Fog Creek’s Remote Work Policy

&quot;You still have stuff like chat, commit messages, code reviews, cases, Trello boards, etc. Be a little paranoid for this time about showing your work. It will help you feel good about your time, and us feel good about granting it.&quot;<p>Run through a de-weaselizer, this reads:<p>&quot;Be a good little pet, and do an extra set of tricks when we take you out to the park, so you feel good about running around in the park and we feel good about granting you the privilege to go out once a week.&quot;<p>Yeah, bullshit. Place where I work operates on a culture of complete trust, period. Example: Once, a guy on my team had to go to his parents&#x27; house out in the country and was stuck with a slow internet connection. No problem, he did some stuff, stuck it out for as much as he could and then shelved it. I bet he enjoyed his time there much more than he would have sitting in a bunch of chatrooms anyway, and he did it on company time. He was much happier when he came back, and probably did twice the usual amount of work when he did on average.<p>As his co-worker who was working when this guy was at his parents&#x27; house, did I feel slighted or angry at him? No, for heaven&#x27;s sake -- he was seeing his family, and enjoying a few choice, uninterrupted hours with them. Webapps can fucking wait. I was perfectly happy doing his share of the work.<p>The culture in the American software industry glorifies ass-in-seat hours (directly or indirectly -- this notion of &quot;exhibiting your productivity&quot; is just another version of ass-in-seat hours) at a cost to actual productivity, happiness, and general well-being by waving the distant promise of some sort of vague payout in front of you, and getting you to constantly compete with your co-workers at &quot;putting in more time&quot;. Reject this sort of rubbish unconditionally if you have even the slightest choice.

This seems like a lot of rules... and kind of unfriendly. Especially for just a short stint working remotely.<p>Whats the worst that could happen if one of the workers has a less than ideal setup while temporarily working remotely for a few days? Would it really affect company outcomes? If not, I think developer happiness would be improved by having a more laissez-faire attitude from management.

Seem like too many rules for you?<p>Use this as a reminder about why it&#x27;s important to ask probing questions whenever you interview for a job. Find out what the culture is like and if it is a good fit for you. I know several developers who thrive with the environmental conditions listed here and would love having the company have rules to enforce these conditions. I also know several developers who would burn out.<p>It&#x27;s vitally important to find something that&#x27;s a good fit for you. No need to hate on their rules if it works for their team.<p>Edit: Also, if you don&#x27;t like this list, what would rules does your team have in place to ensure an effective, productive remote work policy? Does it scale up with the team?

&gt;at Fog Creek, it’s sort of assumed that everyone’s working steadily and diligently. In the absence of new information, the assumption is that you’re producing.<p>Well that&#x27;s a dumb assumption. The managers at Fog Creek don&#x27;t do code reviews, don&#x27;t look at commit logs, don&#x27;t look at the features that developers have built? They just assume that everyone is being productive because they are in the office.<p>&gt;When you step outside the HQ work environment, you should flip that burden of proof. The burden is on you to show that you’re being productive.<p>At my job productivity is shown by the code I commit and the features I build, not the time that I visibly appear to be typing away at my keyboard. Apparently Fog Creek does it a little differently. I&#x27;m glad I don&#x27;t work there.

After decades of successful remote work on both sides of the paycheck, I find this recent trend pushing against it with formality and micromanagement pretty revolting. There are jobs that require specifically to-the-second availability called &quot;customer service agent&quot; or &quot;receptionist,&quot; and timeliness is their whole point of existing and they pay a <i>lot</i> less which tells me that just being there isn&#x27;t worth all that much.<p>Otherwise, wherever and whenever you&#x27;re working, you should be judged on the outcome of those projects for which you&#x27;re responsible, nothing else. If collaboration is required, your smart people (you hire people that are smarter than you in their field right?) will know they need to deliver their best in order to keep their jobs so they will work it out themselves. How that&#x27;s going to happen, whether if it means getting together in an office, temporary conference room, Skype, or google hangout they probably know more options than you do. If you want to reasonably keep status on them, hold a standup once a day. Anything regularly beyond that specifically for no other purpose than management is telling them that you don&#x27;t trust them and therefore they shouldn&#x27;t trust you.

This reads like yet another autocratic, micro-managing HR document. &quot;Have a room with a door that shuts.&quot; Seriously?<p>How about this: hire smart people you trust, give them whatever tools and support they need to do their jobs most productively, then get out of the way.

This is true old school thinking at its worst. If my employer is going to put up all these rules and barriers maybe I should put up a few of my own. I bet the managers or whatever they fancy themselves to be at Fog Creek have very little appreciation for all of the small yet tangible things that employees go out of their way to do for them. Things like answering important emails in the evening, especially when it is for a high profile client or partner. Staying late when critical bugs come up. Etc. I bet all that kind of stuff is just expected of the employees.

I worked from home exclusively for about 6 years (this year is the first time I&#x27;ve been back working at an office), and admittedly, my work almost never involved other people (except for clients, who are remote even if I was in an office, as the majority of the application testing I&#x27;ve done was remote testing), so I&#x27;m certainly outside of their demographic.<p>But the one thing which just seemed weird to read was that it gives the impression of everyone being constantly chatting and doing video calls at a moment&#x27;s notice, which seems to run counter to the &quot;give every developer their own office&quot; and create a distraction-free environment for programmers. I think I would feel constantly interrupted working in that environment, which seems counter to Fogcreek&#x27;s whole persona as a place that&#x27;s &quot;developer-oriented&quot;.

One of the biggest hypocrisy that exists here in India at least with regards to &#x27;Remote Work&#x27; or &#x27;Work From Home&#x27; policy is how late night and after office-hour work hours are handled.<p>While companies come up with all sorts of reasons to deny work-from-home during the day, they some how assume all those reasons(which they them self give) will magically vanish while employees reach home in the evening and now employees should be able to work late nights from home.<p>How does this work out? During the day you don&#x27;t want employees to work from home, telling them they won&#x27;t be productive and after office hours you expect them to be most productive while working from home?

I don&#x27;t think I would enjoy the work environment here, and it&#x27;s not because of the rules or whatever. Good development seems to me to be a very solitary activity. The more people you involve, the more friction you create, the more time and energy you burn in meetings, the more you end up arguing about things you really shouldn&#x27;t be arguing about.<p>I&#x27;m the sole back-end Rails developer at my company and I like it that way. At my last job there was one other guy I could have been working with, but it was much faster just doing everything myself. (we weren&#x27;t just coders) When I freelanced, I ended up having to run a front-end guy off a project because his work wasn&#x27;t good enough and it was holding everything up. Once I redid his work the rest of the job went swimmingly.<p>I&#x27;m the kind of dev you can hand a vague idea to and leave me for three weeks and I&#x27;ll come back with a finished project that&#x27;s exactly what you were looking for and more. It just seems like that&#x27;s the right way to make stuff, and I don&#x27;t think I could work any other way anymore. I couldn&#x27;t work at Fog Creek because I can just tell I wouldn&#x27;t be half as productive there.

Seems pretty micromanagey and harsh. Why so many rules? I work with tons of remote people and appreciate the headset and bandwidth requirements, but it could certainly be phrased better. How about like this: &quot;All new hires are given a nice headset, please use it, no one likes static or echo.&quot;

I think these are reasonable expectations. Working remotely does not imply that you get to set the boundaries and rules of employment. It merely allows you to work from another place. I have been working remotely for the past 4+ years, and actually do so in the way they describe. I have an office with a door, do not babysit or have people around during work hours, let people know (family included) that I am <i>at</i> work, and make sure to communicate a lot with the team.<p>You can&#x27;t take your child to a non-remote job, you can&#x27;t have your friends or parents dropping by, and and can&#x27;t isolate yourself from others. It is strange that working remotely would allow for those things. Not really. Less so when the work is programming. Which requires a good amount of concentration and quietness.

i work from home and all the advice here is sensible, and describes how i work (except that you don&#x27;t need that much upstream bandwidth for google meetup).<p>yet, as others have said, there&#x27;s a bad vibe to this article. i do these things because they make sense for me. maybe they make sense for many others too. but what i expect from an employer is the trust that i will know what works for myself.<p>working from home depends completely on trust. if you need rules like these it sounds like you&#x27;re either making bad hires, or you have control issues.<p>couldn&#x27;t you replace them with: &quot;you can work remotely, but it&#x27;s your responsibility to make it work&quot;? and if you really must, add &quot;here are some things you should probably consider: good bandwidth; remote desktop access; time zones; ...&quot;

As someone who works remotely, I think the really key things are institutional, rather than individual. They discuss moving everything to online, and that&#x27;s essentially the biggest part of what you need. When &quot;showing up to work&quot; no longer includes going out to coffee in the mornings, but instead means logging onto the chat room and wishing everyone good morning, you&#x27;ve achieved a measurable step.<p>Isolated office space, all those things are <i>nice</i> to have, but without having everything available via TCP&#x2F;IP, it&#x27;s a nonstarter.<p>I&#x27;ve worked from many an airport that essentially fits none of these criteria without too many problems aside from reliable power supply - the nice thing about working remotely is that you can tune your environment to your own tastes.

I actually don&#x27;t think these rules are unreasonable at all for permanent remote work (though they seem a tad stringent for ad hoc temporary remote stints). I mean, is it seriously asking that much for you to get a good headset and have a room for working? Working from home at all is a tremendous privilege, and these strike me as relatively minor requests over the long run. If it was requested that you dress up, then yes, that would be ridiculous.<p>However, the tone of this post honestly sounds a little frustrated with remote work rather than supportive of it, and I think that is what is leading to the comments here. After reading this, my impression is the author doesn&#x27;t trust remote developers (despite a claim to the contrary) and that he generally looks down on remote developers. I would worry that remote developers are not seen as first-class citizens of the developer ecosystem at the company.<p>In short, even though I agree with these rules for the most part, remote development is something that needs to either be rejected or embraced, not regulated. There&#x27;s not much middle-ground, because that&#x27;s going to lead to micro-management.

I was excited about reading this, but came away very very disappointed. I guess I was expecting Fog Creek to be a lot more gung-ho about working remotely and they weren&#x27;t, but it wasn&#x27;t just that, but the fact that they sounded the way the large companies I have worked with sound about remote arrangements ... like they&#x27;re doing you a favor, instead of giving you a way to be awesome.<p>To be fair,I have never run a company of any appreciable size, so I really can&#x27;t argue with the way Fog Creek chooses to run things (they know what works best for them) ... but it just left me a little dismayed because either all the aspirational ideas I have about work will eventually be dashed when I do get to a position to run a company of my own, and I&#x27;ll have to write things like &quot;The burden is on you to show that you’re being productive&quot; in the company handbook or Fog Creek just stopped being a company I looked up to in terms of company culture, neither of which is good.

It&#x27;s not just cheap internet access that has slow upstream. I have the second from the top tier of service from the fastest ISP in my area (a major and very affluent suburb of an extremely large US city) and my upstream is only 2mbps. Moving to the top tier, which costs over $100&#x2F;mo, would only get me 4mbps. It&#x27;s annoying for sure. But, that said, I do video conferences on a regular basis from my home office and it works perfectly fine. I feel like that guideline is both unrealistic in the US market, and also unnecessary.

I am just curious what is the impetus to all these rules. To me it seems the system has been abused until the management decided to define boundaries.<p>In fact, these rules make sense, to the point if one could be hired by FC, they have no reason not to know these. If rules need to be explicitly spelled out, I am worried the issue would be far more subtle than written rules can address. (hint: cancelling WFH by Yahoo)

As an IT worker with no possibility for remote work currently I would happily agree to this policy which other posters (who presumably do some remote work) seem so unhappy about.

No thanks. This is all completely the opposite of how I want to work and I would never ask my dev resources to work like this. I wouldn&#x27;t employ anyone that thought this was all a good idea and can&#x27;t think of a single high quality dev that would accept it.

I work remotely exclusive and the list present here doesn&#x27;t seem that bad to me. I do feel it&#x27;s a slight bugger to have to constantly ping someone that &#x27;I&#x27;m here!&#x27;. The submitted commits and code reviews should be plenty for that.<p>The place I work has similar guidelines and we communicate via Skype instead of Google Hangouts - and it works very well. There has to be _some_ interaction between team members, otherwise you&#x27;re just a code-spitting robot, no? I enjoy the daily meetings as it lets me see what everyone is up to and let&#x27;s me share what I&#x27;ve been doing as well.<p>I guess I like working in a team that talks.

often, even though I normally work in my office, I will take a few hours to go work under a tree in a park. I used to worry a lot about my wifi hotspot situation but I&#x27;ve found that sometimes, not having the internet at all is good to get you ultra-focused on the task you are working on, especially when you&#x27;ve got your entire dev environment on your laptop. no coworker interruptions, no HN, no Twitter, not even if you wanted them. Also, being in real sunlight (although in the shade) &amp; outside is great for the mind.

I think the only thing that would dissuade me from working at this company is the poor communication of these rules.<p>There is an easy way to communicate clear goals and principles without sounding passive aggressive and authoritarian. This writer obviously wasn&#x27;t aware of it didn&#x27;t care. I can handle high expectations. But I would be miserable somewhere where poor communication was the norm.

Seems ridiculously anal to me. Our only policy is:<p>a) Make sure your team knows where you&#x27;re at.<p>b) Get the job done.<p>No approval, know anal micromanagement about how you do your job. If you can deliver whilst sitting in the garden watching the kids, kudos to you.<p>Not coincidentally, the same policy applies to working in the office...

I have been working remotely for 7 years now.<p>What made it possible:<p>1. Strict work hours - I must be online at 0900 and respond on IMs and such until 1800. You can work outside of that time if feeling like it and the occasional long lunch break is not a problem as long as you have a phone with you.<p>2. Fast broadband.<p>3. Dedicated room.

This sounds awful to me. I get that you&#x27;re writing a paycheck and you want people to work, but that&#x27;s got to get done on the hiring and firing end of things. Hire good workers. Fire people that don&#x27;t work out.<p>&gt;Be a little paranoid for this time about showing your work. It will help you feel good about your time, and us feel good about granting it.<p>The last section is just ridiculous imo. If someone is doing their job, you should know it. If they aren&#x27;t doing their job, you should know that as well. Being paranoid about my job is not going to help me feel good about my time. Promise. It might make me start looking for a new place to work though.

Can someone explain to me why this page starts with a picture captioned &quot;know thyself&quot; of a cow reading a placard about cows? Just when I think it makes sense...no, I&#x27;m confused.

I was Fog Creek&#x27;s first full time remote dev. I left the company about 18 months ago to pursue my own company.<p>There seems to be some confusion and questions in this thread, so let&#x27;s do this:<p>AMA (Ask Me Anything)

I&#x27;m kind of surprised that remote working issues haven&#x27;t been completely solved at this point and it seems like there&#x27;s still a big opportunity there to start a business in that space. There are a lot of cultural barriers there I think that still need to be overcome.<p>What if your company gave you 2 options: 1. Work in the office. 2. Work wherever you like, but let us install software on your computer that will monitor what you are doing at all times.<p>Would you be offended? Would you consider the work from home option?

<i>Being able to participate in a video conference usually means at least 5 mbps up</i><p>Bollocks. Just bollocks.

All of these things make sense to me.<p>BTW are you guys using reportsfortrello.com yet? I think it would help with your &quot;Team Awareness&quot; rule since it allows you see all of the recent activities of other board members.<p>full disclosure: I created reportsfortrello.com.

Can anyone recommend a good wireless headset for this?

I found that a previous job where I could work remotely here and there, I was extremely productive. So much time is wasted on the getting ready to go out (more than just grabbing a shower and throwing on some jeans&#x2F;shorts and a t-shirt), doing the half hour or more commute, &quot;settling into the office&quot; (chitchatting with your co-workers). And then I was ready to blow that taco stand by the end of day. While at home I tended to work longer hours and sometimes twice as productive.<p>But remote desktop just sucks no matter how fast your connection is.