Ah, my bad. I should have considered the issue of problem domains. For my day job I don't work in an "enterprise" or business consulting context. I build specialty hardware products where just making it work is job #1, reliability is #2, time to market is #3. Feedback from product management is limited at best and primarily given up front, modulo some UI tweaking.
Also, when I used to work in more typical sw projects, remote teams worked best when everyone is remote. Hallway conversations short circuit the communications and remote engineers are at a disadvantage unless there is good discipline/sharing. I think this thread has gone somewhat off topic so further discussion should probably be carried on off list. I can be reached @coopsource on Twitter. Alan -- *"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."* - *Goethe* On Jul 3, 2015, at 2:29 AM, Colin Yates <[email protected]> wrote: Having worked remotely for nearly a decade I can say that when it works well it is unbeatable in terms of productivity, satisfaction, home/work balance and so on. When it works badly it is unbeatable in terms of lack of productivity, lack of satisfaction etc. Delivering the software that the business wants depends far less on developer productivity then it does on communication. By orders of magnitude. I realise that we as developers are highly skilled, creative, specialist/generalists and so on, but I have seen many more projects that were built well but delivered the wrong thing then projects that failed because of developer insufficiency. Almost always because there is inherent ambiguity translating: - what the business _thinks_ they want - what the business _meant_ to ask for - what the team _heard_ the business ask for - what the developers _interpreted_ those requirements to be It is communication that is our achille’s heel, not distraction, skill or tooling. For me, if I haven’t sat down face to face and shown the key stake holders a realisation (i.e. working software) of what they asked for every other week or so I get very twitchy. Of course, when there is a whole bunch of hidden complexity to solve then sure, working from home and getting your head down is great. All I am saying is that for the project as a whole, it can be exacerbate the fundamental thing success depends on - getting you and them in a room demonstrating what they asked for. I should also say that a lot of developers (in my non-scientific and non-validated opinion) are prone to introspection and depression and isolation, which is sometimes what they most crave can be the absolute last thing they need. My advice - work from home sure, but regularly get into the same room (Skype really doesn’t cut it. FaceTime neither as then you need to remember to put your pants on before work!) with the key stake holders and other team mates. Also make sure you have a _very_ disciplined and structured process for separating home and work life. Anyway, enough ramblings from me. On 3 Jul 2015, at 03:02, Marc Fawzi <[email protected]> wrote: "The future has arrived, but it's not evenly distributed" -- William Gibson I think the "remote vs in the office" issue is ultimately about our ability to achieve "eventual consistency" with the rest of the team on multiple levels spanning the inter-personal, cultural, process oriented and technical domains. But the truth in today's work environment is that being in the office is less productive than working from your own office where you can shut out all distractions. It reduces productivity and increases distraction and therefore software defects by a critical amount and it does not solve the problem of getting everyone on the same page; it only alleviates it. Raw productivity is not the goal, so many companies prefer to bring people under one roof than let them loose on independent projects or going in separate directions on the same thing. I think we could use better tooling for the remote lifestyle to make sense in the common scenario. But the tools for collaboration that we have are so so. Myself, i feel like a good balance can be attained between productivity and mission coherence. Maybe I'm wrong? Sent from my iPhone On Jul 2, 2015, at 2:17 PM, Joe R. Smith <[email protected]> wrote: Having worked remotely for a couple years now, I can definitely say I’m far more productive. This sums up why: http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer/ On Jul 2, 2015, at 4:14 PM, Alan Moore <[email protected]> wrote: When constrained by a technology choice you may have to give up requiring other developers to be physically proximate. I know managers want the comfort of observing warm bodies in cubes banging on keyboards but it doesn't necessarily translate into higher productivity, I get my best work done when everyone else goes home. I've worked for <self-edit, a while> in cubes emailing co-workers in their cubes and I see no reason why we even have to be in the same building... confounding actually, "stand-ups" not withstanding :-0 Alan On Wednesday, July 1, 2015 at 3:33:22 PM UTC-7, Nate Wildermuth wrote: Interesting questions! The startup I work for (Nowthis News) made the switch to Clojurescript a few months ago, but I don't think our VCs care much about our tech stack. In my experience, they focus on metrics like growth rates, users, and views. On hiring and employment, I can't imagine working anywhere else. I get to program in lisp all day long. But I haven't had much luck finding people to join my team. Would love to hear from anyone who's had success on that front! -- Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ClojureScript" group. 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