The world went primarily remote in the height of the pandemic. With things returning to "normal" in a lot of the world, where do you think the software industry will settle in terms of remote work popularity and overall expectations?
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For me, the last two years have demonstrated remote software development can work very well and I think this model will persist for a while. However, I am concerned about new developers and the impact of not being able to working along-side experienced developer might have on their learning and experience. I think peer-programming will become more important than every before to bridge that gap.
I think Leonid has an important point especially for young developers. The lack of in-office interaction needs to be replaced with extra social-life interaction - who knows it might work out better.
I started as a Junior 2 months before we were locked down over 2 years ago. I miss incredibly the quick informal chats about new tech and what my other colleagues were working on outside of work. Also the quick "Are you getting on OK?" chats I would get from the seniors.
I managed OK, I studied hard on my own and let the likes of; podcasts and discord channels for the tech I was using teach me instead.
It was different but sort of worked. However now I am back in the office, in my opinion there's no contest between office interaction and remote. Office always wins, my progress accelerated again.
Honest truth ... I will love to have a full time job on web development
I found peer programming to work better remotely... as long as I had two or more monitors.
I can put my partners view on one monitor, and my view on the other monitor and seamlessly work alongside them. But in person, it's difficult to get a good view because I need to physically look over the persons shoulder or get out of my seat just to get a good view of what is happening.
Even when I do work in person with someone, we just work remotely from our cubicles lol
What solution do you use? Currently using teams & this isn't natively possible (ifaik, but maybe a meeting + direct chat together could achieve this?)
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "isn't natively possible".
I think the only downside to teams is it being limited to a single screen share. We've used google meets and we were able to do multi-share.
At the moment though, I only have one partner, so meets is able to serve our needs. And of course we do use voice chat while sharing screens.
I think a lot of development work will stay remote, we are an industry with hundreds of tools that are already reasonably mature such as GitHub, Slack etc. that make remote work easy.
Where it becomes even easier is with things like virtual offices, such as gather town (which we use at daily.dev), making it almost like you are "at the office" and, when used properly, allowing for adhoc interactions, and fun games with your team.
gather town quick aside
They recently introduced go-karts on gather town. Here is my personal one sat at my desk waiting for me:
When they were introduced it was a fun 20 minutes of silliness similar to what you would get in the office when someone discovers a new site or game and you just have an "unproductive" few minutes with your team mates for laughs.
Now we have a little parking lot in the corner of the virtual office where we keep our go-karts and we occasionally zip past each other's desks throughout the week!:
And because I am just silly, I had to add a car park to gather town and overlay a certain song to make this (need sound on):
I just wanted to share that little bit of silliness!
With all of that being said, I hope you get the idea - 90% of the office environment and random interactions can be maintained with solutions like gathertown!
Conclusion
So I think remote work and multi-national teams with people from all different backgrounds are going to become the norm, and that can only be a good thing surely!
One thing I think that will need to happen (as it made a huge difference to our team dynamic) is "company gatherings".
No matter how good the tools become there is nothing like meeting in person:
I expect everyone to let me work 100% remotely for regular work, and please don't bother me with daily video calls where everyone will repeat what is clear to see on GitHub or a Kanban board. I am able to deliver good work (front-end web development most of the time) without ever meeting anybody in person and some things don't even need a single meeting or phone call.
That being said, I still enjoy meeting people in real life from time to time, especially for collaborative work on tricky or inspirational stuff, sketching, talking, and I enjoy meetups and conferences as in-person events as they offer so much more inspiration and room for hallway talks compared to online events, and I don' t want to stare at a screen unless I'm coding or in cinema.
As several people already added to the disussion, learning and onboarding of junior team members is probably another aspect that is much easier to achive when actually being in the same place together.
But for regular daily work, the old "normal" is nothing that I have been missing ever since I started remote work (even before the pandemic, thanks to Germany's shitty railway system which allowed me to skip some commuter days every week when I was still an employee). And don't expect me to go back to working 5 days x 8 hours every week either. The old "normal" has never been normal, and it's about time to make people realize that life is not supposed to be a 9-to-5 in a corporate office.
Are you working as an employee, or contractor/freelancer?
I'm free now.
I agree with your thought "Leonid"
But still we don't have proper systems and software's to manage work from remote.
One big problem i have faced during last lockdown that there is lot's miss communications while we are working remotely with few team members.
That's curious because when you write things down it's all clear but when you speak with someone they forgot details and thus those communication issues shine most.
Maybe you need to recap the meetings to ensure all involved people is aligned and send this sort of "TL;DR" through the chat for people to double-check :)
I think this is the right direction and I agree with you, Joel. It might be overkill, but often in meetings I end up taking minutes and notes and at the end will recap with the action items. If it's my meeting I called I will send out an email to the team with the summary of the talking points and action items.
However if it's another person's meeting, while I will take notes for myself, I will still email the group and clarify what we are doing and what my action items are.
Did I do this before having to be working remotely? Nope. However, this is half communication but also half covering my behind.
Its a technique widely used as well in face-to-face meetings since... always.
It's not just about "communication issues", sometimes people tend to do what they want instead what they are suposed to do.
Creating and sharing meeting summaries is a key point, not only to make things clear but also to ensure you all are in the right, or at least the same direction. 😄
Wow Joel your thoughts are very clear
I'm impressed with your clever remote working experience
I will surely apply these ideas at our team meetings
thanks dear, thank you very much!
You always need to protect yourself and those things make organising a job/project/team more... let's say straightforward. If you need to check that everyone is doing it's thing each few hours something is wrong 😆
So let the things written down into a group usually helps on that.
Share your experiences when you use that! :)
What things do you think we can't manage properly remotely?
Ummmmm, Junior developers
I'm probably gonna be the big dissenter here: Remote is less productive in a team. Especially in agile-oriented teams, remote makes important in-person communication difficult enough that the individual gains are outweighed.
A balance needs to be found (we're currently running a 3+2 model, where two days of remote work per week are permitted), but even then the team goals take a small hit. If everyone can work in isolation and achieve overall goals, it works. But that's rarely the case, and often immediate communication with stakeholders is key.
Similarly, training is more difficult when done remotely, because we lack the in-person interaction that transfers much more in much shorter time.
Remote work is not the future. Hybrid models may be, but I'm a staunch believer in integrated on-site work - especially once stakeholders are involved.
Well, I must admit - it works really great in our team. We are currently 6 (next month 7) developers in my team and our productivity increased a lot when the pandemic lockdowns began.
We are currently at "lets meet once a week in the office"-mode and granted, its fun to see the people face-to-face, but productivity-wise, working remote is the better option for us.
Why do you think remote work hampers immediate communication?
To elaborate, the only people I can imagine you have immediate communication with that's faster than remote are people sitting at the same desks.
As soon as you need to speak to someone farther away, you either use the same system as remote, or you get up and walk over to them. In that case, you might find they're not there, or they're busy right now, or someone else tries to talk to you on the way. In half the cases, you're going to take longer to talk to them and it's going to be a more frustrating experience.
I think maybe it's the casual/unplanned "bump in the corridor" conversations that we might miss out on. I know I miss not having coffee/lunch breaks with my team and chatting about things other than work. Getting to know more about your colleagues that their technical capabilities is important. Working from home it is all too easy to ignore the breaks you should be taking. It is not so easy when your teammates are pulling you out of your chair. Fun times.
My hope is:
Reality is that many companies seem to be invested in their "cool HQs" and therefore push people for these hybrid work frameworks where you have to be 40-50% of your time in the office.
I agree. I've been working remote since before the pandemic and I don't want ever to go back to working in an office.
In my view, working remotely is very effective, since it minimizes distractions and interruptions and this is very important in software development.
Yes I agree
Any software company that doesn't embrace remote work is definitely going to be disrupted. This is the opinion of a lot of people, including me. I have been working remotely for quite a while now, and I have never looked back.
My future is absolutely remote work. There are a lot of benefits to this, such as the ability to work from any location and the flexibility to balance family life with work. It has changed the way I live my life and it has made me happier than ever before.
However, there are drawbacks to this type of environment that need to be considered as well. The major ones include but are not limited to constant suffering from burnout because of the unlimited number of tasks to be done, loneliness at home, and a social disconnect.
More and more companies are embracing remote work and hiring employees who can work from anywhere in the world thanks to the internet connection they have at home.
I am in my 40s making friends now is a very different experience from making friends in my 20s at work. I've enjoyed working from home for a decade and with a family it's great. But I loved working in an office and going out to lunch and for drinks with colleagues before I had a family.
The camaraderie you get from grabbing a drink with colleagues and bitching about work can't easily be reproduced remotely.
I've worked long enough (20 years) in the office and 10 years remote. I will stay remote for as long as possible. With Teams, Azure Devops, Visual Studio the collaboration is available 24/7. My team uses Kanban and we have daily stand-up meetings. Everything is visible including my login and logoff times. Not an issue for me because I love my job.
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