Here are my notes for the third section, “How to Collaborate Remotely.”
- The part about overlapping time zones contradicted what the authors said earlier — that anyone can work whenever they want instead of 9-5. Now the authors are saying (which Jameson agrees with) that you need four hours of overlapping time.
- Jameson shared a story about collaborating with remote workers in the Philippines… it may be daytime in the eastern US, but it’s nighttime there, so sometimes people fall asleep on the call.
- Geoff has made using a video camera during meetings a habit. Houston’s office has cameras but most people turn them off. It’s difficult to enforce a “cameras on” rule unless you have the power to make that a policy.
- The home-office is more personal — that is, people can see your home — which can be off-putting.
- Screen sharing is the norm for Geoff and Houston. We talked a bit about Visual Studio Live Share for remote pair-programming.
- Having a calendar for everyone to see… Houston and Geoff have the same issue, where there’s a separate calendar for PTO. You have to remember to put events (and update them should they change) on multiple calendars now. Jameson wondered if this could be fixed by proper configuration (if SharePoint-based). Having multiple systems makes it more likely you’ll miss something.
- Virtual water cooler… Jameson said he’s never seen one of these be maintainable long-term because it feels like forced interaction. It needs to happen organically, not let’s go to this specific area to shoot the breeze. Laughter is also difficult to convey via text. Geoff says he has a problem with the KnoxDevs Slack channel, where he’s more of a lurker and doesn’t really feel like part of the conversation.
- Jameson summed it up nicely by saying that Slack is a supplement to what you get at meetups; it’s not a replacement.
- We chatted about the concept of it being harder to bullshit your peers than your boss. Every one of us has had times where we didn’t have something to do, and there’s a tacit agreement that we not call each other on it. If taken to an extreme (somebody literally not doing their work), the team will self-police.
- We all agreed that letting the results speak for themselves is more important than what you’re physically doing at any moment. The key is this approach applies whether you’re remote or not; why spend your effort keeping score of when people arrive at the office, whether they’re on Twitter during the day, etc.?
- It’s important to set boundaries about when you’re unavailable for chat, not returning emails until X time, etc.
- Yes, it’s convenient to be able to work remotely during a disaster (e.g., weather event). Geoff’s company has managed expectations well — if the county schools are closed, VPN is enabled. Another benefit of remote arrangements is when you’re not well enough to come in to the office (keep your germs at home!) but well enough to work.
- Managers and meetings (M&M) causing problems is a slippery slope. If you don’t have management or necessary coordination meetings, you can easily go off in the wrong direction.
- Think about who the meetings are for. You need to ask why you’re meeting. If meetings are a problem, what specifically is the problem? Sitting on multiple teams is an issue because you now have N sets of meetings to attend. This breaks your focus.
- Houston said that having well-facilitated meetings helps (e.g., time keeping, making people stay on topic).
- If you have information radiators, management shouldn’t need to bother you about status reports; they can simply look at a dashboard of some kind. Caveat: This only works as long as people are providing timely and high-quality input for that dashboard.