8 ms·

Honestly, I haven't seen a company that does the hybrid remote/on-site thing well. I'm sure they exist, but every time I've worked at one the people who were re

Honestly, I haven't seen a company that does the hybrid remote/on-site thing well. I'm sure they exist, but every time I've worked at one the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything. Hybrid remote/on-site requires some great discipline. If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was said. +1 for working remotely on a team that makes an effort to make it work.

sotojuan 10y ago
It works at our company because the only remote guy is the only one in his "domain" (iOS). He probably doesn't care about the frontend watercooler chat and anything important about the backend will be mentioned in standup.
- Perihelion 10y ago
  That definitely helps. I find there are other little cultural things you miss like inside jokes/shenanigans. They're not work-related but they're related to work and can make you feel like part of the team.
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    I think the importance of that varies from person to person... I don't dislike inside jokes but also don't care if I miss them—I'm just there to do my best work. That said, I completely understand why someone would feel differently.
  - sscarduzio 10y ago
    God, who cares of this work jokes shit? They're never funny, it's always the boss that makes them and everyone laughs way too much. FFS, We're not friends, we don't have to be, and it's OK! I like what I do, take pride on it and everything, but at the end of the day, my private life (where I get to choose my friends) is OUTSIDE work hours. And I'm committed to close the laptop as soon as I'm done. I guess this kind of "school feeling", "we're on the same boat" feeling, where groups of people linger together in long coffee breaks tends to belong to corporate, especially in USA where they work stupid hours to "show off" their commitment. Utter nonsense. One more thing that I really feel I "broke free" from (after becoming full time remote) is the ALCOHOL CULTURE. Peer pressure into drinking: company credit card on the tab and unlimited drinks (no food, otherwise it's cheating). So degrading.
    - Perihelion 10y ago
      I'm in no way suggesting that people spend all of their time at work or have significant overlap between their work friends and after-work friends. However, it's nice to work with people and not robots. Some people can tolerate sterile work environments devoid of anything but neutrality, and some people can't. I'm not even saying you have to be friends with the people you work with, but being friendly goes a long way. You spend a large portion of your day with these people, so it's not a huge ask for someone to give a crap about them as people.
    - problems 10y ago
      I think most people have a better office experience than you. I have to be comfortable actually expressing the situation I'm dealing with when I run into troubles, be that cursing about some code or explaining why something will take longer or shorter than expected to my boss. I feel much more comfortable in a less "sterile" work environment in that way. If I'm in a work environment that's too sterile I'll feel like every error I make, every little delay detracts from my value as an employee, and that's immensely stressful to me. That said, no one here puts in extra hours to "show off their commitment", everyone shows up when they want and dumps at 8 hours later. I've stayed late when I was buried in debugging once or twice and got told to go home by numerous colleagues. Just things like that, telling you to put it down is a positive influence sometimes. I came in the next day and solved the issue that I had spent 3 hours on the previous day in about 20 minutes.
    - krick 10y ago
      No offense, but this works both ways. I mean, this is not a secret that there is this sort of people who feel that way, and if I can see that you are one of them — I wouldn't want you to be a part of the team. I mean it strongly: if I don't need you for some very specific kind of job, no way you are hired. Even if you are great professional (but replaceable) and a nice guy otherwise. I don't like myself this weird culture where it's supposed that you have to be always a nice guy, politely nod and smile and say "Completely agree! Except..." when there isn't a single point you actually agree on, so I often dismiss such labels as "toxic attitude". But your attitude is just that — toxic. I'm okay with people being somewhat rude and arrogant and whiny and always complaining about "why should we", but this attitude of "I have a real life outside, and here — I just work here, so fuck you all" — that makes you both absolutely unreliable and very unpleasant to have around. Unfortunately, the word "toxic" fits really well. I've actually never had anybody to work extra-hours, but knowing that they would is significant part of what makes me care that they don't have to. Technology is worthless, people are what makes companies to succeed, and absence of meaningful relationships with your team basically renders you to be a piece of quite primitive carbon-based technology.
  - closed 10y ago
    Agreed, especially RE shenanigans. I'm remote most of the time, but in the office this week, and small things like telling stories at lunch make a difference.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
snarf21 10y ago
Exactly, it requires an active investment in over communication. Hopefully someday the tools will evolve to help reduce the need for this to be so manual. Bouncing an idea off of someone remote gets difficult. I feel bad for interrupting them and they feel annoyed at being interrupted. Culture also plays a big role in that as well.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I'm not a developer but just last week I was visiting one of our locations where a lot of the people I work with are actually located. I was down there for a specific meeting but I bumped into enough people and had serendipitous conversations with them that I left saying to myself that I should really go down there more often. To your other point, communication tools are still pretty limited. IM/Slack/IRC are good for some things though a lot of people I work with don't use them. I've yet to see anything that remotely compares to being together in a conference room for high bandwidth interactions.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    Or you need to get everyone hanging out in a group chatter environment (Like IRC).
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Unfortunately, while most/all of the tech folks hang out on IRC, it's much less used by a lot of the marketing/business people I deal with. I should use it more routinely myself but the fact is that it's not that widely used by some groups.
- konschubert 10y ago
  I think what helps is to keep everybody in the team in a permanent video call during working hours. This requires suitable hardware and software (I would love to build a company producing these tools one day.), but also a considerable amount of discipline. A wordier version of my thoughts is here: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remote-work.html https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remo...
rqebmm 10y ago
MY company does hybrid remote/on-site, and one of the best ways to mitigate issues with off-site communication is part-time work from home. Since on-site workers spend some of their time as remote workers, everyone has a good idea of what's required to empower remote developers. It's not always roses and rainbows, but it definitely helps.
- joe563323 10y ago
  Hybrid remote/on-site method should only be used as a migration path for the remote-first method from on-site, else it does not work well.
  - nnq 10y ago
    WHY?! What parent poster describes above seems like "heaven" to me. Some people can be "true nomads", others can spend 50% time in office, 50% working from home, everybody can be happy and find "what works for him/her". I hate both working in-office full-time AND working fully remote. But a mix sounds awesome, I always feel energized when working one day from one place, another day from another, and I also enjoy having the meetings in-person...
    - joe563323 10y ago
      > others can spend 50% time in office, 50% working from home What this really mean is 50 % teams in a company are remote and 50 % are onsite. Remote working is binary.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  The company I work for does hybrid remote/onsite as well. I'm remote and I actually think that having onsite people take some remote days is almost required to get things working. After people take a couple of days remote they suddenly understand the issues a lot better. Also for me, not always roses and rainbows. But that mutual understanding is really helpful.
amorphid 10y ago
You have to be diligent about researching a potential employer with multiple locations, too. My last job on "on site". I learned on Day 1 that all of my teammates were all remote (or at least not in my office).
farslan 10y ago
We do it here are DigitalOcean and it's just awesome. We have people in NYC HQ and remote all over the world (for example I'm working from Turkey). The key is not only over communication, also to care about your remote employees, let them feel like they're really a part of the company, bring them to the HQ, not per year, multiple times, etc.. There are many things but so far DigitalOcean is one of the best companies I've worked remotely (and I'm working remotely for almost 5 years for different companies).
- peterjmag 10y ago
  Can confirm—DigitalOcean is great at remote work. I'm consistently impressed by how well connected I feel, despite being across the ocean from our HQ in NYC. People really care and put in the effort to make it work. It also definitely helps that both "sides" are well represented—we're almost exactly 50% remote at the moment. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/#current-openings https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/#current-openin...
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    > And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) Yeah, and your hiring process is rife with stupid biases like autorejecting people based on who they worked for in the past.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Perihelion 10y ago
      Could you elaborate on this? I think DO has a right to hire however they want to but I'm curious about who they're auto-rejecting/why.
      - vonmoltke 10y ago
        Last year I had my resume submitted by a third-party recruiter for a role there. My resume was rejected out-of-hand by the hiring manager because the companies/customers I had worked for were "too enterprisey" (i.e. I had only worked for government contractors at that point). The "too enterprisey" quote came directly from the recruiter. I suppose he could have been blowing smoke up my ass, but I don't think he would have said that if he was.
iamdave 10y ago
Anecdote but our team does it brilliantly. Working from home? Just let the team know via slack and go for it. Management is onboard with it and has taken the openly stated position of "we don't care as long as you're reachable during the hours it's reasonable for someone to be online" (and the obvious: "deliver your deliverables when they're due"). In my case as the ops lead, I have additional hours but we are so well baked into slack that if someone needs me, I get pinged via mobile, reply from where I am or delegate it. Heck just last week I did a couple of deployments from 4 timezones away, tested it, and left a PR note in the channel with a link to the JIRA ticket. It got worked, updated, fixed and closed while I slept. I wouldn't say our team made a concerted effort, we just set the expectation that if you're going to be away, let us know, and during production hours the absolute bare minimum is that you'll be reachable if absolutely needed. Heck, even if you need to leave early to take care of home stuff or what have you: go to team chat "Hey I'm taking off early to take care of thing" and go. You'll get replies like "Take it easy" and "Cya tomorrow". Every team meeting has a join.me session for remote people to join, they speak up and contribute if asked or needed, even our stand-up comes with an auto generated Google Hangouts link that gets published to slack every morning at 10am. If you miss the stand-up or can't connect, people have been really great about just typing up what they're working on when they're available again. Otherwise, no one really cares. I've absolutely loved it. This is one of the better teams I've worked on just by how well everyone communicates without bombarding each other. People stay out of each other's way, but will ask when they need help and there's never any fear that you wont get someone willing to at least look at a problem with you; even if they don't know the answer-I've had devs pipe up and offer ideas and a second pair of eyes. Problem gets fixed, I shoot over a thumbs up emoji and a "thank you" and we go back to our own little worlds. Read-only Friday comes along, and we go drink. Contrasted with my last job where I negotiated the right to work remotely because the distance constituted a total four hour commute. I was consistently turning in deliverables on-time or early, conducting client calls via an expensed voip phone and getting several orders more work done from home because I wasn't waking up hours earlier than normal to make the 2 hour drive in. That privilege was arbitrarily lost because of a few critical management slip ups (owner took a vacation with more than a couple projects open in the lurch, and left no instruction behind for me in his wake, so things failed in a big way when). Shortly after becoming an 'office worker' again and putting in 12 hour days between commuting and sitting at my desk, I was out the door.
scruple 10y ago
Yep, this is absolutely correct in my experiences. I'll chime in, since I'm a remote employee at a company that is hybrid remote/on-site but with the vast majority of employees being on-site. Long story short: I actually started on-site but negotiated part-time remote. Then after about a year of that my spouse accepted a dream job offer on the other side of the state and so it was no question that we were moving. They wanted to keep me on and so I transitioned to full-time remote. It has it's ups and downs. From my experience, it depends on the team and ultimately the lead and/or the manager. If they get it, it's good. If they don't, don't bother. My last team, it was beautiful. Everything worked great. It became obvious to me after transitioning away from that team just how much extra work my manager was doing to keep his remote employees in the loop. With the team I'm on now, it's not working at all. Why? Because, as you so eloquently put it: > the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything... If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was said. This is exactly the problem I am facing down. About a month ago, I even tried talking to my manager about it. Even going so far as using this exact phrasing. His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! Completely missed the point. I'm not surprised, I guess I just expected some effort. I'm trying to remain positive but it's tiring. I can do good work and make progress but I'm with a lead who is insulating me from meetings and it feels deliberate. The few times I am invited in to a meeting, it's easy to see that he accepts and assumes credit for _the teams_ efforts. He was hired recently as a Senior, our manager wanted him to transition to a Lead, and he's actually landed somewhere around trying to be an architect. Ranting aside, when I bring my concerns up to him it's obvious that there's no attempt to better understand the issues/challenges of the hybrid approach. It doesn't help that he's never worked with remote employees before, either.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach. Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.
Bahamut 10y ago
I work for a hybrid remote/on-site company - we have made it work well. The most important thing I found is to make sure all of the stakeholders are present online for a serious discussion on whatever it is of concern. As soon as one is cut out of the loop, trouble starts.
rwmj 10y ago
Red Hat has 10000 employees, a large proportion being remote (including me - about half of all developers work remotely). I can assure you that remote workers at Red Hat are not out of the loop on anything. The thing is that even if I went into the local office, I would still be "working remotely", because the development teams are distributed all around the world. Therefore everything has to be done on mailing lists, IRC, bug trackers and occasional conference calls.
garrettdimon 10y ago
It's definitely doable, but it has to be remote-focused. At Wildbit, we have 12 in Philadelphia and another 14 in 14 different cities around the world. They keys are in the small things. When we do video chats, the folks in Philly call in just like they were on a home computer. They don't all get together in a big room and call in. We also make a point to run all of our conversations through group chat and project management software. And plenty of the Philly folks work from home regularly as well. Remote work isn't simply tolerated, it's put first. The remote folks (myself included) miss out on some of the office benefits like family-style lunches and get togethers, but we all make regular trips there and get to partake. It's not purely about location either since we're spread across numerous time zones. It just takes more deliberate communication. There's always going to be water cooler chats, but those can just as easily happen via email where nobody would see them. We have to make a point to capture and share things to the right people.
joncalhoun 10y ago
I suspect if you want to do a partially remote team the best way would be to make an entire team of remote employees and then treat that team like a satellite office. We know those work for most companies, so as long as the team can communicate well amongst themselves I don't think them being remote will ultimately be any different for the in office workers than if they all went to an office in a different city.
sqldba 10y ago
I sit in a very small half dozen person team in an office and still need to fight non-stop to be told what's going on.

sotojuan 10y ago

It works at our company because the only remote guy is the only one in his "domain" (iOS). He probably doesn't care about the frontend watercooler chat and anything important about the backend will be mentioned in standup.

Perihelion 10y ago
That definitely helps. I find there are other little cultural things you miss like inside jokes/shenanigans. They're not work-related but they're related to work and can make you feel like part of the team.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  I think the importance of that varies from person to person... I don't dislike inside jokes but also don't care if I miss them—I'm just there to do my best work. That said, I completely understand why someone would feel differently.
- sscarduzio 10y ago
  God, who cares of this work jokes shit? They're never funny, it's always the boss that makes them and everyone laughs way too much. FFS, We're not friends, we don't have to be, and it's OK! I like what I do, take pride on it and everything, but at the end of the day, my private life (where I get to choose my friends) is OUTSIDE work hours. And I'm committed to close the laptop as soon as I'm done. I guess this kind of "school feeling", "we're on the same boat" feeling, where groups of people linger together in long coffee breaks tends to belong to corporate, especially in USA where they work stupid hours to "show off" their commitment. Utter nonsense. One more thing that I really feel I "broke free" from (after becoming full time remote) is the ALCOHOL CULTURE. Peer pressure into drinking: company credit card on the tab and unlimited drinks (no food, otherwise it's cheating). So degrading.
  - Perihelion 10y ago
    I'm in no way suggesting that people spend all of their time at work or have significant overlap between their work friends and after-work friends. However, it's nice to work with people and not robots. Some people can tolerate sterile work environments devoid of anything but neutrality, and some people can't. I'm not even saying you have to be friends with the people you work with, but being friendly goes a long way. You spend a large portion of your day with these people, so it's not a huge ask for someone to give a crap about them as people.
  - problems 10y ago
    I think most people have a better office experience than you. I have to be comfortable actually expressing the situation I'm dealing with when I run into troubles, be that cursing about some code or explaining why something will take longer or shorter than expected to my boss. I feel much more comfortable in a less "sterile" work environment in that way. If I'm in a work environment that's too sterile I'll feel like every error I make, every little delay detracts from my value as an employee, and that's immensely stressful to me. That said, no one here puts in extra hours to "show off their commitment", everyone shows up when they want and dumps at 8 hours later. I've stayed late when I was buried in debugging once or twice and got told to go home by numerous colleagues. Just things like that, telling you to put it down is a positive influence sometimes. I came in the next day and solved the issue that I had spent 3 hours on the previous day in about 20 minutes.
  - krick 10y ago
    No offense, but this works both ways. I mean, this is not a secret that there is this sort of people who feel that way, and if I can see that you are one of them — I wouldn't want you to be a part of the team. I mean it strongly: if I don't need you for some very specific kind of job, no way you are hired. Even if you are great professional (but replaceable) and a nice guy otherwise. I don't like myself this weird culture where it's supposed that you have to be always a nice guy, politely nod and smile and say "Completely agree! Except..." when there isn't a single point you actually agree on, so I often dismiss such labels as "toxic attitude". But your attitude is just that — toxic. I'm okay with people being somewhat rude and arrogant and whiny and always complaining about "why should we", but this attitude of "I have a real life outside, and here — I just work here, so fuck you all" — that makes you both absolutely unreliable and very unpleasant to have around. Unfortunately, the word "toxic" fits really well. I've actually never had anybody to work extra-hours, but knowing that they would is significant part of what makes me care that they don't have to. Technology is worthless, people are what makes companies to succeed, and absence of meaningful relationships with your team basically renders you to be a piece of quite primitive carbon-based technology.
- closed 10y ago
  Agreed, especially RE shenanigans. I'm remote most of the time, but in the office this week, and small things like telling stories at lunch make a difference.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

snarf21 10y ago

Exactly, it requires an active investment in over communication. Hopefully someday the tools will evolve to help reduce the need for this to be so manual. Bouncing an idea off of someone remote gets difficult. I feel bad for interrupting them and they feel annoyed at being interrupted. Culture also plays a big role in that as well.

ghaff 10y ago
I'm not a developer but just last week I was visiting one of our locations where a lot of the people I work with are actually located. I was down there for a specific meeting but I bumped into enough people and had serendipitous conversations with them that I left saying to myself that I should really go down there more often. To your other point, communication tools are still pretty limited. IM/Slack/IRC are good for some things though a lot of people I work with don't use them. I've yet to see anything that remotely compares to being together in a conference room for high bandwidth interactions.
- mjevans 10y ago
  Or you need to get everyone hanging out in a group chatter environment (Like IRC).
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Unfortunately, while most/all of the tech folks hang out on IRC, it's much less used by a lot of the marketing/business people I deal with. I should use it more routinely myself but the fact is that it's not that widely used by some groups.
konschubert 10y ago
I think what helps is to keep everybody in the team in a permanent video call during working hours. This requires suitable hardware and software (I would love to build a company producing these tools one day.), but also a considerable amount of discipline. A wordier version of my thoughts is here: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remote-work.html https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remo...

rqebmm 10y ago

MY company does hybrid remote/on-site, and one of the best ways to mitigate issues with off-site communication is part-time work from home. Since on-site workers spend some of their time as remote workers, everyone has a good idea of what's required to empower remote developers. It's not always roses and rainbows, but it definitely helps.

joe563323 10y ago
Hybrid remote/on-site method should only be used as a migration path for the remote-first method from on-site, else it does not work well.
- nnq 10y ago
  WHY?! What parent poster describes above seems like "heaven" to me. Some people can be "true nomads", others can spend 50% time in office, 50% working from home, everybody can be happy and find "what works for him/her". I hate both working in-office full-time AND working fully remote. But a mix sounds awesome, I always feel energized when working one day from one place, another day from another, and I also enjoy having the meetings in-person...
  - joe563323 10y ago
    > others can spend 50% time in office, 50% working from home What this really mean is 50 % teams in a company are remote and 50 % are onsite. Remote working is binary.
mikekchar 10y ago
The company I work for does hybrid remote/onsite as well. I'm remote and I actually think that having onsite people take some remote days is almost required to get things working. After people take a couple of days remote they suddenly understand the issues a lot better. Also for me, not always roses and rainbows. But that mutual understanding is really helpful.

amorphid 10y ago

You have to be diligent about researching a potential employer with multiple locations, too. My last job on "on site". I learned on Day 1 that all of my teammates were all remote (or at least not in my office).

farslan 10y ago

We do it here are DigitalOcean and it's just awesome. We have people in NYC HQ and remote all over the world (for example I'm working from Turkey). The key is not only over communication, also to care about your remote employees, let them feel like they're really a part of the company, bring them to the HQ, not per year, multiple times, etc.. There are many things but so far DigitalOcean is one of the best companies I've worked remotely (and I'm working remotely for almost 5 years for different companies).

peterjmag 10y ago
Can confirm—DigitalOcean is great at remote work. I'm consistently impressed by how well connected I feel, despite being across the ocean from our HQ in NYC. People really care and put in the effort to make it work. It also definitely helps that both "sides" are well represented—we're almost exactly 50% remote at the moment. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/#current-openings https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/#current-openin...
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) Yeah, and your hiring process is rife with stupid biases like autorejecting people based on who they worked for in the past.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Perihelion 10y ago
    Could you elaborate on this? I think DO has a right to hire however they want to but I'm curious about who they're auto-rejecting/why.
    - vonmoltke 10y ago
      Last year I had my resume submitted by a third-party recruiter for a role there. My resume was rejected out-of-hand by the hiring manager because the companies/customers I had worked for were "too enterprisey" (i.e. I had only worked for government contractors at that point). The "too enterprisey" quote came directly from the recruiter. I suppose he could have been blowing smoke up my ass, but I don't think he would have said that if he was.

iamdave 10y ago

Anecdote but our team does it brilliantly. Working from home? Just let the team know via slack and go for it. Management is onboard with it and has taken the openly stated position of "we don't care as long as you're reachable during the hours it's reasonable for someone to be online" (and the obvious: "deliver your deliverables when they're due"). In my case as the ops lead, I have additional hours but we are so well baked into slack that if someone needs me, I get pinged via mobile, reply from where I am or delegate it. Heck just last week I did a couple of deployments from 4 timezones away, tested it, and left a PR note in the channel with a link to the JIRA ticket. It got worked, updated, fixed and closed while I slept. I wouldn't say our team made a concerted effort, we just set the expectation that if you're going to be away, let us know, and during production hours the absolute bare minimum is that you'll be reachable if absolutely needed. Heck, even if you need to leave early to take care of home stuff or what have you: go to team chat "Hey I'm taking off early to take care of thing" and go. You'll get replies like "Take it easy" and "Cya tomorrow". Every team meeting has a join.me session for remote people to join, they speak up and contribute if asked or needed, even our stand-up comes with an auto generated Google Hangouts link that gets published to slack every morning at 10am. If you miss the stand-up or can't connect, people have been really great about just typing up what they're working on when they're available again. Otherwise, no one really cares. I've absolutely loved it. This is one of the better teams I've worked on just by how well everyone communicates without bombarding each other. People stay out of each other's way, but will ask when they need help and there's never any fear that you wont get someone willing to at least look at a problem with you; even if they don't know the answer-I've had devs pipe up and offer ideas and a second pair of eyes. Problem gets fixed, I shoot over a thumbs up emoji and a "thank you" and we go back to our own little worlds. Read-only Friday comes along, and we go drink. Contrasted with my last job where I negotiated the right to work remotely because the distance constituted a total four hour commute. I was consistently turning in deliverables on-time or early, conducting client calls via an expensed voip phone and getting several orders more work done from home because I wasn't waking up hours earlier than normal to make the 2 hour drive in. That privilege was arbitrarily lost because of a few critical management slip ups (owner took a vacation with more than a couple projects open in the lurch, and left no instruction behind for me in his wake, so things failed in a big way when). Shortly after becoming an 'office worker' again and putting in 12 hour days between commuting and sitting at my desk, I was out the door.

scruple 10y ago

Yep, this is absolutely correct in my experiences. I'll chime in, since I'm a remote employee at a company that is hybrid remote/on-site but with the vast majority of employees being on-site. Long story short: I actually started on-site but negotiated part-time remote. Then after about a year of that my spouse accepted a dream job offer on the other side of the state and so it was no question that we were moving. They wanted to keep me on and so I transitioned to full-time remote. It has it's ups and downs. From my experience, it depends on the team and ultimately the lead and/or the manager. If they get it, it's good. If they don't, don't bother. My last team, it was beautiful. Everything worked great. It became obvious to me after transitioning away from that team just how much extra work my manager was doing to keep his remote employees in the loop. With the team I'm on now, it's not working at all. Why? Because, as you so eloquently put it: > the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything... If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was said. This is exactly the problem I am facing down. About a month ago, I even tried talking to my manager about it. Even going so far as using this exact phrasing. His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! Completely missed the point. I'm not surprised, I guess I just expected some effort. I'm trying to remain positive but it's tiring. I can do good work and make progress but I'm with a lead who is insulating me from meetings and it feels deliberate. The few times I am invited in to a meeting, it's easy to see that he accepts and assumes credit for _the teams_ efforts. He was hired recently as a Senior, our manager wanted him to transition to a Lead, and he's actually landed somewhere around trying to be an architect. Ranting aside, when I bring my concerns up to him it's obvious that there's no attempt to better understand the issues/challenges of the hybrid approach. It doesn't help that he's never worked with remote employees before, either.

ghaff 10y ago
>His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach. Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.

Bahamut 10y ago

I work for a hybrid remote/on-site company - we have made it work well. The most important thing I found is to make sure all of the stakeholders are present online for a serious discussion on whatever it is of concern. As soon as one is cut out of the loop, trouble starts.

rwmj 10y ago

Red Hat has 10000 employees, a large proportion being remote (including me - about half of all developers work remotely). I can assure you that remote workers at Red Hat are not out of the loop on anything. The thing is that even if I went into the local office, I would still be "working remotely", because the development teams are distributed all around the world. Therefore everything has to be done on mailing lists, IRC, bug trackers and occasional conference calls.

garrettdimon 10y ago

It's definitely doable, but it has to be remote-focused. At Wildbit, we have 12 in Philadelphia and another 14 in 14 different cities around the world. They keys are in the small things. When we do video chats, the folks in Philly call in just like they were on a home computer. They don't all get together in a big room and call in. We also make a point to run all of our conversations through group chat and project management software. And plenty of the Philly folks work from home regularly as well. Remote work isn't simply tolerated, it's put first. The remote folks (myself included) miss out on some of the office benefits like family-style lunches and get togethers, but we all make regular trips there and get to partake. It's not purely about location either since we're spread across numerous time zones. It just takes more deliberate communication. There's always going to be water cooler chats, but those can just as easily happen via email where nobody would see them. We have to make a point to capture and share things to the right people.

joncalhoun 10y ago

I suspect if you want to do a partially remote team the best way would be to make an entire team of remote employees and then treat that team like a satellite office. We know those work for most companies, so as long as the team can communicate well amongst themselves I don't think them being remote will ultimately be any different for the in office workers than if they all went to an office in a different city.

sqldba 10y ago

I sit in a very small half dozen person team in an office and still need to fight non-stop to be told what's going on.