Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Okey dokey. I clicked on this thinking "hell yeah!" and stopped short of agreeing after reading it. Why? Because although I agree with the author, his argument is too shallow.

Here's the thing: delegating to remote workers is going to be the critical skill of the first part of the 21st century, and it's not as simple as black and white.

So it's not just "do it all the time" or "only use local help" It's much, much, much more complicated. I work with a lot of technology companies, and I've seen them kill perfectly good projects by poorly-configured remote worker configurations. If you don't know what you're doing, you're better off with 4 guys working in the same room than 40 guys working all over the world. See "The Mythical Man-Month" (http://www.hn-books.com/Books/The-Mythical-Man-Month.htm) Technology labor is not fungible. The social dynamics of teams physically co-located can create powerful momentum. Serendipity is about 20 times harder to do over a telephone.

"Get up to speed on remote working practices" contains a lot of nuance. For instance, I've seen teams fly in remote workers for the first few sprints of a project, then going "truly remote" once the rhythm and cadence was established. I've seen teams pair up with each pair working in a different location. I've seen teams work mirror configurations where they still paired up, but each pair was separated. Each of these setups (and many more) have their advantages and disadvantages.

So yes, by all means, leverage the terrific talent and resources available to you around the world. But don't read a slogan and go running out to shoot your foot off. Take some time and figure out what kind of company you are, what kind of culture you have, and what kinds of projects you do. Then grow and evolve your remote working to fit in with that. Don't be the guy who already has the solution and is just looking for the problem. Remote working is the key to the new century, but it's nowhere as simple as flipping a light switch.

I love the 37Signals guys and opinions, but this is where I greatly differ with them.

Case in point. I worked at a place where at one point, everyone was remote but me. I could have been remote, and sometimes I like working from home or a cafe or wherever. But for team morale and even with phone or video conversations with the other devs, it became totally demotivating after a while.

I was contracting with that company and joined years later as a ft employee. Engineering consisted of about half a dozen and we were growing. We started to notice that it was 'hard' to hire anyone local, so they just gave up (accepted maybe?) and ended up going with a contracting company and almost doubled the team with everyone new being offsite. Standups became something that was no longer fun because there was so much emphasis on looping in the remote people - screwing around with the video camera, trying out this video service, etc, etc. Come tomorrow (1/12), everyone at that place will be remote and they'll have lost pretty much all of the local devs for various reasons, me included.

Building a team can be hard. But I don't buy the "we can't find anyone local" argument and if I was building a team, I want people local. It's definitely a programmers market right now, but if you want to hire local, then you have to go out and get creative - go to user groups, meetings, etc. It can be done and I've seen it both ways. Local, to me, is just hard to beat. I want people engaged with each other and don't want to have to Google+ someone on video every time I have a question for them.

That said, I'm fine with some days a week where local people work remotely, but to have everyone or some 100% remote is not a good idea in my mind. You don't develop 'company culture' that way. If everyone's remote, there's no one to have a beer with after work and talk about the latest coding issue, problem, point of interest, socialize, or whatever. Guess that's just the difference with getting the work done vs. enjoying your work and the people you work with.

Yes. Agreed.

Too many times we programmers view programming as if it is a transfer of bits over a wire somewhere. You shove a pizza under the door, email some requirements, and out pops a solution.

It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time. You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen.

The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM. I'd rather have 5 guys who weren't so smart all working together in an awesome team than 10 guys who were rocket scientists all plugged in remotely.

Having said that, there are ways to get where everybody wants to go. Hire locally and then let folks work remotely from time to time. Hire people who have already worked closely together and have developed a great relationship. Hire in clusters, etc.

I like 37Signals, but too many times much of their blogging and communication consists of "look how awesome we are!" I am all for people self-promoting, but this schtick starts to become annoying to me after a while. It sounds a bit like pandering and easy sophistry. Things are not that simple. We would not all be awesome if we worked like 37Signals and things would not be better if we all suddenly switched to remote workers overnight.

"You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen.

The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM."

Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys.

No, I am not saying that OS dev is the same as commercial dev, or even that what you are saying is essentially wrong.

I am just challenging the absolute nature of "The magic doesn't happen when nobody has met each other and communication is limited to telephone, email, and IM." Plenty of "magic" does happen every day when people who know each other only by their irc handles or email ids work together on a codebase.

Whether such activity can be harnessed to help a commercial dev effort is certainly debatable (and there are many good points on either side of the issuel), but the idea of confining "magic" in software dev to only dev teams working in the same room is somewhat dubious (imho, ymmv etc).

That said, time to party here in Bangalore. Happy New Year, everyone!

Fair point. I over-generalized as well. Just note that I am all in favor of remote work. The trick is reproducing those teams that kick ass. I've seen a lot of configurations, and from what I've seen it usually doesn't work that well. The dream is awesome, and it's the future. It's the damn execution that's tough.

The trick in addressing technology development is to choose the right level of generalization. At some point, you're going to be communicating in leaky abstractions no matter what you say. My overall critique of the article was that the few paragraphs the author provided wasn't deep enough and led to a false impression, not that remote work is somehow unworkable. I could easily post some HN click-bait like "SOPA is the Devil!" and watch the votes climb. What would be tough to do -- and much more useful -- is to provide some kind of analysis where both sides were presented, along with some possible solutions. The first kind of article is a waste of my Saturday morning. The second kind gets me to thinking some. I like that a lot better.

But the Linux community didn't appear overnight. It's grown very slowly over twenty years.

"Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys."

Open source projects generally have no deadlines. It's always a work in progress. So, team "magic" isn't really necessary.

Agreed, in fact for non trivial problems almost the opposite is true in my experience. For me at least spontaneous brainstorming meetings are usually a waste of time; I'd much rather take some time alone to think over a problem and put my thoughts on paper or email than coming up with half-baked brainfarts on the spot. Similarly for understanding and evaluating what others have to say, the signal-to-noise ratio of a well thought written paper/email/presentation is more meaningful than a bunch of random ideas thrown around in a meeting.

Once there is a basic plan in place, face time (or phone/IM) are fine to flesh out smaller issues, Q&A, etc.

May I ask what open source products you view as "magic"? Linux is great, but I guess I don't view an OS that has been in development for 20 years and is still mainly constrained to server apps as "magic". And there's very few other open source projects that are used vanilla without some dedicated team sanding down all the rough edges (Unix -> Mac OS, Webkit -> Safari/Chrome, etc)

> Someone should tell the Linux Kernel (and other Open Source dev, where a lot of terrific "as magic as it can get" sw dev happens) guys.

Apparently someone did. The express purpose of the Kernel Developers Summit is to work out problems that couldn't be resolved online.

A summit once a year doesn't change the fact that the default mode of working is still remote and distributed.

An equivalent would be someone working 9 to 5 in an office and doing two days of "work from home" in a year.

When we developed Basecamp, I had only met Jason and Ryan once. We met zero times during the development phase.

I agree that face-to-face is great, but I also believe that it's vastly overrated as a necessity for "magic" to appear.

Tons of remote teams crank out magic all the time.

For me it's as much about not liking working at home as wanting face to face. I'm too easily distracted at home.

I think that raises the most important point. People are different. I prefer the quiet at home because I can concentrate (I like to talk to people A LOT :) so I spend to much time talking to people at an office). Heading into a 100% remote situation myself I'm still conscious about grabbing a desk in a co-working space for at least 1-2 days a week to socialize a bit and not turn into a hermit.

I do think remote teams can work very well but it has to be built with people who love to work remotely from the start. If you have a mix of people who can't work from home and need social interactions to be productive and combine it with people who want the opposite you are probably going to have problems.

I think it comes down to hiring for one concept or the other.

Then a coworking space could provide you with the separation between home/office that some of us need.

Yes! If I were to be a remote worker, I would make a co-working space a requirement.

I worked 15 months for startup company in California (I am in Toronto Canada) one week on site one week off site so 50% telecommute and that worked exceptionally well product was done and company is highly successful in own field.

Sure you have to make boundaries and it helps if you have office so you can close door and isolate from rest.

Nowdays I try to teach my customers that I will work at least 1-2 days from home. Most times it works but some are not equipped for remote work at all.

It also takes discipline not to slack but that goes for on site worker as well or even more because they get more benefit of doubt being "seen to work"

>> It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time.

Teams are people, people make really cool things happen regardless where their butt is planted. If cool things aren't happening whether they are in the same room or not might be an indication that you're building the wrong product or service. If you trust them, ask them what they think about what they are supposed to be working on.

>> You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen.

For how long? Do you come back in 3 hours like Dilbert's boss wondering if the product is built yet?

> It doesn't work that way at all. Most of the really cool things that happen with teams can't be predicted ahead of time. You just put some really smart people together in a room, throw a tough problem at them, get out of the way, and watch the magic happen.

This seems to imply that remote teams don't interact with each other as much. I've found in my experience that pair programming on a remote team is actually a lot more important than locally precisely because it enables this kind of "magic". If you've got the right (free) tools, it's easy to set up an environment where you spend all your time on voip collaborating directly with teammates over SSH and tmux.

Sure you don't see the other guy's face and can't have lunch with him (which is why as dhh mentions below that periodic team summits are also important) but the claim that you can't have the same level of focused communication is silly. There will be less cross-pair communication obviously, but it's easy enough to rotate up the pairs.

I reluctantly have to agree with you. I have worked from home for the last 2+ years, and at first thought it was the greatest thing ever. Next month I'm taking a new job where I will be going to an office again. I'm actually excited about going to an office and interacting with my peers.

IMHO the key is the team and the employer. At my current company software development is a side item that mostly looked on as a necessary evil. In general I don't want to interact with anyone at the office. The new company is a small startup software company with lots of smart software people. The excitement of building cool things feels great, and is something that I think is hard to get across remotely.

I think you're behind the technology curve here. The giveaway was 'even with phone or video conversations"

No remote team need be use phones - there are now headset collaboration tools that are lightyears more effective for erasing the distance bias and making remote teams work almost as if they were in the same office.

In fact, they can be better. In my home office I can take off my headset when I need an hour of concentration.

With devs split between local and remote workers, it depends a lot on the office setup, unfortunately.

A previous office I've worked at had rows of benches (a common setup, at least for us over here in Australia). It wouldn't have been feasible for a local guy to talk to a remote dev with a headset with that setup. We had local guys working on a project pre-book and crowd into conference rooms to talk with the remote guys in India. Definitely a little sub-optimal.

(The place was Yahoo!, which may explain a few things.)

Can't visualize. What situation prevents you from plugging a headset into your laptop? Was it a privacy issue?

Anyway our 'local guys' in Mt View are all in the same room, and are almost always headset-on and available. It takes some discipline, sure.

Less privacy, more not wanting to annoy your neighbours sitting a meter away either side. (No music playing, which amplifies the negative effects of one-sided phone nattering.)

Dang. Sounds pretty crowded. It might actually be better to send the folks home, and provide them all with headsets - at least they could collaborate with one another!

I actually feel that it is pretty simple to set up a good remote structure and is as simple as good old fashion people skills. When I set up a project and on-board remote developers, the first thing I do is tell everyone, no video conferencing for a week. I do this to play a game, I then get the team together after a week and we play a game of describe your coworker. Of course hilarity ensues, as everyone build these crazy visualizations of what their other remote development counterparts look like, sometimes we will have the artists among the team sketch out the visualization on a shared screen. I also open a group chat on Skype for the project, where I kick of casual office conversation, I will usually post some interesting tech articles and kick up a discussion. From there the team dynamics tend to start growing organically. Sure these things may start organically in an office setting with no effort at all, but it does not take that much effort to seed it among an all remote team. Further some of the more introverted members of the team have expressed that they really like it because they feel more comfortable with the introductory exchanges not being face to face. I am a big proponent of remote teams, I can't say that I always was. I used to believe that they would never work because the team dynamic would not form. I was wrong and don't mind admitting that after being part of many teams that have resoundingly proved that my assumptions where wrong. Some of the most efficient teams that I have been on where all remote.

I'd really like to hear more about your experience with the success and failure of remote team configurations.

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