Remote as a way of Working

Running a fully distributed remote organization

The title may not be as sexy as “Remote is the future!” or “X Reasons why you should do remote now!” but Remote is not the future. Actually, for quite a number of people I talk to it’s the norm already and most of them have been remote for 10+ years. As with everything in life, there is the good sides and the darker side (pun for the star wars fans) of remote, let me share some of my observations and try to keep it updated over time. Please note this is entirely subjective

Background

• See my bio, I’m Chief Technical Office of Telestax so I’m a software engineer at heart.

• 4 years of a office & remote mix. During that time, I helped bootstrap Mobicents (rebranded since then to Restcomm) mid-2003 with some folks: Amit and Ivelin (with whom I founded Telestax in 2011), Ranga (my former boss & mentor at NIST and creator of JAIN SIP), Tim Fox (lead of JBoss Messaging, creator of Vert.x, …)

• 13 years of full time remote split in 2 periods:

  • Red Hat (now IBM): in 2007, after it acquired JBoss and 6 months after acquired Mobicents, I was working inside a fully remote distributed team for 4 years

  • Telestax: funded in 2011 after we spinned off out of Red Hat. Working at first inside a fully remote distributed team (aka the founding team which from the get go was 3 people in 3 different countries… talk about shaping the culture) and then scaling the engineering organization with people distributed across 15 different countries at peak

The Illusion of Flexibility

As Jean-Paul Sartre, a famous French philosopher, declared “Hell is other people”… The context of this is that people can be a pain in the ass and you would rather avoid them and herd goats in a mountain but they are also a necessity to fulfill layer 3 of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, Social Belonging.

So, coming back to the topic at hand, as much as it’s true that you are free to work whenever you want, you rarely work alone and that means you need to collaborate with other people part of your team who live in different timezones or may work on different work schedules. Collaborating means communicating which mechanically requires agreeing on time slots during which you can work together. Though you may sometimes have the feeling that you had an illusion of flexibility; in the end, you’re still pretty flexible to sync up whenever you want to allow for the unplanned of life: a sick kid, a goat that escaped, and so on…

I can fucking work anywhere…

…. and tease my friends feeling miserable at the office. Yes, theoretically you can. I guess some of you readers already picture themselves working by the beach with a mocktail… - Yeah a mocktail because a cocktail would mean alcohol and as we all know alcohol sucks (especially in our age where you can end up in pretty awkward situation forever on Facebook…), OMG a french person rejecting red wine ? - but practically, sand and sun doesn’t play nice with your computer. If there is a coffee shop on the beach - the other name for co-working space - it’s fun to watch your kids in the summer play in the sand or take a swim as you get more quality time with them or just see them grow up and enjoy life.

Truly speaking, you need to force yourself to make it work sometimes. I personally embarked my wife and our 3 kids on a European tour to meet of all of my European co workers a couple years ago and that was an amazing experience for everyone or could work from my parents house to accommodate my dad’s end of life at home after he got diagnosed with liver cancer and spend his final last 3 months with him and have him go in peace (well psychological peace not physical, cancer is a real bitch people).

Separation of State and Church

If you do work from home and not from a co-working space, it can be hard to separate your personal life from professional life as your computer and phone will be always on and that means you are potentially always reachable. That’s something I’m still struggling with on i.e. when to stop and set proper limits to avoid overwork which can lead to burnout. In a typical setup of office (co-working or real company office), you usually commute one way or another i.e. by bike, walk, metro, bus, train, car, helicopter, plane, space shuttle… - later options are not recommended for fighting climate change though - so your brain takes a real break and allows you to change mind state and get into work or out of work. In a work from home setup, there is no such thing so you exit your work room but you’re still thinking about work and that means you’re not really here for your relatives and be tempted to check your phone and work activity as your brain is still in work mode.

It can get lonely at times

Inevitably, if you work from home for long period of times you may start to miss social belonging and coffee break/chatter. You’ll end up talking to yourself at the coffee machine at home.

There multiple ways to fight this such as enroll yourself in a social activity (sports, volunteering, or whatever would make you happy), go work from a co-working space (but then you end up getting the same issues from the office you were trying in the first place, ie noisy open spaces fucking up your focus, commuting and contributing to killing the planet, and so on… so do it only once in a while), trigger a multiple personality syndrome so you can talk to yourself at the coffee machine alone (but I don’t really recommend it), jump on video calls with your co-workers and make fun of them, travel to meet and work with your co workers (you can enjoy new places and new cultures), walk your dog or goat, …

Fight Climate Change

Yep, working from home is usually better for the planet. No need to commute, No need to shower for months (hey I’m French, we have a stinky reputation to keep), you can move permanently in countryside and grow your own vegetables, raise goats (or kids), …

Also you can help reducing urbanism by moving to the countryside if your country has the right facilities to permit that and leave a healthier life without pollution for you and your family and get your kids to enjoy real nature

Hire anywhere

If you are in a position that requires hiring, the world just opened to you. You are not tied to hire potential B or C players close to an office because you need to scale your company fast anymore, you can get A players experts wherever they are because location doesn’t matter. Just a note here, location actually do matter depending on how your organization is structured. We learnt the hard way that coordinating people on timezones that are too far apart is challenging, creates friction and reduce velocity, flow and team happiness. See more in Team work on Locality.

Diversity

Given you can hire anywhere, you will have the chance to work with people from different cultures and quickly realize how awesome it is to exchange traditions through pics, videos, face to face meetings, … and learn more about other culture, different ways of thinking and break barriers and make everybody grow personally.

Trust

As opposed to an office, you don’t see people which means you don’t necessarily know when they work if they worked less, worked more in a week which is good as you don’t want to loose your time tracking this kind of shit and nobody likes to be tracked like a baby. So you need to trust people they will do their best and if they enjoy their work they will. Focus on results and outcome not hours.

This is also just logical, if you hire someone, you need to trust them. Check the end result, don’t micro manage and track people it’s useless and counter productive. If you’re new to this and still scared people will not do their work, well, usually If the person doesn’t work, the rest of the team will bubble it up anyway and you can take action or they may end up quitting by themselves because they don’t like what they do (Layer 5 of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, Self Actualization)

One thing to pay attention to, is that some people who can’t manage their time well may actually over work and burn out without you noticing, so make sure to check on your team member regularly and have other team members check on each other if possible.

Over-Communicating is better

When you work as a remote team, you default to asynchronous out of band communications. This is great because you manage your time to get slots of focus time to get “in the zone” and “get shit done” but it can be dangerous as well as you may tend to under communicating and people or other teams are not in the loop anymore, don’t know what’s going, etc so over communicating is usually better but it can kill productivity and focus as well as it creates too many interruptions (see Basecamp book, it doesn’t have to be crazy at work on interruptions) so one way to manage this is to have dashboards (hopefully automated) so you people can see what’s in flight, what are some bottlenecks, blockers quickly without having to interrupt the team unless necessary. It’s important for both parties, managers and team members , to be aware of this as team members will end up using the tool better as nobody like interruptions.

Documentation & Processes are not Evil

Being remote forces you to document and encode your decisions and processes so knowledge transfer, new team members onboarding and becomes your single source of truth otherwise things can turn to a shit show real fast. Some processes actually got extended from original intent, by example, our blameless post mortem culture created as part of our SRE Team (and modeled after Google SRE) became so valuable that it extended beyond the walls of SRE. You can even extend it to yourself and personal life, see this good Treat Failure like a scientist article from James Clear on that

Face to Face time

While working remote is cool and trendy, nothing can replace physical and face time together. So try to meet at least once a year to bond in a work hard, party hard type of mentality to keep you warm in hard times and be more efficient and happy as a team. It’s always fun to meet for the first time people physically after having worked with them for a period of time, you get this I already know you but I never really saw/met you before.

It’s usually very efficient to meet every quarter or six months with your team, focus for 1 week on a game plan to execute on for the next period and go back home to execute staying focused.

Hybrid vs all remote

I recommend reading this excellent piece on remote worker/distributed team from a former JBoss/RedHat Colleague of mine Bob McWhirter, explainig the pitfalls of an hybrid model vs all remote

Scaling Remote

Many people have a strong belief that all remote doesn’t work at scale and you have to have some office at some point. To those fellas, I say look at Gitlab as a posterchild of all remote. Full remote at 1000 people strong in 65 Countries at the time of writing… they have scaled, perfected and documented the all remote model very well.

Closing Words

I’m obviously biased as working remote fits my way of life and thinking but there is countless examples of how remote works well and make for happier and more inclusive workforce. It does have some challenges but when you learn to manage them and manage yourself, you may feel more fulfilled. Feel free to reach out if I missed to cover any topics or questions you may have or apply at Telestax Careers if you’re looking for a remote job, if you fit technically and from a value perspective, we would love to greet you on the team.