A rant

It doesn’t make sense to mandate that I sit in the same building as you to work on things somewhat related to the things you work on. By recognizing this fact, both employers and employees now have a great deal of freedom (for some value of the word “freedom”). Employers can hire people from across the globe, and employees can live anywhere on said globe.

When I tell people I work from home I rarely get any sympathy, but the fact is that working remotely is harder than working in an office for millions of little reasons. The in-office workplace is the default – if you’ve ever had a job chances are you went to a building some place to do that job with other folks that did a slightly different job who were (at least nominally) working towards the same goals as you. And oooh the things you took for granted in your cushy IRL job!

That meeting that was loosely scheduled for 4pm? I’ve got some time now, what if we just scrap project Foo? Work for you? Cool. {{done}}. No one updated their calendars. No one likely bothered to update the documentation for the project Foo. I can just walk down the hall and talk to Jan faster than I can update the office wiki which is always hopelessly out-of-date anyway. Nobody checks the mailing list, everyone knows if there are project Foo questions, they can just ask me. Problem. Solved.

Remote companies cannot be this lazy.

It’s not just that remote work is lonely (it is). It’s not just that it’s hard to find a good place to work when you’re remote (it is hard). It’s a million little things – documenting the little decisions so that when someone on the other side of the world wakes up, they don’t have questions (because you won’t be around to answer them), keeping the office wiki up-to-date, making sure to post big changes to the mailing list.

Being “remote friendly” is not a thing, having a remote culture is. Remote culture is something that everyone has to cultivate constantly.