Hardly a day goes by without my linkedin feed either celebrating the demise of remote work or a post from someone explaining that, just possibly, people may quite like the idea of seeing more of their family and less of some strangers back or shoulder on an over-crowded commuter train.
Yes, I do have an opinion on this and yes I currently work remote. I’m writing this because it seems to me the anti-remote posts are mostly senior managers concerned that a way of working that has served them so well may be coming to and end. Others are people with clear, vested interests in the success of commercial real estate.
This article probably isn’t as balanced as it should be, I don’t have enough manager DNA in me to put a convincing case for why being in the office is so critical but I have worked both remotely and with remote teams for nearly ten years now so am able to explain why it’s not such a bad thing and can even be good at times.
In the office with remote teams
14 years ago I worked for a stereotypical seed-invested startup above a shop in soho that one of our more demure employees wonderfully described as ‘a bikini shop’. On her way to an interview with us she’d found the building but not the entrance to our office in a side alley so had called to find out where we were and described where she was.
There were just a few of us but we did well and soon needed more talent. Our platform was built in Ruby on Rails at a time when Rails developers were at a premium, especially in London. For a number of reasons we didn’t have the best of development cultures so, despite the hype, in a densely packed and competitive employment market where our company was never seperated from potential candidates by more than one or two beers it was becoming a struggle to find good people that wanted to work for us.
We hired a talent manager who threw out a wide net across western and central Europe promising an exciting job in London working with exciting people doing exciting things. That brought some success. We hired smart people, mostly from Poland and France, but far too often that success wasn’t as long-lived as we’d have liked.
The first few months were always great for any new starter. Soho is an exciting place to be, especially in the summer, and out of work we could be a pretty fun crowd but all that initial enthuisam faded quickly especially amongst the more experienced hires. 8 months into this drive I began to realise that it usually co-incided with the new starter’s family/girlfriend/boyfriend arriving only to realise that the wonderful London salary we offered gets you a shoebox in a less desirable part of the city with a long commute thrown in.
Remote creeping in
Some returned home, most moved-on to other companies. I left but not before making friends with a developer from a part of Latvia that is remote even by Latvian standards. Ruby hiring is often about who you know and we worked together at the next two companies before family issues forced him to return home for a while. The company appreciated his input so agreed he could work remotely.
He never really came back but his work remained valuable so It seemed pointless forcing the issue especially in a culture of headphones-on developers that didn’t really communicate face-to-face that much on a good day.
We moved company together again, this time me locally and him officially keeping his remote status. This new company hired locally in London when they could but already had some experience with remote workers through a third party supplier based in Ukraine. In less than a year our team had grown to more than forty with a little under two thirds remote.
I got used to working with people I’d never met before and made friends with some that I still consider to be friends to this day. We had some wonderful linguistic misunderstandings “Stephen, I must go home, my three year old daughter is intoxicated” - I learned the next day he meant food poisoning though I never quite got over being told by one Austrian developer that he would “ski down” to meet the other Austrian developer on the team.
Suddenly it was me that was remote
To be honest I hadn’t considered remote to be a way of life for me until the pandemic arrived. Stupidly I wasn’t ready to work from home and developed a bad back through some highly inappropriate office equipment but apart from that I didn’t notice much difference other than me spending much less money on alcohol, seeing my young children before they went to school each morning and spending time with them before they went to bed. It wasn’t my favourite job so when eventually I did leave and told my children one said “Oh,… does that mean we won’t see you any more ?”.
But I’m not here to make an emotional case for remote work, my arguments are more concrete.
Talent in them thar hills
These days I work for a remote-only company. When I say remote-only I really mean we’re hardcore remote-only; we hire across the globe and work asnychronously. I have teams staffed with engineers from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South, Central and Northern America and it works every bit as well as any team I’ve worked with face-to-face.
Very much to my shame, I had no idea just how much tech talent there is outside the well-known tech hubs across many, many countries. Talent keen to work for a company that can appreciate and nurture their abilities.
One of the more legitimate concerns that pro-office people have is how less experienced people will develop in such a disconnected setting but like so many things it depends upon the person involved. Someone that finds it hard to ask for help will find it even harder working remote but still hard enough in the office. We’ve hired enough confident juniors to undertand it’s a consideration for the hiring process but not for the right person. Someone that wants to learn will always find a way.
Any experienced person worth hiring will know how to get the answers they need.
Retaining Talent
Back to my Latvian friend.
He’s a talented developer, he also has a family and comes from a part of the world with no tech companies anywhere near interesting enough for someone of his ability. Hiring people lik him you get an experienced employee that mostly stays at home with his family and doesn’t kill time in the pub with friends telling him how cool their other company is and how they’re looking for people just like him. In other words you get a loyal employee that values their employment in ways that are significantly geater than just monetary reward.
No-one said it perfect
Of course there are down sides but in my experience the positives can easily outweigh the negatives for right employer & employee. Yes I understand that managers who have built a career engaging with people face-to-face must wonder if they have wjhat it takes for this brave new world but personally I feel a much better manager for the experience:
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I’ve learned to describe the outcomes I need not just tell people what to do
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I’m WAY more able to measure those outcomes.
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Oddly, I feel more of a need to be empathetic. I can’t just march over to someone and talk at them, now they have to want to listen.
There are some days it would be nice to be in an office, especially when I’ve DM’ed a few people and left wondering if anybody is going to respond. Perhaps my perfect job would be hybrid - just one or two days in the week but, hey, I’ve never worked anywhere that was perfect and what I have serves me just fine.