failing like never before

Why I Hate Remote Working

(Because titles with broad, sweeping statements (that may not actually totally reflect the author's opinion) are wonderful at garnering attention... So maybe read all the way through before deciding to lambaste me?)

I work in the Silicon Valley and my team works with people scattered across America, Singapore, Israel, and India. A terrific feat, that without technologies like desktop sharing, VoIP, and IM would be virtually impossible. Many tech companies support and even encourage remote workers these days. And why shouldn't they? It allows the company to hire the best engineers around the world without having to worry about providing a physical space for the engineers to work out of.

But communicating with people that are 12 hours ahead of you is hard. At 9 PM in California, it's 9:30 AM in India. So by the time that 9 PM meeting is done, it's 10 PM (or 1 AM(!) on the east coast), just enough time to talk "off-line" to individual people, wrap up loose ends, and go to sleep. You'll try to share the pain, alternating who has to take the late night meeting, so that everyone only loses one night a week. But things don't always work out according to plan. People are busy or sick, so meetings get moved, and then the management bureaucracy rears it's head and suddenly you're spending two or three nights a week in meetings.

Do you need some help from your co-workers that are abroad? Well I hope you enjoy working till 2 AM to accommodate their schedule. Do make sure to load up on coffee before tomorrow's 9 AM meeting.

And you'll especially love dragging yourself to work for your early morning meeting only to find it's been rescheduled (Hey, it was your fault. Maybe you should have checked your e-mails before you drove to work).

Social life? What's that? Maybe you'll make the mistake of going out with friends and accidentally miss your 8 PM meeting, much to the displeasure of your manager(s).

So now that I've raised your ire and piqued your interest, I can afford to be a little more reasonable. I do in fact work quite a lot, but it is not a 24/7 lifeless schedule. I have no trouble working with people in the midwest or the east coast; the time difference is not so substantial to be a burden. I've on occasion worked from home, or some other remote location and found it to be fairly easy and enjoyable.

This is not my attempt to publicly flame my company or deride my co-workers or managers. I actually like my company and enjoy the people I work with, but like all relationships it often needs work. The idea of remote workers working closely together as a team is relatively new to this world and difficult to pull off. They are plenty of success stories (just look at the open source community), but also many stories more like mine. I do not believe we created this globally distributed team without fully considering it's implication or the strain it would place on the engineers, and now that we're knee deep into it, happiness and normalcy is a long slog away.

TLDR: Long distance relationships are hard work. Make sure you've considered the challenges and set guidelines before you jump feet first into it.