I feel like this is the main benefit.
And more often, the answer is somewhere in between, and it's hard to generalize.
If you're in the i/o bound phase remoting is often hard. You need to talk to people, pull answers from them, communicate, coordinate, reach agreements and nail down development plans. You can't do anything anyway unless you agree on the next steps first.
Conversely if you're brain bound all you want is a laptop and being alone at home because it's way more efficient to focus on a problem when you can forget about everything else. You can't plan ahead anyway unless you dig down in the code and see for yourself first what will work and what needs to change.
These phases alternate in worklife, maybe based on projects, time of the month, the whatever happenstances take place in the progress of development. Usually when you're stuck in one phase you really need to spend time in the other phase for a while. This is normal.
This has consequences. People working remotely tend to maximise their time on what they're efficient at, i.e. brain bound programming. At the office it's easier to invite people to meetings through the week to get work done that way because you can't really be brain bound at the office anyway. Thus remote types and office types tend to inflate their favourite phase as much as possible.
This inflation happens because these two phases are inherently incompatible with each other, and crossing the gap to switch phases is tedious.
But if you only ever work i/o bound you begin to wonder how could people work remotely at all. After all, everything happens in the office anyway so maybe working from home could work if only we add enough meetings to keep the remote people more tightly in the loop... And people working steadily from home begin to fathom, in time, whether it's possible at all to work at the office as all you have is constant breaks, meetings, people coming to ask about stuff and you can't ultimately get any real work done.
Different things begin to become important for people who don't alternate. So there's a slight confirmation bias in how people flock to the position and environment that maximises the kind of work they're really good at. But the caveat is that in doing this that you could be comfort-siloing yourself. So natural and healthy alternating between phases is what keeps you open and able to adjust to changes in work life and work projects.
On the other hand, people who alternate too often begin to get nothing done. You need to allocate batches of time for both phases in some moderate proportion. How to balance that is more of an art than anything else.
Sounds familiar, anyone? This is a dynamic I've observed in my own work life over and over again.
An owner of a company I'm close with found her employee was abusing work from home. This same employee was formerly a Superstar or so we thought.
Maybe bad management, but I found myself calling a 7 hour work from home day 8 hours too.
I bet most people from those 8h work a maximum 4. The rest is chatting and socializing. I like it.
The problem I have with this is that I don't really get to choose who I can chat and socialize with -- I like my work colleagues, but they're not my main social circle and never will be because I find it unhealthy if your colleagues are your core friends since if you ever want or need to leave (or get fired), it makes it all the more painful and makes an already stressful situation even more stressful. I'm a firm believer that you should enjoy the company of the people you work with, but that you should have a strong social life outside of work too so that you don't feel socially trapped in that job.
Management there only values "butt time in seats" and the ability to come over and interrupt you by tapping you on the shoulder whenever they need something.
As one of my ex CEOs put it: "If I don't see my employees stressing out at thier desks I get the impression they're not working."
Until we get over this psychological attachment of management loving to visually see their slaves on the open office plantation through their private panopticon[1] offices, remote won't take off no matter how many studies get published.
(1) all employees are trusted and unmeasured, but you have to tap people on the shoulder every once in a while to confirm that they're on track. Naturally, this is easier if everyone is on-site.
(2) everyone is accountable for producing of tickets, and you can check that everyone is at least doing some work. Check-ins can happen via comments in tickets.
(3) Everyone just does whatever they think they're supposed to be doing, and the manager only finds out something is wrong when the employee volunteers the information or the project isn't delivered on-time.
(1) is the common case, (2) requires time and skills many managers don't have (and creates @#$% Jira commentary form the peanut gallery), (3) requires building an excellent team with years of mutual trust between them, and still goes wrong all the time.
Seeing you at your desk working, and asking a casual question or two at the water cooler is by far the easiest (laziest?) way to make sure things don't go too far sideways.
I don't get it - shouldn't one-on-ones and regular progress check-ins (be those standups, metrics (This is your #2), whatever) give you that information? None of those are easier when on-site. In fact, given today's move towards open offices, any form of 1:1 collaboration is easier remotely where you don't have to fight for precious meeting room space.
I think the core problem is that you're trying to prove "everyone is working" when we should be interested in "the work is getting done". Seeing that everyone is working doesn't actually mean progress is getting made. If you have to take steps to answer that question anyway, the first question is fairly pointless.
It's a weak manager that's constantly concerned about their reports not being productive. Nothing in the world is easier to spot than someone who doesn't produce. You don't need to optimize for that, when it happens, deal with it. Optimize toward keeping your team motivated.
I just finished working on a fully remote contract that worked that way, every day at noon there was a conference call that never took longer than 15 minutes. It worked great. A couple manager types were on the call, and they'd share any developments on the contract side of things, feedback from the customer, things like that, but mostly they just listened and took note of potential issues and made sure they got resolved (so like if you mentioned a problem one day then didn't the next, they'd ask if it got dealt with).
We have 8 people on our current project team and we can typically finish this meeting in under 5 minutes each morning. We have some people on each coast, and half the people are remote so we do it at 10:30 am Eastern.
It keeps everyone accountable to the company and each other, and because everyone knows what everyone else is working on, it makes it easier to avoid overlap and divide up tasks in the most logical way possible.
When I've seen "things go side ways" it's almost exclusively at higher levels of management when politics create goals other than "create an amazing product". Anyone who has worked both in a large company and a small startups has likely seen the difference between "my boss's goal is for us to create a best in class product" vs "my boss's goal is for him to get L_current +1 promotion".
There are no companies that have failed because the workers have finally figured out how to sneak their way out of doing work. But workers do have a hard time being productive when "productivity" is some weird game that no one will really explain the rules to.
But the logic of blaming workers who get "off track" is a huge part of the culture we need to get rid of to have successful remote work.
If the only method for your manager to know what people are working on is to tap people on shoulders, then doing that isn’t a “bad behavior” for the manager, it’s necessary behavior.
Of cause a better solution is to have trust and plans. (Agile, scrum, waterfall, napkin sketches or whatever it doesn’t matter as long as people align during planning and have transparency into the plan). But in the absence you still need to have management in sync with what is going on.
Naturally the best pathway forwards is to look into changing your system to include all these value adding elements. But enabling remote work while management is critically dependent on physical presence to continue operation is not a good idea. And the solution is not just for managers to “give up the mindset” of knowing what’s going on below them. Trust is great when it works, and toxic when it doesn’t. The agile mantra of increasing trust is not just supposed to advocate blind trust. It’s about building a framework and working routine where we are validated in trusting each other.
I honestly think that EVERYONE should be using a ticket tracking system and just put assignments in a person's queue. I don't see why this is such a big deal or looked down upon. It's so easy to see what everyone is working on, run reports to see how long things took, have a place to keep track of notes which builds a knowledge base, the benefits are limmitless.
Not to mention the fact that if all you have to do is look at the reports to know what is going on, you don't physically need the person there which will allows them to work from anywhere.
https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
It is bad behavior, for two simple reasons:
1) The tapping of the shoulder (both literal and figurative) doesn't award any information, only the question afterward. So focus on what that question is, and implement whatever information that gets you (if any) into another system that doesn't require you huffing around interrupting the flow of your employees.
2) If that is your only method, you have already failed, and anything you do in that position that is not directly related to getting out of that position, is bad behavior.
This really hits the nail on the head, in my experience this is accurate for employers that are anti-remote, they want to be able to see people "work". I've argued that that means they are essentially paying people to be there 8 hours a day, not that they're working 8 hours a day. You see it a lot in stale offices, people are sitting at their desks appearing busy. Work doesn't get completed in the that time and they start hiring more busy drones.
It's absolutely baffling to me that we can't look at the statistics at a higher level and recognise that it's a highly inefficient way of working.
We can look at them and your management can too. The important takeaway is not that they don't know or can't learn, it is that their sense of control over you is more important than any measurable truth. Once you realise it's just a dysfunctional personality trait it becomes a lot easier to understand why it's so hard to change.
So, home office for senior developers with awesome productivity only?
When I am working remotely, due to the organisation's inability to measure productivity, fostered by their management's "bums on seats" culture, I can't demonstrate that remote work is a benefit to them.
David Graeber's book "Bullsh*t Jobs" is about that.
These companies main priority is not efficiency and productivity. If it was, they could hire less people to do the same work and that would foster unemployment.
They have a political and social role: hire as many people as possible. Keep them employed and busy and keep an eye on them.
Become too big to fail and you'll be rewarded with overbudgeted contracts (and even bailouts, sometimes).
Still with you here...
> They have a political and social role: hire as many people as possible.
You lose me here.
Most companies are out to make as much money as possible now or in the near future. I spent the first three years of my career in QA at a total BS Jobs company (120k+ employees, lots of government contract and enterprise software work). So many people coasted, nothing ever really got done, etc. Even in a totally dysfunctional organization like that, hiring was either about backfilling attrition losses or hiring people that were expected to directly or indirectly contribute to revenue growth.
Never attribute to a vast socio-political conspiracy that which can be explained by the emergent incompetence of a large organization.
Even with 12 years of professional programming experience, I am only beginning to have an idea of how long things are going to take in the context of a small team. If you've never programmed before, I don't know how you could possibly come up with an idea of how long something should take. So it reduces to the heuristic of "well they're at their desk, I'm sure they're doing something."
They also save on office space.. I don't see how this is not a win win for everyone either.
Your ex CEO sounds like a psychopath.
Of course, one of the hardest professions to measure output for is software engineers.
I once worked with a guy who, it was discovered after a long time, actually had two Silicon Valley jobs. That he actually showed up at! He walked/drove between them a few times a day, and managed to keep the illusion up for quite a while.
I'm guessing he has 4 "remote" jobs now :)
the VCs aren't putting all their eggs in one basket with startups, so why should the workers?
I would suggest something like: "I've been crunching the numbers on how to increase efficiency and been pleasantly surprised at how well we're performing compared to our competition. I was thinking of trying an experiment based on this new study I've read <Link> where we leverage existing great management techniques to also allow remote work on a limited basis. If you're interested I could show you the numbers but I think with a small sample set <me and a few other good developers> we could prove that this could boost our efficiency even higher! In fact even though it's increasing our numbers we can even offer it to the team as a perk, <study> has shown that when a team gets a perk even if it boosts efficency they work even harder! We have this great new/old project <X> that would be perfect to measure the numbers with. How about I roll it out at the beginning of next month? Don't worry about the planning, I have some experience and can have a proposal on your desk by the end of the week."
It's then empirically obvious that I get more done and am happier.
If they don't like it, they can sack me. I earn more than twice minimum wage, ergo I can work half the year and get by.
It's never happened yet because it turns out actually people like people who get stuff done. Who knew?
Behind this monitor I'm looking out at the river, watching Winter roll in as I eat lunch. :)
working remotely gives too much power to workers because interviewing elsewhere becomes so inexpensive. In fact I'd argue most remote devs that are not already at the top of their potential compensation/status (say, someone working in the linux kernel team) are interviewing constantly. Most companies not aiming for top tallent are better off taking on contractors than remote full time developers.
Yeah, the answer to the OP articles question about why the remote studies work out that way isn't a big mystery.
The first thing you learn working from home is self-motivation and training yourself to get "in the zone". Then try doing the same at an office, where interruptions are far more often.
But that said not all offices are like this. A lot of companies work to 'protect' their creatives/engineers from disruption from the extroverts/talkers. Either by isolating them in separate closed office rooms or having rules like headphones on = don't bother them.
Well, yes, that's what you're being paid for.
The alternative is hard KPI's and getting fired for not meeting them, which is not something you really want.
To help this movement, we built open source SaaS boilerplate. We also built Async, an asynchronous team communication tool designed specifically for small teams of software engineers.
It's kind of like how legalizing prostitution makes way more sense especially for the sex workers, but nobody ever talks of legalizing it because nobody wants to be the guy to bring it up or challenge the status quo.
Just leave and get a job at any remote-friendly company. The grass is really greener.
I've noticed that one thing that make me work harder than in an office, is that I feel that I need to earn the trust that my employer gives me. In an office, sometimes I feel that just being there is enough to justify my salary, even if I'm just chatting with colleagues or browsing the web. I discipline myself better when I work remotely.
Another thing that makes a difference for me: I suffer from back pain when sitting in a chair for too long. At my place, I can lie down if needed.
On the downside, I suffer from being far from where decisions are taken, and I sometimes miss important information.
First off let me acknowledge that some people prefer remote work and also say up front I do not.
I recent YouAreNotSoSmart podcast interviewed Laurie Santos from Yale and if I understood her research basically claims we often both individually and as a society choose things we think will make us happy but actually don't. Examples seemed to include anything that takes you away from people. One example was the ATM machine. It's more convenient than a bank teller but interacting with the teller adds to your quota of needed interaction for happiness. Things like the fact that you can order a Starbucks coffee on your phone and pick it up with no interaction as another tiny example. I'm sure those were minor examples but she was basically claiming we're often inadvertently choosing things that actually make us less happy.
For me I prefer in office work because I want to be around other people. I want them to interrupt me too. Not 100% of the time but I enjoy the camaraderie, the conversations, going over solutions together, etc...
So in that context, is it possible the push for remote work fits in that line? We think it will make us happy but it for many people it will have the unintended consequence of isolating them and actually make them less happy.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be given the choice. Maybe you are different. Maybe you have special needs (someone you need to take care of for example) or maybe you're remote location has family or friends around. But, if Laurie Santos is correct then maybe a large percent of people are actually making a bad choice?
PS: I don't know if I trust her research. I'm only passing on my interpretation what I though she said in the interview.
After about 16 years of on-site work (at various jobs), I did almost 5 years of remote work (for a single company), having just recently returned to an in-office role (despite focusing on landing another remote position, the best opportunity wasn’t.)
And, frankly, I find neither inherently, categorically superior. It has far more to do with a number of unique variables, among them: culture, software tools, and the people themselves.
So while I do largely agree with the core argument of the linked post (roughly summarized: asynchronous communication helps facilitate productivity for knowledge workers), I also feel too much emphasis is placed on working remotely as inherent in part of the solution.
How about we just teach and incentivize people to, for example, not interrupt others unnecessarily, how to recognize when someone may be deeply focused on a task, how to indicate such an effort is currently underway, plus to recognize when it may be appropriate, necessary, and healthy to stop the “deep work“ and address communal, biological, and psychological needs? All regardless of the exact mode of the work.
It is assumed that everyone needs to do exactly 40 hours of work per week, but ask yourself this: for every person in your company, what do their next 40 hours look like? 40 hours worth of HR policies need to be created. 40 hours worth of sales calls need to be made. 40 hours worth of snacks need to be ordered for the office. 40 hours worth of website text updates need to be made. 40 hours worth of UIs need to be designed. 40 hours worth of code needs to be typed in. Isn't it strange that all these vastly different tasks take the same number of hours to complete in a week? My guess is that chattin' is what takes up whatever time remains; people are required to pretend that they do 40 hours of work every week, so they come up with their own way of filling the time. Planning is always valued (and a good idea!), so if you report "yeah I spent the week planning for our Q3 XXX" then it sounds like the money spent on your salary was worth it, and it continues to pay.
As a software engineer, I've never had the problem of not having enough work to do. Tasks are always added to the backlog at a faster rate than they are removed from the backlog. But I feel like a lot of other jobs aren't like this, and the "there is infinite work forever!" thing is most prevalent in fields like engineering, design, art, fabrication, etc.
Meanwhile, most of the people in your average office aren't doing any of those things. To some extent, they're on retainer, waiting for their skills to be needed. And, trying to optimize this is perilous. If you get employee utilization up to 100%, people complain loudly (Amazon fulfillment center workers aren't sending 1000 Slack messages a day). If you try to not pay people for the time periods where they're not being utilized, you just get the "gig economy" which is awful.
I dunno, it all makes very little sense to me. Sometimes I wonder what percentage of the US economy is about doing work that doesn't need to be done, and how many people would not have jobs if we decided "we're not paying for this anymore". I think I'm scared about it, though.
The other thing that came out of that thread was "If you're remote and don't respond quickly enough, people assume you're slacking off - while in the office people visibly slack off all the time and it's considered OK".
Until recently we used Toggl to track work time and the guidance was to have "6h of focused work daily".
I'm managing 5h 15min-ish, but only when working remotely. When I'm in the office that number organically drops to around 3h 40min.
Only person really doing those hours(and above) is one guy who's not into chit-chat.
When I was using the "pomodoro" technique, I first started with the goal of 14 pomodoros per day (14 x 25min of focused work). My (fairly successful) friend who had done pomodoro told me that was not a reasonable goal. 10-12 seems a more reasonable goal for most people.
When doing focused reading in grad school I could do maybe 8-9 hours on a good day.
Working on a personal project I enjoy at home, I can do maybe 7-8 hours of focused coding in a day (but probably not multiple days in a row).
At work I probably do 4 hours of focused coding on average. This is partly because of non-coding tasks, but also my attention tends to peter out beyond 4.5 hours.
I am, however, bad at time tracking by disposition, and haven't made a full system yet.
It actually was dropped not that long ago, because clients complained that we "weren't working full time".
Little do they know that those 6h were honest, focused work and the requested 8h won't be, because there are limits to what can be achieved on any given day.
People will start conversations with just "Hello", and wait for me to respond, as if we're talking on the phone or something. This, to me, fundamentally misses out on the benefits of online communication: You don't need to wait to establish a conversation with me to ask me your question; you can just come out with it. And your question/problem can become just another item on my TODO list, which I can prioritize throughout the day:
- If it's something I can answer/address right away, I can do so
- If it's something that will take some investigation, I can start investigating it (and let you know how much time I'll need, etc)
- If it's something clearly low-priority, I can wait until later when I'm not as busy to address it
- If it's something that doesn't really make sense, or there are things I can explain to you to help point you in the right direction, I can spend a moment to help dig up some information for you.
If you just say "Hello" (or "Ping", etc) you're taking away my ability to prioritize your question/problem, and are asking me to agree to spend time on something before I know what it is.
If instead you begin the conversation with the question/problem that needs addressing, you're adding an item to my TODO queue, which can be re-sorted/re-prioritized continuously throughout the day, and allows me to be more effective. I can get to your question when it makes sense for me to do so.
I have my status permanently set to http://nohello.com to hopefully drive this point home with people, and anecdotally I've seen a lot less drive-by "Hello" messages on Slack. Additionally I've just stopped responding to people when they say "Hello". I just hope that doesn't come off as me being a jerk, though...
Where do I get the best ideas to solve a problem?
Not when I'm sitting in front of it for 8h a day.
I get them when I stand up, buy groceries, do my laundry, shower, etc.
Does this provide huge value to the company I work for? Totally
Does the people at the company think I cheat them? Many do
Would they feel better if I sat in their office for 8h, have worse ideas, provide lower value and generally feel worse? Somehow many do too
Any kind of meeting is a synchronization bottleneck. People synchronize their workday around these. Workdays and office hours are synchronization points as well. They create bottlenecks in our traffic system even where literally everybody is trying to get to work at the same time just so they can be at a standup meeting.
Treat it as a technical problem and get rid of unnecessary blocking activities and things run smoother. It's true for software, it's true for logistics, and it is true for work processes. The same principles apply and you can use similar design patterns (queues, events, etc.). A side effect of non blocking processes is that people can work more effectively without waiting for people to talk to them or meetings to happen. It enables remote work but is just as effective when used on site.
Git was invented to support asynchronous development where independent groups of developers work on their own branches and exchange patches or pull requests when they want to synchronize. Works great for OSS but it is now also common in non remote software teams. Create a ticket, assign it, create a branch for it, do some work, create a pr, pr gets reviewed, ci builds trigger and if you figured out deployment automation, ultimately the change goes to production as well. It's all orchestrated via events that trigger somebody or something to pick up the work for the next thing. It's great. It replaced a work process where people were bottle-necked on central version repositories that required a lot of ceremony around branching and merging because it was so tedious; which in turn made commits a big deal and necessitated commit freezes and lots of communication overhead, meetings, and delays. Git got rid of most of that.
I guess the article also assumes different time zones when working remotely?
I filed the article under the "rubbish bin". I've worked remotely for several years, and maybe I live in a different planet, because "async" and remote work do NOT go hand in hand for me. If anything, Slack means people can reach me even when I'm taking a dump, and I'm expected to reply at that moment.
Your phone is with you at all times. Work should not be.
Being able to work from home if I need to is nice, and I sometimes take advantage of it, but generally I like to be in the office so I can have a better idea of what is going on.
This is partly paranoia due to astonishingly (often deliberately) terrible communication under a previous regime where for instance I discovered my own line manager was leaving two days before he did by overhearing it mentioned in a conversation between people who worked on a completely different project, though even now under a much better environment I feel being in the office keeps me better abreast of things I need to know, before it becomes an emergency that I don't know them.
It also creates opportunities for unplanned collaboration whereby I hear a problem that I can help with, saving others time banging their heads against it, and sometimes works the other way around for me too.
And contrary to many of the other anecdotes here, I have far more attractive distractions at home than my colleagues could hope/fear to provide for me! Though maybe that speaks more about my will-power than it days about my work & home environments...
I will be cynical but this does not sound like some work is being done there. Reminds me of the guys of the gym who spend 90% time here just talking.
I prefer to work/live alone, but to deny the benefits of camaraderie and relationships with a high-performing team? Absurd.
Sharing the space with your children or partner? Asynchronous communication. Being able to take short breaks in your own space? Asynchronous communication. Not being distracted by people chatting about their weekend? Asynchronous communication.
One of the major benefits of remote working, for me, is just not having other people around. It's not much a matter of communication but simply of the relax and focus I get when I don't have to be aware of others.
At home this obviously never happens for me. The only distraction I have is Slack and my dog that reminds me that it's time for a walk.
So I can attest to this.
Instead of writing arguments how remote work is just awesome, it would be more useful to have statistics on how many people are actually capable and accountable to work from home, and what do people really want out of their workspaces or by asking for remote work.
Get all the staff meetings and brainstorming and shit-shooting done in one day, then actually work the rest of the time. As it is, I have at least a half dozen different ways that you can get in touch with me if you really need to, over text, voice, video, screensharing, etc.
The other thing about working remote is that you need to actually commit to it, and get prooerly setup. It's difficult to do that if it's an irregular or one-day-a-week thing; the work-from-home day just becomes an unofficial vacation day.
I can recommend the work on Dynamic work design by Nelson P. Repenning to make a case for both in what context either is best but even more importantly, when and how to move back and forth between different work modes. Here is a good introduction: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/a-new-approach-to-design...
I can't really do "fire and forget" messaging. When I ask something I want the reply to arrive as quickly as possible because I don't want to lose the context that I have in my mind right now and load it again later when I receive a reply. On an async channel this results in compulsive checking for replies which of course kills productivity. Almost-sync channels like Slack are the worst - who didn't experience the frustration of their chat partner suddenly disappearing without a word in the middle of a discussion?
On a related note I very much prefer a focused half-hour meeting to a whole day of async back-and-forths.
Inbound messages are problematic too because they provide the same kind of addictive random gratification that social media is infamous for.
Any tips for dealing with these problems?
Mostly, try to reduce switchyness. Not all input is blocking, sometimes you can put a question out early and have hours/ days/ weeks before you need an answer. Work on identifying potential hangups early and often. Try to handle your communication in batches. Respond to urgent messages faster, but spend time between deep tasks or in the lame duck part of the day doing email.
i would broach the subject with the team to the extent possible. i think it requires buy in from others to the extent that if you're getting stuck with regularity, then those with whom you work don't seem to be empowering you with either the autonomy or information you need to work async.
so, the company needs to resolve that either via empowering you (=> individuals), or get their knowledge/discussion norms set up to empower async/remote type stuff, to include such things as escalation guidelines (e.g. can use phone call for urgent matters, but gitlab issue is 24hr turn around), project planning, decision provenance/knowledge storage, etc.
As a remote team, implementing the async communication style will allow you to never have to depend on fixed calendar meetings. No need to have to organize everybody together in a room, at a specific time, to just make a decision.
I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for a remote team. Hope you find it helpful:
https://standups.io/blog/a-basic-guideline-for-async-communi...
> I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for remote teams. Hope you find it helpful.
> I wrote a bit about how to do this within a remote team, which is a guideline into how to set a basic async comm process for remote teams. Hope you find it helpful:
Joke about async communication or copy-paste error?
1. Find the person involved, talk to them and try to resolve it right away
2. Write a mail to them, print it out, clamp it to the related paper and hang it on the wall.
We were a very tiny 7-person company with rooms in the same building and still the approach outlined in point 1 rarely was more productive than just waiting for them to reply. For situations that happened more often I created email templates so there was even less work.
Another advantage of method 2 is that unresolved work in the end of the day is already taken care of and if you are working in shifts the handover is easier then.
Anyways, I think a big barrier to this dream are the tools that can promote and sustain asynchronicity.
It's really hard to keep communication open and job responsibilities/deliverables clear without being mircomanage-y. Lots of leaders will have to give up control - which is going to be really hard, to say the least. Software tools will need to be security-blankets for managers as much as performance trackers for employees. Give them a little pat on the head that "it's all ok". That's going to be hard to accomplish.
Its because they worry that it creates incentives that could lead to a decrease in productivity over time.
I think the root of it really is the first line Management. These guys need to be really good at their job in order for WFH FT to be more productive. If these aren't all that efficient to begin with, that will make it much more visible in a WFH situation. I think all parties intuitively feel this.
Should you keep all seats even when 20% of your workforce prefers to work remote? What do you do with those seats when they are empty? It's possible, and it's great when it's there, just not as simple as choosing one option or the other.
I happen to prefer to work alone, but I recognize those times when meetings or pair programming are truly valuable and needed, and I jump to it at once when needed. It's about recognizing the pros and cons of each approach, and minimize the impact of the cons as much as you can.
And your employer suffers from your lack of input in those decisions.
Meanwhile when I was working in an office, I felt that Slack messages were often a distraction that pulled me out of my flow state. I felt that if it were really that important or urgent (it rarely is), then they'd just come to my desk and tap me on the shoulder.
By the way, regarding:
> I suffer from back pain when sitting in a chair for too long. At my place, I can lie down if needed.
I suggest wearing a smartwatch that will notify you when you have been inactive for at least an hour. Try to do a couple minutes of stretches or bodyweight exercises when you get the notification. I see the opportunity to be able to squeeze in tiny amounts of exercise as another benefit of working remotely.
I have no data to back this claim, but I can provide this single data point.
I completely agree with both your other points about trust/discipline and important decisions though.
However, I see fewer people on net because I work in-office. Basically just my coworkers, no one else. The vast majority of public interactions I have going into work are fleeting and poor (driving next to someone, ignoring someone on the train with headphones). At work, I talk to the same people every single day. Then because of my commute time, I get home late enough that I can't go out or do anything after work. On weekends, I usually have chores to do that I can't do during the week because of how busy I am.
In comparison, back when I was working from home, I would go running and pass people on trails. I would go to meetups at my local church after I got out of work, or take trips into the city to attend conferences on weekends. If you're spending 2 hours or above commuting to work every day (which is not that unusual), you're going to be pushed towards human interactions that are very brief and inconsequential, because you literally will not have time to do anything more significant.
Quality vs quantity matters a lot here. I think people occasionally hype up inter-office relationships too much. I like the people I work with, but I would much rather spend my limited "interaction time" on family members or friends that I've known for years, instead of on coworkers and commuters on the train. I make casual conversation with my coworkers, I don't talk to them about intimate struggles or goals in my life.
Not everyone wants to work remotely because they're antisocial -- sometimes it's literally the opposite motivation.
Similarly, I've noticed that being open to being disturbed means being open to having random tasks dumped on you outside the ticketing system, which takes time away from what they're actually tracking your time on. Email and Slack can do the same thing, but seeing someone right there sitting all alone and lonely without my task to keep them occupied seems to be a powerful incentive for some people to air-drop random work.
To fill up the social meter without a family I think I would prefer one or two days in an office, but similar results could be achieved at a co-working space or taking the time to make friendships locally and spend time with them in the evening.
Let's be real here, what percentage of people - especially engineers - really find that their social needs are being satisfied through their office jobs? After you or your co-worker leaves their job, how many ex-coworkers do you actually still remain in contact with?
I've always found office relationships to be fairly boring. Because they're you're co-workers, you have to keep a certain level of professionalism and political-correctness so as to avoid offending people. This basically confines the realm of acceptable dialogue to banal things like the weather and small-talk. If you want to say anything interesting about anything interesting like say politics, you basically have to first probe them to make sure they're not going to get offended and passive aggressively retaliate. Anything you do outside of work like a cool side project or that band you're in can't be seen as threatening to your dedication to your job, so it's safer not to bring it up.
And I'm prob going to get a lot of flack for this, but I think most office workers are fairly boring - going to work, going home to their significant others/kids, and waiting to retire. Or maybe they're really interesting but don't feel comfortable talking about interesting things at the office for the reasons I mentioned above.
Ultimately I think it's better to find social fulfillment on your own and not expect it in the office, otherwise you're bound to be disappointed. But I get that it's unfortunately hard to make friends after school. I think there are a lot of reasons for that, but that would require another long post that's outside the scope of this comment.
EDIT: Just after I posted this I see this on the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21274511#21274909 Kind of supports my thesis.
It seems waste to spend so much time with co-workers and not be friends. It also seems a waste to spend so much time "working" and not have it be fun and pleasant and social.
But, thinking about it more maybe I was spoiled making video games. It was something I wanted to do, my co-workers wanted to do it to, we did it together sharing the struggles and feeling proud of our product. I'm guessing there are plenty of jobs that if I had to do I'd just want to put in the time as quick as possible and then get back to something I enjoy.
I have a close friend that upon graduation wanted to make video games. He applied, was rejected, ended up in finance, made more money but at least for him it's clear his job is just something he does to get paid.
Personally, I'd rather interact with people who are honestly there, and aren't economically forced to submit to me or me to them.
EDIT: Wait, are you a manager referring to your subordinates? If so, you may have forgotten how stressful it is to constantly be submissive to everyone around you. If you're the same rank or above everyone else I can understand wanting interaction, but if you're on the receiving end then any interaction is an implicit demand you cut more flesh off yourself to please them.
I'm curious if daily social video calls with your remote co-workers would be helpful in that regard.
Is there some evidence that mundane interactions with total strangers actually make everyone happier? I know some people who thrive on social interactions, but for many of us it is a chore rather than an opportunity. A rather taxing chore at that.
I think the post makes it clear to that office workers could benefit a ton from async communication. And I agree completely. Sync communication at my previous job was such a drain on my productivity. For me, Slack made communication easier, but it made focus more difficult and work more stressful.
I think you're right that software tools can make a big difference. The author seems to be promoting its product - Twist - as a great Slack alternative. And I think it looks solid.
They promote Async, because they also claim that their coloboration tool (email/slack alternative) is the right option for async.
Personally, I believe in a hybrid solution. You work remotely say 2 days of the week, and you spend rest of the time in the office. This makes sure that you get your dose of water-cooler talk, as well as having time to yourself to get things done.
Every office I've been in has been open-plan. If it's full of developers it will mainly be quiet and conducive to work. Put just one person in there who needs to talk, especially Sales and Marketing, and it's all going to fall apart.
I find async comm tools like Slack invaluable for allowing ppl to display their status (eg "DND"), as well as the ability to control notifications -- and to catch up on topics when unable to participate in realtime. These things have immense value, whether you're remote or not.
I'll never forget the experience, some 20 years ago, being on the critical path for an imminent major release, heads-down, working furiously to deliver a mission-critical feature, and enduring a steady stream of shoulder-taps (despite headphones and body language) that made it ~impossible to do my job. Silver lining was, it made it crystal clear to me that I needed to carve out time for "deep work", and empowered me to push for and receive permission to work remotely at a time and in an org where that was a nearly unique exception. I chose to spend about half my working days remote, and across various jobs and companies and industries since, have sought and pushed for and mostly maintained this balance. I'm convinced we'd all be happier and more effective if such a balance were available more broadly.
I personally prefer mostly remote work, but I think it's much harder to pull off - there are no play books on how to do it and if you don't do it from the start it becomes exponentially more difficulty to execute correctly.
Sure, they're likely to spend a good chunk of the other 90% working, but it's just busywork. That busywork might be important: they spend a lot of time inspecting and maintaining their fire trucks, for example. But it's not their "real job". Their real job is to be close to the fire truck so that they can respond when an alarm rings.
It's much the same for the rest of us, except that the line is grey, not black and white like it is for firefighters. We have a priority list, and stuff on the bottom of the list will never get done unless it bubbles up in priority for one reason or another. That stuff at the bottom is real work, but since there's always stuff that's more important it's comparable to "washing the fire truck".
And even the stuff at the top of the list is busywork in a way: it's always possible for more important stuff to come in and bump it out of the way. A server can go down, or an important customer can call, or ...
You're shadow-banned btw (which I normally wouldn't tell) but your comments look OK, so maybe this has happened by accident? You could try to challenge that (maybe via the email support?).
ofc, short breaks should be in those paid times. And the hour/week is not the same in every country.
But 40/week doesn't have to be every week, just average (as some times there is less work to do, and other times stuff is on fire and must be fixed)
also, that rate has nothing to do with being remote or on-site.
EDIT: Maybe I should give some perspective: I'm single and under the impression that people in a relationship have an easier time managing 40hr weeks because they can better distribute the random shit that comes up every week (how people with kids do it though, I have no idea...). Also I'm currently laying in bed sick, due to having had no reasonable work-week for months, because the only thing I get as reward for finishing my projects in time and to the utmost satisfaction of our customers is even more work. /rant off I guess...
And that's not even considering how humans are physically unable to work 8 hours day in and day out.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-De...
You wont keep most employees around for part time work, but you want to make sure if your production systems go down or customer orders need to be expedited, or an emergency patch, etc... that you have a team that knows how to do the work, can get it done fast enough and is cleared to do the work (if applicable).
In some cases it might be cheaper to have employees that might be idle a bit than to lose money on downtime. Just a guess though.
Funny thing is, when I am a freelancer, who gets paid much more money per hour than an employee, people valued my time and would send me mails or text messages and wait hours or days for an answer,.
When I was an remote employee, people paid me less and called me three times before 10am.
Somehow, many employers have the perception to own every minute their employees are awake.
I would never go back to such a work culture.
This is increasingly true from my perspective as well. Not sure if I was willingly unaware or what.
The disconnect is that their expectations are higher for remote than on-site. If I go for a short walk, and my boss comes to my cube and doesn't see me there, he assumes I went for a walk, or to the cafeteria, or whatever. He'll just try again or send me an email asking me to drop by once I'm back. It's not a problem.
But what I've heard from remote employees: If their manager tries to ping them and don't get a response, then it's "OMG these remote workers slack off too much!"
As a remote contractor, they judge me by my results and trust me to do my job however I see fit. No hand-holding or micromanaging, only one standup every couple days.
Meanwhile at the office I've got to attend a morning attendance meeting everyday, a bunch of other useless meetings, and I need to ask for permission if I need to take a couple hours to go to the doctor and apologize if I happened to sleep in one day.
Can't say I miss office life.
Can you suggest a better way to use IM that doesn't require me to respond quickly?
I'm fine with IM for sending over quick URL's, etc while doing a live debug or something. But if you just have a "quick question", email me if not urgent or come to my cube if it is. If you are located far away, call me. Both email and phone are more efficient for simple questions. IM is in the unhappy place where it's worse than both.
Ironically, many places will use JIRA/Trello/etc, and then still have the sync meetings where you repeat all the actions you've performed on the board!
Don't waste a day resolve that issue now.
For my part, I've been self-employed (full-time consulting), 98% remote, for about 3 years. Before that, in almost 20 years of traditional software-related jobs, about half my working days were remote. I was fortunate in being able to insist on a high degree of autonomy wrt how/where/when I got my work done, for most of my positions. Not always possible, but you'll never get the freedom if you don't look for the oppty and make the case for it.
It's not about blame, it's about trying to ensure the team works together cohesively, and that individuals are unblocked.
I suspect there are such companies, but that the guilty individuals weren't serious professionals. Hire bad enough 'developers' and I can see it becoming a problem.
If the job is shovelling snow, I imagine it becomes one of the management's chief concerns.
Why waste one person's time when you can waste ten?
The company in the abstract, sure. Not managers and VPs and such. Not even the C-suite, necessarily, or at least they likely have other concerns in addition to just the company making money. It's the principal agent problem plus the management version of résumé-driven-development, basically.
Bill Gates: Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight
And then, how do you measure someone refactoring code and ending up with -1kLOC?
Or someone thinking hard for a few days to come up with an elegant algorithm?
i would say that it is a very quick way for employee to reach towards a new company.
I’d love to see companies abandon chat in favor of discussion threads.
For “water cooler” conversations video is almost always better.
Slack usage covers the whole gamut, from one extreme [proper (ie, consistent) use of channels, status / DND, and notification settings, making it a very effective, developer-friendly and management-helping async-oriented system] to the other [flowstate-killing, nonsense-generating chaos of interrupts and noise].
Want meaningful async communication? Think of the UIs of usenet clients or even email clients.
Also had managers that were basically invisible but kept a great crap umbrella for us. Loved them too. Ended up working a ton and getting enormous amounts of work done because trust and autonomy are huge.
I think the worst situations are when managers are too insecure to be honest with direct reports. That’s decidedly uncool and super ineffective.
Also, it seems managers get so overloaded that 1 on 1s and stand ups end up being mostly a waste of time because it’s too hard to remember all the little details.
So remote or in office isn’t really the issue. In my view, remote is superior due to productivity, flexibility and happiness, but it does require everyone to do regular video chats and pair programming.
Ironically, the in office folks have the hardest time with this because they feel they need to get up from their desk and find an overly booked conference room as you mentioned.
Simple solutions are context dependent, but could be along the lines of a) work remote if you have the discipline, b) asynchronous slack based standups, c) report status as you go in your tickets, d) every day or two peers and managers sync up 1 on 1 or in person depending on their preference, e) have clear goals as a company and a team, f) have good technical product people writing 1-3 day user story tickets including completed designs if it’s ui work, g) have good tech leads writing 1-3 day technical improvement task tickets, h) vote as a team on contentious technical decisions, then disagree and commit, i) generally chill out a bit and let work be enjoyable.
At least that’s a start...
> Also, it seems managers get so overloaded that 1 on 1s and stand ups end up being mostly a waste of time because it’s too hard to remember all the little details.
I'm not sure how the first quote doesn't count as a 1:1 - the goal isn't to have a highly formalized process, it's to have communication. Some about the specific work, some about general work and workplace, but communication.
Total agreement about the overloading of management though - I haven't had a boss in years that didn't regularly have most of their schedule booked and often double-booked. I had to fill in for my manager while he was on vacation for week and it reaffirmed my lack of desire to do management - and I only had to deal with pieces that couldn't wait a week! I sometimes think the recent shift to focus on regular management 1:1s is all about reclaiming enough time to actually know what their team is doing.
Yes, you’re right, I guess those were a form of 1 on 1s :-)
> Total agreement about the overloading of management though - I haven't had a boss in years that didn't regularly have most of their schedule booked and often double-booked. I had to fill in for my manager while he was on vacation for week and it reaffirmed my lack of desire to do management - and I only had to deal with pieces that couldn't wait a week! I sometimes think the recent shift to focus on regular management 1:1s is all about reclaiming enough time to actually know what their team is doing.
Absolutely! It’s wonderful to have empathy for this! :-D
> I don't get it - shouldn't one-on-ones and regular progress check-ins (be those standups, metrics (This is your #2), whatever) give you that information? None of those are easier when on-site. In fact, given today's move towards open offices, any form of 1:1 collaboration is easier remotely where you don't have to fight for precious meeting room space.
This is not quite the case everywhere. We have agile 5-8 person offices and people are still supposed to walk out for longer phone calls occupying one of the smaller meeting rooms.
But I actually like that different teams can mix a lot easier.
I've heard this claim for open offices a lot. I never understand it. It's not like I'm AGAINST easy collaboration. But I spend (or try to spend) more time on my own, and everyone "collaborating" around me and expecting that I can turn off my peripheral vision and hearing with a brain that is hardwired to NOT ignore those things just makes the majority of my time worse.
Plus, in the last 20 years and 5 companies (spanning 8 offices if you count office moves) I've never had adequate meeting room space (defined as: We need a space to spontaneously talk without disturbing others, can we find it trivially?) for more than a 3 month span after moving to a larger building. Hardly scientifically conclusive, but personally persuasive.
So I'm all for collaboration between people, including between teams, but I don't understand sacrificing the REST of the time in the name of that one thing.
My team shares an open office with another one, working on a different project. We see them every day.
I don't think anyone knows any name of the people in the other team.
I work for myself, so if I can improve my efficiency within a given timespan, it's all win.
It was a lot like preparing for an exam after you skipped classes the whole semester. You don't wonder off and you don't stop and think about the direction you're going.
My take is that you can't shoehorn creative work into your desired time slots. Not if the result is supposed to have any quality.
I have found that sometimes I just need to stare away from the screen and forget what exactly I have written in order to obtain a fresh perspective and spot any problems.
No way to speed up this process, and what's worse is that if I try to log only the time during which I did "focused work", the result generally doesn't go over the mentioned 5h 15min daily.
Every person I ever asked about this is in the same situation.
Of course the right thing to do is to work to get proper visibility, and when you have that, then the "tap" is pointless interruption.
I have not set an alarm for months now.
I’m not sure how you could combine it with typing, though!
I now hate my standing desk and want a climbing desk.
As I see it, none of the queuing stuff is really controversial.
> It's so easy to see what everyone is working on, run reports to see how long things took
This, on the other hand is usually what's controversial, and the reasoning behind that is that it often leads to management using past data as a stick to drive "faster" future development, with silly statements like “Well, the average plugin took 2 days to write, why is this one taking 7 days? Oh it must be that the person doing it is lazy. Better give them negative feedback on it and tell them it can affect their promotions”.
The example is contrived, but the motivations and behaviors are very real. Competent developers tend to leave companies where they are constantly badgered about stuff like this by managers who have never developed software. In the extreme case (very few organizations are this bad, but they do exist), all you end up with is the remaining ones who know how to show that they are doing a lot of work, but are generally afraid to show their lack of knowledge in any area for fear of being dinged by the data-equipped management for it.
Since this is not conducive to the technical health of a software development team, estimation practices that purport to be unrealistically accurate are what's looked down upon.
Of course bad management is bad, but the idea that the type of metrics available to them make any material difference is not one that has any merit to my mind. A bad manager will always make your life hell, regardless of what measuring tools they have available.
Correct. That's why developers with bad managers strive to make as few measuring tools available to them as possible. In other words, if you're a manager and your employees seem to resent and fight against more ways of measuring "velocity" and the like, you should probably consider that your usage of this data and how you express the results might need some work.
We had a ticketing system and one guy in our group had between 60% and 80% more tickets than the rest of us. So it would seem we were all slackers, however he took the tickets that took like 2 minutes to do (password resets, account unlocks, etc...), meanwhile i would get stuck troubleshooting a production performance issue that would consume hours. Management didn't care what the ticket was, they liked to see pretty numbers of tickets completed.
I might be the only one who had this experience, and i am not saying ticketing systems are bad, they are extremely useful, as long as everyone knows how they work.
Honestly, I think the problem is structural with regard to management. Just changing the process or tool (ticketing vs constant communication with manager) isn't enough. It probably needs to be combined with smaller teams (i.e. Amazon's pizza rule) and management defining goals and "success" as more than meeting some narrow KPIs (MTTR on tickets, for example)
Sorry you had that experience, but to me the justification of those types of system are solid.
The very essence of being a boss is having the means to force you subordinates to submit to you, and at most companies I've worked with that's an explicit primary benefit to the rank!
The "very essence" of being a boss is knocking out obstacles for the people under you. That is what a boss actually does, not tell people what to do. Sure, a boss translates vague prioritization from above to meaningful and actionable items for his/her team to work through, but the only "power" a boss has is the ability to absorb shit so the people under him/her don't have to.
The boss also has a boss, who has a boss, and so on and so on, up to the CEO, who has a boss (the board and/or shareholders). No one gets to "force subordinates to submit" to anyone, at least not for very long.
> The "very essence" of being a boss is knocking out obstacles for the people under you. That is what a boss actually does, not tell people what to do.
Those types of managers/bosses are great, and are some of my favorite people because they simply allow me to do what needs doing while shielding me from bullshit. But by no stretch of the imagination (or certainly the experience of workers as a whole) do they represent every manager/boss. If you've been lucky or sheltered enough to avoid the kind that aren't like that, you should reflect on that as a fortuitous outcome and maybe consider that your experience isn't everyone's experience.
I am not a helpless passenger in my life, so I don't get "stuck" with bosses who treat me like cattle. I anticipate problems like this and preemptively deal with them, and you should too.
Only if you are a contractor and you've fulfilled your contract. If you are a salaried employee I expect you to keep your hopper of tasks full so you aren't sitting around idle 95% of the day waiting for me to feed you 30 minute taskers
The "goal" in a lot of cases is nebulous (i.e. "keep developing the product", "improve stability", etc). There might not be a manager feeding you tasks every time you run out. At least in my company, you are expected to figure out on your own how to continually make the product better and proactively do it, not sit around idle after rapidly finishing the last task your manager gave you.
If you are just a dumb worker that can only work when your manager fills your queue, you are not valuable to me as a salaried employee (you are more valuable as a contractor who I can call upon for a one-off difficult task that you can then complete in 30 minutes).
If employee is getting extra works as a reward for being efficient guess what will happen.
If you're truly doing all those things in 30m, you should be running the show.
Sometimes taking the full 8h allows you to put in the packaging to confirm you've done the "hard" part.
Sure, some unknown quantity of people can just fuck around and hide from work, but again, you're not paying me because I'm a fuck off person, yer paying me because I have the decades of experience, and because you know with certainty I'll do the damn work, find more work when I need more, and will never miss a deadline on my own fault. Everyone on HN just assumes bad faith all the time, geez....
It feels good to help people, as long as it’s with healthy boundaries so as to prevent burnout.
Most tech workers get paid a bit more than that.
I did actually signed contract that actually specifies fI'll time - 40 hours.
If they expected a response within an hour and didn't get it, they can call me or physically come to me.
I've told two of my bosses while being interviewed: Assume I'll check email only 3 times a day. Is that workable?
No one says "No" (even though it may not be workable).
One of my bosses actually suggested to me that I should have "office hours" and be available in those hours, and simply not respond all other hours.
It all depends on the need of the job. And most engineering/SW jobs do not need you to "be available to respond within an hour" for any request.
My boss who suggested office hours wouldn't want to hire someone with your view.
I you wanna count weekend thinking into it, is a different question.
Here's what I believe:
If I pay you a salary, I want (roughly) 40 hours per week of productive work at your current skill level. Note: I consider sitting around thinking about things relevant to the product or company to be productive work. If you believe your level of output deserves higher compensation than you are receiving, come talk to me or find a company that will pay what you think you are worth. However, accepting a salary and then doing tasks really fast and then going idle (watching netflix, working on side projects, etc.) until your manager cattle prods you is not acceptable for a salaried employee; that would be more appropriate for a contractor where you can idle on your own dime.
- you have an employee that works faster than others, in the same pay grade.
- You are annoyed that he or she has empty queue of work
- You expect employees to look for tasks on their own when they are done
so either that employee:
- has no creative control over the work he or she is doing and cannot move forwards on their own.
- is severely underpaid and undervalued
- is under bad management that cannot fill their work queue fast enough
All of that will lead into them doing tasks at the same speed as other ones - you just turned a good, valuable and fast employee into another drone.. or worse - they'll go work for competition, and you'll have to both suffer the loss of a good trained employee and a cost of hiring someone else.
Further, you have no clue what my policy is regarding instant messaging, don't lash out at me because you're feeling vulnerable.
Whatever provides less cognitive dissonance, I guess?
They are not the "best employees" if they are constantly idling, waiting for me to tell them what to do next. People here seem to think the ideal manager/subordinate relationship is that of a worker thread pool where the manager fills the queue and the worker threads pull tasks off the queue.
Not so. The "best employees" are ones who can examine the current state of affairs, and then come to me and propose things to work on. The ideal manager/subordinate relationship is actually one where the workers are all artificial general intelligences that learn over time what the product is, how to improve it, and proactively create tasks to work on.
If you are a rockstar but only work as a a super-fast super-efficient thread in a worker thread pool, you are less valuable to me than a non-rockstar AGI who can dynamically recognize which tasks need to be done and only occasionally needs guidance and course-correction.