Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

After remote working for a while I feel like I do miss having an office and people to talk to. At the same time I enjoy having access to my fridge and furniture at home, zero commute time, and being able to be super focused with no people distractions. I think something like 3 days a week in the office + 2 days at home would be an awesome balance post-virus.

View on HN

We were ramping up our remote work as a team for the last year and experimenting because we figured we'd have to at some point, so better learn how. Of course, each individual worked from home from time to time but we shifted the focus to doing it all a once. We experimented goin the whole week, then first day of the week as a transition after the weekend.

We did that to expose shortcomings: what are we unknowingly relying on physical presence to communicate? This forced us to write better and institutionalize knowledge.

We also did that because our CTO was unavailable for contribution for a year, could only read emails without attachments, could not answer, and couldn't visit web pages. We shifted everything to GitLab so he could receive issues and conversations in text emails.

We also did that in case money would run out and we were forced to close down the office to save on rent, and in case we wanted to hire people in other geographic locations. We didn't want to hire before having revenues from the platform and needing people to implement features actual people are requesting. Keeps the team small.

We also did that to allow people to test our internal ML platform to allow people to collaborate on data projects and train/deploy models remotely using standard laptops to run jobs on beefy machines. In other words dog fooding our platform.

Was your CTO in prison? Very intrigued by this

Not prison, but unavailable technically. Former CTO/co-founder quit and we stepped up to maintain the company as COO and CTO and spent the year shipping to customers (we build custom enterprise applications with ML capability from data acquisition to "the javascript") while building a team that could survive if something happened to us, from how to pay taxes to how to write issues and develop product and think about the business, to how to hire and fire. After a year, new CTO was unavailable. We then started to build our ML platform and did our best to keep him informed so he could hit the ground running when he comes back, which is in a week. Woop woop!

> unavailable technically

This sounds like a good reason to hire a new CTO. If the CTO was working on full-time on something that isn't technical, their job and title should change.

No. The CTO wasn't working full time on something that is not technical. He was unavailable but not replaceable. He couldn't write code but knows what's going on, and I don't want to pollute the core team. I filled in to ensure we're fine product wise and business wise. We've seen it through and will continue to do so now he's one week away.

We're both technical but I concentrated on freeing him and the CEO from everything that I could do so they could focus on the things I can't do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com