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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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".<p>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.<p>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 :) .<p>(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.
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 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.<p>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.<p>Working remotely is awesome. All power to remote workers, but no amount of collaborative tools replaces the value of face-to-face communication.
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).<p><a href="https://goo.gl/bvNXHQ" rel="nofollow">https://goo.gl/bvNXHQ</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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>There is no shortage of remote job boards and job aggregators</i><p>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.<p>The aggregators are even worse. They are automated. That's why they contain an ad even when it has <i>no remote allowed</i>.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>I operate an engineering team as a seed stage startup across 2 coasts of the US, multiple parts of APAC, and europe.<p>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.<p>From there we've made our hires only through referrals or our open source channel.<p>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.<p>A few notes on what's worked for us:<p>Remote first office, no one (even if there is an office in your area) is required to come in (at all). We use <a href="https://gitter.im/" rel="nofollow">https://gitter.im/</a> to interact with our open source community, partner companies, and team members.<p>Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well.<p>Some of us choose to for a separation of work and home.<p>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.<p>We've found productivity to be quite high overall. A lot less noise and very efficient communication.<p>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.<p>We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a standup.<p>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.<p>Happy to answer questions or expand on anything that sounds interesting.
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 <i>great</i>. We very much have the be-able-to-pop-in-for-a-question thing going on like you would in a project war room.<p>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.
"Communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a conversation."<p>Probably the main reason I want to get a remote job. Constant disruptions.
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.
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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?
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.<p>Wrote about it here, if anyone's curious. Recruiting is a trail of tears: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tXlm?trk=prof-sm" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tX...</a><p>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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>Company "culture" must be something for people who don't have families or friends. Personally, I don't get it.<p>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.<p>I don't ever see going into an office again unless it my my own leased space. Remote work is the future!
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
If some of the site owners see this. I clicked on a random job by Gitlab. Two of the links at the end looked interesting. Both are dead.<p><a href="https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/" rel="nofollow">https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/</a><p><a href="https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/" rel="nofollow">https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/</a><p>Whose fail? Gitlab's or RemoteBase's?
I have almost no marketable skills to speak of, how can I work remotely?<p>I'll take phone calls, answer questions from a script, whatever I have to do.<p>Also, what marketable skills should I focus on developing if I want to work remotely in an actual, skill-required job?<p>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.<p>Thank you in advance.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
In my experience it is best to create your own remote job.<p>You can start consulting / freelancing.<p>Or existing job can be made remote. Employer must trust you.
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.<p>{ I own stock in Sococo }
Remote work is going to be the future - aided by VR technology collaboration in teams will become much easier.<p>I already look forward to living in a little house on cheap ground somewhere in the nowhere and do my fork from there :)
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.