I know, I work remote with people in 4 continents across 6 timezones. It simply doesn't work.
You can't teach people, you can't train people, you can't show anything over a phone or a chat.
On top of that, as soon as you have different timezones with little to no overlap. You cannot synchronise or work with your colleagues at all.
Remote work and remote teams should be limited to people who are already senior, fully autonomous and experienced. And even there, it's a constant battle and it takes a lot of self discipline.
Prove me that you can have a conversation with someone who's 8+ hours away and sleeping when you are awake.
Prove me that you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, knowing he's never used a profiler before. (That's one of the thing I had to do last week).
There are remote-only outfits, and they do fine - at least as well "We're not getting any work done because we're in an open plan office and we can't hear ourselves think" outfits.
But hiring policy is an issue, and so is PM. It needs people with a compatible attitude, and that includes management.
It's not that remote is a panacea, but it shouldn't be a showstopper either. There are plenty of productivity killers in non-remote work styles too.
What's the context of the conversation? That's really important. Of course you can't have a conversation with someone who is sleeping.
Equally you can't expect a well thought out response from your colleague when you are sitting over their shoulder asking them questions, wheeeas you will get that if you give them time to respond.
> prove me you can teach someone over the phone to use a python profiler, ...
Again, why? In that case surely it makes sense for: A) you to do the task (as you colleague can't use a profiler)
B) your colleague to learn to use the profiler. If your job is to teach someone to use a tool over the air, then yes you have a very valid point. If it's mot, then you tell them to earn how to use a profiler or you'll do the task and they should tackle something else instead
I can concede that remote work doesn't work for everyone. I'll even concede that remote work is probably not ideal for most software engineers and the companies that employ them, even in "high tech."
But I'm going to draw the line there. The team I work with is entirely distributed, between the east and west coasts. For most of my career across several companies I've worked remotely. It works spectacularly well for us because we are all very motivated and have the self-discipline to complete our work according to deadlines.
I have also worked remotely on a team where one person was across the Atlantic. I admit that was a bit more of a struggle because we were frequently not online at the same time, but it wasn't a deal breaker in the end either.
Remote work probably doesn't work for most teams because the teams are very large and the work process requires a lot of synchronous communication. But it's really disingenuous to use a caricature of remote work (distributed across several time zones where heavy mentoring and synchronous communication is required) to say it simply doesn't work as a concept.
When there are people in Europe, Asia, Russia, Australia, it gets a lot harder.
The criticism is more about working across time difference than just remote.
P.S. Mentoring is always required, unless you only hire the most experienced people you can find. Communication is always required, unless you work on trivial problems.
Out of curiosity, what do you work on?
For you. I work in an office where some team members are remote. If something is urgent, you have to consider what's urgent about it. Is it you feel unable to proceed without discussing a topic face to face? If so, you are the problem , not remote work. I'd argue that 99.9% of things people claim are urgent, aren't urgent and could wait 8-10 hours.
Remote work is diffeeent to office work. If you treat asynchronous programming the same as synchronous programming, you're gonna have a bad time. If you design your work and your environment around remote work, it can and does work.
I'm going to challenge that. If you need direct, synchronous, face-to-face communication in order to teach or train, I have to question the quality of your documentation. I would also question whether the people with whom you are engaging in direct face-to-face communication are being trained adequately. For many people, verbal communication isn't the most effective way of teaching. They would rather have a written document that they can refer to, over and over again, as they learn whatever it is they need to do.
