Tag: office

Only Yahoos Work in an Office!?

Ok, so I think almost everybody has either slammed Marissa Mayer about the new Yahoo non-remote worker policy or said that it’s the medicine they have to swallow. Very few are actually pointing out however, that Yahoo was probably just really bad at managing their remote employees. In the end, I don’t care, that just means there are now going to be more people who are probably great that will be available in a tech market that is happy to hire the talent!

But I do digress, I have something else to talk about that is actually productive. I’m going to kick this off with a short story, that actually inspired me to write this post.

Remote Workers Unite!

I was in the office, a coworking office called NedSpace in downtown Portland with my fellow Bashoians Eric Redmond (@coderoshi) & Chris Tilt. Generally we all work remotely, because everyone at Basho is remote. The entire company, from CEO to HR to Marketing to Engineering, everybody is remote. Basho does a solid job of working like this, it is indeed, a modern Internet enabled software company. However today we were all in the office.

During the day I pulled up Scott Hanselman‘s Blog Entry “Being a Remote Worker Sucks“. I found this on twitter and shortly after reading it, tweeted,

Case Study Coffee
Case Study Coffee

Within a few minutes, lo and behold in the glare of my Apple Cinema Display I see Scott Hanselman walk up behind me! (Isn’t this building secure?!!? Scott’s name is now Hacker Hanselman!) Wow, that doesn’t happen everyday or does it? So Eric & Chris finished up some coding. Chris headed off to return home, where he remotely works from. However Eric, Scott & I headed out for a stroll through the city of Portland to Case Study Coffee. We had a great conversation, discussing all sorts of blog entry ideas, Node.js oddities, duplications between Rail & Node.js & Java & .NET and all sorts of other things. I mean, you probably know how it goes when you have three geeky people going on endlessly about awesome nerdy stuff. Simply put, we covered a lot of topics.

…that’s when I thought…

Offices Are Often The Worse Place to Cross Pollinate Ideas

Not a little bit, but likely the absolute worse places to cross-pollinate ideas. But then I got to thinking a little bit more. Is Yahoo on to something? Is there a need or a reason why people should be in a similar place? I mean, I know for a fact the most rapid learning I ever had was pair programming with other coders. But I’ve done this in an office and outside of the office, at coffee shops and hackathons, on the rooftop of buildings and in dark and dreary bars. I’ve paired with a lot of coders and learned a lot by doing that.

Another question came up, is it really important to be in the office or is it important to be near others you are working with? More of that thinking and remembering things and more experiences popped into my mind. Whew, this was becoming a serious thinking session. I’d also had a great experience working remotely and learning at practically the same rate with friends. We were all working on an open source project. We asked questions in general chat on IRC or other places, and got instant feedback and help when we needed it. We’d put ideas into chat and discuss them readily and sometimes excessively. We weren’t anywhere near each other, specifically we were about 1400+ miles from each other in different time zones. But it worked and it worked damn well!

My correlations in trying to figure out, should employees be in office or out of office could go on. As Eric said when we all returned form the coffee shop, “correlations do not show causation, but they sure as hell imply it“. Well, I didn’t want to just imply onsite or remote work is better I wanted to know what really works or doesn’t. More thinking ensued and then…

Freedom Punched Me In The Face

Then it hit me. Geographic location doesn’t make any difference. The difference, which also makes Yahoo’s demand for no more remote working, is again the freedom of the individuals involved. The freedom to work where we are needed with who we ought to and need to and when we are most efficient and capable of performing the work best. The key is this freedom is granted, and that driven self organizing individuals make use of this freedom. It may be that one day we might end up in the office while another day we end up in a park, at home or in some coffee shop.

So forget remote working or in office working. These things aren’t correlated to someone being productive or not, the core reasons someone is productive is the ability that they have the freedom to be productive in the way that best works for them and for the company they’re providing services for. The most important thing is being able to give freedom to those doing the work to be productive. Remote or not is pure distraction and in turn is bullshit.

Don’t get distracted by the remote or onsite worker debate, figure out the best ways to work with your employees based on individual freedom. You’ll have far more productive individuals than any existing hierarchical corporate structure nonsense.

Office Applications, Cloud Office Applications: An Open Letter

Alright, there are a dozen office suites out there that sit in various places on one’s computer, in the cloud, can do X, Y, and Z and the list goes on. However, I don’t want to talk about any of those suites. I want to talk about the suite we all want, the suite that actually gets the jobs done across the spectrum of online, offline, or on Mars! So with that I start an open letter to…

Dear Microsoft, Google, and All Office Suite Makers,

Please accept this letter as a clear message about what we want. This details not some fuzzy idea about what we want, it is what we want, need, and desire to remove the legacy environments of today and to move on with the work of the future.

Installation

We need office apps that can execute from the browser, because simply, there is no reason they need to be an installed application anymore. It is absolutely absurd to install a gigabyte or more locally (MS Office, yeah, I’m looking at you) anymore! There should be zero install. If anything is needed, it should be cached and utilize a transparent, seamless, uninterrupted user experience. In other words, I should never need to install anything and be able to use things offline whenever I need to (now I’m looking at you Google Docs).

Deployment

For large enterprises that need to keep control of their environments and content, deployment should be clean, policy based, and managed through a single sign on mechanism like oauth. Possibly with some clean integration into LDAP or whatever other primary authentication mechanisms a company may user. I reiterate though, no software to install, it needs to run in the browser, and it must deploy cleanly through policy management and verification of user identification.

Ease of Use, UX, and UI

This is simple. You each have unique user interfaces that can be replicated I the browser with today’s technology. Do NOT use Silverlight, Flash, or some embedded proprietary software, use the web based technology of HTML5, Javascript, jQuery, etc the tools are available and ready for use, use them!

Online, Offline

Already there are offline features for installed packages, but that isn’t what we want. HTML5 enables offline capabilities NOW. Get them built please, already. Cheers! As for online capabilities, this is easy because they pretty much exist now.

Collaboration

If I can’t update a document, spreadsheet, slide deck, or other office suite application document in real time with other users that I’m collaborating with it has failed. All office applications must have real-time, collaboration capabilities, with chat built in, sharing, and other capabilities. End of story, this is as fundamental now as being able to type stings of characters in a document.

Welcome to the demands of the future, I’ll leave you to get back to work office suite teams!

Thanks,

Future Document Creators

Me on TDD/BDD/Pairing and Jason Fried’s TED Talk and “why work isn’t done in the office…”

This talk is so right, but could it be so wrong at the same time?

Just watch this, that’s all I have to say. Jason is so right about this topic. Here’s a few quotes to convince you.

  • “I’m going to talk about work, and why people can’t seem to get things done at work…“
  • “If you ask people the question, “where do you go when you really need to get something done?” you typically get three different types of answers; one is a kind of a place, a location or a room, another is a moving object, a third is a time…“
  • “The Train”  <  – That one caught my fancy, if you’ve ever talked to me about transit you know that one caught me…  🙂
  • “What you almost never hear people say is “the office”“
  • “Managers and bosses will tell you the distractions at work are things like Facebook, Youtube…”  “…and they’ll go so far as to ban it…”  “…what is this China?!”
  • “The real problem in the modern office is the M & Ms”   <  –  Oh hell yeah, so very true.
  • “Manager’s jobs are really to interrupt people…” “…they don’t really do work so they have to interrupt you.“
  • “You would never see a spontaneous meeting of employees, no, managers do that…“

To summarize, do telecommuting right, and it will absolutely blow away anything that is ever accomplished “at the office“.

Oh my Adron, you’re such a hypocrite! You are always talking about TDD and BDD and Pair Programming and teams being together and…

YES! You have a point, so let me throw this prospective hypocriticalness of mine away and prevent any concern that I’ve missed a logical connection. I assure you, I haven’t.  🙂

I do support people working remotely. I also love to have a team close together with high communication (and here’s the catch) that is focused on the problem. This is what Jason is talking about! People generally don’t stay focused in cross-cut teams, with this focus and that focus and then throw managers on top of that. The next thing you have the dreaded M & Ms dramatically decrease any chance of work getting done.

If a team can be left to their work, especially if they have clear problems to attack, to pair on, to write tests against and to implement this is the precise example of why to work together. However, I’ve also seen successful, very successful teams working together remotely. Jason & the 37signal’s crew have done that before! They’re a prime example of it.

But How Does Remote Work, Work?

You have to be disciplined, you have to have check in points, but take 2-4 hours at a chunk and do work! Use e-mail and instant messaging as Jason points out. These are the keys to successfully getting things done! Where I currently work, we actually get this type of allowance. We even do remote pairing (albeit rarely, but it has been done)!  It can work, and it can work very well. However we often break away and have time chunked where we don’t talk, but instead leap forward in our efforts to get work done. Sometimes we pair, sometimes we don’t, it generally depends on if we’re writing code or just getting configs and databases put together to write code against. No reason to pair on a configuration file!  😉

So really, the key isn’t to be physically collocated, or that you have to be remote to each other. The key is to have communication, high levels of communication, but at the right moments in time! The communication must be focused and to the point. It much bring information that is needed, not long drawn out meetings of vacuous boredom and emptiness. The work is done when someone, or a pair, can focus on the problem at hand and find the solution to that problem – alone or with their pair. These are the keys to getting real work done!

Thanks TED Talks for getting me all fired up this morning!  🙂