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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

Remote work is not a silver bullet for solving the faux work shortage. Aside from the fact that there is no shortage in the first place [1], remote work is still very new. Without proper operations in place and a solid, tested, management structure you'll end up with a hodgepodge of culture and unhappy employees. I used to be bullish on remote work until I actually started doing it. It can certainly work, and I still encourage companies to explore it, but it's not a one size fits all approach, or a replacement for proper organizational management.

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-solomon/the-myth-of-...

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Those of us that have worked as remote engineers for a lot of our career know that most companies in general are just plain not managed in a way that would work for companies that have lots of remote workers, especially larger companies. Policies that discourage and undermine remote work that are popular with large companies include:

1. Mandatory all-hands meeting times

2. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype

3. Expectations of all workers to be present continuously for their timezone instead of letting workers self-organize

4. Performance and productivity metrics based around KPIs that do not actually measure productivity but presence

You left out:

5. Incompetent IT Ops mostly staffed by cheap contractors to offset overpaying for terrible hardware and software from Cisco to ensure a complete inability to reliably utilize the corporate VPN.

It was a sad day when my old company shuttered the web-based VPN portal, which allowed us to access the company intranet through a browser window. Closing it down required us remote workers to connect and send all of our traffic through AnyConnect, killing our connection speeds. Come to think of it, we were still running Windows XP on all of our laptops when I left in mid-2015 (laboratory information systems).

Having been ops before I have to stand up a little. Not all contractors compete primarily on price (in my case I was paid substantially more than FTEs and even other contractors I found out - 20%+ more than my peers, in fact) but also based upon scarcity of qualified persons. I've rarely heard of VPN that's consistently stable that meets the conflicting requirements that IT managers ask for. Juniper, F5, Cisco, and even smalltime crap based upon OpenVPN just constantly breaks repeatedly in many real-world corporate networks.

This doesn't mean that you're incorrect though - most IT O&S winds up going to lowest-bidding contracting companies and offshored resources that are measured upon the dumbest KPIs ever that completely leave out whether users are actually happy with anything at all. In fact, most IT in the F500 seems to have given up on ever making users happy. I'd say the better measure would be tickets / user filed - if a user never files a ticket, they're not complaining.

>2. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype

What? Who would do this?

Almost everyone I've worked for in enterprise and defense, for starters. A couple places didn't allow chat applications that recorded history (too much liability during legal investigations was the excuse I heard). Doesn't mean that these policies weren't violated.

This isn't the worst I've heard by far though. A lot of places won't give developers even power user access to their own laptops so you need to request installation of every application you might ever want, including git, Cygwin, etc. Many places will not allow users to run VMs either (and will disable VT-x mode in BIOSes that are locked out).

A lot more enterprises than you think, unfortunately.

I got my first remote position in 2002. That's 14 years ago (time flies, doesn't it?). I wouldn't call that "still very new".

I do agree it requires a certain know-how to make it work. It seems to me there's more of a shortage of knowledgeable managers than there is of able developers.

Making remote work work is "easy", but it requires breaking a lot of existing behaviours.

Devonkim is right, remote work fails because people think it will work just like working on premises

Rather, you need your work on premises to work the same as remote.

- Communication is key: slack is good, but actual phone or video calls are needed (and face to face meetings sometimes - just so people know each other). But more importantly, nothing should depend on a face-to-face meeting. This requires people to actually stop being lazy and getting communications going

- Good infrastructure for code/testing, no "this is only available on site" kind of stuff

- Redundancy and fallbacks (what if the internet is down?)

- Clear information on the people to reach for anything you might need

A great comment (which I'd upvote more than once if able). There are many underpinning problems that lead to business inefficiencies - none of which are solved by choosing to hire remote vs. local (or by "using the right tool", which is another decision folks make to try and put out management fires). If you have "human problems" you need to solve them the hard way; or as was said: there is no silver bullet.

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