> I cannot conceive of a reason we'd track screen time for employees, remote or otherwise. I can model why a company which had an adversarial relationship with employees might want to do that (to discourage shirking). We do not have an adversarial relationship with our employees, and (hopefully) have more interesting utility functions than that.
its not about the company. See you guys are in a unique position - you have an in-office team and you have a remote team. So it is a A versus B for those people - people who are having to commute for hours to work, mandatorily sit at their computer screens . Versus others who wake up late (because no commute) and can walk about the house in their pyjamas.
How do you deal with the perceived imbalance in quality of life between these two teams ? I asked about mandatory screen time from that perspective. Because there is a set of people who are working synchronously - is there no cognitive drop off between them and the remote team who may have chosen to take their dog walking at the same time when a team decides to ping on a code bug question ? this wouldnt be an issue if everyone was in office together.
An all remote team is a simpler setup. I'm not at all arguing for one or the other - i do understand some people are very social and need people around them (like me) and others work best at their homes. However, after having run large orgs, I do know if you have both kinds simultaneously together - there is a massive grass-is-greener issue. The remote workers think that the in-house employees have more management "ear time" and the in-house employees grumble at the remote workers taking it easy. I have massive respect for you guys, if you have built a cultural practice that neutralises this issue.
>Something Stripe Atlas does, for example, is schedule time for the team to low-key socialize without an explicit agenda
How do you do this ? any learnings here? this is something i have wondered a LOT about.
> So it is a A versus B for those people - people who are having to commute for hours to work, mandatorily sit at their computer screens . Versus others who wake up late (because no commute) and can walk about the house in their pyjamas.
It's a false dichotomy. It's not commute + "mandatory" screen time vs. sleeping in and wearing PJs.
When I worked in offices, I enjoyed commuting, it gave me time to listen to podcasts and transition between home and work. Working in an office with other people brought many opportunities to socialize, get pulled into impromptu conversations, take long lunches, and leave really early (to beat the commuters) if I needed to get home for some kid's after-school activity.
I work remotely now, and I still have to wake up on time, get dressed (hello video chat!), and be accountable. If I step away for a measurable amount of time, then I let people know in chat. It's far easier for a remote person to engage in overwork because there's not a clear boundary for when you're "at work" vs. "at home" (unless you create one). For better or worse, I "work more" as a remote employee than I ever did in an office.
The office folks who commute sometimes get to work late (traffic, train/bus issues, etc.), are pulled into random conversations and are unexpectedly unavailable just as much as any remote person. Are they contributing more by being in the office, or is the value just in their "presence", that you could literally tap them on the shoulder?
IMO, It all comes down to communication and empathy. If you're experiencing a major issue because you have to wait 10 minutes for someone to finish walking their dog, then imagine that person were in the office but in the bathroom. Would you still sneer at them because they were holding you up? Very few conversations are _SO_ urgent that you absolutely need an answer immediately. Having remote coworkers allows us to engage more thoughtfully with each other, and often pushes us to write more (and more useful) documentation so that we _aren't_ expecting immediate answers from any specific human.
>Having remote coworkers allows us to engage more thoughtfully with each other, and often pushes us to write more (and more useful) documentation so that we _aren't_ expecting immediate answers from any specific human.
this is very interesting - is this emergent behavior or have you guys figured out some todos that makes this an effective tool ?
for example, do you consciously allocate more time for documentation by developers, than you did before remote workers ? is there a particular way you do this that makes it better, etc ?
This is my experience at the company I'm currently at which has offices in SF and other US locations, as well as a significant number (as a % of the Eng team) of remote people across the country. I don't know the origin story, as the practice was in place when I joined this team, but it's proven its value time and time again. We do consciously make time to document and discuss how to make that information more useful/discoverable/accurate.
* Use the tools - ticket tracking, chat rooms, wikis or other documentation repositories
* Own it - engage in the conversation, do the work, help the whole team get better, accept responsibility, acknowledge your own mistakes, and acknowledge others' wins and contributions
* Do it in public - @mention people in tickets, etc., use PUBLIC chat spaces, use org-wide sharing of documents
A company I worked for in the past, which had a SF office and a smaller number of remote engineers, did not embrace the value of thoughtful written communication, and ultimately didn't see the value of remote engineers. It fostered a culture of "need-to-know" conversations where they felt if you couldn't be "in the room" then you simply weren't going to have the information you needed. They didn't value recording (video, text, etc.) the agenda, discussion, or outcomes of these discussions, so it only lived on in the individuals involved. This artificially stunted the remote engineers, and in turn it backfired on the entire team's productivity.
In my experience, this has been both an emergent behavior that has worked out well, and subsequently a culture/process that has been encouraged by management for new members (both remote and in-office) of the team.
There hasn't necessarily been a need to allocate more time for documentation, except for everyone getting in the habit of default communication modes being easily accessible documentation (common wiki/docs that all decisions, specs, and proposals go into) ... so it's not a "more time" thing, as much as it's a "don't send an email, but instead update the docs"
I work at Stripe and I'm not sure the answer to the question, largely because it hasn't come up that I know of; most folks enjoy working in our SF office (even many who usually decry open seating plans).
I often work from home (or will WFH until ~11am, and commute in after traffic). I also know some SFBA Stripes who work from home more often than in the office. To an ancestor's point, I am not remote and often do code in my PJ's.
I think there may be at least one Tahoe/Truckee-based remote, but I may be misremembering...
> I cannot conceive of a reason we'd track screen time for employees, remote or otherwise. I can model why a company which had an adversarial relationship with employees might want to do that (to discourage shirking). We do not have an adversarial relationship with our employees, and (hopefully) have more interesting utility functions than that.
its not about the company. See you guys are in a unique position - you have an in-office team and you have a remote team. So it is a A versus B for those people - people who are having to commute for hours to work, mandatorily sit at their computer screens . Versus others who wake up late (because no commute) and can walk about the house in their pyjamas.
How do you deal with the perceived imbalance in quality of life between these two teams ? I asked about mandatory screen time from that perspective. Because there is a set of people who are working synchronously - is there no cognitive drop off between them and the remote team who may have chosen to take their dog walking at the same time when a team decides to ping on a code bug question ? this wouldnt be an issue if everyone was in office together.
An all remote team is a simpler setup. I'm not at all arguing for one or the other - i do understand some people are very social and need people around them (like me) and others work best at their homes. However, after having run large orgs, I do know if you have both kinds simultaneously together - there is a massive grass-is-greener issue. The remote workers think that the in-house employees have more management "ear time" and the in-house employees grumble at the remote workers taking it easy. I have massive respect for you guys, if you have built a cultural practice that neutralises this issue.
>Something Stripe Atlas does, for example, is schedule time for the team to low-key socialize without an explicit agenda
How do you do this ? any learnings here? this is something i have wondered a LOT about.