Ask HN: Good Remote Work Literature?

I've been working remotely for the last 4 years of my life. In my latest company, I just realized how little literature has been written on the topic of remote working. I've been seeing some forms of reports on the status of remote working [0], but I couldn't find any in-depth materials (whether blogs, essays, papers or even books) with some qualitative thinking on remote work and the future of work. We have been flooded with solutions and tools without a deep understand of our working flow and caveats.

Ie: why are things happening in a certain way? What are the school of thoughts? What are the best practices (synchronous vs. asynchronous, remote vs distributed)? What is the Keynes vs. Hayek of the subject? What are the implications of remote working on organizational structures (eg. functional vs. divisional)? What can and cannot work? What's the tool stack one should adapt depending on the org configuration?(Slack + Zoom for sync, etc) How does this should adapt as the org changes over time?

Do you have specific resources you could recommend me to read on the topic?

This write-up I just published on the blog is the closest example to what I'm looking for: https://sametab.com/blog/future-remote-working/

[0] https://buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2019

GitLab is one of the most successful remote companies. Their handbook is free to read. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

But what you are looking for is this one: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/

cwarrior · 6 years ago

They pay salaries based on the location of the employees, which kinda sucks.

rtkwe · 6 years ago

Yeah but it also makes a lot of sense from a talent attraction side. People in cheap areas need less pay to be attracted to work at a company and someone living in a large city will require more to want to work at your company. It sucks a bit from the remote work dream of getting FAANG West Coast salaries while living in the middle of nowhere but that was always a bit of a pipe dream for most people, they can pay you less and still far out pay the local competition, the only way to really get that would be for everyone to adopt remote work as a completely normal thing. Even then though I'd expect salaries to track somewhat with local cost of living.

blumomo · 6 years ago

They go great lengths to justify why salaries are paid location based: https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

I think that's a wise decision because it allows you to stay where you are without pushing you into another country just to benefit from lower living costs while having a comparatively high income.

alohaandmahalo · 6 years ago

Thanks very much! We're building out the all-remote section with new pages on a regular basis. Just added dedicated sections for people, jobs, meetings, compensation, hiring, etc.

langitbiru · 6 years ago

hoodwink · 6 years ago

Echoing the recommendation for Remote elsewhere in this thread. I also recommend Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.

Cubed does not address remote work per se, but it does help explain the history of the office and how that became the de facto workplace for cognitive labor. It also discusses the history of the theory of management, which is a relatively young scientific subject, maybe 130 years old, which is predicated on one assumption: everyone is in the same building!

As a proponent of remote work, I believe what is happening right now is practice is outstripping science. It’ll take several years before science catches up to study what entrepreneurs and companies have already figured out through trial and error.

kitd · 6 years ago

I've not read Cubed. It sounds interesting. But the topics you mention brought to mind similar themes in Peopleware by DiMarco and Lister. I'd add that to the list, though not related to remote working.

raamdev · 6 years ago

Distributed.blog is a new podcast series by Matt Mullenweg (co-creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, a fully-distributed company of nearly a thousand folks). The podcast explores distributed work, the future of business, and what it means for the global economy. https://distributed.blog/

buboard · 6 years ago

Great resource, thanks

dashpeak · 6 years ago

The team at Doist (creators of Todoist, Twist) just released long-form guides on remote work (e.g. asynchronous communication, taxes, product design, management, hiring, project management, etc.)

https://twist.com/remote-work-guides/

mikkelam · 6 years ago

I'm also interested in how to RUN a remote company as i've found myself in that position without previous experience. I've found most material online to be related to how to work remotely as a person but not how to actually run the comapny.

mvip · 6 years ago

Shameless self-plug, but I wrote about my decade long experience of remote work here[0], and included some further reading material that I've personally found useful. There are some books dedicated to this. I am actually toying with the idea of writing a book on this and would love to get your thoughts. Ping me at @vpetersson if you wanna chat.

[0] https://blog.viktorpetersson.com/remote-work/2019/05/18/a-de...

vinrob92 · 6 years ago

I wrote two free books specifically on productized services.

The first book discuss how to productize your services and hire and manage remote workers (and it covers the tools and techniques to work remotely). The second book is mostly about value proposition and marketing.

1) http://www.productizebook.co 2) http://www.productizemarketing.co

ed_balls · 6 years ago

https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

supr_strudl · 6 years ago

Table of Contents > Humor > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3lhfVpLL4