>Companies that support remote workers and do it well seem to have a huge leg up on the competition.
I'm a remote worker and I'm definitely spoiled by not having to deal with open office plans and disruptions.
That said, I see no evidence that the article's statement is true. (I want it to be true, but that doesn't change the fact that so far, I see zero evidence that it is true.)
You can't convince people with just rhetoric.
Instead, show compelling examples of how Company-A-with-mostly-remote-workers is beating the pants off of the Company-B-with-onsite-workers.
Show that RemoteWorkerCompany is 10x more innovative, delivers 10x faster, has 10x profits, etc etc.
I suspect finding comparisons that control for other variables are hard to come up with. Nevertheless, that's what it's going to take to convince managers. A bunch of programmers writing a thousand essays on the "advantages" of remote workers is just preaching to people like me who happen to like working from home.
There is evidence that working form home increases productivity. [0] But the problem is harder to solve than just convincing managers that remote work is productive. Many of the employers who believe in the productivity of remote work are more willing to offshore the work for $25 an hour than shell over a the cost of a fully loaded local dev of $80-90 an hour. So if you want remote work you need to convince your boss of two things. That remote work is productive, and that the benefits from timezone sharing and language fluency are worth an extra $40-50 an hour.
>There is evidence that working form home increases productivity. [0]
Those were call center workers answering the telephones.
For the HN crowd, I think a more relevant study would be "knowledge workers" like programmers and engineers collaborating to ship products.
Think of the type evidence that would convince Paul Graham and Sam Altman to yell at all YC2016 founders, "What? You haven't set your up your team as 100% remote?!?! Are you stupid?!?! Why did we give money to you?!? Put the whole team on Skype and VPN access immediately because that's The Competitive Edge you need to beat the competitor from NY-Incubators."
Before we can compare remote and local teams productivity we need to solve the problem of measuring developer productivity. Very smart people have been trying to solve that problem for a long time and it seems to me like they have made very little progress.
>Before we can compare remote and local teams productivity we need to solve the problem of measuring developer productivity.
In the blog post, there's the phrase "more productive"... note the qualifier of "more". In this thread are additional examples posters using the phrase "more productive".
More than what? It implies a mathematical relationship right?
If you want to argue the merits of remote workers, you can't have it both ways with the word "productive". On the one hand, everyone can just throw around the phrase "more productive" when it's convenient to the remote-work narrative but then also discount it as "unmeasurable" when we're looking for the type of concrete evidence to satisfy managers.
If that's the state of discussion, these mixed messages reduce to "Remote is good because it is MORE of This Unmeasurable Thing". The discourse on this topic needs to be higher quality than that.
I think the topic of measuring productivity is a little more nuanced than what you think.
Something could be unmeasurable (unquantifiable), but comparable. Consider a contrived example: Two cars start a race at an unknown time - you are allowed to watch the end of the race. Which ever car finishes first is faster (on average, more fast). However, since you don't know when they began, you cannot measure their average speed.
I think a great deal of the headaches concerning productivity is comparing it between people and trying to put an exact amount on it. It is quite possible to say that one would be more productive in one environment vs another. Sometimes it is quite clear (I am less productive if I have a broken hand) and sometimes not so clear (not being in an office makes me more productive,... maybe).
And there's not going to be evidence like that any time soon. Software Developer productivity is extremely difficult to measure. It has very little to do with how busy you manage to keep yourself.
That used to be true a long time ago but the game is changed. $25/hour will buy you a junior dev at best who barely speaks English and is 12 hours away. And this developer needs constant communication to be productive. More often than not, you can't get cheap rates like that unless you offshore 20 developers and get a group discount. Usually then there still is a point person you have to communicate with daily, and still you wind up getting a rectangle when you asked for an oval. This is from first hand experience.
For skeptical managers, start with 2 days a week. Standardize on a communication platform like Skype + Google Hangouts. Require the person to be constantly available via IM.
Bottom line, it may be more expensive up front but key advantage to a US remote worker is they are generally always available, highly independent, and it's easier for them to come onsite as needed.
I think translating that hourly salary to yearly salary makes it untrue. You can get some very reasonly english speaking devs for less than 1/4 bay area salaries in europe.
If you have contacts or know where to look you can get solid mid-level or even senior devs with excellent English skills at that rate. The timezone issue and whether they're suited to remote work are different questions altogether.
Agreed. And actually, there's plenty of case studies and efficiency research on this subject.
What it really comes down to is:
Get the right team of remote workers together, provide the right tools, and apply the right policies and you can give yourself a great market advantage.
But it's exceptionally hard to satisfy all those dependencies.
Many individuals aren't nearly as effective in remote positions, and many more might be effective with some practice but don't actually have the experience required to do it well yet. Paying for their inefficiency while they learn the ropes of remote work is a dangerous and competitiveness-risking bet, especially if they never even quite manage to figure it out.
Tools and policies are a whole other issue, as those not only need to be identified but they need to suit the team that you assemble and put constraints on who else can join that team. Not every toolset and not every policy is a good fit for every worker, remote or not -- and it's much more important that they are for remote workers.
So at the end of the day, you absolutely CAN have a great company that works remotely and there are many out there. But it's not reasonable to suggest that many or every company can see benefits from it any time soon.
Having worked in and managed a remote/distributed team for the last eight years I can agree with that. We have made really good progress, but as you grow it is a challenge and you don't always get it right. Often you don't have a good template to work from and you have to iterate your way towards a good process. Which sometimes can be hard work.
I worked for an insurance company with the whole cubical world, then switched to a 100% remote office. I can attest to the following being true from my experiences:
They prioritize communication and collaboration by necessity
There is a lot less wasted communication
You get a huge portion of your life back
They tend to be more flexible in general
I see no evidence that there is any more or less posturing, or the caliber of workers being better, and it is pretty moot on reaching out for help, no real difference.
I have worked 100% remote for 3 years and love it.
On the quantitative side of things, remote workers are much less likely to have commute time to and from work, leaving an extra ~1 hour a day (assuming 30 min commute from home to being in office chair ready to work) being available. Assuming those numbers, thats an extra 5 hours per employee per week. Again, assuming that multiplied by 50 weeks, thats 250 additional hours per employee per year. No small sum which could lead to a sizable productivity advantage.
This is assuming that the employee would devote that extra hour a day to the company of course. By my point is that onsite employees would not even have that hour available since it is eaten up by transit time.
For worker value the important input isn't time, its focus. Does an extra hour on personal life, rather than commute create an extra of hour of focused, innovate, high productivity work? Answer depends on the person.
I've run a remote team for not quite a decade, but close. I've run an office. I have a lot of friends that work remotely, besides my own developers. There are big pros and cons to both. For an information worker there are huge health downsides to being inside at home all day, even with a full family around.
My conclusion based on these experiences is having both a physically active and healthy social life is what matters. Both working at an office or remotely from home can make these better or worse, dependent on the person and who they work for.
> For an information worker there are huge health downsides to being inside at home all day, even with a full family around.
This statement strikes me as odd. I can't really figure out what health downsides do you have in mind. Can you elaborate?
I would argue the opposite. Being an information worker in an office environment is deleterious to one's health. Humans are not designed to sit around in poorly ventilated rooms for a larger part of the day(light), where the only recourse from the unpleasantness of the situation is a fridge stocked with free sweetstuffs and soda. I've been there, eaten the Snickers, and am much happier now that I'm working from home, where I am able to take a short walk around the neighborhood, do a couple of yoga asanas or other exercise or even take a short nap almost anytime I want. There's also the fact that I can eat healthy food as per my liking, and not just one that is available in the cafeteria or nearby restaurants.
I am aware of the research and the reality of how important it is to not be alone all the time, but you really don't need the daily office-going grind to protect yourself from those particular dangers. In fact, at the end of my workday, I am eager to go out and socialize, whereas in my office-worker days, all I could think of was going home, cracking open a cold beer to decompress, and hoping that I don't have to talk to anyone for the rest of the day (not likely with family around).
I agree with you but still see it as a net positive for the employer, even if none of those hours are spent on work. Perhaps it's a stretch, but I think that 250 hours of potentially stressful commute time being allotted to more fulfilling activities will result in a better employee (albeit only incrementally perhaps).
Yes, I'd also add that when you work without commuting, the time you start work is likely also the time you start working. Whereas if you have a long and possibly stressful journey, you might have a bit of warmup time before you are ready to start working.
Totally agree, and that's the point I would have made, vs. one where the employer benefits by having me work from the time gained by not having transit. That's why I found it odd.
And what is the correlation between happiness and 'productiveness', or more to the point, profit? Ibankers and junior associates at white shoe firms are overwhelmingly miserable, and still a) people line up for their jobs; and b) they make their firms a multiple of most other jobs (maybe with software being an exception, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that tech companies are successful just because they have great engineers).
Correlation isn't causation in either direction in this case. Among the many reasons for long hours for finance, productivity and profit are quite low on the list. "Face time" is a phrase for a reason.
For those of us who only drive out of necessity, it's effectively six weeks of vacation that the employer doesn't need to foot the bill for. I suppose people who enjoyed commuting would not view it that way.
I suppose it would depend on who he's trying to sell this to ;) workers are more inclined to like the version you present while employers would be more inclined to like his version.
Also, consider the fact that hiring pool increases many folds once you allow remote work. So a company will be able to find better people at lower costs.
I'm curious as to how companies that have many remote workers (developers, more specifically) achieve some of the benefits that come with in-person communication and co-working in the same space? For instance, in our experience, a lot of the times our developers will get together in a conference room and work together and we've had remarkable success with it. Problems get solved quicker, there is more coordination, and just good motivating camaraderie. It becomes sort of a war room, especially around critical projects.
How do you emulate this in a remote working scenario?
You'd be surprised by what can be achieved by just having Slack. The best parts of IRC and email, put together. Searchable. Persistent communication changes companies. My current employer is only running part-remote, but we actively move important conversations to slack, because if nothing else, we can go back to them later.
When sharing actual screens is necessary, there's ScreenHero, which is very useful for pair programming and such.
Now, I think it's important to have at least some video chat every day, if just so that we can keep up with the emotional state of our coworkers. Over the years, I've preemptively fixed many team dynamics problems by paying attention to people's emotions. If Joe is sad today, maybe I can help with whatever the problem is, or I can at least make sure he isn't pressured too much. If you do most of your talk by text, it's far harder to pick up on those things. If there's some rotating pair programming going on, those things can be handled better.
We do use Slack and it certainly helps. However, we invariably find that there is a certain inertia to reach out via video among some devs or wait until the person is in office to hash out a problem. It may just be because we don't have anyone 100% remote on the team and hence expectations aren't set. Also, in an open office plan, talking over video at your desk can becoming annoying to the person sitting next to you, which means grabbing a conf room. I'm just saying it depends on the personality of the developer in how she/he handles working with a remote worker.
When I worked remotely, we would often do conference calls with someone sharing their screen, which reproduces a lot of the benefits of being in a conference room with one person's laptop hooked up to the projector.
How about hiring? Instead of being restricted to talent in the 30 miles radius around your office building, you can effectively hire anywhere in the country, or the world. No need to displace someone and their family from their existing community and then cover their relocation costs, just so they can jockey an office chair in your building. And no more need to constantly belly ache on blogs and articles that there is a "talent shortage".
Salary negotiations will be a bit different since you're also competing with all local jobs. So you can take on multiple devs and pay them differently if they have similar skills (hard to measure anyway), or you can pay everyone the same and limit what markets you pull from. The former could get ugly if anyone found out.
It is an advantage. But it isn't without disadvantages. Not everyone thrives in a distributed environment and it is hard to do certain type of work (brainstorming, very interactive requirements and design work, for example) in a remote only setting. It is also harder to build good team spirit, when you don't hang out together. It is possible, but it isn't a no-brainer even when you look at all the advantages. We have a hybrid model with a lot of us focused in hubs, but working remotely part of the time now.
Yes, yes you can. You can't convince all the people all the time, but you can certainly sway more than 50%. How do I know? The stupid shit that so many people do.
From Wikipedia: In this dialogue, Socrates seeks the true definition of rhetoric, attempting to pinpoint the essence of rhetoric and unveil the flaws of the sophistic oratory popular in Athens at this time.
Ayup, it seems like such a done relationship that I'm surprised more people don't understand. Arguing for understanding is hard, swaying with emotion easy.
The biggest problem with Remote culture is lack of exceedingly reliable communication. It's improved a little bit by things like Zoom lately, but we still need to work on integrated whiteboarding. Crazy, I know..
Also, mixing remote / onsite is hard because of politics. I think to be effective in remote, it has to be all remote and everyone has to be mature. Like netflix mature. You know, if you don't start producing at high velocity continuously and immediately, you get let go immediately. This is because unless you are mature, you generally goof off when you don't visibly see other people working hard.
I disagree with your requirement of immediately and continuously producing--least of all because, in all odds, the codebase of such a culture (optimizing for "throw code on the wall now now now don't waste time thinking") is going to result in a big pile of garbage that will take a little time to get up to speed on.
This is because unless you are mature, you generally goof off when you don't visibly see other people working hard.
So what? God forbid anybody in my super lean startup have fun in a non-company-mandated way. If I've got a dev who "goofs off" but when they're on point they're really on point, I'm fine with that--I just know not to put them on time-sensitive things, because I'm experienced enough to know how that'll work out.
I'm currently a remote employee, but recently my employer has started mandating what I call "micromanagement" techniques. Every 5 minutes of my day must be accounted for and logged. Project managers have started pinging me on the status of my tickets twice a day. The irony of the situation is, the harder they crack down, the less desire I have to work.
It didn't used to be like this. Slowly over the past year, somebody up the ladder has been mandating these changes. It seems like this is the standard MBA approach to increase company efficiency. I'll be paying close attention to whether they succeed or not.
I don't really see it being true yet but I think it's coming.
Right now if you're based in SV you can hire the best talent in the world, pay them a fortune and build something great. Investors are reluctant to touch anyone outside of that bubble.
With lack of housing (and no more construction virtually) alongside better tools for working remote, and more managers experienced in working remote, I can see remote teams leading the charge towards the end of this decade.
you can hire the best talent in the world of people willing to move to SV, the world is a lot bigger than SV and having worked with excellent developers plenty of times around the world I think if you are hiring only in SV you are definitely limiting yourself also in terms of the perspective individual developers bring to the company.
It is obviously difficult to have a pro-remote company if you hire executives or management that values "face time" above all else, and prefer phone to email/chat, this is why likely it's a lot simpler to start a company fully remote than to change an already existing one.
Given the advantages of cost of labor (you can be a lot more flexible in compensation terms if you don't have to compete with SV salaries), pool of talent and retention advantages (if you have a great remote environment I think it'd be a lot easier to have very low turnover) I am really surprised more companies are not being formed doing this.
But then again as you said a lot of VCs/investors won't touch companies not based in SV so that definitely can be a contributing factor in the low % of fully remote outfits.
couldn't be open source projects a good example? almost everybody contributes remotely.
Why couldn't work the same way for private software ?
I see that could be a confidence problem and effort mesure problem because it's hard to mesure effort in number of lines of code or commits, even user stories, right ?
True, maybe a good follow up to this would be some use case studies. It would be so easy to pick any given set of companies for my narrative though. I feel like that is just as dismissable.
>It would be so easy to pick any given set of companies for my narrative though.
Yes, please try to come with convincing case studies. I would love to have ammunition to show benefits of remote work.
Remember though, when citing companies's with remote workers that are successful, that you must control for other variables unrelated to remote workers. The other replies citing Automattic Wordpress and 37Signals did not do that.
> I feel like that is just as dismissable.
I feel the opposite. Companies and managers have a herd mentality. You show them any management technique that demonstrates superior results and they will copy it. Look at Six Sigma, or JIT Just In Time manufacturing, or Henry Ford's assembly line regrouping of manufacturing, etc etc.
Show some evidence that reorganizing your onsite workers as remote workers is The Killer Management Technique (trademark applied patent pending) to blow everyone else out of the water and every company will be doing it.
37 Signals, Stack Exchange, Dell, IBM, I hear Microsoft has a few remote teams too. A lot of TC startups put "SF or remote" in their job ads. Go to Stack Exchange careers they place an emphasis on remote.
On the flip side, there are a lot of companies that only make exceptions to hire remote workers, as in my case. But a bunch of my onsite counterparts prefer being onsite.
I am pretty sure those numbers doesn't exist and even if they did they would be meaningless. Company culture is very unique and based on specific people being involved. One person can literally make or break the companies productivity and success.
I think the real point to be made anyway is that there isn't any numbers showing that remote work is in itself making productivity worse.
Sometimes you need to reboot (ex. Yahoo) but mostly if you have good people with good ethics it's just as good as any other setup.
I've been a remote worker for almost 10 years. In fact, I hardly know what working in an office is like.
I can say that remote working is not without its own set of challenges. Chief among them is the need for EXCELLENT communication skills. I've worked with supremely talented and previously successful teams that simply fall apart in a remote environment, because they don't understand the value of transparent communication. Working remotely, everyone relies almost entirely on the word of their coworkers, as its much more difficult for leaders/managers to get a feeling on their team.
Like any successful team, it comes down to establishing trust. But with remote teams, there's much less margin for error.
We've done both (office in Berkeley, but now two founders in Berkeley, and the other 7 or so around the US).
A couple of points:
a) It should be all remote, or all local. You ruin the fun for people if a chunk of the team if talking, and chat is dead.
b) My co-founder/wife and I purposefully avoid shop talk, and keep it all in chat.
c) Remote is a good life style for some people. We look for people who will be happy at home, people with lives and families, who don't need to meet friends to go out with and lovers at work. This fits our culture - we attract outdoors types, who like time to themselves.
d) Some people are self-driven and make good remote workers. Some people need to be in an office and get constant nudging from physical social pressure (and their boss).
e) Tools: weekly Google Hangout, frequent one-on-ones, Slack, Trello, Github - almost zero email.
Hey, question for you. Have you found a good "remote whiteboard" solution? Our company is all remote, and this is the one area where things could be better. Sometimes we really want to just get in a room and whiteboard something, but we can't.
Please check out Deekit app @ https://www.deekit.com and see how our tool can help with your teams whiteboarding issue. It is free (for now), browser based (chrome or firefox preferred), with IPad app coming soon.
just brainstorming (haven't tried it) but as a low tech solution have you tried screensharing somebody's desktop running something like Krita? If most people have a wacom tablet they ought to be able to just take control of the session and draw on the "whiteboard" with also the advantage of Krita doing smoothing and making handwriting look nicer in general
Yeah I thought about equipping everyone with a wacom and then finding a good way to share that experience. Or maybe find an iPad app, since the iPad would be a lot more useful than the wacom. :)
Doesn't that just waste people's time? The weekly google hangout as opposed to a daily one is a good decision. Less disruption to those actually doing the work.
> a) It should be all remote, or all local. You ruin the fun for people if a chunk of the team if talking, and chat is dead.
I've worked in both situations. I'm remote now on a 100% remote team, but I've also worked in the main office and communicated with two remote co-workers. With Google Hangout and Zoom, I've noticed no difference between these two setups. People who work better by talking everything through in person will just use google hangouts to have conversations with the people they need and leave the rest out. You still wind up with some people being left out of the loop and chat is still 90% dead, except for the occasional entertaining gif and water cooler talk.
I worked for a large company that had a somewhat flexible policy (if your manager allowed it, you could). I found that on the days I was working from home, I could get a lot more done. I was more relaxed, and highly productive. I didn't have to go through the morning ritual of chit-chat, coffee, etc. etc.
Having said that: I also saw how it was being abused. There were some colleagues who were working side gigs while working remotely. If it's a highly specialized area, then it's hard for a manager to make sure you're pulling your weight. There were some stellar remote workers; and there were some total slackers. Just like with anything else in life, it's a mixed bag.
> Having said that: I also saw how it was being abused.
There are easy ways to ensure productivity. For example, using Skype and requiring offsite workers to be available (i.e. green status) throughout the day.
If workers are not being productive at home it's management's fault for not laying out a culture and guidelines to ensure productivity.
I've worked in this situation and it worked out great, and I've worked in this situation and it was terrible. There are a couple of things I would say are key:
- Everyone has to use the same communication tools, ie everyone in the office has to be using Slack/Hipchat and regularly do hangouts with remote people
- All meetings have to assume someone is going to be remote. It has to be burned into the culture that when you have a meeting a laptop is open and hangouts/gotomeeting/etc are running
- Annual onsite is a must! I've been amazed how a few days of in person communication can form pretty deep bonds. Once that username has a face and some shared inside jokes they become human forever. Anyone more key on any team should also strive to make it out around quarterly. I think everyone has people they'd consider good friends that they only have met in person one or two times while attending a conference or visiting a far away friend, same goes for the office.
- Let your local people work from home when it makes sense! Don't make your office people trudge through feet of snow while the remoters sip hot cocoa at home. In my experience most people working in the office actually like working in an office and most remoters like working remote. But, whenever possible, let the local people stay home if they need to wait for a package, take care of a sick kid, need some time to clear their head, the office is under construction etc.
Even though it sounds like the smallest one, the chat one is actually one of bigger issues. If everyone is on Slack you'll find even people in the office start using it to communicate with people a few seats away for small stuff, sharing links, conversations you'd prefer to be quiet etc. And this eventually means that communicating with someone 10 ft and 10k miles away feels very similar.
I actually introduced Slack which is much better than Google Hangouts; having any sort of shared chat room is much better for team cohesion but I feel there's something missing the culture because we don't constantly chat. At my last workplace we had no one remote but since everyone was on different projects the Slack #general channel was the place to make sure you get that cross-team and company-wide communication happening and to have fun. Here with 25% remote and 75% in office it feels like the watercooler and team cohesion aspect can't ever really happen.
On the other hand, it is annoying to be one of the people on site with a remote team in an environment where other divisions are not remote. In some cases you become the person that gets interrupted all the time while the remote workers get to be productive.
I'm a non-remote worker who agrees with the article - I definitely benefit the more things are done via chat/web conferencing. Even if I'm at the office part of the day this gives me the freedom to sit in a park or coffee shop without guilt of missing something integral.
Not if you give the workers the option to work remote or not. Believe or not there are many workers who prefer to be onsite. This is the case in my office, the onsite people are more social and want to be close to the core of communication.
I love this idea and very much agree you end up with a much more modular, and proactive organisation with the right people. Owing to desk space issues, finance is moving more towards working-from-home. Honestly, in my next job I'd like to go 100% WFH - the amount of time saved from commuting is huge and, from an organisational perspective, if I get inspired over the weekend or the evening I'm much more likely just to get some bits and pieces done.
Unfortunately there's still a lot of legacy managers and people who make the transition tricky. If you can start from the ground up, or at least foster it within teams that's great.
Yea, those "legacy managers"... always trying to harsh our mellow. That's surely the only thing getting in the way of the ideal 100% remote-work-everywhere nirvana.
If remote working was really the slam-dunk productivity panacea that its supporters claim it is, then companies would be switching to it overnight to beat their "legacy" competitors. Shareholders would demand it! Soon, you'd have a hard time finding companies with physical offices. But that's not happening. Is it because of these old stodgy legacy managers, or could it be because there are major down sides to remote work that tend to get get glossed over by people singing its praises? What's more likely?
I don't think we can easily argue that "it this was good, people would have done it long time ago". Culture changes slowly, and people don't always make the best decisions.
The culture of "I want to make more money than my competitor" doesn't need to change. I can easily argue that if switching to remote work, in and of itself, were to produce clear, repeatable productivity gains that consistently outweighed the downsides, companies would switch to it very quickly.
In that case, the easy money would be in selling remote-work consulting to businesses that want help implementing it. The results would largely depend on the quality of the people jumping onto that particular bandwagon.
Can you argue that a company that wants to try remote, but doesn't know where to start, can consistently achieve measurable gains by employing such consultants?
That element seems to be what killed the positive momentum behind Agile. If the same people end up doing the same things, remote work will likely become just as dysfunctional as local in-office work, if not more so. Companies will buy just enough rope to hang themselves from people who will even gleefully tie the slip knot for them.
Much as science advances one funeral at a time, I sometimes think working practices advance one bankruptcy at a time.
We are terrible at measuring productivity. I'm not sure any of the places I've worked could've distinguished a factor of 2 in productivity one way or another. There're too many other factors affecting a company's performance.
I don't know about "slam-dunk" in the sense of 'silver bullet'. But I don't find your argument convincing at all.
Why would you think that large companies, entrenched in their ways, would be capable of switching overnight to any paradigm?
Remote-work happens as most new things tend to: mostly in small companies. But it's becoming more and more common, for good reasons. There's no reason for that not to continue. And the lack of massive, immediate adoption isn't an argument for or against anything.
To cite pg's awesome OSCON talk: "I'm saying that companies will learn these lessons the way that a gene pool learns about new conditions."
I've worked remotely for the last 10 years now. Existing businesses will probably stick to their existing practices until they die, while new startups which don't have too much baggage to drag around, may indeed see that the future is heavily biased in favour of working remote:
- There is a higher caliber of workers worldwide than just next-doors (if the company is truly capable of distinguishing)
- Some workers may conceivably even be cheaper (cheaper countries, but don't count too much on that for high calibre workers)
- Part of their salary is that they get a huge portion of their life back (this has real cash value)
- The tooling and overall technical management tends to be better, simply because it has to
- Especially in an international context, both employer and employee avoid an impressive number of government regulations, including visas, work permits and so on.
Even though an entirely remote company is more productive, I don't believe that existing on-site companies would be able to introduce it. I see them rather continuing to outsource while shrinking their head count year after year.
It doesn't have to be 100% one way or the other. I think the optimal solution might be something like 1 (or maybe 2) days per week in the office for planning and sync up, and then 3 days WFH.
I'm sure it depends on the size or the organization and type of work being done (even depending on the type of software being written), but it's something that could be experimentally figure out.
I currently do 2 days in the office, 2 at home, 1 off. While it is easier to have meetings while in the office it feels like most of the meetings I'm in could have just easily been a few emails, or shared Google Docs document which would better capture the process getting to any conclusions.
> As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers motivated and executing on time.
The only time I've seen this to be a "problem" is when one of the following is true:
A) Non-technical people are responsible for the estimates and/or have the ability to make changes to the requirements without understanding the complexity of the new requirements.
B) They are stuck fixing bugs instead of doing new feature development due to technical debt.
C) There is a serious communication problem.
D) People want fixed, written in stone deadlines before the prototyping is done when things are still too fluid for anything resembling a good time estimate is possible.
For instance, the only deadline I've majorly missed at my present workplace is the one project I told my boss was impractical, a terrible idea, and to please give it to someone else because I don't have the temperament to handle such requests. I'm sure some "business" person responsible for it considers it a "motivation and executing on time" problem despite the fact I basically said this was a terrible idea in front of the entire IT department in an official meeting with minutes being taken.
Are you completely certain none of these 4 exist as an employer?
A, B and D would be affecting on-site developers just as much as the remotes, but C (communication) is the thing that requires unique abilities for a remote worker.
If either the worker or the company is not good at communicating, that will cause serious problems. Poor communication from the managers can easily cause poor motivation and execution problems from the workers. If a worker is not communicating blocks or reaching out for the help they need, that can also lead to those problems.
Yes but I don't agree "C" is a "unique" ability for remotes. Our operations/IT stuff always has someone who is technically remote due to business travel.
I have a side project with volunteers working on it remotely as well.
I don't see it as a separate problem. People either can communicate effectively via text/phone....or they can't. In an office environment, you still need that. About 50% of my stakeholders are "remote" as they work in other companies many miles away.
> As an employer however, we've found it hard to always keep our developers ... executing on time.
There's something off about this -- it has the whiff of micromanagement or waterfall; perhaps I'm misreading your point. Far better than micromanagement is hiring good, trustworthy people and collaborating with them together on incrementally building something out.
It could also have the whiff of an "Agile" team that has a crisis every 2 or 3 weeks, due to routinely setting unrealistic sprint goals. No, this isn't supposed to happen, but I've seen it at more than one shop, that's for sure.
The motivational aspect is, in my experience, a consequence of working 100% from home. Spending that much time at home can make it hard for me to get stuff done. I'm perfectly capable of being productive when I work from home occasionally...possibly even more productive than I am when I'm in the office since I'm less distracted, but find that my productivity drops off considerably when I work predominantly from home.
There's easy fixes for this--headphones, coffee shop Wi-Fi and a VPN connection work well for me--but I have to do something or I go stir crazy and can't get much done.
When herding cats, it is better to carry a can opener than a cattle prod.
While this is difficult for traditional management styles to grasp, it is most useful to just ignore the down times and instead do absolutely everything in your power to encourage the ultra-productive "flow" state to happen as often as possible. The necessary conditions will vary by developer. Some people thrive with regular teammate feedback. Others like to pull a lonely all-nighter. Some will do their best thinking on a treadmill or in the shower, then sit down and execute. Some perform work-related rituals, like the morning coffee ceremony.
There is no single thing you can do, other than getting to know your co-workers. Once you know them well enough, it should be obvious what you need to do. It may well be that the best way to motivate one of your developers is to institute timelines, milestones, and deadlines, but another will just switch off the creativity and motivation because of the micromanagement, and they won't come back until well after you remove the artificial pressure.
How tight are your schedules? How much do you overcommit developer resources? How much do your salespeople promise that you can't realistically do?
I just left a position where remote was impossible because of the workload. The office culture had strict hours, and developers were expected to work on new projects AND bug fix tickets at the same time. (They would tell the architect "You can use these 2 good developers this week" and then tell the developers "You can't work on the architect's project this week, you have to do bug fix tickets.")
Essentially, a remote culture is a more laid-back culture. It's about herding the cats...not about herding cattle, or milking cats.
You HAVE to have a very heavy heavy heavy hand in hiring. Hiring good is by far the best thing you can do, you could hiring the most brilliant coder in the world, but if he is a poor communicator and procrastinator, your SOL.
For remote work, I look for hiring a personable motivated people, who are good at staying up on communication first, I can teach Tech, I don't want to teach someone to communicate or to stay on task. (This means they keep me informed by choice, not when I ask)
Also, as the guy above me said, let them fail and dont over work them. Micro management is something that everyone has issues with, especially if your a new-ish manager, and especially if you are managing a remote team, and if you pile 45-50 hours of work on them in a 50 hour work week, they will become disinterested, and just show up put in the hours and leave without any regards to quality to deadlines.
Isn't that just a pacing issue. If there's enough discrete work going through the pipe line then burn-downs (or if you're not traditionally agile, targets) should be pretty reflective of your output.
You have to be careful, but I wonder if giving a developer access to their own progress/burndown would be an encouragement for those who arn't quite so self motivated.
One thing I've never heard from a manager at an in office gig - "my team is ultra motivated and always, without fault, executes on time. No problems there!"
My point being that with software development, even in an office, you'll still have to deal with lack of motivation and missing deadlines, and will never feel totally accomplished here. Working locations become a correlation, not a causation.
The first four points are summarized in "Email is better than verbal communication." While email definitely has advantages, there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication. It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc.
The last three points are much better (though I can't attest if they're true or not).
> there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication
At the company I work for we use a combination of Slack and some video/voice tool (speak.io, hangouts, joinme, uberconf, teamspeak, etc. - we've used all of them) for any complex communication. Email is 100% external (customer) communication.
> It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc
While I don't think forming a bond with a co-worker is at all important you can supplement this with quarterly "work weeks" where everyone is in the same place working together 4-5 times per year. Also, I have to disagree that it's slower. Face to face communication often leads to wheel spinning and shooting the shit. Hardly anything gets done. Remote work is defined by communication, so it's much faster, and more effective.
I agree with you. My experience with remote work has been touch-and-go, but it always helps when team members are mutually willing to communicate over the phone. Effective back-and-forth over email seems to be a rare skill. No matter how much time you put into refining a message, it is only ever one piece of a conversation. If there is more to say than just "Do this," or "I have done that"—if you need a back-and-forth—all email does is stretch the dialogue out. Answers come more slowly, and often as incompletely. And, as you say, tone is very hard to get right over email. I'm sure I've read at least a couple articles on HN about the tendency to read aggressiveness into concise emails.
Email is simply not a conversation medium, and rarely even a discussion medium. It's a medium mostly useful to propagate information and meeting requests (where discussion happens).
My friend tony, that owns a startup called fleetio, made a compelling presentation about remote work and it's advantages. It also has lots of info on tools.
I've been partially remote for the past 5 years, averaging 2-3 days a week in the office. During that time I've also had stints of being fully remote while overseas for a few months at a time. The fully remote time is vastly more productive, but could be very difficult regarding communication. The work environment wasn't designed to be remote-first, and this puts a strain on anybody who isn't in the office.
In my experience remote all-the-way works wonderfully. Remote partially suffers around communication when the rest of the team doesn't emphasize asynchronous tools like chat/comments/email.
As person who has spent half their career telecommuting and half in an open floor plan: it seems mostly like a series of trade offs.
Being remote forces you to be more deliberate with communication. I tend to make more design docs and proposals than I think I otherwise would.
Working in an open floor plan means you can randomly overhear things you are either passionate about or have expertise in and jump in.
I suspect there is also an emotional and introvert/extrovert bit as well. Sometimes it is nice to be physically be around people working industriously on your same problem domain.
They're are many downfalls with working remote. In the past year of being remote I've found that it can be very difficult to pick up on the attitude of a co-worker or boss. It also can make difficult conversations not go so well. People will also avoid having to have face to face conversations because they don't like confrontation. I like working remote, but I also think it's important that a "connection" be built with your co-workers and sometimes that just only partially happens over chat and hang outs.
I find that in the age of the open office, working remotely is the only time I'm really productive. I didn't mind working from an 8x8 cube, but my current tiny desk in a maze of desks, all alike, is the pits (cue some nimrod posturing about how this enhances agile/availability/WTFever).
That said, I totally grok people who have a large social component to their dayjob seeing these things as a perk. I am not one of those people. I write code. It it isn't truly important, GO AWAY...
The one quantitative thing I think you can say about companies with lots of remote workers is that they don't have to pay as much for engineers. Speaking as someone who lives in the Bay Area, that makes me less likely to work for such a company. Yes, I could move somewhere where the cost of living is lower, but I actually like it here, and I have yet to run across a company with a strong remote culture that doesn't use it as a cost-savings device (among other things).
Big companies. Multinationals. Megacorporations. My coworkers in other states have no idea if I'm at home or work, and they have no idea where I am. Often enough I'm not sure what cities are involved much less office or home on on the road.
This leads to a BIG social and cultural problem that it's director/vp privilege to have a boss/employee relationship across timezones, how dare those lowly scum cross timezones, next thing you know they'll be using the exec washroom, nobody under $250K/yr gets to work across state lines, etc.
Also there's stealth WFH if everyone is expected to put in some hours while VPN in from home during emergencies, then weekly emergencies become BAU, then people are expected to VPN in when they're sick at home, next thing you know people are staying home and VPN in because they have a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, then people start going home after lunch and VPN in on a regular basis... You will save commute time money WRT rush hour slowdowns but you won't save many car-miles.
Also look for professional, experienced managers. Noob managers will be lucky to achieve and measure trivial baby step metrics like "butt-hours in seats per week", although the pros will get stuff done without making graphs of tardiness infractions and dress code violations. There are numerous other advantages to working for professionals instead of amateur hour.
Look, I get that working remotely is good for many workers, but let's admit that's why we're doing it instead of pretending it's about "getting a leg up on competition".
> They prioritize communication and collaboration by necessity
This is exactly what remote culture doesn’t do. A remote culture inherently has decided that being off-site is more important to them than being able to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily.
> It is easy to reach out for help
Easier than standing up and asking for help over the cubicle wall? No.
I can see how the increased difficulty of communication could be arguably a better thing, but let’s not pretend it’s easier.
> There is a lot less wasted communication
This is true, but it’s balanced by the fact that the non-wasted communication costs a whole lot more. And I think it’s also an overstated claim: just because you can refer back to your communication doesn’t mean anyone actually can find the communications or actually does go back and refer to it.
> There is a lot less posturing
I can see how this is annoying, but I’m not sure how this relates to a claim of productivity. In the end, I’m not sure presenting ideas with logic is actually the best way to do things: often I’d rather just do what the best doers on the team suggest, with or without justification. The best plan is the one that gets the job done quickly and with quality, even if it’s one that’s hard to justify logically beforehand. Requiring logical justification for things means that you prioritize the talk of people who talk well over the intuition of people who are actually good at their jobs. It’s worth noting that posturing tends to be most effective for people who are respected by their teammates, which tends to correlate with being good at your job in technical fields. Posturing evolved as a behavior for a reason, and I’d not be so quick to discard it.
Also, there’s an apparent contradiction between "Even if we are over-communicating, it is okay, because we aren't forcing a squadron of employees to sit in a meeting room pretending to be interested.” and "I have to believe that it has something to do with the fact that most of the effective communication is either written, or is done in large meetings where lots of people are watching.” Either your meetings are larger or they aren’t; don’t pick whichever fits the point you’re trying to make.
> There is often a higher caliber of workers
Uh, okay. If we’re allowed to make vague unjustified claims, I guess I can just counter with, “Remote work tends to lead to unhealthier workers because they don’t go outside”.
> You get a huge portion of your life back
This is also a pretty unjustified claim. When I worked from home I found that it was a lot harder to “turn off” when my workday was done.
Citing commute times is a good justification for living near where you work, not necessarily for working remotely. I’m a 25 minute train ride from my work, and having an excuse to get up and go out is pretty good for me in general.
Very much agree. There's a herd mentality in the programmer community on this issue. Having worked remotely for a year myself, I think remote work should be considered harmful for the career of most engineers.
For engineers who are in the habit of thinking of their job and their career (and maybe a lot of other things?) exclusively in mechanistic terms of inputs and outputs, it's a tempting abstraction.
But when you work remotely, you're basically advertising your work as commodity work. You're basically consistently reminding the company -- and the job market -- that you are substitutable. In economic terms, that is simply not a smart signal to be sending.
It's also short sighted in terms of the arc of your career. Right now you might be making economic value in the marketplace strictly by extruding a software widget from your keyboard. Great! But at some point, the odds are good (not 100%, but good) that the way you'll make value is by enabling others to build software; reading body language, detecting issues in a team; or negotiating; or motivating; or selling; etc. The proportion of people reading this who will hack til their retirement day is quite small.
Sitting in your home office being "productive" isn't preparing you to do much that's important in the second half of your career. It's a case of over-fitting. You're optimizing around your current skill set and not thinking about the larger portfolio of useful -- human -- skills.
> But when you work remotely, you're basically advertising your work as commodity work. You're basically consistently reminding the company -- and the job market -- that you are substitutable.
You don't provide an argument for why working in an office provides what you are claiming remote workers to lack, nor do you provide evidence to backup your claim that remote workers are more replaceable.
> But at some point... the way you'll make value is by enabling others to build software; reading body language, detecting issues in a team; or negotiating; or motivating; or selling; etc.
If you can't do this through verbal communication and hangouts, maybe you should work on your communication skills as a manager - sometimes listening to the words people say is more reliable than making assumptions based on body positioning. On the flip side, maybe you should focus your hiring efforts on developers with strong communication skills, and enforce an evaluation period w/ new developers to see if they can meet the mustard in terms of remote communicating. Good developers don't communicate passively; they use their words and this can be assessed by good managers.
> You don't provide an argument for why working in an office provides what you are claiming remote workers to lack, nor do you provide evidence to backup your claim that remote workers are more replaceable.
Maybe the reason you don't see that this is obviously the case is that you haven't been in enough direct contact with the people making these replacement decisions. :P
> If you can't do this through verbal communication and hangouts, maybe you should work on your communication skills as a manager - sometimes listening to the words people say is more reliable than making assumptions based on body positioning.
...and sometimes it's not. Also, you're making it sound like people are more likely to make assumptions based on body positioning--every form of communication involves assumptions. Communication without body language inherently communicates less--you're making more assumptions because you have less information to go on.
All of that is obsolete thinking. Good headset-and-webcam collaboration tools make it actually easier to ask for help, than 'over the cubicle wall'. Because now everyone in the company is your digital neighbor.
We are all remote at my company. We've had to train managers to stay in their damn offices and put on the headset, instead of walking around or gathering people in conference rooms. Because being away from the collaboration tool is the biggest source of isolation and communication trouble we have.
If everybody is jacked in, can see everybody else in their space, knows who is talking to whom at a glance, and can talk/webcam/share with a mouse click, why then we get so much more done. More than being physically present, which really means being close to 1 or two people but physically isolated from everybody else in the building.
There's no way to way what most office setups tend to be like, but I can tell you that when I'm in the office, I feel really isolated from others. To the point where being at home is no different other than maybe for the two 5-minute personal interactions I have with people. Let's face it, a lot of modern office environments are shit for human flourishing. You're better off being surrounded by a couple dogs at home than the stale interaction at the office.
Again I realize offices are all different as are tasks, but this is my opinion from experience in about 7 different offices spanning full time, contract and temporary onsite freelance work.
I would love a job where I NEED to be at the office, instead of feeling like it's a waste of my time just to satisfy my supervisor's 'feelz' but not his / her or the company's actual needs.
I'm for balance between in and out of office. I'm for not being locked into one chair as if sitting in the same place was ever the way that humans were supposed to live for the majority of their day / life.
Arguing over whether remote or in-person is better when your company is systemically bad at communicating is like arguing which color to paint a turd: no color of paint is going to make it less a turd.
On the other side of things: a team with good communication skills will communicate effectively either in-person or remotely.
I'm calling out the dumb logic of the article, not arguing against remote work. I think remote work is bad for productivity generally, but it's a small problem. Personally I prefer the flexibility that working remotely allows.
This is an authoritarian way of thinking. Basically, I prefer to be onsite therefore everyone should be onsite. You make the claim that the author fails to substantiate the benefits of working remote, but you also failed and just countered with your own opinions.
BTW - since I work from home I just got to on a 20 min jog with my wife. Yes, we do go outside.
> Basically, I prefer to be onsite therefore everyone should be onsite.
That is the opposite of true: I prefer to work remotely.
The purpose of my post was to tear apart bullshit claims that working remotely fixes all sorts of problems. Working remotely is better for workers, not for companies (at least not in the ways claimed).
I'm a remote worker and I'm definitely spoiled by not having to deal with open office plans and disruptions.
That said, I see no evidence that the article's statement is true. (I want it to be true, but that doesn't change the fact that so far, I see zero evidence that it is true.)
You can't convince people with just rhetoric.
Instead, show compelling examples of how Company-A-with-mostly-remote-workers is beating the pants off of the Company-B-with-onsite-workers.
Show that RemoteWorkerCompany is 10x more innovative, delivers 10x faster, has 10x profits, etc etc.
I suspect finding comparisons that control for other variables are hard to come up with. Nevertheless, that's what it's going to take to convince managers. A bunch of programmers writing a thousand essays on the "advantages" of remote workers is just preaching to people like me who happen to like working from home.