Ask HN: What stops your organization from being remote first?

6 points by gyani95 8 years ago | 3 comments

I can't help but think that the future of Software Engineering is remote. I was watching a talk by Peter Thiel who was talking about how it's weird that most of the VC money goes to pay rent, either directly(for the office) or indirectly (employee pays for their house).

Earlier last month there was a post by YCombinator asking, "Why would you not want to work in a start-up?". Most answers were about money, it makes sense startups can't match what Big N pays in the Bay Area.

So I see a few advantages of hiring people remote -

- Global access to talent, can pay the best salaries for their local markets

- Provide around the clock support without having engineers and support people awake at odd hours.

- You don't have to worry about visas, the process and associated costs. No satellite offices to L1 people in after an year.

- Word of mouth. Your developers will talk about their work with their friends and you'll have people talking about you accross different markets.

- Easy internationalization. You don't have to specfically hire people to add different translations or support different markets.

- Diversity - People from around the world can work on your product. You have access to a more diverse set of candidates.

- Hiring doesn't have to be around H1B dates.

- Personally I'd love to work from remote locations. Travel around Asia while working on a product that I like.

So, what's stopping organizations from supporting remote teams?

I understand some startups do embrace remote. Even some big companies do, what's stopping it from being the norm?

What can one work on to make it easier for people to run remote first companies?

DoreenMichele 8 years ago |

As someone who does a lot of remote work -- though I am not a programmer -- I will suggest that communicating remotely is different from doing so in person and many people suck at it. This is a serious problem if you are going to work remotely.

Time difference can be an issue as well. When I had a corporate job, I knew a woman at this American company who was managing a remote team in India and, when things went wrong, she got phone calls at 3 a.m. The company did about 3/4 of its business in Japan and the CEO split his time between the US headquarters and Japan. They also had probably the world's most amazing teleconference setup that I have never seen a write up of anywhere. Among other things, the huge time difference was challenging to deal with.

Also, you need to be able to embrace diversity and multiculturalism. This is not easy for most people, as evidenced by the ongoing cries of racism, sexism, etc in the world. People tend to know how to deal with folks "like them" and not be so good at dealing with people who are different. Even if they aren't intentionally excluding "others," it tends to have the effect of excluding them.

Multiculturalism is a hard problem to solve and you have to solve that if you want remote first policies, IMO.

gyani95 8 years ago | |

I'd have guessed that people would have become better talking over screens given how much time people spend on social apps these days. At work I do find it easier to catch hold of a person and talk to them rather than messaging them over our instant messaging platform. Though if they are working from home the experience is similar to the in person experience if I can have video call with them.

The second issue seems to be due to a lack of autonomy on part of the engineers in India. It seems they had a satellite office in India and the Indian workers themselves lacked autonomy to act in case something went wrong. What was so good(I guess you are being sarcastic) about the teleconferencing software?

DoreenMichele 8 years ago | | |

teleconferencing setup, not software.

IIRC, they paid an artist $18k (many years ago, when that was "real money") to create a large oval table in two halves. One half is in The Tower at the US headquarters. The other is in Japan.

The table halves face a blank wall. The entire wall serves as the canvas for projecting the teleconference.

So, you are literally sitting face to face across the same table with people a continent and ocean away, separated by something like a 17 hour time difference, yet it is like they are in the same room.

I have been in the conference room, but never participated in nor seen the conferencing happen. The description is like something out of a futuristic movie and it leaves me agog that the company has apparently never waxed eloquent about it anywhere, though perhaps it is part of their "secret sauce."