How to Determine If Candidates Will Thrive in a Remote Work Environment

https://hackernoon.com/how-to-determine-if-candidates-will-thrive-in-a-remote-work-environment-d538d1e8f831

by drieddust • 9 years ago

132 74 9 years ago

Clubber13• 9 years ago

I miss the old days when companies interviewed you, asked some technical questions, some personal questions, then hired you. It took 30 minutes to an hour. If you didn't work out, they just fired you and started again.

chasing• 9 years ago

"Have you ever used a microwave? Great. Grab your apron and get going. The Big Mac rush starts around 11:30."

Clubber13• 9 years ago

It's funny, back in the Delphi days, we had a famous interview question, "What's the difference between a procedure and a function?" If you couldn't answer that in 5 or so words, we knew you weren't to be hired. You'd be amazed at how many people couldn't. One guy went on for 20 minutes trying to BS an answer.

sp332• 9 years ago

I think companies are less willing to do job training now.

mahyarm2• 9 years ago

Thats called the phone screen now :D

Clubber13• 9 years ago

We made them come in to make sure they didn't have any weird shit attached to their face. This were client facing people after all. :)

jerrylives• 9 years ago

The new thing to do is put employees on a contract agreement for 30 days such that even IF you complete the ridiculous interview gauntlet, you are still a "tentative" employee and have to prove yourself. I did this for a YC company this spring and it was awful.

hashkb• 9 years ago

Success in remote cultures has a major dependency on leadership as well. I've helped a client start a company who was dead set on having a remote engineering team until he realized that he wasn't comfortable with it. He would have said "they were all bad at remote" but really he was a micromamager with trust issues.

dgreensp• 9 years ago

We’ve found that people from big companies with a slower work pace and unclear project owners often find it difficult to adjust to a culture that expects them to personally drive their own deliverables.

This doesn't sound very compassionate to engineers leaving big, dysfunctional companies (which by the way preach the exact same ethos of personal responsibility). Basically, they are damaged goods who aren't expected to thrive in a better environment?

Clubber13• 9 years ago

Agreed. Most people can adapt to their environments. I've worked at both and big companies tend to wear me down, but I can still work there.

The problem with small companies is usually they are chaos and often cult of personalities. It's not their fault, it's their nature. They have to be able to pivot their business on a dime. That's tough on developers though, particularly when the thing you've been working on get scrapped on a pivot.

What it boils down to is it's short sighted. He's professing like he's solved the interview process. I'll bet his success / failure rate is just like everyone else's.

albertgoeswoof• 9 years ago

More likely that people who are succesful at big companies don't leave as much, because there's a higher upside sticking where they are than joining a small startup that allows remote working. So the people they are hiring from big companies are usually the rubbish ones.

Btw, if you're really good you can work remotely even in the largest companies. Just work your way up to your own P&L, hire a global team and away you go. Probably will have to check in a few times a year in person, but that's no big deal.

Clubber13• 9 years ago

There are pockets of awesomeness in big companies. I worked for a company that sold for over half a trillion, and it was a great job until we got acquired.

Small companies can be hellholes too, especially when runway is short, or competition is fierce. Like anything, it depends on the culture.

As far as staying at big companies, inertia is a big reason. It's easy to justify staying at a place that pays really well, particularly if you have a family, a car payment, and/or a mortgage. 5 weeks of vacation is nice too; that comes with tenure and leaves as soon as you do. I have to constantly check myself to see if I'm miserable. I have scars for staying miserable for too long. It's bad for my career due to burnout. Not everyone has learned that lesson though.

seaknoll2• 9 years ago

Why should it be compassionate?

eropple• 9 years ago

Because we're all people? And people are important?

FLUX-YOU• 9 years ago

Basically, they are damaged goods who aren't expected to thrive in a better environment?

He's probably generalizing for the sake of writing, but you can get some really lazy positions that really can rot your skills if you don't drive yourself. We're talking about companies that barely need more than for-loops and if-statements and some CRUD.

If you try to go from that to a fast-paced startup then I agree you're chances of thriving are going to be much lower. You have to absorb all of the startup's knowledge in addition to not having enough technical skills "in cache".

pc862• 9 years ago

We're talking about companies that barely need more than for-loops and if-statements and some CRUD.

This is 99.9% of all companies, including startups.

How many companies need developers to write a new sorting algorithm that is 15ms faster?

SmellTheGlove2• 9 years ago

This doesn't sound very compassionate to engineers leaving big, dysfunctional companies (which by the way preach the exact same ethos of personal responsibility). Basically, they are damaged goods who aren't expected to thrive in a better environment?

Compassion aside, it also isn't the least bit accurate. If our process sucked that bad in large companies, then I shouldn't have the numbers to show for it. Somehow, though, we manage to be really profitable despite being lazy idiots.

I've posted this elsewhere on HN, but if you find an engineer or manager with a history of accomplishment at large companies, you're lucky to have them. Not only can they get shit done, but they can get shit done even with the distractions and roadblocks from big company politics. Those folks would probably be very effective in a remote position given their ability to filter noise. But yeah, if someone sucked in a big company, they might suck in a startup, too.

johnpython• 9 years ago

If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down.

Talking about the work/life balance benefits of remote work is a bad thing? This makes even less sense since remote work is usually coupled with flexible work hours.

codingdave• 9 years ago

If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down.

I've worked from home, successfully, for many years, and I disagree with that criteria. Everyone works from home differently, and I know people who can rock their work exactly because of the added flexibility to care for their home and family on their work breaks. It decreases the stress in their life to slice their day in different ways, and allows people with busy lives to do better on all fronts.

There are many different ways to manage remote teams - some are hands-off, only concerned about whether the work is done. Some monitor their people to be sure they are 100% online during "working hours". Many are in a middle ground, with expectations set of specific response times to Slack, IMs, emails, etc. Likewise, there are many different remote working styles. Some people do well with a typical 8 hour day. I tended to target a 40 hour week, but that would be made of many 2-3 hour chunks throughout the week, not 8 hour blocks.

At the end of the day, you have to trust your team to do their work. The companies that are resistant to their remote people handling personal tasks during their "working day" don't truly have that trust.

Spartan-S63• 9 years ago

The way I see it, too, is that companies that don't embrace flexible work hours in fully remote companies (as opposed to just flexible working arrangements) aren't really a remote company. They're just pushing off the capital cost of having an office to the employee themselves. It's a pretty dishonest thing to pass themselves off as a remote company if they expect you to work like you do in an office environment.

The flexibility of being able to intermingle personal tasks throughout the workday is paramount to remote work. It totally does reduce stress and it allows you to work when you're productive and not work when you're not. I find that I'm a very bursty developer and I think that's more the rule than the exception in our profession. Remote work arrangements really help accommodate that reality where output is not constant throughout the day.

randlet4• 9 years ago

They're just pushing off the capital cost of having an office to the employee themselves.

I made the same comment elsewhere. Completely agree with your post here.

gregmac• 9 years ago

Seriously.

I don't regularly work from home, but I have solved several difficult problems while doing laundry, and I can specifically think of one time recently that was during a workday while I was folding towels. I know it's happened other times as well, I just can't specifically think if it was during the day while working from home.

I've also solved problems while showering, mowing the grass, eating dinner, and laying in bed trying to fall asleep.

Who knew -- developing software involves lots of thinking. You don't have to have your butt in a seat in front of the computer in the office to think. Sometimes doing something completely different is just what's necessary to break through -- whether this is getting up to get a drink, going for a walk, or doing sometimes completely non-computer-related like laundry.

jansho• 9 years ago

Absolutely agree. My profession is more creative and most of my eurekas happen when I'm doing mundane house chores. Something about the mind wandering about I suppose. I don't think it's a coincidence either that some of our best ideas often come just before we fall asleep.

HurrdurrHodor• 9 years ago

My high-school math teacher used to say that we have our best ideas for solving problems in the shower and on the toilet. :)

marcosdumay3• 9 years ago

An office space, with a computer always on your face and the expectation that you will be working is probably the worst environment possible for any kind of creative work.

... Or not. Make it an open office space, with people taking around you. Then you'll get the worst possible.

Paul-ish• 9 years ago

The hard time I have with having a computer in front of me is that I always feel the need to use it (eg surf hacker news), even if that isn't the best course for solving the problem I am grappling with. Sometimes a shower or a walk helps me disengage visually so I can spend some time with my thoughts.

christophilus• 9 years ago

Yeah. What I like about remote work:

- I can focus

- I can go on a walk w/ my dog, wife, kid(s) whenever I want

- I can sit and think without worrying that I don't look busy to some stupid manager...

Lots of reasons, and they're all perfectly acceptable. Good leaders will realize that the best work often happens when you're not directly working (e.g. in the shower, doing laundry, going for a walk). Being able to step aside and do these things throughout a workday is a productivity boost.

unit91• 9 years ago

Agreed. I routinely fold laundry during my morning standup call. It's a zero-mental-effort task that gets me on my feet while I chat with my coworkers in a meaningful way. Since I'm at home, my wall-sized dry-erase board is right there. Anything I need to note gets written down, then I resume folding.

One of the things people often forget about in this discussion is the lost company time from being at the office. Yes, valuable conversations can happen in the hallway, but more often than not a lot of non-work chatter does too. I'm fine with that -- I don't want to work in a POW camp -- but to me it highlights how ill-considered the "laundry folders = bad workers" mentality is in many cases. I worked in a cube farm for 5 years, then from home for the past 4 years. I'm vastly more productive at home.

mellery451• 9 years ago

Successful remote workers are disciplined and self-motivated. No boss is eyeing them from across the office to see whether they’re working. They alone are responsible for structuring their workdays.

This sounds like precisely the kind of person I want to work with, regardless of whether they are remote or co-located.

prh83• 9 years ago

If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down.

That really just means they're a butts-in-seats company that doesn't have an office. Take this from a job listing of theirs[1]

we don't care if you work at night, on weekends, in your pajamas, after class, in another timezone, etc. We do ask that you are available by Skype during regular 9-5 CST work hours

That's great if you can flex your work time, but if you have to always be available, that means you are either working or thinking about work almost all the time. This makes work even more stressful, unless you only work during the proper business hours.

On another note, the laundry thing is just ridiculous. That's a 5 minute task. People in an office environment burn 10 minutes at a time playing ping pong, foosball, or any number of time wasters.

[1] https://community.articulate.com/discussions/building-better...

JshWright• 9 years ago

That's a pretty hilarious quote from the job posting... We don't care when you work, as long as it's in addition to the regimented 40 hours we prescribe.

pc862• 9 years ago

Don't forget the very first line: 15-20 hours to start. So you're paid for 15 hours, but required to be available for 40.

Decorum prevents me from saying how I truly feel about that.

graysonk• 9 years ago

Reminds me of this: http://www.theonion.com/article/laid-back-company-allows-emp...

SmellTheGlove2• 9 years ago

Yeah, let's also point out that it's an internship posting that requires 1 year of experience publishing content and knowledge of multiple LMSs.

prh83• 9 years ago

Yeah, anybody who has those "must have" requirements is not going to be looking for an internship, being low paid, or part time. It's an interesting posting to be sure

surflight• 9 years ago

The job posting you're referring to is posted on the Articulate community site, but it's not an Articulate job. Another company posted it there. :)

Of course, one of the benefits of working from home is that you can do a load of laundry and perhaps background process on a complicated problem in the meantime. No question that it's a nice perk. The flexibility to craft a healthy work-life balance is wonderful.

I think the point in the article is that if that's the FOCUS of why you want to work from home, it COULD be a red flag. The people we've found really thrive in our remote environment are those that cite the fact that they are more productive when not working in an office.

fromonesrc• 9 years ago

I've been here at Articulate for 5 years and prior to that I worked at several butts-in-seats companies. I hated working at those places where my value was measured by the amount of time spent in the office or with co-workers. This is not that kind of company. Sure I have folded laundry and done other low brain power tasks while thinking through a tough problem before. Putting my hands on auto pilot helps me find creative solutions to problems. That works for me. May not work for everyone. What excites me about working here is the freedom and autonomy I have to get shit done and the opportunity to work with a stellar group of humans to build something great. I have never felt like my butt had to be in a seat while working here. Not once. My time is my own and I'm responsible for making things happen. That's it.

SirZimzim• 9 years ago

Ok so I'll just turn off Skype for the day then.

darioush• 9 years ago

I find it somewhat hilarious that companies think they're vetting employees and use these small little "probes". It's much more likely that the candidate is vetting you and already has a good idea of whether or not they will be able to work from home.

Wow, I really like lunch time with my teammates so... I think I'll go remote where I can't do that at all and just freeloading on a random company so I can do my laundry from home! No one will ever notice my evil scheme! Said no one ever.

randlet4• 9 years ago

    - If they talk about how great it was to do their laundry during work hours, thumbs down

    - we don't care if you work at night, on weekends, in your 
    pajamas, after class, in another timezone, etc. We do     
    ask that you are available by Skype during regular 9-5 CST

    - Cool things about working for us:
        Potential to earn bonuses for projects. Very *LOW* 
        salary but since we are ROWE (Results Only Work 
        Environment), bonuses are part of the deal!

As someone who successfully works remotely full time: nope, nope, nope. These guys have offloaded their office space costs to their employees homes under the guise of a flexible work schedule.

randlet4• 9 years ago

Too late to edit but I realize now points 2 & 3 are from a non Articulate job posting posted on the Articulate site. My apologies!

tcfunk• 9 years ago

We look for work-from-home experience and affinity

Great, back to the "you've gotta have experience to get experience" dance.

ksk• 9 years ago

It seems like every other week an article is posted about interviewing, and then half the commenters proceed to customarily disagree with their own personal anecdotes and such. Has anyone proposed an alternate method that has been put into practice, and actually works? OTOH, it seems like tons of different styles based on often opposing viewpoints (yes/no CS questions, yes/no whiteboard coding, etc) all work. Maybe what needs to happen is someone needs to create a proper taxonomy of the differnt styles, and a method to choose one depending on the situation ala data structures.

kvonhorn• 9 years ago

Has anyone proposed an alternate method that has been put into practice, and actually works?

Not that I've read this year, but I think we're finally past peak FizzBuzz.

j45• 9 years ago

Having remotely hired others and being hired, I've noticed remote workers don't always understand how critical it is to deliver and add value, instead of putting their interests and balance and what they're getting out of it ahead.

Highly recommend anyone who has opinions about certain rights try hiring someone for a gig and see how much the responsibilities come to mind, when it comes to being effective.

Some people aren't geared to work from home, or good at it from the get go. They still may be geared to work remotely (maybe a coworking space). Managing distractions at home is no different than managing distractions at the office. Same goes for finding a way to be effective at the office vs remote.

The ability to focus and manage distractions is something that can take people a while to figure out, and a worthwhile thing to focus on.

I just try to remember the value of removing the commute - If we take an the 2 hours a day saved in a commute (door to seat), it saves 60 hours a month, or 720 hours a year. That's an entire 30 days of living per year of extra waking hours.

How to Determine If Candidates Will Thrive in a Remote Work Environment

Related Stories