Remote Work (short inconclusive stories)
Remote Work (short inconclusive stories)
Close remote, far remote, time zones and motivations.
It’s been five months since my last post here, sorry.
But I have got my reasons.
Last month I returned from Asia, my place of recharge.
This time I ended up moving from Bangkok through Krabi, Singapore, all the way to Hongkong, the pearl of my life so far.
There wasn’t an end goal and no return ticket. If you ever have a chance to go - do it without thinking; there won’t be another chance just like it. Life goes by fast for those who merely exist. Believe me, I know.
A side note here, cities are alive. They make you walk, smell and think differently.
So whenever someone tells me it is all the same in terms of possibilities and the richness of life - living in a rural area close to Bogota or trying to survive in a city like Hongkong… You have no idea.
Places create people. We are byproducts of villages, towns and cities around us. Some sites do encourage one’s development; some areas force you to change, compete and suffer, while others make you rot alive, at times literally.
To finish that off-top, I’d suggest reading this article by Paul Graham on cities and their meaning, you won’t regret it.
While travelling, I didn’t take many days off - I am still relatively fresh at my current company, and it wouldn’t be fair to my team in the first place. Hence I have decided to try working remotely like a local would - Bangkok, Koh Lanta and Hongkong. I always wanted to try it out.
Going fully remote, so to speak, with a difference in time of 6 hours with my core team (4 different locations in Europe).
Way to experience a nomadic lifestyle without losing one’s main base & contemporary luxuries.
So over a short time, I got a few things noted on remote work, something rarely discussed and deemed obvious, I will drop my notes below in no particular order:
1. Time zones require a more considerable commitment from a PO than in standard settings with a high level of team co-location.
It is easier if the scrum team you are working with isn’t that dispersed (2 hours difference max); in this case, making it all work is much easier - it is about your discipline.
For example, I had 4 hours before my standup in Poland, 4 hours to enjoy Hongkong in the morning, and almost no time after my 8-hour shift (the last ferry to the central island leaves at 22:30 with me finishing at 21.00). Planning my commute was crucial as I had to be back in my hotel to call in (wifis are limited in HK, having limited space, and their coffee shops tend to restrict one’s usage up to 1-hour max). I could handle it. But mind the living conditions - the difference in time zones is amplified by the chaos of the journey, and it is much more challenging to focus.
Years ago, I had a different situation with a guy who wanted to go part-time & travel while keeping a place on the team. It was a nightmare; hence if you ever expect someone to make a move like that - be aware - some folks are not built for precision, discipline and delivering on promises. Some of us can’t handle freedom well.
The travelling part-timer isn’t the same person you’ve used to work with.
There were days without contact with the guy; he was reading my messages (I was constantly presented with an eye icon on the chat app), but he wasn’t responding to whatever I wrote. Or sometimes just enough for me to ask five additional questions to remain unanswered.
Apparently, he was on the road from Argentina to Colombia, stopping by here and there, having issues with his stomach, enjoying Tinder or trying to catch another train to Sao Paolo.
I got all that from my Tech lead, the only person this guy was frequently in touch with. And I couldn’t do much either, as the guy had some serious tenure in the company, so no one wanted him out really.
I didn’t care as I was responsible for the increments we stopped to deliver.
Whatever the situation, the sprint is some form of a contract between me, as a PO, and the team, a contract covers a certain number of deliverables of a certain quality.
Ah, quality, this went down too.
2. During the sprint, you rely on communication a lot. If some team members aren’t there to catch up, extra work is required to make things move properly.
So in this case, as you can imagine, the communication went LOS, so I often didn’t know what was being worked on a frontend side (if at all).
The deliverables were dropped unexpectedly without information on the testing procedures, and the questions - if there were any - were never raised. Is it on production already? Is it on test?
For example, whenever some issue appeared, he tried to fix it somehow with glue and tape to dump it onto the test environment to start that endless back-and-forth game of questions and issues reported (mind you, some of them were written down as acceptance criteria in Jira).
Needless to say, no one on the team expressed it, but the morale went down by X, who wants to polish that ideal backend if the client-side work is being shipped once a month on a floppy disk (remember those?). With a crappy interface and long feedback loops?
Backend folks are highly fragile regarding feedback; they already exist behind the curtains; they live and breathe feedback loops.
No feedback - no motivation to make it work properly.
I had a guy in a different company who liked tackling issues like peanuts, sometimes without asking us for details. He wasn’t a native speaker; hence at times, stuff he got from the description wasn’t precisely the acceptance criteria but his creative understanding of it all (yes, one could blame me for that, I bear some guilt here).
So I have started recording video instructions, committing a crime against Agile if you wish. But I wanted him to get my vision on tape if he didn’t care to ask me.
Actually, this form of communication, while cheesy and weird, is bringing a lot of good to the table in remote settings (and/or part-time). Don’t write a lot. No one reads it.
Record a video, and prepare some viz in Miro. Make them see it. Enclose it in Jira so no obvious thing gets unnoticed.
Obviously, the person needs to want to go that far; some people don’t. That LATAM expat didn’t give a damn.
3. Your motivations plummet when you are away
The more significant the gap between your life and those of others around you in the new place, the more significant the drop in motivation.
By that, I mean you start analysing your life closely, earnings, and spending. Then, you suddenly realise your hourly pay is X in your home country and XX in a country you have just moved to. Same workload, similar industry, different pay.
So you are contemplating, and you are getting angry and frustrated. You realise there is a certain level of earnings, a ceiling if you wish, in your home country (primary residence here) and thanks to the majority of people tied by conformism, mortgages and families - the XX won’t be achieved in the near future. Because X is acceptable in a world “there”. And the majority decides what you will be getting.
At this point, you have to swallow it.
It is a bitter substance with salty grains in it. Some take it hard and start looking for opportunities.
The majority gets back to the routine soon, conveniently forgetting about the relativeness of one’s value.
Working remotely within the vicinity and being truly remote in a digital sense constitute different worlds some of us aren’t ready to dive in.
Before the trip, I was going to write a post on bullshit propaganda by corporations to make everyone return to the office, and I still think that way.
But there is a level of operational finesse required to manage truly distributed teams; most managers suck at it. Because the textbook management postulates (developed just after the Industrial Revolution) stopped working. No more “employee of the month” on PowerPoint presentations or kudos from your CPO/CTO.
Who cares about this nonsense?
The travellers (by that I mean real connoisseurs of this world) can’t be bought like that.
They are mercenaries who do things for the following three reasons:
Hard currency, and they know exactly how much they need.
Learnings & portfolio to exchange for the previous one but later on.
For the sheer joy of it. Some people enjoy building ML things but don’t do it for the ‘employee of the month’ title. Instead, they do it for themselves (a rare thing, usually easily confused by surrogate goals everyone else has).
This post isn’t ready yet, and I am still reworking it.