[ggregoire]

The first part of the book has a really good description of the "modern" work environment and its defects, and how it valorizes superficial work over deep work. I was actually surprised by how identical this description was to my last work environment.

- Open space to promote communication and knowledge sharing (and controlling what people are doing), but at the end you are interrupted every 5 minutes by people walking and talking/screaming/laughing about anything but work.

- People expect you to have Gmail and Slack open all day and to reply in the 5 minutes.

- You are encouraged to go on Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/whatever to like and share the latest news/video/open position/whatever posted by the company. Then you start reading/watching something else that looks interesting and you lose easily 30 min / 1 hour.

- At the end, what matter is how many hours you spend in the office. Nobody cares if you spend a full week on a task because you can't never focus on what you do.

[BeetleB]

>People expect you to have Gmail and Slack open all day and to reply in the 5 minutes.

When I was looking for my last job, I explicitly queried about this:

"Will it be OK if I check my email only 3 times a day (at work)?"

In my previous job, too much work was done through email. Person wants me to do some work and return a plot. I send it to him. Within 5-30 minutes, he has a question about it. I have to respond soon. And it goes on and on - with each email interrupting whatever work I'm doing.

So I don't have "meetings through email" any more. They want to ask me stuff? Let's get in a room and at a fixed time and work through them.

"I keep my messenger app permanently off. Is that a problem?"

>but at the end you are interrupted every 5 minutes by people walking and talking/screaming/laughing about anything.

For me, this is a non-issue, and much preferred to emails and IM's. Especially IM. Also, phone calls are OK too. Why?

With IM, they start a conversation and then suddenly disappear, only to reappear 15 minutes later when I think the issue is closed and have started to work on something. No one does that in person (well, almost no one).

When they come to me in person or call me on the phone, they cannot just browse the Internet while talking. They are mindful of my time. And somehow, I feel they prepare their questions better, too.

[ensignavenger]

-"have to respond soon."

What is it about the email that makes you think you have to respond soon? Is it the culture at the company around email?

I work at a non-technology Fortune 500 in the IT dept. (I work remote, too) and the general expectation is that we check our email 2-4 times a day. Occasionally I go a day going through my inbox once all day, and it has never been a problem.

I suppose it is a company culture issue?

[ryandrake]

Frequent sender of such E-mails chiming in here:

Often when there is a response expectation, I'll explicitly say so in the subject, so that if you're scanning your E-mails it will stick out. Will also specify my default assumption should you not respond. I like to be super clear. Company culture is the product of the people who participate in company culture.

SUBJ: [Reply needed by 5PM] Deadline for project approval approaching

(somewhere in body): Blah, blah, blah. If I do not hear back, I will assume we will go forward with the project.

[BeetleB]

I think the part that is missing in your comment is the company expectation on how often people should check their emails. This is why in my interview I specified something like "Morning, after lunch, and before I head home".

If getting an email like yours, sent at 2pm where a reply is needed by 5pm, then the answer to my question should be "No, checking your email at that interval is not OK".

I'm not going to say your expectation is objectively bad or anything. Some businesses may need to work at a fast pace. Just that I would not want to work there if this is the norm. Frankly, in the places I've worked, I didn't see why it had to be through email vs coming to my office or calling me.

[BeetleB]

>What is it about the email that makes you think you have to respond soon? Is it the culture at the company around email?

Yep. They insist they need answers soon.

(They probably do, but they should just come down to my office or have a proper meeting).

Really, as I said, they're essentially having meetings asynchronously through email.

[bananarepdev]

This. Especially the IM thing. Even if it is something unimportant, any ongoing conversation leaves this "ping" on my head, disabling my ability to focus.

[collyw]

This is one of the main motivations for me wanting remote work.

[taway_1212]

With remote work, there can be a constant slew of inquiries on Slack, esp. if you're a senior team member. Trivial things take 5-10 minutes to work out on Slack because of how inefficient typing is versus being in the same room.

I guess the ideal situation is to work on something that requires little collaboration, but such positions are very rare.

EDIT: They're even more rare that they could be. In cases where a component could be reasonably written and maintained by a single person, managers will still usually impose a requirement of having at least two or three people involved with that code, which creates large and completely unnecessary communication overhead. The reason is of course they don't want to be dependent on this specific programmer, because then they would have to pay market or above market wage and generally create a developer-friendly environment. They think that it's easier and cheaper to treat developers as replaceable cogs, even if it means they have to subject them to excessive knowledge transfer, thus making them less productive.

[ensignavenger]

What is wrong with a phone call (preferably scheduled) to work out such details? It seems to work pretty well for me with my remote job. I prefer more complex solutions to be worked out via a wiki-like editable document that everyone can share and discuss, but for trivial things, a phone call works well.

You are right that many more things could be done without so much collaboration with better practices. I think code reviews can help maintain a sufficient spread of knowledge across the team.

[eicnix]

Being able to call somebody and do screensharing helps a lot in this aspect. It isn't the same as sitting together in front of the same computer but way better than solving technical or conceptual issues through text messages.