I have been working remotely full time for about 10 years. I have some opinions about it.
This will be a 3-part series. First, I want to give some background. Then, I’ll discuss how to set up a process and culture to effectively manage remote work. Finally, I’ll talk about best practices as a contributor.
Some of my background
Prior to working remotely, I worked in an office as a developer. Somewhere around 2011-ish I started to log in to work remotely. It was a small company and I had a lot of leeway in my position. I had root + ssh access to the servers, and I was largely as responsible for ops as I was for development. (We didn’t call it DevOps back then.) Most of my development at the time took place on the dev server - I didn’t use a local setup at the time. I learned how to set up a SOCKS proxy to the dev server over SSH. I could do development and I could access via browser my work that wasn’t exposed to the public internet. Our desk phones were SIP phones. I had a SIP client with a SOCKS proxy. I could take calls just as if I was at my desk. I mainly only used this setup for a few things after hours or on sick days.
One day, my manager called me into his office. “You seem to get a lot more done when you’re at home.” Of course, I did.
Now, I wouldn’t recommend that setup for full-time work. My bandwidth wouldn’t have supported video calling well. Our team and company culture wasn’t set up for us to communicate effectively remotely. It was important that I was in the building with other stakeholders. We had an XMPP server, but we didn’t have Slack or Zoom. But that was 2011 and this post would not have been nearly as relevant then.
Even when I first started working remotely for another small, local startup, it was a new and strange experience. I’d later learn what all I did wrong and why it wasn’t ideal. We didn’t video call, and it was weird and intrusive when someone actually tried to video call. GoToMeeting was flaky and I had better results dialing in versus the desktop client. Screen sharing was great, but that was the only effective thing. We still mostly talked by phone daily and had weekly in-person meetings. In 2014 the tech was practically there, but it was all new. I wouldn’t recommend this setup either.
The office
Office work is riddled with issues.
Inadequate equipment / workspace. I worked at a desk with a half-wall. I measured the “desk” once - it was a short 20”-ish counter top - not even a desk. Sitting that close to your monitor is not good for your eyes. At one point I got my hands on a keyboard tray and installed it myself to hopefully move away from the monitor a bit. By the way, I worked at a another company with basically the same counter-tops-as-desks. Apparently this was normal, but it’s definitely not good for eyes or posture. You’re lucky if you’re issued a decent-sized monitor. Really, bring your own monitor, mouse, and keyboard if you can get away with it.
Shoulder-tapping is the worst. If someone wants to ask you a question, they can simply walk up behind you. After all, you’re just sitting quietly at your desk - you don’t look busy. You might be an hour and a half into tracking down a bug that only appears when you hold your head a certain way, and you’re taken totally out of that head-space because, after all, you don’t look busy.
Cross talk and side conversations. The half-walls didn’t block any noise, and it was unavoidable to have the 6 of us in the room talking across to each other. Sure, you can try headphones, but it’s almost impossible to avoid joining a conversation.
Meetings away from your computer. We had desktops back then, so when you spin around to the conference table or over into the conference room, you have a notepad with you at best. Boss wants a project status? Hope you wrote things down. On paper. And ad hoc meetings can happen, because you’re all right there together. And you don’t look busy.
The in-office experience is often a series of distractions that make us look busy, and we’re the most actually productive when we’re quiet but don’t look busy.
The worst of both worlds
I won’t unprofessionally name names. I worked briefly for a contract firm that has offices in various less-urban centers. The COO once held a town hall and was asked about remote work. She happily said, “It’s our policy that you get the benefit of working from home one day per month, so you are encouraged to use that. But it’s important that we’re all in the office so we are collaborating and learning from each other.”
So, there I was. I was in an office of 40-ish people. Most people were working on projects for different clients - between 1 and 3 devs per client. I overheard everyone’s daily standups for their clients. I heard about the particularly friendly but loud coworker talk about dropping off the kids every morning. On my project for my client, I was collaborating with: 1 coworker from another office, 1 coworker that we subcontracted in another state, 2 coworkers who were on-site in at the client’s office, and 3 team members in India. On my counter-top desk, I juggled between the company-issued laptop and the client-issued laptop. It was, of course, very important that I was in the office.
In practice, I had a handshake agreement with my director to WFH 2-3 days per week.
During 2020, that same company was proudly boasting about how they were early adopters of remote work, and you should hire them because they are already prepared to handle the pandemic. 🙄
The tools
But it’s not all bad. The ticketing system is online - whether it’s Jira, Trac, or the home-rolled system we used back then. Really, all of our work is online. The SVN server was centralized. Of course, we have GitHub today. Between tickets and code reviews, most of that stuff is already online.
Even when we were in the same room, we were able to cut down the cross-talk with XMPP (chat). Of course, today we use Slack or Teams.
To cut down on shoulder-tapping, it’s a whole lot better better to do screen sharing. Asking a colleague for help is a lot easier when you just use Meet, Zoom, or Slack Huddles to share a screen.
And ad hoc phone calls would be less disruptive if they are calendar events instead. At first, it seems pretentious to send a 30-minute invite to someone when you could just pick up the phone, but it’s actually more respectful of their time.
But, here’s the thing. Once you’ve implemented the necessary tools and culture to optimize in-office work, you no longer need the office. Indeed, the best in-office environment is nearly identical to remote work.
The pandemic
During 2020, about 35% of the workforce was working remotely at the peak, up from 6%. That’s over 40 million people suddenly sent home to work. (link)
A great many people have formed a strong opinion of remote work based on this experience.
Since then, that number has return to about 7.7%. (link) So, remote work is only slightly up from pre-pandemic levels.
That means that millions of people were sent home - maybe with a laptop, maybe not - and were expected to figure out how to do their job with little preparation. Zoom boomed during that period, and millions of people were using it for the first time. The idea of using Slack or Teams for daily communication was foreign to most of these folks. Amazon was sold out of most decent webcams. Managers had no idea how to manage or measure performance.
There is a stark difference between a culture that is built to be remote-first and being suddenly sent home during the pandemic. Over the next couple parts, I’ll discuss how to effectively manage and contribute to remote team work.
Backlash
Now there is a loud public discourse regarding the effect of remote work on productivity. Elon Musk has been a very vocal opponent. More on that later. CNBC cites a $664 billion loss in productivity and blames remote work for it. USA Today cites research that 32% of hiring managers saw an increase in productivity while 22% cite a loss in productivity. Of course, I’d be curious what their metrics are. (More on this later.) Forbes seems to sit on the fence promoting a hybrid model. I believe that flexibility - having some folks in the office - can be a good thing, but a rigid “hybrid” model, such a a policy of 2-3 days per week in-office, misses the mark and misses the point. Interestingly, the Bureau of Labor Statistics sites a slight increase in productivity through 2022 correlated with remote work - though this might be hard to prove as causative. As of 2022, businesses were first realizing the recovery from tumultuous policies from 2021.
Regardless of public perception, I’ll contend that when done correctly, remote work will not lead to a loss in productivity.
Up next
Next, we’ll discuss the details of managing remote teams and how that already overlaps with in-office concerns. Then, we’ll discuss how to effectively contribute as a remote worker: remaining accountable while reaping the benefits of the freedom to choose your environment.
Quick note
Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order ending remote work for federal employees. Nothing in this post is meant to be commentary on that policy. This article was written weeks before this new policy was written. Federal executive agencies comprise a behemoth bureaucracy that may be able to ultimately benefit from all the suggestions I make here, but that doesn’t support this policy being correct or misguided today. This article is more a reaction to how businesses have responded to remote work since 2020, particularly made public with regard to X and Tesla.