Dale and I worked together (more or less remotely) for a number of years. There is another side to this story that he doesn't bring out.
There are managerial challenges when you are responsible for for is working remotely. For the first 3 years or so of Hypernumbers we were rotating between 7- and 6- day working, going down to 5-day working in the summer.
The real concern when you are working with young developers (I was mid-40s, Dale was early 20s) is about burnout. Particularly with software developers. Young men working long and engaging hours with addictive work practices, with the usual poor dietary habits - this is a bad accident waiting to happen. At if.com we had a particular developer who physically turned green during a big push. Easy to spot in the work place, remotely not so much...
Dale has a quite common tendency for diurnal drift - a 25 hour cycle. Nothing wrong with it, slightly alarming when you sign off in chat at midnight, go to bed, start up at 7am when you get up and he's still there. Diurnal drift can rapidly turn into social isolation though (and a one way ticket to the bin).
Our industry has a lot of people at one end of the autistic spectrum - and remote working is not an policy for everyone.
Domestic circumstances also count a lot - support at home, friends, community stuff.
I heartily agree with what Dale says about communication, practices and procedures. I have long thought that the main lesson of open source projects is that they can only succeed if all the modalities are tip-top. We adopted 'open source processes' at hypernumbers to drive quality - and remotish working helped drive them in.
The circumstances of hypernumbers were a bit different though. Normally you would look to colocate the person specifying the system and the people who are writing it. With hypernumbers we spent the first couple of years essentially cloning Microsoft Excel so the business processes were optimised for remote working. (This is also one reason why open source programmes are dominated by clones.)
So it is a bit more nuanced I think than in his write up.
Would I hire remote workers again? Yes I would. Contrary to received wisdom I try and hire people from the 'other' end of the autistic spectrum (the end I would put Dale on).
On conventional measures of productivity (production SLOC per person per day) I would regard the experience at hypernumbers very highly - although the total difference in working procedures versus if.com where I have 'before' measurements from make it hard to allocate outcomes to a particular aspect of how we worked.
I work from home all the time and I agree heartily with what you've said regarding burnout. It's that "work feels empty and I don't want to touch a computer" feeling and I can always tell when it starts to come on, usually following an intense week-two week push. When it does, I make sure not to touch the computer or atleast touch it minimally until I start to feel excitement to work on something again (usually takes 3 to 4 days).
I also have to take issue with his routine - diurnal drift has always been a problem for me (hard for me to get up early, easy to stay up late == bad sleeping habits and a sloppy daily routine); I find I cannot maintain a structured and meaningful routine if I start slipping outside of my established "get up early (early here is 7AM or 6AM), shower, work, exercise, read, sleep" cycle (excluding other creature habits like meals &c...).
I'm a rare one in that I don't actually socialize with any developer community at all - but I do have a vibrant and active social life outside of computers - most of my friends aren't anywhere near the programmer/developer culture. I would say exercise (I hit a CrossFit gym three times per week) and an active social life, whatever that means to you, and a structured daily routine are the keys to working remotely and on your own.
From a managers perspective it is very difficult to manage.
Internet startups have a cult-like culture at the moment - uber-important, the 'next Google' and all that statistically unlikely guff - with remote working that can make a perfect storm for mental illness.
That was the sort of stuff that used to keep me up at nights. People were doing long hours for shite wages, the last thing you want is to fry their neurons. Burn out is more than just 'don't want to touch the computer for a couple of days' - you can really damage people.
I manage a remote worker and I'm the CTO of my own co-founded startup; yes there's a lot of stuff going on all at once, but I think it's a bit extreme to posit anything related to mental illness. If someone tanks like that, it's their failure as an individual to know what their boundaries are and how to uphold those boundaries (this would go so far as to even quit the job or stop what you are doing till you are well again).
I had to learn those personal lessons the hard way - a long time ago I was a quintessential nerd in that I didn't ever exercise, eat properly, or maintain a healthy routine AND I worked 80+ hour weeks. That was in an office with co-workers. Burnout wasn't just the symptom, it was one of many symptoms of a deep psychological shortcoming on my part: self-worth. The more self-esteem you have, generally, the more capable of knowing what your boundaries are and how/when to uphold them in the face of an encroaching white collar executive that doesn't understand what you do or why staring at a screen for 12 hours and eating donuts as a breakfast "bonus" is (IMHO) mistreatment. That example is an extreme one, but it's where I came from and now I manage my time effectively, have an equilibrium in my life that is healthy and feels good, and I own my own company...
> If someone tanks like that, it's their failure as an individual to know what their boundaries are and how to uphold those boundaries
I disagree - managers have a duty of care towards their employees.
> The more self-esteem you have, generally, the more capable of knowing what your boundaries are and how/when to uphold them in the face of an encroaching white collar executive that doesn't understand what you do or why staring at a screen for 12 hours and eating donuts as a breakfast "bonus" is (IMHO) mistreatment.
I'm sorry but employment is a power-relationship and saying that the critical thing is 'self-esteem' is simply wrong.
> managers have a duty of care towards their employees.
I agree with this, but I still maintain the original point you were responding to - I still think it is an individual responsibility.
> I'm sorry but employment is a power-relationship and saying that the critical thing is 'self-esteem' is simply wrong.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "power-relationship" a bit more? I still do think self-esteem is a critical component; when you are hiring people to be a cog in the wheel, the last thing you look for is individuality - so yes, when herding the sheep, as a manager you come from the power position and benefit by taking care of your sheep so they output most effectively.
But I suppose the question over which points are being argued here has more to do with what kind of personality we are talking about? Like I said, I agree with what you say when the person in question is desirable as a replaceable part (as is the case in many larger corporations) but I disagree when we start talking about autonomous individuals (the irreplaceable people in an organization - small or large).
I suppose it was my fault for relating the concept of "remote worker" with one of "autonomous individual" - when in fact there are people of many different personality types and roles that engage in remote working.
It's definitely a two-way street. Employees bear some degree of responsibility for self-esteem and upholding of limits. At the same time, managers bear a big degree of responsibility for the productivity and wellbeing of their employees. And when they cross lines and reject reasonable limits, that shouldn't be seen by default as the employee's failing.
I've worked for a big corporation in the past that bore a particularly onerous, victim-blaming animus toward its employees. Anytime anyone, anywhere, had an issue with his boss, he was told to "learn to manage upward." "Managing upward" became a catch-all excuse for allowing a boss's failures to be re-characterized as your own. As it so happened, our division had a few downright abusive bosses. I mean, abusive in the legally actionable sense of the word. And their direct reports would invariably try to "manage upward," then get firmly reprimanded for doing so. To top it off, they'd be labeled internally as malcontents, politically isolated, and subjected to further abuses. Not surprisingly, very few people below the upper-middle-management tier of this company stuck around for longer than a year.
I am your boss. I allocate your work. Your pay depends on me. Your promotion depends on me. Your reference for your next job depends on me. I can fire you.
I'm also naturally prone to staying up late and sleeping late. I've been that way since I was a (young) teenager. My normal routine is going to bed between 2 and 3am and getting up between 9 and 10am. It works out fine, but if I don't keep that schedule, I'm worthless the next day.
After years of working from home and feeling rather unsatisfied with it, a couple of years ago I started to lay down a more firm schedule. Work from 10 to1, break for lunch, work from 1:30 to 5:30 or 6. A few months ago, I turned the guest bedroom into a dedicated office space. Both of these things have made a tremendous difference.
Without a dedicated workspace and a set schedule, I find that I end up working off and on throughout the day, easily distracted, tending to wander. As a result, I would be less productive, but yet it would feel like I was always working. That lead to some serious issues with burnout and depression and made it very difficult to spend any sort of quality time with my family.
There are managerial challenges when you are responsible for for is working remotely. For the first 3 years or so of Hypernumbers we were rotating between 7- and 6- day working, going down to 5-day working in the summer.
The real concern when you are working with young developers (I was mid-40s, Dale was early 20s) is about burnout. Particularly with software developers. Young men working long and engaging hours with addictive work practices, with the usual poor dietary habits - this is a bad accident waiting to happen. At if.com we had a particular developer who physically turned green during a big push. Easy to spot in the work place, remotely not so much...
Dale has a quite common tendency for diurnal drift - a 25 hour cycle. Nothing wrong with it, slightly alarming when you sign off in chat at midnight, go to bed, start up at 7am when you get up and he's still there. Diurnal drift can rapidly turn into social isolation though (and a one way ticket to the bin).
Our industry has a lot of people at one end of the autistic spectrum - and remote working is not an policy for everyone.
Domestic circumstances also count a lot - support at home, friends, community stuff.
I heartily agree with what Dale says about communication, practices and procedures. I have long thought that the main lesson of open source projects is that they can only succeed if all the modalities are tip-top. We adopted 'open source processes' at hypernumbers to drive quality - and remotish working helped drive them in.
The circumstances of hypernumbers were a bit different though. Normally you would look to colocate the person specifying the system and the people who are writing it. With hypernumbers we spent the first couple of years essentially cloning Microsoft Excel so the business processes were optimised for remote working. (This is also one reason why open source programmes are dominated by clones.)
So it is a bit more nuanced I think than in his write up.
Would I hire remote workers again? Yes I would. Contrary to received wisdom I try and hire people from the 'other' end of the autistic spectrum (the end I would put Dale on).
On conventional measures of productivity (production SLOC per person per day) I would regard the experience at hypernumbers very highly - although the total difference in working procedures versus if.com where I have 'before' measurements from make it hard to allocate outcomes to a particular aspect of how we worked.