The book Remote: Office Not Required has been on my reading list since August 2018. At the time of this writing, I manage two remote developers and Houston Miller has recently become a remote developer.
Continuing our book club (with Jameson McGhee), we picked this as our current one for discussion.
Here are my notes for the first section, “The Time is Right for Remote Work.”
- This first part is about “the why”; the three of us agreed there wasn’t much new here that we needed to be sold on. We’re looking forward to the later sections about how to work with remote folks and how to work remotely.
- Houston thought it was fitting that he was listening to the audiobook version of this book while commuting to/from work.
- Jameson mentioned that working asynchronously with a team in the Philippines was difficult, especially because of the time zone issues. Remote + async leaves email as your only option for communication.
- “Where do you go to get work done?” This assumes you cannot control what’s stopping you from being productive at work. For example, Geoff works in an office where everyone has a door; if it’s closed, people leave you alone. We agreed that it’s important that people respect the heads-down status, which typically means wearing headphones in an open-office setting. Geoff said this would suck for him because it’s replacing one noise with another noise. Jameson said he has the opposite problem — he gets distracted if it’s too quiet.
- Commuting… Jameson has a rule of not accepting a job if it’s outside a certain radius from his home. This is a personal decision about how much commuting bothers you. Knoxville, TN is different than say Chicago where you can’t afford to live extremely close to your employer. Geoff uses his commute for decompression — reflecting on the day, listening to fiction. At some point, you need to get out of the house.
- Regarding the chapter about “escaping the 9-5”, the authors mentioned a company that went into nocturnal mode to deal with time zone issues for a movie production. Geoff took issue with this, as just because you can work that way doesn’t mean you should. Here’s an article about how working third-shift isn’t good for your body.
- Not everyone wants to move to the big city; cost is an issue. The downside of living away from the city is you miss out on organic exposure to culture, people, events, etc.
- We disagreed that remote = outsourced. Maybe contractor = outsourced. Keep in mind this book was written in 2013, so the connotation may be out of date.
- The argument for savings at scale seemed cherry-picked. You have to be large enough to realize huge savings like that. For example, American Airlines saved $40K by removing an olive from a salad.
- Geoff commented about the shell game of office supplies… You’ve gone from needing one office printer to N printers (where N is the number of remote workers). Also in saving lease space for the company… a cottage industry of co-working spaces (that charge money!!) has sprung up; this pushes the cost from the employer to the employee.
- Houston mentioned a benefit of being remote is that it’s harder to make an excuse for being late to meetings.
- We discussed the argument about how companies are already doing remote things by having a CPA or HR firm offsite. Those are really contractors who are focused on other companies besides yours.
- Email has several benefits… paper trail for reviewing decisions, minimizes interruptions.
- Technology advancements in the last several decades has made remote working considerably easier. Video chat is virtually free now.