What It's Like To Work Future Style

What It's Like To Work Future Style(hoppycow.com)

50 points by yoavfr 13 years ago | 23 comments

bunkat 13 years ago |

'During Thanksgiving, I spent the week in St. Louis, working from Jared’s parents’ kitchen counter for a few days.'

I think this is the worst aspect of working 'future style'. Since you can work anywhere, there is no longer anyway to get away from work. Celebrating the holidays with the family - perfect time to get some work done!

jes5199 13 years ago | |

She didn't say she worked on Thanksgiving - she said she stayed in St Louis longer than would be normally possible on a holiday. If I can work eight hour days at my in-law's house rather than having to rush back across the country to be in the office, then I get to stay longer. Best of both worlds.

bunkat 13 years ago | | |

But if she had gotten a phone call on Thanksgiving that something had broken and needed to be fixed, she would have worked on Thanksgiving (we've all been there). That was my point - since now we can be productive anywhere, we are always available.

cwp 13 years ago | |

Nonsense. If you don't want to work, then don't. Close your laptop, turn off your phone. If you can't do that, you need to learn to set boundaries (see #6 in the article).

Personally, I find this the best aspect of working future-style. Right now, I'm in the middle of a 6-week stay in Ecuador, visiting family, just like the OP. If I couldn't work remotely, I wouldn't be able to visit at all.

Expez 13 years ago |

How is the salary at these remote-only places? Living just above the poverty line* would mean a salary of ~$45k in Norway.

I would love to work at such a company--preferably one with a flat organization structure--to get a glimpse of a possible future. But I'm not entirely sure how it would make sense financially for either party.

*Using the EUs definition of relative poverty at 60% of the country's median income.

JoeAltmaier 13 years ago |

Great stuff, but typically she uses a cobbled-together list of apps to get the job done.

I work at Sococo (helped start it). Its an integrated voice/video/doc/presence/chat engine that really brings a group together - like working in the same office, almost. I recommend it (because I want us to succeed!) We also eat our own dog food - Sococo is distributed across 6 states and 3 time zones. And it works great!

asc76 13 years ago |

This sounds in many ways very similar to my company we believe in the lean startup philosophy. All members of our team work in different locations and we are quite successful in doing so. At the end of the day, results are the only thing that matters. If you don't pull your weight, it shows.

bravura 13 years ago | |

I have no idea what this has to do with lean startup.

Lean startup is not about: technical efficiency, a distributed workforce, or keeping your burn low.

"The Lean Startup relies on validated learning, scientific experimentation, and iterative product releases to shorten product development cycles, measure progress, and gain valuable customer feedback." (wikipedia)

nobody_nowhere 13 years ago |

Anyone have examples of a well-known, successful company which is fully virtual like this?

rpicard 13 years ago | |

It's my understanding that at Mozilla you can choose to work remotely or in their office, so I imagine they shoot to make everything virtual to make that as seamless as possible. GitHub is largely distributed too [2].

I'd say that Automattic, the company that this poster works for, is pretty well-known and successful (makers of Wordpress, Gravatar, etc.).

Also, DuckDuckGo (where I'm an intern) is mostly distributed, though you might have to stretch your definition of well-known to include us. :)

[1] See around 1:30 in this video (I can't remember where I actually read about this): http://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/ [2] http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works-hours/ , http://zachholman.com/posts/how-github-works/

daleharvey 13 years ago | | |

The OP pretty much sums up exactly my experience working remotely at mozilla (and previously couchbase).

I did write about it previously, not as well though - http://arandomurl.com/2011/09/03/working-remotely.html

trustfundbaby 13 years ago | |

37Signals and Github are two of my favorites

AaronBBrown 13 years ago | |

Basho, Github, and Percona immediately come to mind. Lots of other companies (including my current home, ideeli) have distributed Tech departments with employees all over the world.

reinhardt 13 years ago | | |

Still few and far between overall. Wondering when, if ever, it's going to be "the year of telecommuting". Hopefully sooner than the year of Linux on the desktop.

spudlyo 13 years ago | | |

Let's not forget MySQL AB, which predates all of these companies.

mikelbring 13 years ago | |

Here is a link to a blog post about our company working remotely.

https://creativemarket.com/blog/2012/07/31/working-together-...

ipmb 13 years ago | |

Not as well-known as some of the other examples, but our company, Lincoln Loop (http://lincolnloop.com), is successful and fully virtual.

sputknick 13 years ago |

I like her comment about documenting what happens in meetings. Can anyone recommend software to help with this? I currently just use Word files in a folder, can someone recommend something better?

Vitaly 13 years ago | |

workflowy.com

sputknick 13 years ago | | |

awesome, thanks for the heads up

iamtherockstar 13 years ago |

After working remotely for more than 5 years, I can say with confidence that one of the best things you can do is not wear pants with an elastic waistband more than once a week (i.e. stop working in your pajamas).

AaronBBrown 13 years ago | |

I'm a big fan of pajama working. Just make sure to remember to put pants on (or not stand up) during video conference calls.