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

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

[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

[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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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)

[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?

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.