I'm excited to be joining InVision as a Principal Engineer working on Studio.
Years ago, before I began working remotely full time, I would often steal away to a hidden conference room on some sparsely inhabited floor to hide out and work. Getting work done often meant getting away from the office chatter.
The sounds of other people working can be overwhelming. It doesn't take much to overload my senses and shut down my brain.
The nature of remote work changes the nature of communication. Chatter for remote workers comes in a different form. Messages are often asynchronous and non-blocking. The result is longer periods of intense focus and concentration. Productivity ensues.
As much as we still complain about our clogged inboxes, for remote workers, noise is seldom the problem. It's silence.
If a little quiet is good for work, then more quiet should be better, right? For me, a prolonged lull in email, chat room conversations, and @mentions can have its own negative effects.
Even the most independent people need regular human interaction. I normally work at home, where we also homeschool our kids. When not at home, I frequent local coffee shops with friends in the industry. I'm rarely alone.
Yet the co-workers I work with most are in North Carolina and South Dakota, quite the hike from North Texas.
When online communication lapses, it's easy to feel isolated with that kind of distance between team members.
We all have our areas of expertise within our organizations. We are the keepers of certain domain knowledge. While it can become taxing to constantly field questions, there's a joy in sharing that knowledge with others. For better or worse, we often form our identities on being The API Guy, The JavaScript Gal, The HR Lady, or The Product Person.
When people stop asking you questions it's easy to begin doubting (however misguidedly) the value you bring to the team.
Chatter is seldom constant. Every din will eventually recede during periods of travel, holidays, and life events. It's the artificial lulls that you have to watch. Here are some things that help me handle that cycle.
Never work alone. It sounds obvious, but your chances of getting isolated decrease considerably when you're actively part of a team. Enlist support for features or initiatives you want to work on, or pitch in on someone else's efforts. We're better together.
Look out for each other. On the flip side, don't become so blinded by your own TODO list that you fail to notice when a co-worker has gone radio silent. An email, IM, or phone call has real power to help someone feel more included. I have no official HR responsibilities, but I try to reach out to new GitHubbers a few weeks after they're hired, just to say "I'm glad you're here, are you getting plugged in?"
Embrace the rhythm. Take advantage of those brief periods of peace and quiet, knowing things will get loud again soon.
Embrace the noise as the soothing sounds of :ship:-ing.
DHH on hiring:
So stop whining, spend a day to get up to speed on remote working practices, and hire outside of your commuter zone.
At Pure Charity, we all work remotely. Karthik previously shared his thoughts on building distributed teams which gives a bit of detail on how we work.
I've been working in distributed teams exclusively for the last four years, for both small firms and very large teams. It's not for everyone. Working remotely requires self discipline and a results-based team culture. These are characteristics of any successful team. They're just more easily masked in a traditional office setting that equates hours in the office with productivity.
Even though we all work remotely, we still value face time. Some problems are better solved in a huddle around a whiteboard. We aim to get together as a full team once a quarter. Two thirds of our team are in the DFW area. Those of us who can meet up and co-work every other week or so to pair in person. That's why when we hire, we look locally, but we hire remotely, based on skills and team fit.
Great take on apprenticeship from Chad Fowler and the folks at Living Social:
Today we’re launching a new program at LivingSocial called Hungry Academy. Hungry Academy is a five month intense entrepreneurial immersion that will take raw, hungry talented programmers (and aspiring programmers!) and develop them into ultra-productive software engineers. Those that make it through to the end will be offered a position on our development team and paired with a mentor from LivingSocial’s growing list of some of the industry’s most talented software engineers. Best of all, we will pay you to attend. Your job for five months is to take your craft and career to the next level.
Hunger definitely marks good programmers, right up there with laziness, impatience, and hubris.