Slashdot Asks: Are Remote Software Teams More Productive? (techbeacon.com)

A recruiter with 20 years of experience recently reported on the research into whether remote software teams perform better. One study of 10,000 coding sessions concluded it takes 10-15 minutes for a programmer to resume work after an interruption. Another study actually suggests unsupervised workers are more productive, and the founders of the collaboration tool Basecamp argue the bigger danger is burnout when motivated employees overwork themselves. mikeatTB shares his favorite part of the article: One interesting take on the issues is raised by ThoughtWorks' Martin Fowler: Individuals are more productive in a co-located environment, but remote teams are often more productive than co-located teams. This is because a remote team has the advantage of hiring without geographic boundaries, and that enables employers to assemble world-class groups.
The article shares some interesting anecdotes from remote workers, but I'd be interested to hear from Slashdot's readers. Leave your own experiences in the comments, and tell us what you think. Are remote software teams more productive?

Comments

Does masturbating at home count as productivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

No? Well... probably not then, to answer the headline's question.

Your milage may vary

[rkordmaa]

Surely there is no clear cut answer for a question like that. I personally am much more suited to working in office and can never get anything done at home, surely there are people with opposite working environment preferences. Personally I work on industrial equipment software, that means my work needs to be done where the actual hardware is and remote work is in most cases not viable, if it means traveling half way across the word then so be it. Some software project lend itself to remote work better than others, some projects you can complete entirely remotely, some you can break off pieces to be done remotely and sometimes you must have boots on the ground. As with any team, success depends on what is worked on, who does the work and how its managed, there are no golden rules to fit all situations.

Re:Your milage may vary

[ShanghaiBill]

It is not just a question of whether a programmer is more suited for remote working, but also if the management and the rest of the team is willing to make the effort to communicate and coordinate. In my experience, all these factors NEVER happen, and companies that try distributed development are some of the most dysfunctional organizations I have ever worked with. There are always people way out of the loop, and submitting work on projects that were cancelled weeks ago, and when it comes to office politics and backstabbing, the remote workers are at a severe disadvantage. I am not saying it is impossible, I am just saying I have never seen it work.

Re:Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, some people just can't seem to be accountable without the threat of others showing up at their desk in person wanting to know why something is days late and why emails are not getting answered or voicemails returned.

Re:Your milage may vary

[R3d M3rcury]

I personally am much more suited to working in office and can never get anything done at home [...]

I'm the same way. My solution was simple: Go get an office.

There are lots of options for people who don't want to work from home. Personally, I went for the "Executive Suite." I get an office with a window and decent Internet for a little less than $600 per month. There's also a community kitchen and photocopier. It came with a desk and chair--nothing fancy--but I'm not paying extra for them (i.e. I didn't rent a furnished office, they were left by the previous tenant). Needless to say, the company provides the computer and router. I can sit and video chat or IM anyone I need to get ahold of.

Other options are your local coffee shop or co-working type places. While the company I work for doesn't assist me in paying for the space, some will. Also, as I understand it, I can write off my rent on my income taxes.

While the commute from the bedroom to the spare bedroom or living room sounds cool, I like keeping them separate. But my office is about 4 miles from where I live. I can bike, drive, or even walk!

Re:Your milage may vary

[djinn6]

Just setup an always-on VC at the office, then tell everyone to log in to it during work hours. This is exactly the same as having them all in the same room. And as a added bonus, you avoid a major disease vector that could put the entire team out of commission. Don't give them excuses to not be on: buy them headsets, mic's, additional screens, and if necessary, internet. No matter how you cut the cost, it's still going to be cheaper than renting a bigger office and equipping them with $1000 desks and chairs.

The rest of the problems you mentioned are not problems with distributed work. Someone (presumably the manager) should know what their people are working on and tell them to stop working on obsolete stuff. If that guy can't figure that out without constantly looking over people's shoulders, then the higher-ups need to find themselves a better manager.

The only real problem I've seen with a distributed team is timezone differences, but you can avoid that by hiring on the same side of the globe.

Re:Your milage may vary

[Lorens]

I mostly communicate with my coworkers over slack or mail or github, even with those literally sitting next to me, so communication isn't a problem in my case.

Re: Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the issue is more that we naturally communicate in person, and so ensuring that a distributed team does not become a case of "out of sight, out of mind" takes particular effort. Of course it can happen in a co located team too, and I don't think cubes help. Neither are insurmountable.

Tooling for communication, team building, or assisting with staying on task is still far from ideal. Too often video conferencing still falls apart, and it sometimes feels we have progressed that much in this area in over a decade.

Re: Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

One complexity regarding the desks is your may still have a duty of care as an employer, so can't necessarioy avoid that desk and chair cost.

Re: Your milage may vary

[tigersha]

If you communicate with the people sitting next to yiu over Slack or Gihub only then, yes, you have a communications problem. A bad one

Re:Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on a number of factors.

a) The remote worker's family life. If they have babies or pets at home, they are likely less productive due to interruptions. If they only have caged pets or no pets, then they have literately no excuse to be unproductive. That said you can also skew productivity better, so while it might take 15 minutes to resume from an interruption, there is no downtime from it either like there would be in an office.

b) The worker's social personality. If someone is very abrasive (you know the kind, the person who talks shit about everyone behind their back,) they likely drag down their co-workers, remote or not. However when they are remote, they can easily be "ignored" by dropping them from group communication channels. That said, an abrasive person should be fired unless they are immensely valuable. I've known people to be totally shitty people, and somehow they remain employed after missing months of work.

c) The worker's access to shelter/food/water/entertainment. If someone literately lives out in the boonsticks, 30 miles from anyone. They are going to be much less productive because they will be compelled to save money by deferring everything to one day a week or month, and then spend that entire day doing chores that involve driving. Where as people who can order a pizza and have it delivered in 10 minutes, doesn't ever need to leave their apartment, thus they could work on something for 16 hours a day 3 days a week and then go do other stuff 4 days a week. They don't need to be held hostage to 8 hour work days. On the flip side of this, sometimes it is better to work in a small group in the same building if the project requires a lot of brainstorming or prototyping.

So the best attuned people to work remotely are those that do not have high social needs. People who don't care for partying or drinking, people who would rather stay home and keep working or play mmorpg's. People with high social needs feel lonely or stressed out when there aren't people around. Like sometimes I wish I had a shitty job to go to just so I can talk to people. Basically all the people I talk to around here are the people who work at the Subway, Sushi, KFC, and Pharmacy/Grocery I frequently go to that are all within 10 minutes of walking. They know who I am because I go to one of them every 3 days or so.

My parents on the other hand are both the kind of people who need to hang out with people and drink otherwise they are bored. They're both retired now. But oh wow my mom will just not let anything go. Before she retired she would unload every dramatic tale about work. Not surprisingly, I do the same thing with people who want to know, but I won't automatically bring it up like my mom does.

Which goes back to the entire thing about productivity. If someone who is remotely working, and their productivity is going down, it's likely because you're not paying them enough to live where they are, and they are stressing out how they will be able to keep living there. If you're like Yahoo and have no goddamn business sense, and decide to axe remote working for no reason, you're going to have people who were barely getting suddenly not being able to get by and they are forced to quit the job. Not because they aren't productive.

So before you consider letting people work remotely, make sure that they are comfortable working remotely. If your office has a lot of backstabbing people, then remote workers are going to be left out of the loop. Or maybe they become the victims of being out of the loop. As an example, two of the places I worked for before working remotely had co-workers who filed complaints against me. What for you might ask? Talking to them. No this one person who sat immeidately behind me just could not deal with having someone like me getting along with the person to the right of me, and decided to complain that I was somehow harassing them. Like what the hell. The supervisor didn't even need to say who it was, I was able to figure it out because that was the only p

Re:Your milage may vary

[Cytotoxic]

This was exactly my reaction. It entirely depends on the people involved and the job to be done.

The most productive programmer I ever worked with was remote for more than half the time we worked together. She'd have her kids running around in the background while we were collaborating. But as I'd describe an idea I had for solving some tricky multi-system, multi-business problem you'd here the clickety-clack of a keyboard mixed with the sounds of preschool children playing. And usually by the time I had finished explaining the idea to the team she'd say, "you mean something like this" and post a preliminary version of the solution I was describing.

She was crazy fast - both mentally and with her keyboard skills. So you could work with her being anywhere. And in her particular case, I think she was better remote... because she didn't have to do the office dance and chat in the breakroom or any of the other stuff that wasn't really her thing. She could just build amazing stuff.

On the other hand, I have worked with guys who needed their hand held in order to get their best work. Not just someone looking to make sure they were working instead of goofing off, but also a team concept to make sure they kept moving in the right direction. There are a lot of programmers who get excited about an idea they have and can go off on a tangent. I've had several guys who would, if left to their own devices, build a really cool bit of code that doesn't actually address the issue at hand. Because they lost sight of the forest and got way too interested in the trees. For these sort of folks, having a team in the same room is a big help. Because they are going to say "hey, check this out" before they get too far down the wrong path. Whereas they might work for 5 hours on the wrong thing before saying anything if they were remote.

Re: Your milage may vary

[tomhath]

If you communicate with the people sitting next to yiu over Slack or Gihub only then, yes, you have a communications problem

Read the part in the summary about how disruptive it is to be interrupted. Unless the question needs to be answered RIGHT NOW it's often better to send a text or email and let the other person respond when they have a spare minute. People who think they're really good communicators are often the ones who wander around the office or shout over cubicle walls, disturbing everyone within earshot.

Re:Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

There was the story of a guy (during a tumultuous era of layoffs) that set up his garage with a desk and other office doodads. But he also "drove" to work, so that he still had the 'rhythm' going. The drive would be around the neighborhood block, so when he gets to this office, his coffee pot was nice and warm and he would've gotten a bagel or paper or something. He *did find work eventually so it still paid off somehow--having the mindset that he only had a temporary setback.

You may have seen the TV ad with the office view folding up with the garage door. A tad extreme but it works.

Re:Your milage may vary

[jez9999]

Sounds like you've been unlucky. I'm currently working for an organization that doesn't have perfect management, but generally remote workers are kept in the loop just fine. I've worked for orgs with far worse management and lack of communication where everyone had to go into the office - and the office environment was noisy and distracting. A massive blow to productivity.

Re: Your milage may vary

[rholtzjr]

And word of mouth is better than a documented technical discussion. Do not know about you but some that I have talked to sometimes get selective amnesia. So in some instances, word of mouth is fine, but on big projects documenting quite a bit helps in the long run.

Re:Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

Same, though the open office environment makes it too easy to get distracted. People with annoying habits, people who can't stay seated for more than 5 min, people who can't talk quietly and have to make sure the whole office hears, people who have to open their mouth about any random thought that passes through their brain, people who need to show off how hardcore they are by using an obnoxiously loud mechanical keyboard, etc. An office that is setup to reduce those distractions would be ideal for me.

Re: Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

Take pizza from freezer, put in oven. Do some more work. Take pizza from oven. Eat pizza.

Living 30 miles out of town isn't a productivity killer if you are even slightly organised.

In any case, why not have a break for a while 3Pl0 minutes at lunch time to cook and eat the pizza and be refreshed?

Re: Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

30 minutes.

Unhelpful autocorrect.

Re:Your milage may vary

[luis_a_espinal]

There was the story of a guy (during a tumultuous era of layoffs) that set up his garage with a desk and other office doodads. But he also "drove" to work, so that he still had the 'rhythm' going. The drive would be around the neighborhood block, so when he gets to this office, his coffee pot was nice and warm and he would've gotten a bagel or paper or something. He *did find work eventually so it still paid off somehow--having the mindset that he only had a temporary setback.

You may have seen the TV ad with the office view folding up with the garage door. A tad extreme but it works.

I can see the driving-to-work ritual as something that works. When I work from home, I *have* to dress up. Sometimes I dress up even more formal than when I go to the office simply because I need to get in the mode to work. I can't do that in shorts and slippers.

Re: Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to disagree. The most productive team I worked on was a small 8 person team (2 DEV, 1 architect, 2QA, 2 QA automation DEVs and me). I was the RA and product manager and was sitting with 10 meters of them. 5-6 times a day a DEV or QA or both will come with a blocking question we would take the meeting room behind my back and resolve the question in a matter of minutes. Then they would go back. I never went over to disturb them but having me available and in within 10 meters helped productivity a lot.

Re:Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter how you cut the cost, it's still going to be cheaper than renting a bigger office and equipping them with $1000 desks and chairs.

Yes on the rent, but if you believe $1000 chairs are worth having then they're worth buying them for their home office as well.

Re:Your milage may vary

[Full$tack]

I guess I'm the opposite. I don't have the problem of distractions when working from my home office. This is largely because I have a very dedicated home office space, no interruptions, so nothing to cause a distraction.

Also, I can confidently attest that I get a LOT more work done working from home, where no one is poking their head in my cubicle to interrupt me. I also set my IM banner message to "Priority interrupts only" when I am writing code. Most people will respect that.

I do a lot of freelance contract programming, some on-site and some remote. I can definitely promise higher productivity and shorter deadlines to a client if I can work remote. Just the ability to focus deeply without distractions makes such a tremendous difference in TTM for any project. I agree that every distraction costs 10-15 minutes of catch-up time when one is deeply entrenched in code. Add in commute time for onsite days and it becomes even more of an impact.

Focusing on algorithms, complex object-models or coding end-to-end feature sets across multiple tiers of a large MVC enterprise application or large cloud-based app that flows from a back-end database through a services/API tier, back through client-side factories and controllers to the UI views... the more you can concentrate, the faster that sort of work can be done, and the more likely it gets done in fewer debug cycles. Debugging end-to-end through services and front-end at the same time is something that also takes a ton of real-time concentration.

There are valid arguments both ways, and of course it depends on the situation, how much interaction with other developers is required, etc... but in general I do my best work (and more of it in less time) when I can work remotely, just due to fewer distractions. [It really sucks these posts

Re:Your milage may vary

[tdelaney]

A $1000 chair is most definitely worth having. My current one did 10 years at my previous employer, and another 6 years since working from home (I'd started working from home 6 months before we were all made redundant and was allowed to keep the chair ...).

Also made a big difference in recovering from lower back surgery - most chairs it was impossible to sit in, but this one was usable with a pillow sitting across the arms.

When this chair eventually dies I'll be investing in the current equivalent.

Re:Your milage may vary

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you not feel that it's expensive just for the feeling of getting out? 600 is the cost of a whole apartment here.

Re:Your milage may vary

[R3d M3rcury]

Southern California. It's about half the cost of a studio apartment.

Re: Your milage may vary

[GeekBird]

... People who think they're really good communicators are often the ones who wander around the office or shout over cubicle walls, disturbing everyone within earshot.

This.

I hate noisy offices. I can't hear myself think, and answering stupid questions that can be looked up on google demolishes my productivity for the day.

The worst is open plan noise pits and "benching". It reminds me of the photos we see coming out of third world sweatshops, with monitors and keyboards instead of piecework on the tables.

I often communicate better over IRC/Jabber/Slack because I can actually type stuff out, and don't have to struggle to understand 50 different accents.

Give me a door or let me work from home

Re:Your milage may vary

[sjames]

Of course rent tends to be outrageous and forever rising. A one time cost of $1000/employee for an excellent chair is tiny in comparison exen if you treat it as a signing bonus.

Bad news Bob

[Anonymous Coward]

You're fired because the team lead ignored all your pull requests on the company GitHub when you didn't follow our coding style as you were told when you were sent an email with a link to our wiki.

Re:Bad news Bob

[Anonymous Coward]

Disregard the fact that the wiki is hosted on our intranet (and also contains the VPN info) this has nothing to do with you not following the STYLE GUIDE!!!1

If you want the best, you enable remote employees

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

Many of the folks who have a track record of getting stuff done in their field (especially open source projects) know their value and often don't feel like they have to relocate to command what they're worth. And I think that's the way it ought to be.

It's nice when you can have teams gathered in a single place, but I certainly wouldn't "not hire" a rockstar simply because they couldn't/wouldn't relocate to some arbitrary location that the company wanted. Hire the best talent you can afford and don't stress about where they live.

Are local managers more destructive ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If a remote team is more productive than local then you are looking in the wrong place.

The only reason they can possibly be more productive is that the local management is toxic.

Re:Are local managers more destructive ?

[Grishnakh]

The only reason they can possibly be more productive is that the local management is toxic.

Oh come on. Local management not being toxic is the exception, not the rule. It's a rare workplace where you have really effective and competent management (and I don't mean just one manager, I mean the whole chain; I've had good direct managers, but they were hamstrung by the idiocy directly above them).

Re:Are local managers more destructive ?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Not the manager, but perhaps the environment or the office culture. I've had times where I wasn't getting much done working from home, and I have had great runs of banging out code at the office (sometimes in a cube farm no less). Some people can't stand distracting noises but I have no problem with them. I do have a problem with interruptions. As the articles states: a programmer needs 15 minutes to resume work after an interruption, which is true in my case. On top of that, after a day full of interruptions I am exhausted, both physically and mentally. But: getting up for a coffee is not an interruption. "Are you coming to Lisa's barbeque later?" is not an interruption. An interruption is when you have to engage your brain on another task: a phone call, someone asking a technical question, your manager asking for some document, etc.

A good manager understands this, and is able to create a work environment for differing work styles, or work out reasonable compromises (keeping in mind the consequences). Such a manager will also make sure to create a culture where these work styles can thrive. It's ok to ignore your email for most of the day, as long as you make that clear in an out of office reply. Don't disturb coworkers with headsets on, or those working in isolation pods. Do disturb others in case of emergencies, as long as you understand what those are. Seat the more chatty people together. It works, but it isn't always easy to create such an environment, and it does cost money.

I've had a rare few managers who understood this, and who created a work environment suitable both for solitary coding as well as collaboration. And in my experience, in such an environment the coders are just as productive as they are at home, but the collaborative parts like design meetings, brainstorming sessions or daily standups were vastly more productive compared to conference calls. In contrast I've worked in toxic environments where productivity was low. But it wasn't a case of toxic management, just poor management. And they might do as poorly when managing their teams remotely.

Re: Are local managers more destructive ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It might not be the management. It might be the layout of the offices. This has been discussed before. An open plan office has a constant stream of distractions. These can include banging doors, people running up and down aisles, rolling carts of equipment back and forth like some mythical Greek legend, loud discussions in meeting rooms, the workers next to you having ad-hoc standup meetings right next to you or constantly being on the phone (like Office Space). I've known people to whisper down a telephone only to sudfenly laugh out loud like a Kilngon, back folders on their desk or just shout.
Sometimes the atmosphere is so laid back that one team can be having a slack afternoon and partying like Superbowl night at the bar while another team is having crunch time banging their heads on the table with all the noise.

Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Tablizer]

One should be close to the customers and users to make useful office software. If most of your effort is fiddling with low-level programming and UI issues, then you are doing something wrong and wasting labor.

I used to crank out custom internal software quite quickly in the pre-web days: blam blam blam! Now it takes a 10 fucking hours to get shit like scrollbars to work right in JS libraries with lots of screwy code and dealing with browser differences. Something is fucked about the Web Stack; we are doing it wrong; billions are wasted. We are chasing fads instead of productivity. I want to make useful tools in short time, not make fucking skirts; you goddam fashion monkeys buy into this shit!

I didn't have to micromanage UI crap back then. It may be great job security, but a nuke to productivity. One of these days a standard or tool will get network UI's right and jillions of programmers will be unemployed or serving fries. The UI shit-bubble will pop. I will learn it early and replace many you goddam fashion monkeys because I'll be able to crank out and quickly fix and adjust apps again! There is a market for eye-candy, but it's not everywhere. Internal apps don't need eye-candy and the org shouldn't be fashion-taxed to get normal apps.

Re:Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Anonymous Coward]

.....and with that senile rant, your coding days are finished.

Run Logan Run!

Re:Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Tablizer]

No, I know how to do it the long stupid illogical way also, like all the other suckers. I just miss being productive.

Re:Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Anonymous Coward]

Its almost like UX is as important for internal tools as it is for consumer tools.

Your bad UI/UX probably cost other people extra labor and time, just not you.

Re: Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Exactly. I just spent 4 hours the other day making a table that is mixed with dynamic controls and an amalgamation of ASP.NET and jQuery pixel fucking perfect when it came to borders for the control because it had to match the look of the old classic website to 'preserve the user experience.' What if I told you the user isn't going to notice that a button is 2 pixels higher up on this page when viewed in Internet Explorer 9? I could have spent the day doing something that adds value to the product, not fiddling with tiny quirks no user is going to notice anyway.

Re:Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, we can fix it with an extra layer. Be sure to run your jsx parsing code that generates javascript that generates HTML (I'm not making that up, it's the modern strategy) inside a VM. For best results, add Docker as well, it makes everything better.

Re: Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Anonymous Coward]

VB6 rapid app dev was the best. You could build a whole CRM app in a week back in the day.

Re:Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Billly Gates]

Apparently you never programmed with the MFC or used win32 with com/dcom :-)

Javascript is roses in comparison to get anything done

Re: Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Lorens]

Yes. Exactly. I just spent 4 hours the other day making a table that is mixed with dynamic controls and an amalgamation of ASP.NET and jQuery pixel fucking perfect when it came to borders for the control because it had to match the look of the old classic website to 'preserve the user experience.' What if I told you the user isn't going to notice that a button is 2 pixels higher up on this page when viewed in Internet Explorer 9? I could have spent the day doing something that adds value to the product, not fiddling with tiny quirks no user is going to notice anyway.

Don't be so sure...

$user complains that she can't open her email.

$me: we did copy over all your settings and your password hasn't changed. Can you show me?

$user: I used to click there, points to blank area on Desktop where Outlook icon used to be.

$me: try moving your pointer up half an inch and clicking there (pointing to Outlook icon).

$user: uhh OK I guess, I don't think i'll be able to get used to this new system

From https://www.reddit.com/r/tales...

Re: Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[tigersha]

Except for the Docker bit that is pretty mich what I do and, yes, it does make it better. In fact I have another layer in there involving Jade

Re:Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[dbIII]

Apparently you never programmed with the MFC or used win32 with com/dcom :-)

Using Win32 with com/dom is certainly a good idea, I wouldn't want something to mess up my pipes.

Re: Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Cytotoxic]

I think I used to work with her!

My favorite is:

$user: I can't find my document!

$me: Where did you save it?

$user: In Word.

$me: Yes, I understand it was a Word doc... but where did you save it? Was it in your network documents folder? On your team's shared folder?

$user: Oh, yeah. Sorry. It was in Word. .... Fast forward 10 minutes as I look through recent documents and other breadcrumb trails and ask questions about the contents of the document in question.

$me: Is this what you were looking for? (pointing to an excel spreadsheet)

$user: Yes! That's it! Thank you so much! I hate this computer..... it is always losing my documents! Can I get a new computer?

Re: Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point, people are going to want to go back to Getting S*it Done (tm). Things like WinForms / VB had many issues but it was very, very fast to crank something out.

People aren't going to like this, but going back to one majority platform across desktop, mobile, etc... would improve productivity across the board. The million flavors of web, mobile, desktop, wearable, etc.... has become fragmentation hell and isn't helping anyone except maybe the platform holders...

Re: Wasting time on fiddly shit (rant)

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to fixing/finding bugs, most seem to be missing lines of code in the UI scripts/binding layers to the actual C++ code. It is absolutely mindboggling how to see how many actial layers of code ate required to implement a script engine.

Nope

[AuMatar]

Unless you're in a position where you absolutely need a certain expert (such as a research project) or a few other special circumstances (if its quit or go remote situation, say someone moving for non-job related reasons).

First off, that whole 15 minutes thing is absolute bullshit. Maybe its a worst case if you were in truly deep thought over one of the hardest problems of the year. But most of the time you aren't, and it will be a few minutes Like around 1.

Secondly- your productivity doesn't matter. The team's does. Those interruptions- it means a team member needs help. They're blocked. Their productivity is at or near 0 until unblocked. If interrupting you costs 15 minutes from you but saves an hour for him, that interruption is worth it for the team. There are almost 0 of those interruptions that aren't a net gain. Now if you have a problem with particular people being too disruptive, that's a management/personnel issue you should bring up to your manager.

Thirdly- not everyone works well in remote situations. Especially not long term (working remote for a day while you wait for a package/your maid/etc is a different matter). Very few people actually end up working as well as they do in an office- there are MORE distractions at home. And communications do not work as well- video conferences do not work as well as talking to someone in person. Even if you're one of those who do work well from home, you won't be as efficient as you would sitting near the rest of the team.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Unnecessary face to face conversations is an excellent way of slacking off. At my last place of work they easily took 30-50% of the time while maybe 10% of them was necessary. In the 90% of cases they either produced nothing or the answer could be found quickly (but with a bit of effort) by the person who initiated it. As a joke put it, "Meetings: a practical alternative to work". Fuck that, life is too short.

Re: Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point on the overall team productivity, although 50% of interruptions seem to be things like "do you know if Bob is going to be in today?" "Have you looked at Bob's calendar" "no, I'll do that"... 15 minutes pass... "How go I view Bob's calendar" "Bob's on leave today, ok"

Re:Nope

[Kjella]

First off, that whole 15 minutes thing is absolute bullshit. Maybe its a worst case if you were in truly deep thought over one of the hardest problems of the year. But most of the time you aren't, and it will be a few minutes Like around 1.

YMMV but whenever I'm stuck with half an hour from coming to work to a meeting or between a meeting and the lunch break or whatever I feel that time is exceptionally unproductive. Whether it's making a change or implementing something new or tracking down a bug I usually need some time to work out what it really does, what it should do and how I can do it with good code that's easy to maintain. Most botched jobs happen if I rush that, I can work quick and dirty but it builds technical debt. That I'd be three times as productive if I had an hour (15 vs 45 minutes effective time) doesn't sound too far off to me. I try to have a few "just do it" tasks ready for that, but typically they're not supposed to be my top priority. So if I had a PHB who wants me to work on that task and no other task until I'm done productivity and quality would suffer.

Secondly- your productivity doesn't matter. The team's does. Those interruptions- it means a team member needs help. They're blocked. Their productivity is at or near 0 until unblocked. If interrupting you costs 15 minutes from you but saves an hour for him, that interruption is worth it for the team. There are almost 0 of those interruptions that aren't a net gain.

Depends on how many of these interruptions are from your team and about work, not to mention if they've actually checked and read the documentation or is just asking because bugging you is easier than making the effort themselves. That said, answering simple questions or checking Bob's calendar to see if he's in a meeting doesn't break the flow for me, that I can push/pop off the mental stack. If I need to take 5-10 minutes to check/discuss/explain/investigate/show something though I've decided I'm already distracted so time to check my inbox and answer what I can now before they're at my doorstep. Sadly we're not big enough to have a support staff to shield us from the solutions we've developed so it's DevOps and most the users are one or two floors down.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Excelent point. Even somhere here on slashdot, there an an article called it takes 90 seconds to catch the train of thoughts hen interupted or so. Defiitely agree about the 15 bullshit.

And of course home ofice is not for everyone. My beautiful company as sold to evil aurea corporation that wants to convert us from family company to home office contractors. e had the possibility to work from home. I tried, I failed. E.g. designing feature in program is hudred times faster in person than via skype. Moreover not being in normal worklife might ruin your habbits and you become antisocial.

Re:Nope

[JaredOfEuropa]

It's a bit harsh to call the conclusion of a study "absolute bullshit" solely on the strength of your personal experience. Maybe you're god and you only need 1 minute to recover from an interruption, but most people need more time. 10-15 Minutes sounds about right for me.

Your remark about team productivity is spot on. However I strongly disagree that most interruptions during the day are team members getting stuck and needing help. In my experience it's often pointless crap, or stuff that can easily wait until the end of the day. If a team member does need help on something, does that really drop their productivity to 0? Perhaps they have other stuff to work on (though I do understand that such a context switch is a thief of productivity as well).

I've actually heard managers use that argument of team productivity to justify pointless interruptions.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, that whole 15 minutes thing is absolute bullshit. Maybe its a worst case if you were in truly deep thought over one of the hardest problems of the year. But most of the time you aren't, and it will be a few minutes Like around 1.

We're definitely not all the same. Your viewpoint would explain the terribly distracting half height cubicles my previously sane previous employer forced on us. I spent a lot of effort to be promoted up to Senior Software Engineer at that job, and I left within a year of the new cubicles being installed. Maybe some people just don't get how damaging distractions are to some of us. I have ADD. I am a pretty damn good engineer, but I have my limitations. I can't switch contexts in 1 minute. A simple interruption can easily get my mind lost for 10-15 minutes. I'm not a machine. I can't just switch contexts right back. I start thinking about the interruption and things related. If simple interruptions are happening all day, that is an incredible mental stressor for me.

Re:Nope

[fluffernutter]

I'm in tne same boat as you. I think the OP just isn't doing any real work.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

I produced some bleeding edge algorithms/systems nobody did before while working 100% remotely for the past 4 years, including traveling around the world (which massively increased my productivity due to pure joy it gave me). I can't now even consider joining office-only companies like Google, Apple Special Projects Group, Uber etc. who are sending recruiters my way all the time as I experienced much better quality of life and significant improvement in my abilities to create great software than in any office space I've ever been to before. YMMV

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Or he considers having to take the lid off his mountain dew as an "interruption" and has a phone manner that loses customers for his business :P

Re: Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

90 seconds to resume buzzword soup MBA train of "thought".

15 minutes to re-crystalize detailed mental model of end-to-end application architecture.

Get it?

Re:Nope

[GeekBird]

First off, that whole 15 minutes thing is absolute bullshit. Maybe its a worst case if you were in truly deep thought over one of the hardest problems of the year. But most of the time you aren't, and it will be a few minutes Like around 1.

Obviously you don't think deeply about much of anything. It's often at least 15 minutes.

Secondly- your productivity doesn't matter. The team's does. Those interruptions- it means a team member needs help. They're blocked. Their productivity is at or near 0 until unblocked. If interrupting you costs 15 minutes from you but saves an hour for him, that interruption is worth it for the team. There are almost 0 of those interruptions that aren't a net gain. Now if you have a problem with particular people being too disruptive, that's a management/personnel issue you should bring up to your manager.

Guess again. Your review is based on YOUR productivity, not your team. Therefore it is what matters. I have been in jobs where I mentored juniors (answering questions takes waaaay more than 15 minutes), then got crucified on my review for spending too much time on "other stuff", and not doing my tasks. I got no "credit" for helping, "unblocking", mentoring or being an information source. None.

Also, your coworker who is so "blocked"? Has a question that they should either a) figure out for themselves without you holding their hand all damn day, b) do some searching on Google and or your internal wiki, or c) write on the group Slack so it is well formulated and able to be answered by anyone who is available.

Thirdly- not everyone works well in remote situations. Especially not long term (working remote for a day while you wait for a package/your maid/etc is a different matter). Very few people actually end up working as well as they do in an office- there are MORE distractions at home. And communications do not work as well- video conferences do not work as well as talking to someone in person. Even if you're one of those who do work well from home, you won't be as efficient as you would sitting near the rest of the team.

True. Some people can't manage themselves well at home. They have to have the conversations that make them feel important. They have to have their managers watch over them to keep them on task, and not bugging everyone else. They need to smell the farts of their coworkers, and get every illness so that they really feel like they are part of something. I for one find those people to be the biggest impediment to productivity.

Face to face conversations are waaay overrated, and for people who never learned to communicate via the written word. These are the same types of chumps who refuse to comment their code.

I am far, far more efficient working from home, or alone in an office after hours, than I am with everyone and their siblings, cousins and significant others interrupting me all goddamn day with stupid questions that can be answer by reading the goddamn wiki or doing a Google search and applying their fucking brain!

Re:Nope

[GeekBird]

Agreed. I figure he is one of those jerks that make open plan such a hell for any deep thinker. He just wants his coworkers around so he can talk at them.

Remote Senior Windows Software Engineer

[wizzerking]

My company is near the east coast so i get up at 6 a.m. have Standup at 7: a.m. attend sprint grooming meetings very thursday right after Standup All through Google Hangouts Yes there is squelching, and feedback, you learn to control that. My productivity is really great when i take on a big project, then I can work hours, and nap, and work more hours I am less afraid of searching , and downloading than when i worked at Intel, DirecTV, or Siemens I have to provide my own snacks, tea, and other drinks no freebies for me I do sometimes find it hard to turn off, so I go for walks, go out to robotics clubs, and church so I stay socialized and interact with ordinary people Not to bad for someone who has the discipline

Re: Remote Senior Windows Software Engineer

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a big thing too that is not common in offices, napping. I was really deep in a coding project and had been coding for 6 hours straight. I realized my mind was absolutely mush at that point, and I went and took an hour nap at around 2pm. I woke up and coded for another few hours and completed the project feeling fresh. If I was in an office not only do I rarely if ever get uninterrupted coding sessions and distractions, but that 2pm basically would be my end of day.

Re: Remote Senior Windows Software Engineer

[Dutch Gun]

If I was in an office not only do I rarely if ever get uninterrupted coding sessions and distractions, but that 2pm basically would be my end of day.

I can easily work eight hours in a day, but doing it all in a big stretch is a lot harder for me than breaking it up into several parts, often interrupted by some mental downtime or even a nap. I worked on my own software for a few years, interrupted by some remote work. It's amazingly liberating to be able to do this. At the moment, I'm doing some on-site contract work, and it's amazing how distracted and tired I am at the end of the work day, compared to when I work at home.

That being said, it's not for everyone. Some people don't have a distraction-free environment or room to work in, while others would end up distracting themselves. You need a reasonable amount of self-discipline and self-motivation to be able to make it work.

Re: Remote Senior Windows Software Engineer

[Anonymous Coward]

I do like being able to listen to my radio from 9 to 11 and not worry if it's really between 9 and 11, at a reasonable level, or whether Betsy's listening to her radio either.

Productivity goes up 100x

[Anonymous Coward]

When there aren't co-workers around to call into meetings on their f'n speakerphones.

Re:Productivity goes up 100x

[GeekBird]

When there aren't co-workers around to call into meetings on their f'n speakerphones.

You left off a zero.... ;)

But amen!

Well, my answer is both? Neither? Depends?

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience it depends on the person.

In an individual basis, I'm more productive at home (to argue for the "remotely" case), because I'll have less annoyances throughout the day. Problem is I won't mind the hours I work when I work from home, so I'll end up doing way more hours than I would if I was at the office (way more, as in close to pushing myself to burnout if I do it for some weeks at a go). There's a caveat, I did started "in an individual basis", that's because most of the annoyances I get throughout the day at office is trainees and juniors asking for help... so as a team I won't be providing much support as I would otherwise, leaving the team handicapped in that aspect.

Now, I've worked with people that simply don't do jack at home. They think no one notices, but the truth is it shows from time to time, repeatedly, that their usual productivity drops.

Ofc, I'll talking about a scenario where normally you would work at the office but from time to time the person decides to work from home for a short time (a day, a week), not projects that are done remotely due to constraint.

When a few team members usually work at home

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is probably the more usual situation compared to a 100 percent remote team, I think the reviews are completely different depending on who you ask.

I'm sure the remote worker feels a lot happier and more productive. Why wouldn't they be?

But it's a pain when you need to rely on that worker and you can't go over to his or her desk to hash out a problem. Then it's mostly asychronous messaging, or low-bandwidth synchronous messaging (like IM) where you're like "Oh, I didn't know that. I'll try that."'

I think that's why companies like Yahoo decided to end the remote worker policy. IBM may be doing it now to reduce headcount, who knows.

Re:When a few team members usually work at home

[GeekBird]

No, Yahoo ended remote work because their managers were not capable of managing remote workers, and were getting scammed. So they punished the whole company because a few managers couldn't tell that their people weren't really working.

Seriously, one remote guy left because of it, and those of us who took over his job wondered what the fuck he did all day, because stuff was so fucked up and incomplete that it was obvious he was not producing any real results and only doing part-time work for his full-time pay. This was purely his manager's fault for not establishing goals and results, and not keeping track. (In the manager's defense, he had a double-sized team, mostly in office.)

But many of Yahoo's middle managers spent more time kissing ass and playing politics than actually managing.

Do your Busy work Busy bees

[Anonymous Coward]

You know why you don't have a three-hour work week yet? You busy bees are busy making busy work for each other. None of your busy work needs to be done, but golly fucking shit, do you need to pretend to be busy in the name of FAKE PRODUCTIVITY! You don't produce shit, you morons!! Get over yourselves, you DELUSIONAL CUNTS!!!!!!!

Re:Does masturbating at home count as productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Sperm bank won't buy from you unless you're over six feet tall, so chances are no, masturbating doesn't count.

Re:Does masturbating at home count as productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

manlets btfo

Preformers preform, slackers slack

[buss_error]

Doesn't much matter if folks come in to work, or if they work in their underwear at home while skipping a shower for a week. Their productivity is about the same from all I can see. I do feel it's a lot easier for a slacker to goof off at home than in the office. I worked with one person for over a year that was remote, and they told me after they left that basically they surfed the internet and did personal projects most of the time. About the only time they did actual work was when metrics with deadlines were imposed or there was a major outage.

Re:Preformers preform, slackers slack

[Billly Gates]

Maybe because the ones at work sit in meetings for half the day so the productivity was about the same.

Re:Preformers preform, slackers slack

[Anonymous Coward]

And performers perform even better!

Re:Preformers preform, slackers slack

[Anonymous Coward]

I also find it easier if the slackers goof off at home. Once had a office mate who just would not shut up at work, talking about news and stuff on facebook he was reading instead of working.

Re:Preformers preform, slackers slack

[GeekBird]

Ugh!

Re:Does masturbating at home count as productivity

[BeauSD]

Disagree.

Lots of programmers have "autistic-spectrum disorders" - loaded descriptor, I know.

What this means is that we need to lock ourselves in our rooms and just do X. No distractions from the bosses. No girls walking by. Just good solid 12 hour days to actually get work done. That is who we are and why remote jobs are such a good idea in general.

Re:Does masturbating at home count as productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

My high blood pressure went way down since I started masturbating twice a day.

12?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was able skip the whole unproductive showering/getting dressed thing when I worked from home and regularly got in over 14, but usually more. A lot more.

Re:12?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only 14? You goddamn slacker. Your slavemasters demand you work 20 hours every day since you don't have anything else to do. You will work 20 hours every day, 7 days a week, if you want to get paid, and don't you ever think about quitting because you'll never find another job. Get back to work!

Re: 12?

[jmcvetta]

Lazy bum! A REAL infoserf works AT LEAST 26 hours a day, 8 days a week. And that's during the holidays!

Basic Income Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay me a Basic Income and I'll volunteer to work remotely for free. Nope can't organize a society like that. Gotta suck lots of cock! To make the "winners" rich! Well then you can all go fuck yourselves.

Re: Basic Income Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Your ability to communicate coherently and effectively is directly linked to your success in life.

Re:Does masturbating at home count as productivity

[BeauSD]

I know you're being a troll, but your chances of getting prostate cancer will go down as well. Prostate massage, if you can get over it being gross, will lower your chances even more.

-Beau

loaded question

[roman_mir]

Are remote software teams more productive than what? Than local software teams? That is an impossible question to answer without knowing much more about the teams, isn't it?

OTOH as a person running a software business with different types of teams (I have local, I have remote teams) I can say that as long as there is somebody in the remote team capable of understanding the requirement at the business level and capable of managing the team there shouldn't be any reasons for the remote team to be less productive.

Unfortunately as all things in life this also is not as simple, it is very difficult to ensure that the remote team understands the business really well, so rather than trying to achieve the unachievable you have to give out requirements in short, easier to manage portions and you have to coordinate daily.

Your research...

[God of Lemmings]

...should also take into account the office format. Today's open floor plan offices is a horrible environment for programmers to work in.

Re:Your research...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. It's (potentially, depending on the details of the survey) just showing that working from a quiet office beats working in a state of perpetual distraction. Well no shit Sherlock: I would struggle to think of somewhere less conducive to work than a large open plan office, particularly if you mix in something egregiously stupid like hot-desking.

Re: Your research...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd take that over cubes.

Re: Your research...

[Anonymous Coward]

How so? Cubes at least cut down on visual distractions. Add noise-cancelling headphones to cut out background chatter and a desk you can claim and use as your own without neat-freaks complaining about the mess and you have a spot where actual work can occur.

Re: Your research...

[GeekBird]

I wouldn't. Open plan and hot desking are demeaning hell.

I've literally left jobs that moved me to open plan from cubes, I hate it that much. I tried it for over six months each time. So no, give me a cube, or better yet, and office.

Re: Your research...

[GeekBird]

Headphones are not a solution, IMO. They give me headaches and ear infections. Bleah.

For me, it works

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working remotely for about a year, after working for the same company for many years in a more traditional office environment.

It's definitely not for everyone, but I know *I* am more productive working from home. There are some extra distractions (noisy washing machine, kids, etc.), but I have an office with a door that closes, I control the music and temperature, and I'm still in constant contact with my coworkers (who are distributed across the US in various offices and home environments) via IM, email, voice chat, and conference calls.

I live in a small city that is *not* a tech center, so there is no local software development job market. But it does have a low cost of living and I have close local family ties. So if my current employment ended, I would give very high preference to a remote work opportunity. Someone would have to dangle a REALLY big carrot to make me relocate my family halfway across the country to work in an anonymous open cube farm, lose 1-2 hours a day to an infuriating commute, live in a house that costs 10x as much as I'm paying now, and require my wife to re-start her small business in a new market.

I've done all 3 and Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done office, at home, and hybrid. All can work or fail. It really depends on the processes. One of the processes is gonna need to be how to get rid of the bad apples. Another should be to not be cheap and organize trips for face to face meetings at least a couple of times a year.

Regarding "rockstars", I think a good team is better than a rockstar. Especially if the rockstar is keeping the others down, purposely or incidentally. Now, I work in sales (at home) and one of my preferred strategy is to keep track of when known rockstars change jobs because the place they are leaving likely needs (to buy) help.

Re: I've done all 3 and Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say I'm a rockstar where I work, and I believe I have the opposite effect. I help lift the team to operate on a higher level. I've been told from others that it's motivating/inspiring to work with me. (I feel weird writing this "me me me" post but trying to share my honest opinion.)

Re: I've done all 3 and Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

The rockstar is usually the super technical person who's good like 2 or 3 of his peers and saves the day at the last minute. Maybe you're more a "leader" than a "rockstar", which is a good thing.

Re: I've done all 3 and Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like your ego is not out-of-control enough to qualify as a rock star. That's almost always a good thing for your team and employer. Depending on the situation, it can also be better for you individually.

The fiddly shit pays the bills.

[Anonymous Coward]

The PHB has the money, so he calls the shots. His priorities are king. A retarded king.

Build up your savings, because you will burn out. All good programmers burn out.

I can't relate to all those who call Linus an asshole because he harshes out on other people when they screw up. The alternative is way overrated. I feel I get a kind of vicarious revenge on most of the bosses I've had by contemplating his success. It's refreshing to see bad practices punished instead of rewarded.

Re:The fiddly shit pays the bills.

[Tablizer]

The PHB has the money, so he calls the shots.

Give me decent tools/standards and I'll tell and show the PHB's I can do apps in 1/4 the time and with less code. PHB's like pretty shows, but they also want to save money for internal apps. "Pretty will cost you more."

Depends on the person and team

[Gavrielkay]

I've been working remote as a software developer for almost 9 years now. It works well for me and I've been productive even in environments where some of my teammates have been in the office. It requires tools like online meeting software and chat rooms, but it can work really well. I think people feel that being in an office means you can make sure someone is doing their work, but I've had office mates get fired when management figured out they'd been working on personal projects all day long in the office for months.

If your team is structured so poorly that you can't tell if someone is doing their work, it's not a problem with where they sit. Teams can be good or bad, productive or not completely separately from co-location.

If the company is willing to provide the tools then it is just a matter of hiring the right people. And that's true no matter the remote work policy.

Tell your TL to man up

[Billly Gates]

It's his job to be in 6 hours a day to be in meetings. Not you which is what seems to happen in an office. Alot of companies love to eliminate that title and have the uses, PMs, IT leadership, and have them interact directly with the programmers instead to cut costs. So you spend 5 to 6 hours talking about what you are going to do with little results. Working from home forces a Sr programmer to be a lead anD go to guy.

Using this title and making him a supervisor will give you the freedom back to do your job. Hey Mike can you do X before Wednesday sorry I promised the client etc? Your answer is to ask Bob the lead?

Meetings are unproductive

[Anonymous Coward]

Even daily scrums are a fucking immense waste of time. I can understand weekly scrums, but daily? Fuck no - unless a particular high priority project warrants that update frequency.

Re: Meetings are unproductive

[Anonymous Coward]

Daily scrums are a crutch for people who can't communicate and want to fix the blame vector rather than the problem.

Re: Meetings are unproductive

[GeekBird]

Amen.

Also, daily scrums are a way for managers/PMs to micromanage the team down to every little task.

At Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.? NO.

[tlambert]

At Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.? NO.

Remote workers are the people you throw under the stacked ranking bus when it's time to get rid of the people you have no emotional attachment to, so that your friends get to keep their jobs.

There's a reason Yahoo got rid of remote workers, and why they tend not to last long at companies which do stacked ranking in employee evaluations.

Re:At Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.? NO.

[93 Escort Wagon]

There's a reason Yahoo got rid of remote workers

Yeah when I think about a well-managed company that's getting things done, I think of Yahoo...

Re:If you want the best, you enable remote employe

[antdude]

Yes especially for far away people and those can't be mobile like me (disabled).

Yes, remote team can build the wrong thing quickly

[ICantFindADecentNick]

The reason you might want to co-locate is to get the developers to talk to the users. The "distraction" is then the interaction about what it's actually meant to do It's quite shocking to see the difference between messaging and video interaction, and face-to-face (sorry remote working advocates), I can remember the moment we turned up at a remote site after working on a project for six months and seeing the a-ha moment when they realized what it was for.

My Eternal Dream

[Anonymous Coward]

Is only to be more productive for my heroic employer.

CANT POST in the following slashdot article

[Anonymous Coward]

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/02/18/1846238/techdirt-asks-judge-to-dismiss-another-lawsuit-by-that-guy-who-didnt-invent-email

and i was going to post that we all should start suing this clown for negligence ,computer fraud and hacking, copyright infringement , fraud, and ask police authorities to do a civil asset forfeiture of all cash he may have on hand , at his residence and any assets he may have acquired on any profits from this SCAM.

Hire better workers

[AHuxley]

Good workers can work in an office, at home.
They can understand an issue and suggest how long it will take to work on a new or complex problem.
see The Mythical Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

To find good staff word the requirements to exclude average and lazy staff.
Read their paper work, make sure it is correct.
Do interviews. Does the resume match the person? Can the person think about problems when asked?
Change up the questions so no interview is the same.
How much contact with computers did the person have over the years?
Computer hobbies? Did all their education provide access to different computer topics?
Don't hire the applicant who did not have access to new and expensive computers over the years.
Your not working out if a nice person wanted to be a vet, doctor, lawyer ... ask about computers.
A smart person who can think and is articulate during the interview?
Academic results match the paper work presented?
Find good workers and spend time on projects. Your projects are not further education or a charity for very average workers.
Every day wasted on trying to make lazy, average workers happy is a day lost to competitors who had the skills to hire the best workers.
Always hire on merit. Ensure merit is the only consideration.
If you need to hire globally something went very wrong. Any advance nation should have given most of its best students access to computers and a good college education.
Why is that "world-class" person trying to find an international job? Failed in their own nation, failed to get into a top university globally and failed to get a real job from that global education. Having a language skill does not make up for been average.
An average "world-class" applicant is as useful as any average local applicant for the same wage.
If they are still looking for a job, they are not the best. Be aware of online groups, charities and people who help applicants with their paperwork, resumes.
Past interview experiences will be shared. Methods to be ready for complex interviews are offered or sold online.
Always interview and ask new questions.
Talk to a lot of good lawyers before hiring any new staff so the interviews can only result in the best workers been selected.

Re:Hire better workers

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I would add some other items:
Have they ever watched IT Crowd? Officespace? Silicon Valley?
Have they read any books by Asimov, Heinlein, Gibson, Adams, Clarke, or such?
Do they grok?

Re:Hire better workers

[AHuxley]

The other issue is the spread of past application questions on social media by alumni. Graduates globally are getting a lot of support in how to pass interviews.
What questions to expect and how to pass.
Always have new questions ready. Social media has allowed too many graduates to seek advice from people who have taken work related tests.

Re:Hire better workers

[GeekBird]

Computer hobbies? Did all their education provide access to different computer topics?

IOTW, discriminate against people who taught themselves on crappy equipment, only hire people with fancy degrees who know nothing except how entitled they are.

Don't hire the applicant who did not have access to new and expensive computers over the years.

Translation: Discriminate against poor people and people with cheap parents.

Seriously, when I was in high school, the AppleII had just come out. I asked for a computer for Christmas. I got some half-baked mechanical boolean logic "game". I was teaching myself to program on the TTY at school because there wasn't room in the programming class. It was real obvious that I wasn't going to get anywhere with computers at that point. I kept it as a hobby that I would try to do, but didn't try to work with computers again until the 90s, after the PC came out and was affordable.

Depends on noise levels and interruptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Noisy environments and frequent unscheduled interruptions by colleagues and bosses are a big problem.

The answer is out there

[Cigaes]

The answer to the question is visible by just observing the world. What are the best pieces of software out there? Linux, *BSD, PostgreSQL, Vim, FFmpeg (sorry for the shameless plug), Zsh, etc.

Then look at the kind of team that did produce these awesome pieces of software.

I'm not lazy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just interrupted every 10-15 minutes.

But how do you fire them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you send security to their homes, break in, beat them to death, trash everything, set the home on fire? In this case I'm all for it.

Re: Does masturbating at home count as productivit

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you BeauHD cheap versiÃn?

Why not do both??

[pablo_max]

Like this bright spark.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01...

Re:Does masturbating at home count as productivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Any tips on how you keep it down to just 2? Do you look in a mirror alot?

Answer

[JustOK]

This is a very important question and needs an answer now! Until then, everyone should stop working immediately.

Re: Does masturbating at home count as productivit

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how masturbating at work is any more productive?

Yes I can watch far more Netflix at home

[Anonymous Coward]

among other things...

Personal experience

[Anonymous Coward]

This is anecdotal but I do find I'm more productive when working from home. The number of daily interruptions is not as high as some think and the less stressful environment helps with productivity. In fack I find the office noises far more disruptive.

In case of major interruptions at home one can easily make up lost time later in the day as your working hours as a remote programmer are more flexible.

However I did find it difficult to keep the work strictly within the working hours so there was almost always some overtime involved. This is great for the employer but presents a very real risk of burning out quickly.

Context

[mrthoughtful]

In SME there are two crises facing an on-site development team:- first of all they will be expected to 'pick up' all sorts of general tech. support and queries, which is disruptive to the coding flow; they will be expected to be present as 'techs' in marketing pitches - which can be great, but also means not doing their job.

SME tend not to even consider 'working from home' as an option, which can be disconcerting for a modern developer who can use anywhere quiet as a coding location as long as there's some sort of workstation/laptop with an IDE and an internet connection, stuff to eat/drink, a toilet, and a bed.

Working outside the office is (for most developers) really tough for keeping hours - some coders are fine until distracted and then lost. Others just don't stop until they are way beyond productivity. (Every coder knows that they start writing bad code when they are tired).

In larger organisations you can suffer from those and other problems - if you work on-site and you are half-competent, you will be promoted to management, often dealing with the more inexperienced/less competent. Alternatively you will be expected to produce stuff way below your ability, which is just boring. Or you will be pushed into crunch-time continually which is just straight abuse.

TLDR; I don't really think that there's a strong correlation between locality and productivity, whereas a harmonious small team with a good leader (who also codes, and understands the needs and limits of the group) directly correlates with productivity.

Agile is your friend

[tomhath]

Sprints and morning scrums are less important when everyone is in the same room all day. But remote teams benefit greatly for all the reasons you listed.

Re:Agile is your friend

[molarmass192]

Agile is definitely not my friend. It's an veiled excuse for stakeholders to avoid making up their minds from the get go and having engineering pay the price for it. Figure out what you want, write it all down, and we'll give you WIP demos as we go along, if you agree to not say a word. You've changed your mind, that's great, write it up for v1.x. Agile correctly assumes that stakeholders don't know what they want, and as a result it's a playbook for missed deadlines, bloated features, and cost overruns. There are good bits to Agile, morning stand-ups (face-to-face), emphasis on simplicity, and defined blocks of work (personal responsibility), but the rest is Kool Aid, and not the good kind, like the peach-mango Kool Aid kind.

Re:Agile is your friend

[GeekBird]

Scrum is the devil. Agile development "methodologies" are just thinly veiled excuses for total command and control over every bit of minutia on a project, plus a forced speedup and a series of two-week death marches with demands for fast "productivity" at the expense of quality and sanity.

Re:If you want the best, you enable remote employe

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean shitstreet or shitriver?

Offsouring

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a leadin to offshore more.

If Bob works remote and is XYZ more productive, Gupta can work remote and be XYZ+2 moire productive because everyone who would interrupt him is asleep!

One thing scrum is good for. Defined responisibilt

[raymorris]

> also if the management and the rest of the team is willing to make the effort to communicate and coordinate.

If you're the only person working remotely in a company where everyone else is in the office 9-5, I could see that being a problem. If a lot of people work remotely, even working from home two days per week, everyone figures out how to make that work.

In my professional career of almost 20 years I've only worked at a few different companies, but all did remote dev and ops work succesfully. In one company *most* people came to the office most days. Other people lived a thousand miles from the office. In all the other companies most people did not come in the office. I had one guy working for me and for months at a time I didn't know or care where in the world he was at the time.

Currently, I work at a place with scrums three times per week. That pretty well solves the communication issues. I'm not a big fan of Agile and Scrum overall, but it does facilitate communication. This company also has offices all over the world - I think that happened before people starting working remote a lot. Because different teams were already in different countries, all meetings include video conferencing by default. The whole infrastructure and everything is built on the assumption that people may be working from different locations. Therefore it doesn't matter if that location is our UK office or your house - either way I'm working with someone who isn't here in Dallas. Because I'm in Dallas, I *can* go into the office (other co-workers can't), but that requires sitting in traffic. Simply working from home instead of sitting in traffic saves an hour a day of unproductive time.

The company before this one, each person had a well-defined role. Each system had an "owner", someone responsible for that system. I developed amd maintained our online learning system (ecampus), someone else was responsible for the courses hosted on that ecampus, etc. That reduced the need for constant communication and coordination because you didn't have many chefs working on the same stew.

Before that, I worked at a very small company which at one point didn't have any two employees in the same city - we were all remote. At that company we used a ticket system for small jobs, larger jobs werw clearly assigned to one person, thereby reducing the need for constant communication.

As you said, it also depends on the individuals involved, some people are better at remote work than others. A big part of that is a few things you can learn (and teach). A company considering making changes to their remote work policy should consider a short training session for remote workers. Mainly covering these two items:

Set up a seperate work area, away from the normal distractions of the home. In my case, my office is the only thing upstairs, other than some storage and a guest bedroom. I go upstairs to work, I go downstairs to go home. There's never any confusion of whether I'm at work (upstairs) or at home (downstairs). If necessary, the office can be in one corner of a room, but it should be a defined place and with as few household distractions as possible.

Set and keep defined work hours. If I'm downstairs at 10:00 AM, I'm late for work. My wife needs me to do something around the house? I'll do that after 5:00, after work. Similarly, after 5:00 I'm at home with my family - I don't make it a habit to ignore my family at work all evening.

After doing this many years and establishing habits, I can *occasionally* work late in the evening or take care of a household issue during the day, just as people who drive to the office to work occasionally stay late. 90% of the time, though, I keep my work space and work time seperate from my home space and home time. Confusing the two leads to many of the problems people have working from home.

Re:At Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.? NO.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've avoided companies that do stack ranking. I won't work for a company that does it knowingly. I don't want to be in a hostile environment where you have to avoid helping coworkers because you need them to get fired instead of you. You lose good people and cross training that way.

It's a dead end for a career

[rsilvergun]

because you'll never have much in the way of networking opportunities. Sooner or later a bean counter will lay you off and you won't be able to shuffle onto another department because nobody knows you.

I guess if you're OK with moving from job to job, but as you get older and can't work the 10-12 hour days most companies get out of a programmer these days you'll hit a wall in your mid 40s and end up screwed.

Re:It's a dead end for a career

[TheSync]

because you'll never have much in the way of networking opportunities.

Yes but you often get a job from someone you know in another company, rather than the one you are in...

Re:It's a dead end for a career

[Jamie Lokier]

Not if your remote work means you don't often meet people from other companies either.

Re: One thing scrum is good for. Defined responisi

[Anonymous Coward]

A great post. I work remotely 2x / week, and setting up a space, and defined work time is key...you either can do office work, OR domestic work...not both.

Global development can be painful...

[__aaclcg7560]

As a lead video game tester for Accloade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owners, multiple personality disorders), I was responsible for a Nintendo GameBoy Advanced title. I was in California, the producer was on the East Coast, the developer's management team was in London, and the developer's programmers were in Australia. I didn't like this arrangement because I was answering British emails at 6AM, East Coast emails during the day, and Australian emails at 12AM. This around the clock development cycle drove me nuts for four months until the game shipped.

Re:Global development can be painful...

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

OH YES, this is a major issue and totally blows. I've gotten calls at 2:00AM-4:00AM CST from corporate in Ireland, because to them it's in the morning. I need to reboot a production server; and am told it needs to be during off hours. BUT, we have teams in China, Japan, India, UAE (who's weekends are Friday / Saturday and are at work Sunday), Ireland, Germany, Brazil, etc. So there really isn't much of a "no use" timeslot, someone is ALWAYS using a esxi host as they have multiple servers on them...if I send out a notification I get a ton of responses "we use this server at this time" and everyone conflicts. So, now I just wait until Saturday night, take stuff down, and don't even bother to tell anyone. Last time only two people even noticed.

Re:Global development can be painful...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could be part of the reason why Atari no longer develop in Australia. That, and our ridiculous out of control inflation over the last decade.

Re:Global development can be painful...

[__aaclcg7560]

Could be part of the reason why Atari no longer develop in Australia.

Not quite. The CEO of Infogrames borrowed $200M to go on a merger and acquisition spree, buying up Accolade (where I worked) and Hasbro Interactive (which owned the Atari intellectual property), and later renamed Infogrames to Atari. The grand plan was to turn Atari into a multimedia empire and relocate headquarters to the US. Since Vivendi Universal was trying to do that first, the French government nipped that in the bud. That's also when the dot com bust happened. All those studio were sold for pennies on the dollar, including the studio that had developers in Australia.

I'm not a coder, but...

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I know that trying to set up a new server, set up DFS, configure esxi, etc is pretty difficult when people keep walking into my office. A few weeks ago I was trying to re-cable a bunch of patch panels and switches, after the third person walked by and stopped for some random conversation I lost track and plugged a switch back into another twice and caused a small outage.

I end up working 2-3 hours after 5:00PM often because of interruptions, and usually at home on the weekends for another 10-12 hours. I figure I'm up to about 70 hours a week at this point. Almost every conversation ends in "send in a ticket, I'm not going to remember all that and am in the middle of XYZ" which often I can tell annoys them and/or they just don't believe me. Closing the door only makes the end-users knock on it. I finally put up a special sign for my lunch that says "AT LUNCH: UNLESS IT'S ON FIRE FILE A TICKET" that usually seems to help.

The fact that the recently fired my boss, and dropped all his responsibilities into my lap isn't helping either. He hated documentation, had worked there for 12 years, and had everything in his head. I've only been there for a bit over six months.

Re:I'm not a coder, but...

[GeekBird]

He hated documentation, had worked there for 12 years, and had everything in his head.

Auuugh! I hate that!

Seriously people, document as you go.

Let me tell you why: Accidents happen.

Do you know what happens to all that lovely detail data that you keep in your head after a concussion? Yeah, it's has gaping holes, or is completely gone.

I hate to think of how many projects and departments get derailed by auto wrecks ands major illnesses.

I'm still cleaning up stuff left half completed by a guy who went on medical leave a year ago.

Re:I'm not a coder, but...

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

If I had an auto wreck or a major illness my company would probably collapse within a few days. I've made a semi-secret Drupal site on our Nagios box with a ton of notes, but there is only one other network admin in our company that has 15+ sites world-wide and just under 1,000 employees.

OP conflates 2 different things

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, your team will be more productive if you hire the best people, and some of those best may be from another country. But not every company can hire the world's best people, so most of us have to deal with average people, and at that point, you are dealing with the differences of average people in the same building vs average people spread across time zones. And that matters, because it magnifies all the communication differences, cultural differences, and little personality quirks (never replies to email with email, etc)

It works for me.

[ChristopherPecoraro]

I'm an American abroad, so working remotely has given me the chance to tap back into the U.S./U.K. market while living in a city that isn't the best for software development. In some busy Southern European cities, getting to work everyday can often be a huge barrier to most people who didn't grow up there. For me, having virtually no distractions is wonderful. Also, having a few hours "by myself" due to the timezone shift allows me to stay focused for a few hours and then "lock on" with the team. No gossipy secretary, no co-workers cracking jokes, no phones ringing, and I can choose the temperature, humidity, color/quantity of light, and every other environmental variable to suit my needs exactly.

Re: Yes, remote team can build the wrong thing qui

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like bad management of the tech guys. You want them to collaborate, but do not want to waste the non tech staff time by making them schedule time for collaboration with tech.

So, fuck you. You don't get to interrupt my staff to help your project without a billing code. If your internal billing system is a hassle, don't blame me or tech, talk to accounting.

It's bitztream

[Anonymous Coward]

The autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating Slashdot troll!

Not as much as

[epyT-R]

pointless interruptions, bureaucracy, and boilerplate paperwork.

Remote working can be very productive

[amoeba47]

FWIW, I work remotely with a team based in an office. The performance metrics such as number of stories completed, rate of tasks completed, story point difficulty and commit history metrics show that I'm actually the most production member on the team. I think remote working is great, you can do what needs to be done and work more autonomously, but the productivity would depend on the person being employed.

So

[BitztreamNotARealNam]

How's life in the hypocrite lane?

Re: If you want the best, you enable remote employ

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be an MBA...

10 - 15 minutes at least

[Kellamity]

I got interrupted over an hour ago.

I'm just going to go home...

Super-programmers Still Win

[Anonymous Coward]

Per Fred Brooks, if you have super-programmers you will see 10:1 productivity gains. It doesn't matter where they are located.

From California, I manage programmers working in India, Pakistan and Russia. I don't spy on them or clock their hours. I write design specs. We mutually agree on sprint deadlines to deliver the features in the spec. Each workday I get an end-of-day email that lists what got done today and what the developer plans to do tomorrow. All code checked into git at end-of-day. Tasks tracked in Trello Kanban. A few emails to discuss design issues. No phone calls. No skype calls, No scrums. If anyone is ill or has a family thing, they let me know they're taking a day off. If there's an obstacle I failed to plan for, I'll de-scrope or make a design change. Those who can't cut it will fail to turn in their progress reports.

Re:Super-programmers Still Win

[GeekBird]

That's because you manage people by expecting them to be adults, and they step up and do the work.

Re:At Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.? NO.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo got rid of remote workers because Marissa Mayer was clueless, and looked at the VPN to see if people were active. As someone who worked at Yahoo, I can attest to the fact that no one used the VPN except to change their password and a few other administrative tasks. Remote workers instead used the SSH jump box that was available and didn't require the VPN at all. So she made a significant business decision based on a flawed understanding of how the company operated. Something she chose to do on her own, without soliciting any input on how the company operated. It's really a reflection on her deeply flawed style of operation that finished running Yahoo into the ground.

No magic bullet: Remote works if done well.

[luis.falcao.magalhae]

Hey guys. I've been working as a remote executive coach for the past year - this basically means that I help businesses hire and integrate remote workers into their workflow and management. So it goes without saying that I'm biased. If you want credentials, you can find several of my writings on the subject at the remote recruitment company I work with: www.distantjob.com That said, it is my experience that a successfully implemented remote work regimen reduces costs and boosts productivity - IF you have hired the right people. And IF you have created the right conditions. The right people must be self-sufficient and self-motivating. I used to think that remote working would be heaven - then I started working remotely and DAMN, it takes a lot of discipline. So hiring the right people is key. Then you need to be sure that your processes are up to snuff. Communication needs to be seamless, and preferably by video to capture as much as possible of the human element. It's also important to make sure remote employees are includes in the company culture, something that is easier said than done in many cases, and needs to be figured out on a case-by-case basis. And the team workflow must be set up in such a way that remote employees don't block co-located ones, and vice-versa - I've personally found out that the Agile framework works really well here, as long as a robust communications system is in place. This is all a bit general, so if anyone has any specific questions, feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

Must be doing something right

[MooseMiester]

I run a virtual company, which has been in business for just over six years. We're literally scattered about the planet - Texas, Illinois, Detroit, Poland, Ukraine, the UK. We're very successful, very green, and extremely productive.

All our systems are cloud based, we use multiple communications tools (Skype, Uber Conference, Google Hangouts, Goto Meeting, etc.) .

The way you make this work is by hiring "A" players who are passionate about the work, and are quick to fire whiney complainers who carry a sense of entitlement.

Re:At Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.? NO.

[GeekBird]

Yep.

Stack ranking automatically penalizes people who aren't present to be "seen" and play politics. If you mentor others but don't self promote and kiss ass, the people you help will keep their jobs and you won't.

Stack ranking is evil, and destructive to real collaboration and teamwork, regardless of how densely you pack them in and how much you micromanage sprints.