Pocket Book Reviews - Remote

This book was almost entirely nothing new for me - it's been what I've been living for almost three years at this point, and I feel like it could be summarized into a longish list of bullet points... which is what I'll do!

This book might be a nice onboarding gift for new employees to a remote company.

• an office is less productive than you think it is; people are more productive alone

• commuting sucks

• this has never been possible before; technology made remote working a thing in like the last 10 years

• async-first development (less meetings, more message boards) is more thoughtful and easier to wrap our lives around

• loads of talented people exist outside of major tech hubs, we can hire the best workers from Calgary and Saskatchewan and Idaho

• it's better for the environment and cheaper for the company

• you can still have optional offices, but you'll find that you barely need them

• requires disciplined workers

• synchronous meetings are great, but they eat productive time like candy and they should be rare when we want to Get Shit Done

• butts-in-seats was never a good metric of productivity anyways

• everyone with a laptop should be doing full disk encryption, in case that laptop gets lost (I do this on my cruisin' around laptop but I should also do it on my portable-office laptop)

• everyone should be using 2FA and password managers

• everyone's phone should be using lock codes and should auto-lock, not any of the less-secure authentication methods (faces, fingerprints, no auth)

• everyone's phone should be remotely wipable

• this is a concrete competitive advantage vs. large companies that do make everyone share an office

• interrupting people just to get your own problem solved is common in offices, and makes everyone's job way harder

• it's important that everyone's schedule overlap for at least 4 hours - latency on important conversations should be way less than a day. Many remote workers are open to keeping weird work hours in order to make this possible.

• cameras can be good - seeing faces can lend more of a sense of community to an office

• everything you need to do your job should be company-public and available to everybody all the time - github, docs, tasks, if it's trapped on your computer or in your inbox the company can't find it. Async work requires that everything be an open book.

• Slack (okay, they say "campfires", but slack) is vital for camaraderie - because we don't interact in person, there's a greater requirement for us to get to know one another through casual banter and that's what Slack is for.

• Basecamp's "what are you doing today/what are you doing this week" are important tools for getting a feel of what everyone is working on

• the yardstick for everyone is the quality and timeliness of their work; you can't get by by merely being pleasant and inoffensive, because that's harder to SEE remotely

• rando disasters rarely claim an entire company's day or cause downtime, the whole company knows how to work from anywhere

• meetings as a first resort are anti-patterns - meetings as a tool of first resort can solve every problem but at the cost of spending n^2 time on it (a 15 minute meeting with 8 people has cost 2 productive hours, plus any context-switching time)- and so should be treated with extreme care. Don't use a meeting to solve a problem unless everything else has been tried already, and avoid meetings whenever possible.

• producers/managers/pms are anti-patterns - not only are they a leading source of meetings, they often feel the need to constantly harangue people for status updates. very good producers do not dominate people's schedules.

• you need human interaction to live and if your home-office doesn't have a lot of other people around you need to find some friends to hang out with on the regular

• if you're not careful, work-from-home will come to dominate your life, be careful not to make work your only hobby

• ergonomics are huge. sure, laptop on the couch is a nice treat, but if you're going to be working for a stretch do it at a desk, with the screen at eye level, a big monitor, and your feet flat on the floor.

• you're gonna get faaaaaat; the company can try to help but you're gonna get faaaaaaaat. get some exercise, fatty.

• remote workers are more loyal than hub-workers, because

• who wants to leave a great remote workplace?

• getting paid San Francisco rates to work in Idaho makes you KING OF IDAHO; this is no excuse to pay Idaho rates but it means we can keep people longer than we normally would

• they can change their life around without having to leave their job

• this lends to much more employee continuity, which is a great thing.

• remote work massively amplifies drama. one valuable element to in-person work is that a smile and basic social graces can defuse a lot of tension, and that tension never disappears in remote work. this means you need to signal boost optimists, shut down pessimism, crack down on snippy comments and passive aggression, and carefully monitor the company's tone to keep it positive (editor's note: as a leading source of snippy comments I 100% see why this is valuable advice),

• remote work can feel flat - it's really important to have non-work hobbies so that one's day doesn't become an endless gray mash of work

• don't ask hiring riddles - they're dumb

• remote communication is largely written; being able to write confidently and quickly is enormously important for remote workers. when hiring, find some way to check out your prospective employees' writing skills - read their READMEs, read their blog posts, read their cover letter, heck, read read read, it makes you a better writer

• meet people in person before you hire them

• hold company meetings, "at least twice a year", if possible in fun and interesting places. they're vital for keeping people connected.

• large open-source projects are totally structured this way, too, and they manage to deliver huge amounts of value with huge numbers of passionate contributors

• do one-on-ones regularly to get a feel for what people are thinking; sometimes a one-on-one is the only way to hear something you need to hear.

• clear bottlenecks and roadblocks - does only one person understand how to do the deploy? do you need one person's approval to ship everything? this is easier to deal with when everyone's together in an office, and harder to deal with when that person's remote. Build processes and technology where everybody is empowered to move things forward.

• be on the lookout for employees who are killing themselves - if you're hiring talented, driven people, and giving them a cool product to work on, they're going to work, no question. What you should watch out for is when they start to take on more than they can handle - give them extra time off, encourage them to use their vacation - frazzled employees make bad decisions and ugly mistakes.

• build a routine for yourself every day with concrete work and non-work times, and take steps to make work-time feel different from non-work-time by having (for example)

• separate "work" and "play" computers

• a work "place" (cafe, co-working desk)

• a "work only" home office

• actual work clothes

• work slippers

• learn a bit about the science of motivation ; trying to induce yourself to do something with rewards or punishments is essentially ineffective. do work you want to do, or talk to someone about why you don't want to do that work.

• you're free. be a nomad if you want to be. wanna live on an island for a few months? go do that. if you're a bit of a night owl, you can make your overlap time work from just about anywhere in the world.

• change where you work from now and again just to have some changes of scenery in your life

• spend time with your family

• be loud on the company channels. make people look at the work you're doing. it's easy for remote workers to vanish, and you absolutely can not vanish.

The original site didn't record this post's date; this one is approximate.