it is definitely great to meet in person, to shake hands, grab a coffee together, etc. but what is the value, professionally speaking?
Years of socialization training stemming from childhood to gauge whether it's really worth interrupting people. I do enjoy the opportunity to do remote work, but even in the office, I'm finding an unstated expectation that I should always have a second pair of eyes on my slack notifications. It's not really consistent to praise the elusive "in the zone" state where developers get their most productive work done, and simultaneously expect that they should break what they're doing to bucket the importance of every little IM. The need to walk over to another person when you have something important to say, and use your human senses to determine whether this person should really be distracted for what you think is important at the moment puts the onus and effort of distraction on the asker where I think it best belongs.
Also, make sure that this "expectation" to respond to pings immediately isn't in your head.
I work at Automattic and I usually respond within 15 minutes, but sometimes up to an hour or 5 hours.
For remote to make sense, you have to embrace the asynchronous communication as well.
That's a very important point. I have a number of friends who pull out their phones the moment it pings them, and nine out of ten times it's not important. And, usually, the tenth time where they say 'I have to answer this call/message' it's not in the least time-sensitive enough that they can't wait 10-15 minutes.
I'm still not sure how to deal with this, because everyone does it so I'm the weird one for finding it rude and disruptive to the conversation. The only thing I've come up with is to politely ask the people I interact with regularly and the people close to me to not check their phone during a conversation we're having.
(interestingly enough this usually sparks a conversation where they also express a dislike of constant interruption...)
Unlike in real life where someone can come and distract your full attention, IM gives you the ability to set your status to 'Busy'. Seems far better at dealing with interruptions to me.
I work at a 100% remote office. We don't use Slack, or really anything other than Google hangouts. It is pretty easy to just say "Got a sec?", as you would in person. Then type, call, share screens, whatever, when you both have a moment.
It may seem different on the surface, but it really is the exact same communication as you would have in person... you just need to ask. And much of the time, real-time responses aren't truly necessary... so you can just IM someone a question, and know they'll get back to you when they can.
Google Hangouts is the worst. You can't open a named room with the same people as another room (it auto-merges) and the window constantly resizes itself. Not to mention the complete lack of useful (and wasteful) addons and bots.
Yeah, this is why I still prefer IRC over Slack and most other team chat systems. I hear a lot of people suggest them because of missing messages with IRC, but I actually think the missing messages is a feature. A ping on IRC to someone that isn't there is a bit like walking by someone's office and noticing that they aren't there.
I don't want my phone to notify me immediately every time a team chat message goes through. Direct hangouts messages have a higher "weight" and are useful sometimes, too, though.
Basically, this is just a cultural problem that needs to be worked out. Sort of like the (usually) understood idea that you shouldn't disturb a person wearing headphones and working.
> a bit like walking by someone's office and noticing that they aren't there.
No, it's absolutely not like that. The use case for "not dropping messages" is that you send a message and know they received it. You don't have to remember it manually, you don't have to introduce another chat system just to asynchronously remember to resend messages later. The other guy can respond at their convenience. Dropping messages would make the application a critical failure for any serious business uses. There are lots of features to mute notifications per room or for time durations.
I switched to working remote professionally 1 1/2 year ago and worked 1 1/2 year remote on private projects (Firefox committer, university projects) before that.
I make about 20% more money (before tax) than on my last job.
I save 1h every day on commuting, which I had to do on my last job.
I buy my food in my local store, which is much cheaper than buying food in the city.
I have my "own" office, without any people talking, getting sick, etc.
I probably could improve things a bit, by moving into a cheaper city, but overall I'd say, remote work has made my life much better.
I'm living with a friend who also works from home, so I get a bit "kitchen-talk" every day with him.
Also, one of my girlfrieds is working shifts, so this gives me the opportunity to work from her place, when she works late, so we can still see us and talk a bit. The other one works near her flat, so when I work from there, we can go to lunch together.
Ive been working remotely for almost the same time as you. I do miss some of the interactions but I've replaced them with connecting with other tech folk through social media and going to local meetups. Almost as good.
I force myself to attend as many meetups as possible. I find it beneficial to just attend and even if you have no interest in the talk, it's nice being around other people who potentially are
It's mentioned in the "myths about remote work" article that's linked but I think for startup-y kind of things social/power norms kind of force you to not work remotely for at least a decent stretch of the time.
o/~ Move to SV, move to SV, move to SV sure there's some poo on the streets but...move to SV. o/~
I run a 16 person 5 timezone startup cofounded in the valley. I moved to asia from SF. The best thing about this is lack of "startup-y things". All of those things are huge distractions to getting things done.
Many companies run remote fine. Schedules allow people to be home with their kids when needed, no commute over head for most. Emphasis is on self management. Communication is async. We have 1 stand up a week.
Yeah working with people in different timezones definitely comes with even more challenges. I've been working with a 13-hour time difference with my co-founder on our startup called "The Remote Trip" for three months now (I'm working from Thailand while she's working from Costa Rica). The best tool we've used so far has definitely been Trello, it's so easy to keep track of each others work activities and to ask/answer any questions (that's a benefit from working with such a time difference: you leave a question late at night and its answered the next morning!). Next to that, we use Skype for elaborate weekly calls and Google Drive as it is so useful for working in docs simultaneously (plus I love the autosave function). We now also have two additional team members, one from the USA and one from Germany, and although time differences are a challenge - with the right tools and a commitment to written communication it's definitely manageable. We've written an overview of all the tools we find helpful when working remotely in this blog post: http://www.theremotetrip.com/2016/10/21/7-tools-will-boost-r...
Does anybody else have any other tool that they would really recommend for a remote team?
I can imagine difficulties that happen regularly in those teams not appearing, since remote work probably attracts more internationally minded people with fluent english.
I've had to work with a french dev that only wanted to write emails in english and refused to speak it on the phone, maybe because his office mates could listen.
A francophone boss that was so overconfident in his english ability, that he considered using "yeah" instead of "yes" as rude.
I work in/with a mixed Swiss German/German/French/Spanish/Others office department. I don't suppose it will come as much of a shock to hear that English is used in general, with smaller localised dialect outbreaks occurring regularly. Works pretty well, and as an added bonus, you slowly pick up a better understanding/confusion of a variety of languages :)
Wish I enjoyed working remotely, but it drove me insane when I did it for 8 months. I was ignored, time zone differences sucked, actually need human interaction, and I needed guidance as a junior. It's 100% a culture thing, and if I ever do it again, then I'll make sure to choose a company which embraces remote work.
Seriously, no reason to share all your company inner workings with a random 3rd party when it takes literally 5 minutes to set up a completely private (and also free!) clone of the same.
We tried. Oh we tried. But the mobile apps being not native made the mobile usage drop like a rock compared to Slack, leading to the fact that it was harder to reach people than via the old Slack. When I saw that Rocket.Chat also used non-native clients leading to similar complaints, we just dropped the whole project and moved back to Slack.
I might argue that Slack has no interest in anyone's inner workings. I've been at companies building relatively uninteresting products that treated Github like it was the same as emailing source code and server logins to the competition. I could be wrong, but I have never heard of a single instance of a company on Github having code stolen because it was on Github. I have heard of many companies who have had their internal systems hacked.
I might trust Github more simply because their entire product and value proposition is built around the use case of storing code while some company that builds a restaurant app -- their primary business isn't building code storage infrastructure. So why add operational overhead because of unfounded paranoia?
Unless you're running your own metal in your own data center, there's always 'risk.' Even then, if your system is connected to the internet there's still risk.
Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that hazard occurring. Then mitigating that risk in a way that is commensurate with those variables.
> Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that hazard occurring.
Risk analysis: using online DVCS/bugtracker/chat service you are one compromised password away from letting an attacker read the whole contents and potentially alter them.
Many of those passwords will be stored in browser. Browsers are known for being softer targets compared to servers, generally speaking.
Contrast this with an on-premise services:
You still have login credentials but also require people to badge-in to access the building and login on the desktops or start a VPN (often requiring creds and 2fa).
Other companies give access to the company-internal information to the cleaning company. Many exchange business critical information by using a phone company.
When self-hosting you have to care about your service-level agreements and trouble solving. If you rely on it you quickly need a growing IT/operations team. sometimes it's cheaper to pay somebody how is specialized on this. Of course one has to evaluate the company, with the ones which make money from selling information (to advertisers) I'd be more critical, but that's a matter of evaluation of options.
You're absolutely right! When we started, Mattermost did not exist (or was version 0.0.0.1).
Now, just like GitLab, it is a very serious thing and we consider using it instead of relying on a 3rd party. Yet, we are a very small team and cannot dedicate too much time in maintaining/upgrading apps :\
Readit News
Years of socialization training stemming from childhood to gauge whether it's really worth interrupting people. I do enjoy the opportunity to do remote work, but even in the office, I'm finding an unstated expectation that I should always have a second pair of eyes on my slack notifications. It's not really consistent to praise the elusive "in the zone" state where developers get their most productive work done, and simultaneously expect that they should break what they're doing to bucket the importance of every little IM. The need to walk over to another person when you have something important to say, and use your human senses to determine whether this person should really be distracted for what you think is important at the moment puts the onus and effort of distraction on the asker where I think it best belongs.
I'm still not sure how to deal with this, because everyone does it so I'm the weird one for finding it rude and disruptive to the conversation. The only thing I've come up with is to politely ask the people I interact with regularly and the people close to me to not check their phone during a conversation we're having.
(interestingly enough this usually sparks a conversation where they also express a dislike of constant interruption...)
It may seem different on the surface, but it really is the exact same communication as you would have in person... you just need to ask. And much of the time, real-time responses aren't truly necessary... so you can just IM someone a question, and know they'll get back to you when they can.
I don't want my phone to notify me immediately every time a team chat message goes through. Direct hangouts messages have a higher "weight" and are useful sometimes, too, though.
Basically, this is just a cultural problem that needs to be worked out. Sort of like the (usually) understood idea that you shouldn't disturb a person wearing headphones and working.
No, it's absolutely not like that. The use case for "not dropping messages" is that you send a message and know they received it. You don't have to remember it manually, you don't have to introduce another chat system just to asynchronously remember to resend messages later. The other guy can respond at their convenience. Dropping messages would make the application a critical failure for any serious business uses. There are lots of features to mute notifications per room or for time durations.
I make about 20% more money (before tax) than on my last job.
I save 1h every day on commuting, which I had to do on my last job.
I buy my food in my local store, which is much cheaper than buying food in the city.
I have my "own" office, without any people talking, getting sick, etc.
I probably could improve things a bit, by moving into a cheaper city, but overall I'd say, remote work has made my life much better.
The ?? $1k I saved per month is not worth all the good stuff I lost from the city (but it depends what you value)
For example, Berlin is much cheaper than Munich.
I'd never move to the coutryside again. I'm just no small-town guy.
I'm living with a friend who also works from home, so I get a bit "kitchen-talk" every day with him.
Also, one of my girlfrieds is working shifts, so this gives me the opportunity to work from her place, when she works late, so we can still see us and talk a bit. The other one works near her flat, so when I work from there, we can go to lunch together.
o/~ Move to SV, move to SV, move to SV sure there's some poo on the streets but...move to SV. o/~
Many companies run remote fine. Schedules allow people to be home with their kids when needed, no commute over head for most. Emphasis is on self management. Communication is async. We have 1 stand up a week.
Does anybody else have any other tool that they would really recommend for a remote team?
I've had to work with a french dev that only wanted to write emails in english and refused to speak it on the phone, maybe because his office mates could listen.
A francophone boss that was so overconfident in his english ability, that he considered using "yeah" instead of "yes" as rude.
You mistyped Mattermost :)
Seriously, no reason to share all your company inner workings with a random 3rd party when it takes literally 5 minutes to set up a completely private (and also free!) clone of the same.
I might trust Github more simply because their entire product and value proposition is built around the use case of storing code while some company that builds a restaurant app -- their primary business isn't building code storage infrastructure. So why add operational overhead because of unfounded paranoia?
Unless you're running your own metal in your own data center, there's always 'risk.' Even then, if your system is connected to the internet there's still risk.
Proper risk management isn't "paranoia all the time," but an evaluation of the degree of harm posed by a particular hazard along with the likelihood of that hazard occurring. Then mitigating that risk in a way that is commensurate with those variables.
I'm not bashing GitHub, but some people find more value and less risk in using git in its "native" distributed mode.
Risk analysis: using online DVCS/bugtracker/chat service you are one compromised password away from letting an attacker read the whole contents and potentially alter them. Many of those passwords will be stored in browser. Browsers are known for being softer targets compared to servers, generally speaking.
Contrast this with an on-premise services: You still have login credentials but also require people to badge-in to access the building and login on the desktops or start a VPN (often requiring creds and 2fa).
When self-hosting you have to care about your service-level agreements and trouble solving. If you rely on it you quickly need a growing IT/operations team. sometimes it's cheaper to pay somebody how is specialized on this. Of course one has to evaluate the company, with the ones which make money from selling information (to advertisers) I'd be more critical, but that's a matter of evaluation of options.
Now, just like GitLab, it is a very serious thing and we consider using it instead of relying on a 3rd party. Yet, we are a very small team and cannot dedicate too much time in maintaining/upgrading apps :\
Just look up Digitalocean or Bitnami.