I work remotely. I'm from Romania and we have a team that's distributed across the country, with some members from other European countries as well. We do have a small office where I live, but it is provided just as a place to come to in case you don't like working from home and I do go to our office almost daily, but most of the team is on the other end of a Gmail/Skype/Slack connection.
Today I got tired at 1 PM, got up from my desk, got my bike and went for a ride in the park nearby. Once in a while I would take the phone out of my pocket and give quick answers on Slack, but most of my time I enjoyed what is the beginning of autumn. You can feel it in the air, it's more chilly, the light gets warmer and the color of the trees start changing. It's by far the most beautiful time of the year for walking in parks. And it felt great. Now I'm back home and I'm thinking of finishing my work, but after I eat something.
And I do this all the time, while managing to get shit done. Many times I work late to finish this or that. But I'm a responsible software developer, I care about the project and I can work without somebody watching over my shoulder.
And surely there are those times where you need to do design sessions with the rest of the team. But we do those over Skype and every once in a while we travel in order to meet face to face. There are challenges in communication of course, but we make it work.
Sounds wonderful! I was recently working onsite at a Scandinavian bank that had office spread all over Europe. We had people fly in from Sweden and Poland to meet in person, but I loved how all of the remote teams were tied together. At the office I was in, every employee was wearing a Jabra Evolve headset, they were tied in to Skype, and had the Linc (I think?) LEDs sticking up from their monitors to show availability status.
The headsets had a little pad that sat on your desk for changing volume, music tracks, accepting/cancelling calls. They were noise-cancelling headsets, had a flip-down mic that stowed in the headband out of the way when not in use, and had a push-to-listen where you press in on an earcup to cancel the noise-cancelling functions and hear what was going on in the office around you.
I think most employees worked with others from remote offices regularly, though I'm not sure how many actually worked from home. It just felt like a very seamless system that allowed everyone to be connected to each other.
That is generally not compatible with the American way of working - especially in the startup scene - where ever second you're not working is considered a second that your competitor companies have over you.
As an american who works just as he does, and have for roughly 10 years, this is simply not true.
Working down to the bone, "every second", will lead to serious burn out. Your mental health suffers, as do your relationships.
I won't make any assumptions about who you are or how you work, but I tend to see this mindset from new blood who wants to get the edge over others. I understand this mindset, as it's very productive - like a short sprint - but it's not sustainable.
If you want to last the whole race, you need to pace yourself.
> As an american who works just as he does, and have for roughly 10 years, this is simply not true.
For you. I worked remotely for an American consulting company a while back and you were expected to be reachable during the business hours and respond in less than 30 minutes. If you missed that window more than once, that number shrank to 10 minutes. The turnover rate was high.
I agree with everything you're saying, but not all remote employers agree with us.
Odd. I work from home and have for 3 years now. I'm reachable in a second. Because I have my ass at my desk working except when I'm at lunch. 30 minutes is a deplorable standard, 10 minutes is simply unacceptable. No standard should be necessary. If I were managing those groups and I needed a standard: I'd find new employees.
While on one hand I am strongly against employee-abuse and working over an 8-hour day: I guarantee my employer that I'm available near-instantly for 8 hours straight (barring lunch) and I have my head down working during that time. Then I disconnect, and go love my family.
As such, my employer trusts me and if I ever did happen to disappear off on a bike into the forest they have no concerns I wouldn't handle my work. I call it an "honest 8", so they are guaranteed to get what they pay for with no concerns of me screwing off, and everyone is always on the same page.
All that said, I do not work well with mediocre people who don't try hard in everything they do, and put pride into their work. So I might be an oddball in the US, and fit in better with a less abusive, but more orderly, stringent society like Germany. Where coincidentally, most of my family came from to begin with so it may just be a difference in cultural norms passed down.
> "Once in a while I would take the phone out of my pocket and give quick answers on Slack, but most of my time I enjoyed what is the beginning of autumn."
As long as you reply in your 30 minute deadline, i dont see how you still can't do what he's doing. I have my phone on me all the time and if there's an emergency or some sort of window where i must reply, i hop on the phone or go back to the desk and get it done.
That said, my reply wasn't intended to be a blanket statement of all remote workers.
One example of where it doesn't work is at U-Haul. A lot of uhaul customer service is people sitting at home glued to their computers, waiting for calls. There is no 30 minute window there.
My point was that it's not as impossible as the comment author made it seem. A balance between "riding in the park" and "answering my client within 30 minutes" is possible here.
It depends on the expectations of the employer. This stuff is usually stated on remote job listings (though admittedly jobs that start as "choose your own hours" somehow transition to "work between 9 and 5 Pacific time" too frequently). There are remote employers that expect you to be continually available for instant comms all day, part of the day, or none of the day (i.e., unscheduled instant comms are non-mandatory). The latter is obviously ideal but also the most rare.
It's almost as if... different people have different experiences at different companies... as if, dare I say it, not all people and companies are the same?
Right, but the person you replied to was giving the counterfactual that not all jobs are like that. It didn't need to be rebutted; they were not instead stating that ALL jobs are flexible, just pointing out not all AREN'T.
Actually, the argument was that "most" jobs in the US are flexible on hours. I really doubt that's true, given that there's a good many minimum-wage or close-to-minimum-wage jobs out there, and a lot of traditional 9-5 office jobs, and the US still has factories and lots of other companies which need to run to a schedule. And the idea that a single person could state that "most" jobs are anything based on personal experience is probably incorrect.
Same here. All my employers have been totally inflexible on hours and location. It's all ass-in-seat, 8-5 or 9-6, kind of work. I dream of being able to do what others describe here: when I get tired, take a nap, have lunch with my kids everyday, etc... always get shit done, but just also be able to adapt work to fit the life I want more precisely.
A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model. Speed and agility are your only advantages. Working all the time is practically essential for most startups. Are we seriously saying that startups should be comfortable 9 to 5 jobs? There are hundreds of millions of jobs out there that will give you that lifestyle, why complain about that exception where it is actually sensible? Or have we repurposed the word "startup" to mean small business?
Are you sure? Having experts in a given field isn't an advantage to look for? The mere fact that you're able to turn on a dime if necessary without having to reorganise thousands of employees and projects towards your new goal?
If your definition of "startup" includes "doing things that literally anybody else with enough money could do" and "trying to establish a monopoly at all costs", speed and agility are things you need. Unfortunately, that's the definition that most of SV seem to use. But if you're trying to push boundaries and do something new with experts in your chosen field? Not so much.
Really depends on how much distance that expertise leaves between you and your competition. If it's enough of a barrier to entry, then yes you have time, otherwise you better be going fast. A better funded competitor might Uber you after that first MVP has been derisked.
1) It gives you time to reflect on whether the direction you are going makes sense and is aligned with others.
2) It gives you time to sleep and exercise, which makes you more focused and effective at work.
3) It removes the illusion that you can ignore planning/reflection and just pour more hours into something in order to make it successful.
4) If you are demanding people work really bad hours as a matter of course, then that scares experienced hands away. Given that most employees won't see any payout from an exit, those with experience will demand to be paid in cash and will demand that much more if you expect long hours.
> It removes the illusion that you can ignore planning/reflection and just pour more hours into something in order to make it successful.
It took me too many years in the industry to figure this out. When I'm in "get it done" mode spanning consecutive long days, I do not think calmly or clearly enough to recognize the opportunities along the way that I could have taken to achieve my goal faster/better. Since realizing this, I cannot count how many times I have come in the next morning with new and better ideas and approaches after reflecting on the previous day's sprint during my own, calm, personal time.
More lile, every second you are not at your desk appearing to work. I've seen this in established companies in the US too, so it's not exclusive to startups
I don't agree at all. The American startup has lots of time for ping pong, foosball or hanging out in a chill out/game room, or a social with beers after an all hands weekly meeting. Also flex work hours are pretty common in my experience and lots of startup tout those as a perk.
What's not compatible? He says he's getting the work done. I work exactly like he does for an American company in the bay area and it works out extremely well. Unless you have a deadline that day, I don't see what difference it makes whether you finish the project at 5pm or 7pm or 11pm as long as you get your tasks for the day done. Or are you just assuming that he's not putting in as much work because he's taking a break and isn't American?
I'm partially remote working (RW) at an organization that is slowly rolling back its RW culture(1). The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away). "Culture" is used as a smoke screen for more sinister incentives. (I can say that with confidence because I can see that RW is working fine while what hinders productivity is mammoth bureaucracy and politics put forward by the same people that keep blabbing about "culture".
To me it's clear that remote working is (should be) the way to go (why on earth tech jobs and consequently tech workers should cluster in small geographic areas, spend hours in commuting and feed our salaries to landlord rentiers is beyond my understanding). Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction.
PS: Of course RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore which makes the whole thing more of a mixed bag of blessings and curses - like everything else in life :) .
(1) I think the trend started off by M.Mayer's move to roll back RW in yahoo (<cynic>leading to the spectacular yahoo growth we all know of</cynic>) but I'm not sure.
> The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away).
Sorry, but I've got to be the party pooper in this thread. I have worked with teams over the years that indeed DO work better co-located, and who ARE more productive when forced to communicate in an open office environment, etc. Night and day difference. When not in that environment they reverted back to the ol' "do something in isolation, throw it over the fence, wait days for feedback, then iterate" mode. I will stress that not all teams needed co-location, but many absolutely did.
This whole thread needs to be filed under the category "different people/teams thrive in different environments", because right now it's a "remote Work is best for everyone" echo chamber.
Fair enough, but I believe we can do a little better than "different people/teams thrive in different environments".
If its within team communication, and with slack/trello/github/standups and the team members are not speaking except every few days then thats an issue.
If its with external teams, then perhaps its an opportunity for self service api's or automation? I.e. let me query your api instead of having to meet with you. Understood that most cultures don't function this way but is there argument with the ideal?
I think coordination is the key. If someone with authority isn't willing to step up and make sure everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing, things will definitely slow to a crawl and people won't communicate until it's too late. And that team will do better colocated. But a good PM can make a remote team work just as well as a colocated team, in my experience. If you don't have that person, you're just leaving your efficiency up to chance (does the team get along; do they feel like working that day) no matter the work environment you choose.
Edit: I'm not sure "is willing to" is the right phrase. You have to have a brilliant PM, period. I've worked with bad PMs, no PM, and a few great PMs, and it really is night and day. A talented PM can make an organization sing.
As somebody that remote works most of the time, I will stick my head out and agree that working side by side tends to be my most productive times with co-workers.
Working remotely is great for ones health. Co-working is best for synergy and communication.
Yep. Some people default-to-productive, and others need guidance, coaching, "forcing", whatever you want to call it. It's almost as if different people have different motivations, work habits and communication styles!
Yes. There is a pernicious group of candidate employees lurking outside of every organization all of the time, and if you let these people in, this is the kind of output you get.
People who've made their careers as "non-technical people managers" have no. freaking. idea. what to do when you put them in a "remote office". They've gotten by with their free donuts twice a week, their wry smiles, their nice suit, their good posture, and their firm handshake all of these years and work makes no sense to them if you can't have these things. Reading technical mumbo-jumbo in a Slack channel and having to pretend to know what it means is their worst nightmare.
It seems that every technical organization these types touch quickly begins to adopt nonsense practices and make really dubious overall business decisions. Sometimes the manager/executive's connections can help give the company a kick in the pants, but it usually won't survive the new employees' MBA-informed directives too long before fresh MBAs come in to issue a fresh kick in the pants or someone competent eventually ascends (rarely happens).
The really scary thing about the MBA-types is that once you let one in, they invite their friends, and then they're impossible to extricate. Then you start getting "technical" people (read: management's buddy who fixes his computer on the weekend) getting big titles, pretending they know what they're doing and making technical decisions that are absolutely, criminally disastrous in the medium and long term.
Then they call their friends at the trade mag and get an article written about their new revelation, which starts a trend that a lot of normal tech people inexplicably try to copy. :|
A lot of bureaucracy and politics are coming from tech people too. Turf wars, ego issues, you name it. But yes, collocation seems to be of particular advantage to the ones being talented at 'being pleasant to the right people'.
Yeah, it's not that there are no political issues among technical people. I just feel like most technical people will generally recognize good technical arguments and work toward them as long as the arguments are framed/presented considerately, because when it comes down to it, there are cold hard facts in that world. They're approaching their work semi-rationally, so there's some possibility that you'll get somewhere if you have a strong case respectfully presented. That's been my experience with good technical workers over the years.
The primary time that pattern is subverted is when a technical person gets overly concerned with appeasing a non-technical boss. That happens because the non-technical bosses want it to happen. They don't care about the engineering. They are trying to remake the technical side in their image, which is part of why they bring in the aforementioned weekend-computer-fixer and give him a fancy title like "director and architect". This makes it so that he doesn't really have to do much if any technical work because there is plausible deniability -- he can say he was busy doing "direction and architecture" so he didn't have time to write the code. Especially true if subordinates get added.
With non-technical types, successful interaction in the workplace goes from being half-about feelings and half-about demonstrable truths to being completely about feelings. To them, no arguments matter. For example, a non-technical manager or a faux-technical person will always be looking for ways to deflect blame because admitting you're wrong is weakness, it doesn't play well emotionally or superficially. If you want them to change something, you have to make it so that there is no possible superficial negative interpretation of their actions, and then you must show them why it's in their interest to do what you want them to do with emotions, because they don't operate in a world of rationality.
Technical teams are driven to improve their product even if there is blame involved or the possibility of a negative perception somewhere because there are actually consequences to failure or inefficiencies. The program will stop, the data may be lost, etc. Non-technicals don't have this type of real consequence behind their work.
For the non-technical MBA crowd, work is entirely a dance where you curtsy to the other entity's interest in authority, power, respect, and similar emotional expectations and (in)securities in the correct sequence. The dance program must be completed successfully. If it is, the other party rewards the participant(s) with a sum of money (aka "strippers and steak"); if not, offense is taken.
People from that world hate remote work because remote work takes away 97% of their dance floor. With few inflection points for emotional manipulation, they have practically nothing to work with. Technical people love remote work because it trims their "dance floor" down so that the emotional dance area is only there on the fringes, and the technical work can take what they feel is its appropriate place at center stage.
I'm not trying to wholly discount the emotional components that come into play in the workplace or say that they're necessarily wrong. But in work that comprises something more than pampering/nurturing the right feelings, it is obviously beneficial to minimize that aspect.
One huge mistake some companies do is treat remote vs on-site workers differently, making on-site people feel bad when they "work from home". If remote is available it should be available to everybody who doesn't need to be physically in the office, otherwise resentment starts to build up.
This has happened to me as an employee at my previous job;
People living far from office location were allowed to always remote work. However team members living in the same town needed a really good excuse to actually be able to do remote.
Why giving excuses?
I really think that for some types of work, for which you might have been hired for, being at the same office is important. Remote work is not easy nor for everyone and being able to work with remote team members neither it is. The easiest path is to have everyone at the office unless it's physically important to have someone you have in your team there.
But certainly its available to everyone to negotiate during the interview process no? I have also seen people "become remote" after some time on the job, so its also possible to negotiate after that fact I would think.
> certainly its available to everyone to negotiate during the interview process no
Probably not. It would be available to those that are considered living too far away from the office. Those that work within a range that is considered close enough are expected to be in the office and attempting to negotiate that would take you out of consideration.
I'm a remote worker and love it. That being said it's important to keep in mind that face to face communication and collaboration is unquestionably higher bandwidth.
It's gotten much easier since Video Conference became ubiquitous but there is still no contest when comparing face to face communication to a Video Conference or Conference call. Now I happen to think the benefits of remote working outweigh that loss of bandwidth but I don't think you can make the case for it without acknowledging that loss of bandwidth.
A remote team is good at maximizing those benefits while minimizing the costs. But some people are just incapable of managing remote teams. I'm dealing with one right now and the pain is real on both sides.
I think RW supporting teams that do RW well (including both managers who know how to run it and techies) outperform local ones. However, RW makes it easier for slackers to slack off; it is difficult for less effective managers to detect, let alone handle it.
I think managing RW teams well (getting needed work and shielding members from most non-tech crap) is a pretty rare skill.
In any case, if you want to do X (work remotely) and your management sees this as a problem, not a solution, consider looking elsewhere.
> However, RW makes it easier for slackers to slack off; it is difficult for less effective managers to detect, let alone handle it.
This is, I think, because most management techniques don't rely on any sort of objective measurement to determine effectiveness.
Using measurements can have its own dangers if done poorly, but subjective observations and feelings about how productive or effective a team or individual is can be even more dangerous.
I've been on the receiving end of subjective judgements that have ruined a good team.
Yeah, I spent last week clarifying stuff with business analyst and QA person. Cleaning up delivery with small changes. When my team mate wrote quite a lot of code that need bunch of fixes. How to measure productivity.
" Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction."
You are more efficient when you work less (obviously, because you have an internal deadline that says you want to finish before your time is up), it is just that the culture surrounding software engineering is biaised towards long hours, half in which you are not really working or working with a terrible productivity, or worse, be in endless meetings. It also pleases management to work more hours, because you "work harder" :-).
I can't think of a single positive thing any "company culture" I have experienced (around two dozen places in my lifetime so far) has ever created, but racism, sexism, harassment, homogeneity, demotivation, distraction, drunkedness, fraud, and other negatives were indeed products of "company culture" at almost every company I've worked for that touted a focus on "company culture." Often, even the food/drinks are shit, let alone the rest of the culture.
The great thing about remote work, IMO, is that there is NO remote culture and therefore, you don't have to be subjected to the above as much or as often (the actual article sounds like some generic marketing speak to me about something that doesn't exist). It's one of the huge perks I only realized after starting remote work. Mind you, there are whole classes of people, especially many middle managers, whose only job is to create the above things and call them "company culture," and they are typically not so happy about not controlling those below them through abuses of this idea. Thus, they want to pull the remote workers back into their sphere of influence, where they can be controlled, and their jobs' existence justified.
As far as being off shored: if they thought that was a good idea to begin with, the company would have already done it and I wouldn't be working remotely. They probably also wouldn't be in business anymore.
>The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away).
A related reason, that I mentioned in a comment a few weeks ago, is that some people in management who are required to be in the office resent the fact that their reports (who by the nature of their role definitely do not need to be working every day in the main office) are remote and that it helps their work/life balance.
The solution, I think, is for companies to properly define which roles are open to remote — perhaps it might be time for developers to receive a comp differential for being office-based — and to make work in the main office more appealing. Good food, a nice office, and other quality onsite benefits are ways this can be achieved.
... before it's too late and they can't backtrack because it already cost too much in the transition and their ego can't handle admitting they were wrong.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been hired to fix an outsourced project disaster. I feel like this has burned enough people that I'm not nearly as worried about it as I was 10 years ago. If you make your living doing wordpress sites, though, it's time to retool.
It is somehow ironic that not so long ago we could send ships on a 4 month trip around the word, could manage the construction of amazing buildings or sent armies to fight wars on the end of the word without being able to communicate with the people doing their job/duty. Nowdays we can barely let change the font size of a button on a webpage without having a stand up meeting or a conference call.
In all fairness Columbus was pretty terrible at his job. The only reason he was even working for the queen in the first place is because pretty much no one else would hire him because of his track record of being terrible at his job. He tried sailing to India the long way around, almost ran out of supplies and got lucky that the Americas happened to exist.
Its possible he had a Chinese map showing that the Americas did exist. Which he could barely read, and concluded that India was over there. He got the distance right; just not the place.
So he had enough supplies for the journey he made, that part was actually planned. No luck involved.
lol thank you! what a ridiculous notion that just because people in the past COULD NOT communicate efficiently, that it was a preferred or better way to do things. any good manager/boss/supervisor/leader/etc will want to be updated regularly, or at least maintain access to information.
> any good manager/boss/supervisor/leader/etc will want to be updated regularly
Of course they want to, that's how they justify their existence. The question is do they need to have that constant ability to look over your shoulder for work to be done.
> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. There is no catered lunch or a hip office with table tennis table. Everything artificial is stripped away.
I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem.
Working remotely is awesome. All power to remote workers, but no amount of collaborative tools replaces the value of face-to-face communication.
I sort-of agree that meetings are often a waste of time BUT if you have to google something _during_ the meeting, you haven't prepared sufficiently or the meeting organizer hasn't provided a clear agenda before the meeting.
Meetings can be valuable if people take them seriously (and if there aren't too many).
Lots of times, unforeseen questions come up at meetings, in fact, if they don't; that's a sign the meeting wasn't really productive at all. Google should be on a large screen in the conference room. Or Bing if you're into that. Most meetings I get invited to end up with "action item" which means really, people go back to your desks and Google, research, test, decide, etc. so we can have a followup meeting to decide what we could have decided together in the first meeting if we didn't shut ourselves into a conference room, away from the world on the pretense that the meeting will be 100% productive that way.
Lots of problems come up in meetings that you can't adequately prepare for.
Clear agendas don't solve the problem of a bad agenda.
Meetings can be valuable but not nearly as valuable as peer to peer communication in the office. Meetings are almost always a waste of time where I work.
> I can't tell you how many times being able to look something up to respond in a more concrete way has solved countless meetings.
reply
But when the questions and comments are not well expressed keeping the loop in text (email or Slack) makes the things worse. Obviously if you can just fire a voice conference everything can be sorted out but in my, just personal, experience remote workers are working more asynchronously and you don't expect to talk immediately without scheduling it earlier, much earlier than on-site where it is spontaneous.
Not in every case. It was often an excuse for my last manager to not do anything like write down requirements.
"I thought we talked about that."
"Yes you changed your mind three times and I can't remember what the final outcome was."
Personally I like having things done in writing as you have something solid to refer to afterwards.
Sure, instead he'd just change his mind three times distributed across hundreds of Slack messages, and you'd still have no tracked resolution.
When you have a decision born of a conversation, the only useful thing to do is to write that distilled, focused result on some median other than the discussion itself.
This problem ultimately has little to do with remote vs colocated; The same applies whether the discussion happened in verbal discussion, a meeting, an email chain, messaging, etc.
Tip: after a meeting / conversation, create the user story as you understand it based on the conversation then tagged your manager on the item and ask for confirmation. Ideally, you'd have a product manager who keeps an easy to read backlog; but if you don't then you need to take matters into your own hands.
If you don't have someone taking detailed meeting minutes, the meeting might as well not have happened. Always take notes and send to all participants promptly to verify accuracy. Isn't this Running A Meeting 101?
I don't think the author is claiming that more expressive or rewarding friendships form as much as he's claiming that remote really makes you focus on the meat and the content of the colleague's output. That's actually something I LOVE about working remotely. There are far fewer politics because instead of saying "Oh man, Jimmy looked at me cross-eyed last week, I don't want to do anything with him anymore", you just say "Oh, Jimmy needs help on this issue. I'll send him a reply in a minute."
I have literally had colleagues complain that they were offended by the way I sat in my chair (and, I've since learned that at least one of my friends has been subjected to this same criticism at a separate workplace). Remote work strips away all of that inconsequential crap and leaves you to focus on the data.
This is one of the major unsung benefits of remote work: it removes a huge amount of office politics and allows employees to concentrate on working and think less about campaigning.
I've had colleagues resent me for not bringing enough free snacks into the office when I was in a supervisory role. Yes, really. Anything that can help mitigate that kind of thing is great.
In a previous job I gradually instituted by own work-from-home policy for similar reasons. This situation was more due to negativity breeding itself in the office (which was a result of politics) and less about the politics directly.
When I'm having a rough day, I might be sitting there silently thinking negative thoughts about some situation I just dealt with through the computer. But if someone else exclaims some frustration aloud while I'm also in a bad mood then I'm more likely to join in on the bitch session. Eventually I realized how toxic the environment was, and I started working from home as often as I could get away with. Occasionally I was reprimanded for not showing up enough, but that led to an Office Space-like situation where I would show up just enough to avoid the hassle of "a talk."
My productivity at home was well over double (or in the office it was far below half, depending on how you look at it) and my outlook on life became a lot more healthy.
Not sure if I agree with that. Lots of times I catch myself editing my messages again and again thus making them up to the point. You have to be a very good communicator in talking and have very good listeners to get the same amount of accuracy. Communication throughput is less though and what goes missing for sure is context (facial expressions, posture, etc) but for some people that is not a bad thing per se.
This is probably a personal thing. I'm definitely an e-mail editor, but plenty of people prefer real-time or near-real-time communication to the precision of a carefully considered e-mail.
A proper frictionless peer-chat-videoconference tool is actually better than face-to-face. You can share data; you can have facetime with arbitrary people around the 'building' without wasting time walking around. You can hear everybody and tell who is talking in a large meeting. But only if everybody uses the tools.
Worked this way for 5 years. One of the best work experiences of my life. So I don't believe folks who dis remote working, if they've never tried this.
Very few issues that are easily resolved f2f can't be resolved on the phone. It just takes people who are really great at communicating to make it work.
f2f is way better for teambuilding though. Hard to go out to dinner together over Slack.
Actually having worked remote for a while now, what I do observe quite a bit is there's way less office politics on the remote teams. One of the reasons is my coworkers "are" their code, emails or talking heads on google hangouts :)
Less face-to-face interaction == less politics.
Emails vs. "face to face" - there's no need to actually be in a physical proximity for that conversation to take place.
This is a big reason I like remote working (and can't wait to find another job which is remote). I find office life really political and very inefficient. Our team (and others who stop by our area) is very chatty, and there's a ton of political (Game of Thrones level) maneuvering. My experience of remote working is that you're insulated from a lot of that--or at least you're in a lot more control of how distracted you allow yourself to be. Politically there are still stressors from time to time, but at least you're hopefully just judged on your output rather than how many hours you sit in your chair, the car you drive, the length of your commute, how you dress, and whether you shave daily.
Seriously, videoconfering (hangouts, webex, zoom.us, appear.in, etc...) solves this. As a matter of fact I can get a face to face meeting faster with remote worker than on-site workers.
I think remote teams are in a never-ending pursuit to replicate that face-to-face communication. But as you say, nothing can really replace the face-to-face interaction. So I agree with you.
But the main argument I am making here is not that virtual communication is superior to a human one. Rather I am saying that a vague notion of culture is all that ties remote workers to their virtual teams.
But maybe I badly phrased it here because what I call culture is also man-made.
I love this topic. On one hand, many tech giants spent an exorbitant amount of money hiring and bringing their technical talent to one location. Easy examples such as Google and especially Amazon come to mind. On the other hand, any studies on the subject strongly imply anyone farther than 50 feet rarely speaks anyway so you are better off with remote teams as they are setup with better tooling (slack, et tal).
As a single data point my experience as a hiring manager and allowing remote candidates allowed for a much higher level of talent to draw upon.
Furthermore, I have had remote teams develop a great culture merely by turning on their cameras during the daily standup.
Finally, I also question the productivity of team building 'dinners' and other one-off activities. Having been part of teams with lots of corporate dinners and teams without its hard for me to really call out any specific value.
I truly do want to be convinced otherwise, but the strongest argument I have seen here so far is a vague 'Face to face is superior' when I have had great remote teams with cameras on. Anyone have a more data driven argument? Even if its a few data points?
I'm all for being remote (been working from home for about 8 years now for 3 different companies).
Two scenarios where face-to-face wins:
1. "Onboarding + noob training". Sure, this can be done remotely but it's vastly more effective face-to-face especially when the tech isn't limited to the computer and there are "real life" gadgets involved in getting set up for development.
2. If the team isn't 100% remote it takes extra effort for those in the office to be "inclusive" so that remote folks are 100% up to speed. Just like with any extra effort in an already busy environment this doesn't always happen. Can't really blame them either - if a decision is made on the fly between two busy devs hacking their asses off and they rely on you seeing their PR to derive what they decided on that's just how things go sometimes.
For #1, it's enough to not make the team remote 100% of the time. If you get everybody together for a week or so every few months, you'll get those activities done.
Sure it's doable. Getting everyone together often can get pretty expensive though (flights, hotels, less stuff gets done), flying the noob over to shadow an experienced person 1-on-1 is probably a better way to go.
The point is there are cases where face to face is preferable.
of course, all you're saying is right. we are 100% remote, have been for about 2 years.
the only thing i'd add/modify is i do like to meet up with everyone at least once every 12-24 months, usually in a town where a convention is happening.
note we don't actually go to the convention, which i think are largely pointless, but it's good to take advantage of when a bunch of colleagues are in town. that's when we bring the new hires in to meet the team and network with the industry at large.
There is no shortage of remote job boards and job aggregators
That's true, there is just a shortage of the job offers. I'm looking for a remote job now. All the job boards have between 2 to 5 job offers per day. To each of them answer thousands of people.
The aggregators are even worse. They are automated. That's why they contain an ad even when it has no remote allowed.
Interested in your `conference talks about databases` is there any online links to your talks? also your email address strikes me as being a bit odd. I guess you don't want the bots finding your real email address.
Yep, anonymity is funny. I'm not sure about the recordings, and presentations are not in English, and are made as a background for talking, so reading them would be useless.
This was not our experience. We posted for a full-time remote frontend position in our 100% remote company and only received a few inquiries. Thankfully one of them was the right fit but I'm dubious to your "thousands of people".
I think the main point of this article (which could have been half the length) is that you can't just declare a job remote.
You have to have a culture and technology that supports it, or else if you take that remote job, you're getting set up for failure.
If everybody else is having water cooler conversations, and making binding decisions based on them without email or chat, any remote employee is going to be constantly blindsided, and not rewarded by the organization.
I worked on one (and am currently working on another) highly distributed team, and the amount of whip-cracking that my manager had to do to make sure everything was documented and accessible to everybody on the team was incredible.
Well - if everyone else is co located, then changing the way they work to support a new group of remote workers actually add a cost to the local team. This is why it needs to be at a culture and people level, not just a tech level. The tech can be there and the local group can just ignore it, leaving the remote workers out of the loop.
I was talking about a job a while back where I would have been the first and only remote worker. What was a 'no' for me was that not only would I have to do my day job, I'd also have to be the one the pushed the remote agenda - which is a large job in it's own right. If there had been support to help the business migrate this way, then I'd have been more interested, but my feeling was that although they wanted me I'd always be the spare wheel causing additional effort for a whole team.
Now, it comes down to management setting strict guidelines and enforcing them.
What good is it to pay for Jira accounts when nobody uses them? Or what good is it to have Github and everybody ends up hosting their own private repos?
That is definitely a management mandate, and logistically, it's a lot easier to manage a group if they are all in the same place.
I'd say the tech has been there a lot longer than you think, I've known people who've worked in distributed teams 20 years ago. Yes, the tech was a little different, but it was still good enough.
I absolutely agree with you though that the culture of making sure everything is done using those tools is the important part. You essentially have to give up most of the benefits you might get from some members being colocated and do everything as though you were all at separate sites.
> I'd say the tech has been there a lot longer than you think, I've known people who've worked in distributed teams 20 years ago. Yes, the tech was a little different, but it was still good enough.
E-mail, chat system, telephone, version control system, remote access were indeed there and are still enough for most use cases.
What was missing or not very good or reliable? Video chat and screen sharing, perhaps? I dislike the first, I find it almost doesn't bring anything positive compared to the phone but has drawbacks. And the latter makes me seasick.
Then maybe we are not on the same page. I would assume company is already using one or another project tracking tool or distributed source control. I can't think of companies that are not doing this as being relevant.
No, we are not on the same page. The point is not that you're using a project tracking tool or distributed source control.
Btw, Google/Facebook do not use distributed source control, and they are quite relevant.
The point is the communication tools. If you are not accustomed to jumping on chat with somebody with the same comfort as walking over and tapping their shoulder, it doesn't matter if you pay for VC software licenses.
If you talk to somebody in person, and then decide something and act on it, without looping the entire team in on the decision, then remote employees are going to feel like outsiders, even if you are paying money for email software.
I've thought a lot about this. I am posting this in an attempt to give an example of what's worked for 1 company, not as a "guide" or "best practices". I post this in an attempt to give people ideas on what may work for them.
I operate an engineering team as a seed stage startup across 2 coasts of the US, multiple parts of APAC, and europe.
We are around 13 full time with a few part timers. We started as 2 people. Our first hire was co located with us. Our next one was remote.
From there we've made our hires only through referrals or our open source channel.
We did YC W16 this year as ~6 people and most of us remote.
We've more than doubled the team after having raised nearly 3 million.
A few notes on what's worked for us:
Remote first office, no one (even if there is an office in your area) is required to come in (at all). We use https://gitter.im/ to interact with our open source community, partner companies, and team members.
Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well.
Some of us choose to for a separation of work and home.
We don't have job postings either. We do this on purpose. We tell engineers the same thing: Show up in our open source channel. This offends some people, but has worked for us.
I won't claim this scales long term, but there have been fairly large companies (~800+) that have scaled this way just fine.
We've found productivity to be quite high overall. A lot less noise and very efficient communication.
Part of it is self management. The hires we make tend to have that part down pretty well. I've learned to spot bottlenecks. Part of that is just by keeping an eye on a lot of channels. Proactive reaching out if there are problems helps a lot. Periodic check ins are a must.
We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a standup.
For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching.
Happy to answer questions or expand on anything that sounds interesting.
>>> We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a standup.
>>> For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching.
This sounds like a pretty nice granularity -- glad to hear that it seems to be working out.
Most of the trouble I have with standups is the "daily" part...
Are there any downsides you've found to this kind of rhythm?
It happens impromptu. I see a pull request or an interesting project someone built with us. If they stick around and seem interested in the project, I reach out via direct message and see what their goals are. I half heartedly ask them if they'd like to do this full time. If they seem interested, we setup a minor call and we talk about current projects they're working on, and what we're working on at the company.
We compare notes and see if interests line up. From there it's negotiations.
I've already seen their code and interacted with them for a few weeks by this point, so the interviews are painless and obvious.
One thing I make sure to do is be very clear/direct that we're a business. Here's how we make money, here's who our customers tend to be.
Usually it's a just a quick phone conversation to talk about interest. The technical interview actually happens the second you enter my open source channel and contribute code or show off something cool you built.
This demonstrates a few things to me:
1. You know our codebase
2. You can build things we need
3. I've already collaborated with you
4. You're proactive and interested in solving problems we
would have for you.
5. You're able to collaborate with others remotely.
I like this. Interviews are supposed to be proxy of how successful / valuable the team member is going to be on the job. Since the person is already contributing, makes sense to cut out the "algorithmic quiz".
We also do a lot of c and scala :D. That was the idea.
One of the things I wanted to do was avoid using a degree or "pedigree" as an indicator.
I myself dropped out of my undergrad at a no name university in the midwest. I don't have "pedigree".
I'm also not a large believer in the way things are done in the valley (did 2.5 years, that was enough for me..).
This is my opinion, I don't claim this is fact, but I know again, this may offend some:
A lot of the emphasis on pedigree, but there are a lot of dead startups with people who have degrees from stanford,mit, harvard etc.
It's a self perpetuating echo chamber with a lot of money flowing through it. The group think is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
I love the valley, and there are a lot of good things about it, but the perpetual group think with the larger part of the population is a problem.
That being said, I don't think I would found a company anywhere else. I tried 3 times in Michigan, and it's just a lot harder. I learned a lot quicker in the valley. You have to learn what to watch out for though.
Anyways:
I also live the same life style we hire by. I mostly travel.
My cofounder is in san francisco. I travel all over different parts of APAC with an established office in tokyo. There's only 2 of us in japan right now though. A lot of us are in the apac "time zone".
Do you plan to include python in your roadmap in near future (I can possibly help if you don't have in-house expertise on it ;), or choosing to avoid competing with Tensorflow?
I suspect Python would be fairly popular amongst companies looking to build deep learning based products.
That will allow us to benefit from what that community is building in terms of neural networks. We want to be the "deployment path" for those kinds of models while we focus on making c++ on the jvm as fast as possible.
We basically focus on the hadoop and spark crowd. We're already the industry standard in java/scala:
interesting - this seems like perhaps a "good enough" solution for the age old problem that many creative-type career often encounter these days where employers don't want to pay to hire someone before knowing if they can work, while employees don't want to work before knowing they'll be paid. your method seems to basically say, we won't hire you unless you've already done work for us, and we expect that you are self-motivated to do that work and not at our behest so you can't blame us if we don't consider your work good enough to hire you. that's actually pretty clever, although i wonder if this is something that can be applied for other companies.
A lot of companies employ this strategy with some sort of open source presence on github.
The key for the hiring on the open source component is, we use this in our daily work, and it's directly useful when people work on it.
The open source project itself is fairly popular though.
The easiest analog here might be something like a react js.
I definitely don't claim to have this generalize well, only that it's worked for us, and some companies do this to an extent. I'm not sure how many companies hook their hiring in to this though.
If more hiring engineering managers were aware of their open source presence, and who did what on there, it could make hiring more efficient.
We've had very good retention over the last few years, because there's some pre vetting that happens at the very minimum.
I'm currently looking at formalizing this in some form, but there's a trade off to how much formalization you do vs making the process inefficient.
My team just started a large project; a few of us work remotely and a few are in an office. For the project, we opened a Zoom video channel, and all sit there with video chat running on our second monitors. It's working out great. We very much have the be-able-to-pop-in-for-a-question thing going on like you would in a project war room.
I'm thinking of making it a standing thing one day weekly to work this way. There's certainly a distraction tradeoff, but the communication bandwidth is just phenomenal.
I've long assumed that prior to HMDs taking off, we'd see people work with a video screen at the side extreme of their desk, showing a view of someone not physically adjacent to them, and the reverse for that colleague. So, you'd have a representation of a teammate beside you. Large LCDs are cheap. Connectivity is getting to the point that this wouldn't tax some office connections.
Has anyone tried it?
Obviously people could switch off the screen or the feed if they needed to make a private call, or if they were taking a lunch break.
People talk about Hangout windows and so on, but I think having something you can glance at but not have right in front of you would be a better representation of current offices.
This solves some peoples' problems at the expense of others.
A big attraction of remote work to me is that I don't have the feeling of being overlooked while "in the zone" (which tends to mean that "the zone" never really happens). Video might actually be worse in practise than an open office. Could turn it off, of course, but it's the kind of thing that could easily end up as a "not a team player" flag in the modern software world.
There are things like PukkaTeam[1] which go for snapshots rather than video. Less bandwidth and perhaps marginally less intrusive, but still means people are looking at you...
Yes, I have, and it's very taxing if I'm trying to do something high concentration. At least laptops make it easier to sneak off into a corner when there's code to write.
This is the number one factor for me preferring remote work. Commute and housing costs are also attractive, too, but an on-site job would be fine if it came with a private office.
A recent high-priority project allowed me to tell people they couldn't bother me for 6 of my 8 hours in the office. It's been awesome for my morale and my productivity both.
I love helping others, but being interrupted constantly is incredibly frustrating. It can wait until tomorrow.
I get what this is saying, but there does seem to be a nearly-unspoken assumption here that the "perfect" working environment involves high-frequency communication, including regular synchronous communication -- i.e. replicating the open-plan/daily standups/short iterations model of programming that seems to be the current thing for in-office programming jobs. That's a perfectly reasonable model, and clearly suits a lot of people well, but I do hope there's still appetite for exploring coarser-grained "trust people to go off on their own to solve problems" models as well.
It's hard - when that model (leave people to do the right thing) works well - it is amazing. It needs skilled and engaged people.
The problem comes when you have people that don't work well under that model, and who need continual check points to ensure they really are doing the right thing, and that you haven't just wasted a bunch of time.
Getting these two groups to work together is hard, when sadly, getting great people is hard.
Having said that I agree also that there are also trust issues. Forming trust is a hard thing.
It's a shame, because programming (from at least my perspective) is one discipline, where the quality of work is so much higher when you are "in the zone" and can concentrate on a single task without interruptions.
I believe the real dichotomy is "async/sync" rather than "remote/local". There are individuals who require constant micro-coordination on every decision and others who get the big picture immediately and can implement details without specific instruction.
My best decision was probably offloading team coordination to a dedicated "community manager". Even an undergrad working part-time and using mobile Slack / GMail can be trained in an afternoon and be 110% effective. The amount of bandwidth it frees up so you can focus on strategy and product is a Godsend ;)
Does anyone work in a remote team with an always-on video conference?
I really, really prefer being able to shout out a quick question but the friction costs (and fear of interrupting deep thought) about calling someone, sometimes even a Slack message, prevents communication at times.
The times where I've been pairing or on a long call "in the background" have been great I thought. Any downsides for those who do this regularly?
we don't do always-on video conferencing where i work, but with slack + zoom, you can really easily start a conference call on the DM chat (/zoom -> works)
To follow up on what @agibsonccc has been saying: Remote, open-source hiring is one of the best ways to match companies and candidates. I used to have to recruit for a closed-source company, and it was really hard to get good information - for the company and for the applicants.
In open-source, you have nearly perfect information: the contributors see the company's code and how they operate as a team; the company see the contributor's code, persistence, reliability and friendliness. And anyway, it's open-source, so everyone is solving their own problems for their own reasons, so they get something out of it in the end no matter what.
I don't see any valid reason why anyone vaguely technical should commute to an office.
I think this is really overvalued:
"communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a conversation".
Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working. This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next to eachother.
Communicating by text is also better because you never have to say/type the same thing twice. You never forget what a teammate told you because you can look up the conversation.
Company "culture" must be something for people who don't have families or friends. Personally, I don't get it.
I have worked remotely for 3+ years as a contractor. The last office I worked at involved a long commute even though I mostly communicated by Hipchat.
I don't ever see going into an office again unless it my my own leased space. Remote work is the future!
>>> Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working.
>>> This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next to eachother.
I probably fall into this category (actually, for a lot of "serious" things I prefer e-mail to Slack/Hipchat/whatever), but I'm not at all sure this applies to "anyone technical": there does seem to be another culture of technical folks who genuinely do thrive on open offices or "team spaces" and lots of discussion.
I don't think there's any environment that will keep everyone happy.
I wonder if we'll eventually see people sorting into distinct introvert-oriented and extrovert-oriented organisations?
I would be very happy to join a remote team as a data analyst / scientist but, whatever reason (skills, fit, pay, age, time zone), I am falling short. For what I see, many still consider employing remotely as a way to assemble a cheap sweatshop, preferably drones.
Those are mostly first-timers with remote. If they've tried that they know that the only way for it to save money is to throw a boatload of management at it and in the end it costs the same or more. People who can reliably work remotely are worth attracting because there are many more of them than there are good employees in your local commute range.
I love working remotely because it has allowed me to run my business while travelling around India. But I still feel my work would be more efficient if I was sitting next to my co-workers. There's some intangible quality involving instant feedback, body language and social interaction that would make our communication more direct and engaging.
Despite all the advances in technology for working remotely, face-to-face remains the best even for digital businesses. Facebook and Google are evidence of this: working remotely for these companies is the exception rather than the rule.
I do a mix. Some days I like working remotely. Others I will go into the office.
I think more than anything I just want freedom. I don't want to be locked into 8-5. Some days I want to work late and do stuff during the day (yardwork, appointments). I just want flexibility.
This is great. The Digital Nomad future is upon us. I've been doing it for 3 years and it's wonderful. Live where you want. Get out of the Silicon Valley rat race.
I am the only employee in a company of about 60/70 who is completely remote. I was actually working from the headquarters and then ended up relocating to a new city. While I enjoy the peace and quite and get 3 times more stuff done, I cannot shake the feeling of isolation. Some days I feel like i'm going fucking insane not having somebody to just walk up and talk to or go to lunch with.
Yeah there are coffee shops. But really how much time are you going to spend working out of a busy coffee shop? Maybe 3 or 4 hours before you realize that you can't hear anybody on a conference call or you're irritating someone next to you who's studying for an exam.
There are also co-working spaces, which cost on average about 25% of what I pay for my apartment. Seriously, if you're thinking about working remote REALLY consider what you're getting into. Being stuck in 4 walls 8 hours a day does amazing things to productivity but is ultimately a fucking mental torture.
It really depends on the type of work that you're doing. If the work requires a lot of communication and details that need to be hashes out with people from various disciplines (i.e. PM, UX, Eng), you need to be colocated to get the job done quickly. Doing this part remote will only lead to frustrations and missed deadlines. But if everything is fully spec'd out and split into bite-size pieces for engineers to simply fill in the wholes with code and follow the spec, then a remote team can work really well. I've seen this many times at past consulting companies and now a product company where we do have some remote workers.
I have almost no marketable skills to speak of, how can I work remotely?
I'll take phone calls, answer questions from a script, whatever I have to do.
Also, what marketable skills should I focus on developing if I want to work remotely in an actual, skill-required job?
I'm not incompetent: I'm proficient in plenty of basic office software, I can troubleshoot/fix a computer, and I can type 90wpm. You know, the fundamentals.
At this one trench of a large corp where I had a minor contract, they had an office in multiple locations. The idea was, to avoid traffic jams people would work from the satellite offices until the traffic cleared. They opened these up in areas where a large number of their employees commuted from. It was pretty slick, with private sound proof rooms, open spaces for team meetups where they would work then carpool to the main offices, cubicles, lounges, super nice kitchens, etc... In fact it was a shitton nicer than the places they called their main office.
They ended up selling some of it, or downgrading because teams just stayed at the nicer satellites and some ended up getting poached by cunning recruiters and other internal teams.
Edit: The floorplan was pretty far out there and I think they were emulating some European layout. It was super dynamic, so people and teams could migrate between conference rooms, private enclosures, private shared offices, lounges, etc... as they needed or desired and remote conference to the main office. Though after some super important team that had the floor above us lost several key developers and admins to a local company , and people from the main offices were commuting to the satellite offices instead, they started selling off floors or closing off access.
Actually, This is a smart approach. A friend of mien made his own team and he's doing quite well v.s the old way where he was paired with people he did not get along with
I recommend SococoRS for this issue (making remote work seem more like teamwork). It allows you to actually go up to a coworker's desk and say Hi. Unless their door is closed of course. Does screen share/vid conferencing and chat rooms, all in a simulation of a virtual office.
Okay, look. This is easy. I can't pay rent or a mortgage with a team. When my kid asks me what's for dinner, I can't feed her some groceries I got with all the team spirit and esprit de corps that I've picked up. When I need to go to the doctor and he says I need something expensive, all my fellow teammembers aren't going to immediately offer to pitch in and help with those. The author says "I think that we mistakenly put jobs ahead of teams because we choose to ignore the obvious, and sometimes nuanced complications of remote work." No, it's because I've got bills to pay and people to provide for.
I'm surprised you made it all the way to the third paragraph if you just weren't going to read the article.
The point the article is making (a point I understand really well, as a remote worker and a non-24 sleeper) is that a remote job isn't simply "do your exact same job, except do it at home". To actually have it work, you need to fully account for your remote employees. This affects your company, it affects work management, planning, execution, everything. It affects how the work is assigned, how it's prioritized, how the meetings are held. It completely changes the social aspect of the job, so that needs to be accounted for both from the employees' and employers' perspective.
Or you can just ignore all this, interpret the article's title however you feel like, and talk about salary. Whatever.
At my employer, it takes 8 dedicated Slack channels, numerous daily, weekly, and monthly meetings, and a dedicated conference room. And continual reminding from the boss - "Call a random team member, and BS for 5 minutes, you have my permission." But my remote coworkers are definitely part of the team.
It does help that the office parts of the team are scattered between 2 offices in widely different time zones - people in the other office may as well be working from home. This is for a 24/7/365 support organization.
I think there are 2 sides and both sides are important. I think that the author was focussing on the half of our awake time that we spend doing our job, while you are focussing on the other half.
The author is probably talking about naive remote job seekers who focus on the job but don't consider the team culture. I was one such naive job seeker and used to think in that manner until a few years ago.
Can you elaborate on the challenges you encountered with dealing with remote team culture? What realizations or adaptations made you less naive and more realistic and pragmatic in dealing with it?
Not OP, but my personal experience, having done some remote work for a big multinational and now for a startup, the reason it worked well for me was because I already knew the people very well.
If I were to join a team of people I've never met to work remote there are too many subtle unasked questions in the background. For example, right now I have one guy I work with who I only met - and only briefly - after months of working together. I often was in doubt about Skype chats and emails, did I go too far? Was that humor appropriate? His response seems chilly, and he hasn't responded for 5 minutes now but until I said THAT he always responded right away, did I offend him?
You can just brush it off and ignore it, and it may work out - or it may accumulate under the surface until some day it explodes. Or more likely, it's going to fester below the surface and hinder communication: You are less likely to communicate and when you do then only the minimum when you are unsure of the other guy, even if it is just slightly. It really does not need to be a major disagreement, the small and sometimes (when remote, often?) imagined ones are that hurt.
It feels much safer to work away from others when you already feel safe about what will happen when you screw up, or when you make a mistake on the project or in the communication, when you understand the other side from experience. Otherwise imagination takes over, your brain fills the parts that are not visible in remote communication, and when it has no data to do so it will just fill in something, and if you don't feel extremely secure in yourself and in your relationship that may very well be small subtle fears.
We detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12512379. I'm sorry, but these sorts of comments don't belong on HN. Please comment civilly and substantively or not at all.
Today I got tired at 1 PM, got up from my desk, got my bike and went for a ride in the park nearby. Once in a while I would take the phone out of my pocket and give quick answers on Slack, but most of my time I enjoyed what is the beginning of autumn. You can feel it in the air, it's more chilly, the light gets warmer and the color of the trees start changing. It's by far the most beautiful time of the year for walking in parks. And it felt great. Now I'm back home and I'm thinking of finishing my work, but after I eat something.
And I do this all the time, while managing to get shit done. Many times I work late to finish this or that. But I'm a responsible software developer, I care about the project and I can work without somebody watching over my shoulder.
And surely there are those times where you need to do design sessions with the rest of the team. But we do those over Skype and every once in a while we travel in order to meet face to face. There are challenges in communication of course, but we make it work.