Putting on your headphones at the office and trying to get work done is seen as antisocial and hostile (especially daring to direct people to try to get you on im or email), and you find yourself shut out of critical decision points meetings because people will say "we didn't want to bother you" (what they're really saying is "fuck you, thats what you get for isolating yourself").
People want to be able to get immediate responses and interrupt each other whenever they like, and its easy to be pegged as an "asshole" if you don't play along. If you extrapolate from there, it starts to make sense why remote work is still such a hard sell in a lot of places (last stat I saw is that only about 4% of American workers work from home, thats up from 2% last year, but still)
(what they're really saying is "fuck you, thats what you get for isolating yourself")
I think that's not a charitable interpretation. Two alternative explanations, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. Most people don't like confrontation or rejection; they find it awkward and uncomfortable, even if it's done politely. After interrupting you a few times, they find that they are generally rebuffed, so they stop interrupting you. But that hesitancy will continue even in cases where they think maybe you would say yes.
2. They may not really understand why you're redirecting them to asynchronous communication; they don't have a good mental model of how you will respond. Without that, they're not able to assess what you will think is important enough to warrant an interruption. So they err on the side of not interrupting.
Theres a term for that! I think its called passive agression. Passive agression and active accomodation (ie, being nice) shouldn't be confused though. The purpose of course, for the adversary, is to disguise the former as the latter to gain a tactical advantage. While the laguage used by the parent was (somewhat) blunt, I don't think the pheonomenan he is describing is an empirical anomaly.
No, that is not what I am trying to describe. Passive aggressive behavior is still acting with malice. I am talking about people who want to do the right thing by someone, but can't figure out what that is.
Here is an alternate way to interpret the scenario in your second paragraph:
Putting on your headphones at the office and trying to get work done is seen as a signal that you need to concentrate. You find yourself shut out of critical decision points meetings because people needed to make a decision but assumed you were deep in thought and couldn't take an interruption. Balancing these two needs is hard.
You find yourself shut out of critical decision points meetings because people needed to make a decision but assumed you were deep in thought and couldn't take an interruption
Still sounds like a dick move to me, if the office were on fire and you were taking a nap in the breakroom would people leave you to sleep while they got out to save themselves? probably not.
Thats, an extreme example but if you follow it, you can see that the keypoint here is "critical decision", if you're making decisions without somebody that should be involved in the process, because you're so damned polite that you didn't want to bother them, I'd hazard that you're not really polite at all, you're just being passive aggressive, but I'm a bit of a cynic ;)
The problem is that the difference between a routine decision and a critical one is not always obvious at the time, especially if the person who would know that this particular decision is critical is unavailable.
One solution is to build a team culture that communicates asynchronously by default, like what 37 Signals describes. This has efficiency costs, but it does seem to work.
Another solution is to co-locate everyone, communicate frequently face-to-face, and build cultural norms that reduce the cost to individual productivity. My team is working on this approach, but we are considering the benefits of remote work and asynchronous communication.
If "critical decision points" are seriously that critical, they would occur lesser and you don't need to balance that. Since its critical, you must attend it.
But if "critical decision points" are coming in very frequently - you are probably not delegating work or you have a team that doesn't raise issues in daily meetings, or that simply "can't decide" or "doesn't have the freedom to decide independently" or "do not want to take responsibility to decide for some reason".
I'm in this bummer of a situation where I can work remote from pretty much anywhere I like, but my wife is bound to her 9 to 5 that won't allow her to work remotely for more than a few days at a stretch. She does knowledge work as well, and if she had been with the company for a long time and was super essential to the business they might let her work remotely for the long term, but because she's somewhat replaceable if she goes anywhere too long, she loses the job.
Its a real problem because we need to be back on the other side of the country for family at the moment and she's trapped here by the company HR policy.
Really hoping that this stuff starts to break into mainstream corporate acceptance soon. These older companies are pretty sluggish to adopt remote worker policies, especially for jobs that they can just as easily fill with people on-site.
Funny, I just got off the phone with someone I work remotely with. We communicate asynchronously regularly. And that's great. But sometimes there's no substitute for a 10 minute phone call to discuss a technical topic.
The amount of time it takes for two parties to draft and write responses to technical points can be quite high, and the back-and-forth required to correct misunderstandings can take several round-trips. Talking out loud, simultaneously, can allow for much higher bandwidth.
It also engenders basic empathy, which is a big deal in teams.
Our protocol is usually to ping the other person with a message to see if they can chat.
Funny, the last time I suggested that in-person (or at least low-friction real-time audio and/or video) communication is extremely beneficial if not crucial to software teams, especially smaller startups iterating quickly, I was lambasted. One great comment I remember distinctly was that if my job required me to regularly ask another programmer something about a system they had worked on, that means the system wasn't sufficiently documented.
The difficulty of this is higher if you're working across timezones. You need to plan a bit further ahead if you need a technical conversation with someone who's in say, Australia (like me).
That said, I don't mind occasionally* getting up at 6am for this.
I personally enjoy a scheduled meeting via some video client (we use Google hangouts). That way you can be prepared to discuss topics, and it's not an interruption of anybody's work.
We do both, as needed. In this instance, I sent a detailed email this morning. He sent a detailed response in the afternoon, with an invitation to ping him to chat further about one of the topics. A few hours later, I did, and five minutes after that, he called. The emails did the job of all of the background information - facts and basic interpretation, explanation of the problem and our options. The phone call was to agree on how we should proceed.
I can personally attest that it is incredibly hard to land a solid remote based job, even if you're very good at it. I have worked remotely most of my career (with frequent visits to the office) but I still see a constant stream of people who prefer to have someone much less skilled and/or capable on site rather than take the chance and hire remotely.
Time zones, contractual arrangements and/or agreements, distance and track record mean nothing if employers are simply not willing to give you the chance. Worse, some do and require you to keep track of every small thing you do (TPS reports, etc), destroying the employer/employee trust and leaving us with painful processes that no one likes to go through.
The other side of the coin is that remote workers often request US-like salaries to companies in much different economies, which leads to an even smaller rate of success ...
Finally, from my own experience, I would never hire someone who would tell me that they would never be able to come to the office at least a few times per year (3-4, a week at a time). Just one week of in-person collaboration can bring drastic improvements and/or discoveries that lead to better products overall.
I try to insist on a week in the office at the start of a gig -- I only take remote gigs, unless very short. That's never been a problem. (International gigs are an exception, naturally, but I let the client make the call.)
That week in the office is enough to get to know everybody and vice versa. You do need to actively seek out and talk to everyone, though.
I should probably read this book but also, I wonder if I could have written it. We've fully embraced remote working and it's fantastic. It has allowed us to hire above our weight class as a small startup, finding and keeping some truly fantastic developers.
I agree completely that communication is key. You really have to over communicate, to the point almost of being annoying to avoid very simple but costly mistakes. I also find that teams can suffer from the low fidelity of text communication with regard to sentiment and emotional content. It's just too easy to assume someone has a voice they do not and to harbor resentment or whatever silently -- especially among introverted developers.
We host occasional Skype lunches with no agenda except to catch up and chat on peoples lives.
That's really great. I'm glad to hear of another company that has benefited from an all-in approach to remote workers. I think reading the book would be time well spent. You can knock it out in a single day.
One thing I've found is that the effectiveness of remote work depends somehow on the type of work being done. I'm a currently a grad student, and my advisor is not in town very often. We have frequent skype meetings, but I don't get as much out of it as I do from real meetings. On the other end, I also work on startup projects on the week-ends, with people in different countries and I don't feel the same miscommunication problems in this context.
It is possible that remote working in an academic context is indeed possible, but that the highly technical type of communication required to make it work effectively is beyond my current skill. But my point remains that some types of work are harder to carry out remotely.
I work for a major F500 company and while they are currently not allowing any new remote employees, there are still thousands of us. My team is all over the country and I don't have an office to go into.
Honestly when I first started working from home for them years ago, I figured more and more companies would embrace it and it would become much more commonplace. They did it to save money having to house employees somewhere, but I guess other companies don't see it that way. It works wonderfully for getting work done during your own schedule and still be there with your family. Though I still find it amusing when I walk the dog and it's just me and the retirees.
While writing my master thesis in electrical engineering (pure matlab based), I found the best way was to go about 2-3 days a week to the shared computer room from the department where other students where working. Most of those days I didn't get as much work done in terms of writing compared to when I was at home, but many days I got new ideas, algorithms or a new perspective by hearing other students talk about a different but related topic or discussing a problem with a college.
So for me it was the best way to have both worlds, long phases of time at home for writing and implement stuff and quick interrupted time at the university for some quick code trying new stuff, discussing etc.
It was commonly accepted that you are no as productive in the computer room and no one would blame you if you just picked up your notebook and went to a room next door for an hour or so to get stuff done.
I've been working remotely since approx 3 years as an individual contributor (programmer). Here's my take from an individual's perspective-
There have been rare times, when I have "felt" the need to work from office to be able to collaborate better. Faster and better collaboration: I think that is the only advantage work-from-office has to offer.
BUT, the office distractions in the name of collaboration, far outweigh the advantages of being in office.
Low-latency high bandwidth networks at remote work place tend to remove the pains in online collaboration. It feels just like being there.
"In person meetups" - I am not too sure if short meetups really help team cohesion. I believe it takes at least 2 work-weeks in office to improve team cohesion that way. I've also found online meets towards common goals (like new product idea brainstorming) - pretty effective in improving team cohesion (or sometimes leads to groupism).
Personally, I find switching work space for a week or couple of days, from my regular (remote) work space - makes me feel better.
At vLine (https://vline.com) we often work remotely (or from home) and use that as a way to dogfood our service. We just set up a "vLine link" to a TV in our office and people can jump in and out throughout the day when they want to talk. Some people stay connected all day (or just keep the audio on and enable video when they need it).
I would suspect no remote work hire is a cold hire. Most of the times it is someone which has previously worked on-site and shown to be trustworthy enough to manage themselves when working remotely.
So yes, getting companies who don't know you, and will hire you for remote work based on an interview only is rare.
As someone who's worked about 50% remote in the past year, this is not true. I've worked for companies in the US, Mexico, the UK, while based in the Netherlands. One common factor though is they were mostly people already in my network, so there is definitely a trust element - but not a "face to face" trust element necessarily.
It is rare, but it does happen. Over the last 4 years I've help to build up a 10 person development team (from 3) having never met any of the candidates before hiring them.
I didn't meet anyone else from the company until a year after I had already been working here.
The interview process is just needs to be fairly rigorous.
Our preference is to hire within Canada because of:
* Timezones
* Government incentives
* Payment/Tax/Accounting hassles have already been sorted
But that doesn't mean we'll pass up great candidates in other locations.
I work remotely 100% and love it. I would never assume that 'remote' means from anywhere in the world.
When I think of remote jobs for US-based companies, I generally think of those positions being for workers employable within the US already.
Usually the company is specific about where the remote worker can be for ex: in the same city but working from home, same timezone, within 1-3 timezones or just within the USA somewhere. Even meetups are generally written into the employment contract.
My whole team is remotely located across the US and it really works well.
Yeah, Keats. You are 100% right. Remote covered this briefly, I think in the "Beware the dragons" chapter.
I don't understand the legal side of the situation completely, but if you have enough people working out of a given international city, it could create a Nexus and require you to set up an office, etc.
Remote's advice here is to hire international workers as contractors, but to treat them like full-time employees. Not ideal.
My full time job in technology morphed into work-from-home after about eighteen months. It happened for two reasons: #1, they knew me and trusted me to get the work done, and #2, I was literally the last person on my team still on site. My team's spread all over the world at this point.
I kept going to the office for a while, then realized that, aside from having three monitors on my desk, there was no advantage for me going there, and there are disadvantages. After two years, this is what I've learned.
Advantages of remote work:
- Time: I save 2-3 hours daily from getting dressed up, making lunch, and commuting.
- Efficiency: it's quiet in my home office (the family knows to leave me alone while the door's closed). I've got 16 gigs of RAM on my home computer, plenty of disk space, and it's actually faster and better than my work computer. The work computer required so much bureaucratic rigmarole to get it updated that I gave up.
- Comfort: my chair is always where I left it, unlike at the office :(. My coffee is made the way I like it, unlike the crappy K-Cup thing at the office which never has decaf (I can't drink full caffeine). Lunch consists of pulling a piece of cold chicken out of the fridge 10 feet away. I can walk outside into the conservation land across the street while thinking about a problem.
- Quiet: I don't have to listen to nonstop irrelevant conversation, computer noises, phones ringing.
- Financial: We took a trip to Nova Scotia and I managed to work every day from my laptop in wifi hotspots, avoiding using any vacation hours. Of course, it was not a vacation for me during the working day, but the family got to enjoy a nice trip. I do the same when visiting the parents at Thanksgiving--we land Monday or Tuesday evening and I work before the holiday begins. My vacation time has accordingly piled up and I'm going to cash some of it in.
- Family-friendly: I can pick up and drop off my kid to school, and be at home for her while my wife's at work. No need to pay for after-school or a nanny.
- Healthy: no stress from commuting. I can go jogging at lunchtime, grab a shower later on in the day. It's just an hour out of my day, whereas there's not even a shower at the office, let alone a gym.
Disadvantages:
- The fridge, as noted above, is only 10 feet away. Even worse is the bowl of surplus Halloween candy sitting on the counter nearby.
- Always available means never offline. My manager knows I'm probably at my computer at 9pm or 10pm, so he'll text me with questions. (I always answer. To me, this is the price of WFH: out of fear that some small minded executive will some day say, "You should be in the office from now on so we can better track you", I make sure that they never have reason to doubt my productivity and availability. I'm overcompensating of course, but then I enjoy my work and I am grateful for the flexibility so I return the favor. We're kind of a start-up within a big corporation anyway, so long hours are the norm.)
- The family sees me sitting there and talks to me. I have to fend them off.
- Very tempting to spend time on Facebook and other sites such as Hacker News :) I rationalize it as blowing off steam, but jogging's better, really.
A bit of a tangent, but am I the only one who finds texts unacceptable in professional situations? I never reply to a text from a client; if it's important, I'll reply to the text FROM an email, but never as a text. If it happens more than once or twice I explain that I don't receive text message notifications on my phone (which is true; I can see them passively but they do not "ping" me), and that to ensure a timely response they should always email or call me.
This means (a) all expectations of me are in one place (my inbox) and (b) I don't have to filter work from my free time. And in the age of smartphones, there's really no reason not to just use email.
This means (a) all expectations of me are in one place (my inbox) and (b) I don't have to filter work from my free time.
Isn't this a tools problem (ie, at your end)?
I certainly separate my work phone number from my personal one (but that's pretty easy to do these days).
I've never found the SMS vs Email location thing to bother me, but if it does think there are plenty of phone apps that combine them. From memory HTC has one that isn't terrible, and Dias.im[1] looks nice.
What do you do about other message sources though? IM, etc?
I've always considered keeping my work organised something I'm responsible for, and I'd never try to make other work one way or another to fit my tools.
texts (actually, instant messages) are handy for asking simple yes/no types of questions.
"What's the server?"
"<pasted in server address>"
"Thanks!"
"np"
faster than email, and there wasn't a need for a paper trail, more like a tap on the shoulder kind of conversation.
On the food part, I find the office worse than my house. At my house I can control what is in my fridge. At work, there is a cornucopia of candy, yogurts, nuts, drinks and other high calorie snacks that never, ever runs out. And there is 3 meal service which you'll never know the calorie counts of. Everyone has gained 10 to 15 lbs at my work.
At home it would be easy to make the food I want, controlled how I want.
I see a lot more of my family than I would working 9-to-5 in an office situation. So, if I work 8am-6pm or 7pm, I'm still coming out ahead in that department. Sometimes I'll work well into the evening, hammering on something to get it to work. Other times, I'll take half the day off just to recharge and recalibrate. Luckily my job works that way. I'm just very fortunate right now--sooner or later, I suppose I'll be back in some office somewhere, sitting in some cube farm and trying to be productive while the guy next to me yacks on his cell or chews his food loudly.
Agree with most ofmyour points, and I even find that my boss hectors me much less now after hours than he did before I went remote(and his non-stop office interruptions were the reason I moved off-site, so big win there).
But I think I'm much less efficient, focused. Personal flaw, probably. But when at the office I never wasted a second, and grew to resent boss interrupting to come watch latest Yahoo Sports video. I wanted to get the heck out. Now I'm too inclined to piddle. Rather than stair-stepping up 5 flights to pace, I'll rake leaves then fix the kids a snack, then I've got to work after normal hours to catch up.
Also, my study used to be a refuge. Now it's where I work.
But I do enjoy nice days when I can work from the boat and no one's the wiser.
Putting on your headphones at the office and trying to get work done is seen as antisocial and hostile (especially daring to direct people to try to get you on im or email), and you find yourself shut out of critical decision points meetings because people will say "we didn't want to bother you" (what they're really saying is "fuck you, thats what you get for isolating yourself").
People want to be able to get immediate responses and interrupt each other whenever they like, and its easy to be pegged as an "asshole" if you don't play along. If you extrapolate from there, it starts to make sense why remote work is still such a hard sell in a lot of places (last stat I saw is that only about 4% of American workers work from home, thats up from 2% last year, but still)
"Hell is other People" --- Jean Paul Sartre