[Perihelion]

Honestly, I haven't seen a company that does the hybrid remote/on-site thing well. I'm sure they exist, but every time I've worked at one the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything.

Hybrid remote/on-site requires some great discipline. If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was said.

+1 for working remotely on a team that makes an effort to make it work.

[rqebmm]

MY company does hybrid remote/on-site, and one of the best ways to mitigate issues with off-site communication is part-time work from home. Since on-site workers spend some of their time as remote workers, everyone has a good idea of what's required to empower remote developers.

It's not always roses and rainbows, but it definitely helps.

[mikekchar]

The company I work for does hybrid remote/onsite as well. I'm remote and I actually think that having onsite people take some remote days is almost required to get things working. After people take a couple of days remote they suddenly understand the issues a lot better.

Also for me, not always roses and rainbows. But that mutual understanding is really helpful.

[joe563323]

Hybrid remote/on-site method should only be used as a migration path for the remote-first method from on-site, else it does not work well.

[nnq]

WHY?! What parent poster describes above seems like "heaven" to me. Some people can be "true nomads", others can spend 50% time in office, 50% working from home, everybody can be happy and find "what works for him/her".

I hate both working in-office full-time AND working fully remote. But a mix sounds awesome, I always feel energized when working one day from one place, another day from another, and I also enjoy having the meetings in-person...

[joe563323]

> others can spend 50% time in office, 50% working from home

What this really mean is 50 % teams in a company are remote and 50 % are onsite. Remote working is binary.

[farslan]

We do it here are DigitalOcean and it's just awesome. We have people in NYC HQ and remote all over the world (for example I'm working from Turkey). The key is not only over communication, also to care about your remote employees, let them feel like they're really a part of the company, bring them to the HQ, not per year, multiple times, etc.. There are many things but so far DigitalOcean is one of the best companies I've worked remotely (and I'm working remotely for almost 5 years for different companies).

[cookiecaper]

I'll be contrarian here and say that I actually hate that most remote companies make frequent on-site travel part of the job and pretend like it's a perk. Travel, including on-site visits and "group retreats", are not perks for me.

I have a family and a life where I'm at and part of the reason I like to be remote is because it allows me to be productive with minimal impact on other things (e.g., don't have to waste 2 hours in commute time each day). Places that require quarterly visits to the home office are kind of just aggregating all of that disruption into a single week. Still better than doing it every day, but not a thing to tout as a benefit.

[ghaff]

It is contrarian. As someone who has worked remotely to a significant degree for quite a while, I also find face to face get togethers (whether in an office or elsewhere) incredibly valuable.

You're welcome to your own preferences of course but, as someone on a largely remote team, I consider regular get-togethers in various forms pretty much essential.

[cookiecaper]

Just curious, what specific value do you derive from these events that makes them "essential"? While I understand that a lot of people who may not have a lot going on at home may find them enjoyable, I really don't think it can be characterized as essential for accomplishing the job tasks.

If face-to-face communication is "pretty much essential", what's the argument for continuing to run the company as a remote/distributed enterprise? Isn't the whole concept of telecommuting predicated on the fact that face time is not essential to performing the job function?

Leaving aside the personal interruption represented by such events, I don't understand the philosophical underpinnings. To me, it seems like someone said "There's not enough chance for politics and cliques to emerge over IRC [which is incorrect btw], let's make sure we all get together physically at least once every 3 months so we can find new things to take petty offense at."

Again, I think that well-run open-source projects provide some really good examples of the right way to do a distributed company. They usually have one big pow-wow per year, and it's a convention with planned talks, networking events, etc., and of course, attendance is voluntary and the meetings are transcribed and broadcast. Debate and consideration occurs online where everyone can participate.

If a massive project like the Linux kernel can get by without having such events every 3 months, why can't $Random_Startup?

I've been a full-time remote worker at the same company for the last few years. I'm the only remote worker on my team and one of a small handful dispersed throughout the company. I've been back to the head office once. It's absolutely true that there are negatives and downsides to being remote, but nothing that jeopardizes my ability to perform my duties.

Beyond that, I did several years fully remote as a full-time contractor. Some clients were local and I would meet with them face-to-face up to a couple of hours a week, but the majority were non-local. I only met a few of these people in person and I don't feel that impacted my ability to do my job.

Like so much else in contemporary tech culture, my opinion is that it traces back to putting single 24-year-olds at the helm and making everything subservient to their whims. They think it's cool to rent out a vacation home on a beach in Belize and fly 10 people out to set up camp in there for 2 weeks. Grown-ups with spouses and kids or other significant non-work obligations are likely to be less enthusiastic.

[nnq]

Some people like me dislike working fully remote just as much as they do full-time in-office... a hybrid approach is only thing that can work for me. "Constant consistent variety" is what keeps me ticking and productive. Also, just as you want to take time off from work, don't you also feel the need to take some time off from family too ? ;)

[ghaff]

I value variety as well. I mostly work from home when I'm not traveling but I like to go into the office at least one day a week even when I don't really need to. I'm similar with traveling. There are times when it really wears me down but then I'm doing the routine day-to-day in the office/home for three weeks and I'm ready for a change.

[ghaff]

>If face-to-face communication is "pretty much essential", what's the argument for continuing to run the company as a remote/distributed enterprise? Isn't the whole concept of telecommuting predicated on the fact that face time is not essential to performing the job function?

I think it's predicated on face time being not necessary on a day to day basis given the tradeoffs associated with requiring it.

A lot obviously depends on the task and individual preferences. I probably shouldn't have used the word "essential." However, I've found some level of F2F very useful and I'd probably encourage teams that weren't too distributed to get together physically on a semi-regular basis (as most want to do anyway).

It's funny that you mention the Linux kernel. I've heard GKH on a panel at a LinuxCon explicitly say that he thought one of the reasons that Linux development was so robust was because there was enough money in the ecosystem to get people to events like he was attending.

[emj]

Could we quantify this a bit more? A largely remote team for me is a 3-7 person teams, all but project lead are remote. The regular get together are 4-8 hours every month plus some annual dinners. The remote distance is just 20km - 500km

I think our face time is abit excessive but it's ok, even nice, but that's because it fits into my workday and family life, and it's always paid travel time.

[ghaff]

It probably depends a lot on the nature of the work and working styles but having a F2F sync every month or two seems pretty reasonable for a not too geographically distributed team.

[farslan]

I also have a son and I understand you. You don't have to go btw and it's not mandatory. However it's encouraged and you're welcome to go and visit. So there is a big difference there!

[peterjmag]

Can confirm—DigitalOcean is great at remote work. I'm consistently impressed by how well connected I feel, despite being across the ocean from our HQ in NYC. People really care and put in the effort to make it work. It also definitely helps that both "sides" are well represented—we're almost exactly 50% remote at the moment.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =)

https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers/#current-openin...

[bogomipz]

I applied to Digital Ocean and the recruiter before even speaking to me sent me a link to an online test that tested exclusively for knowledge of how to automate things using Chef. Nowhere is Chef mentioned on my CV as I have not worked with that config management tool, although I have with worked with others Puppet/Ansible. Needless to say I deleted the email. Talk about ridiculous. What a massive fail.

This was the second such miserable experience I had with D.O. I assumed that my first bad experience may have been due to a lack of maturity at the time with the interview process and so applied again a couple years later. Wow, was I was wrong.

[vonmoltke]

> And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =)

Yeah, and your hiring process is rife with stupid biases like autorejecting people based on who they worked for in the past.

[Perihelion]

Could you elaborate on this? I think DO has a right to hire however they want to but I'm curious about who they're auto-rejecting/why.

[vonmoltke]

Last year I had my resume submitted by a third-party recruiter for a role there. My resume was rejected out-of-hand by the hiring manager because the companies/customers I had worked for were "too enterprisey" (i.e. I had only worked for government contractors at that point). The "too enterprisey" quote came directly from the recruiter. I suppose he could have been blowing smoke up my ass, but I don't think he would have said that if he was.

[Perihelion]

Ah, okay. Sounds like they were trying to focus on people with a specific type of experience and not blacklisting people based on a specific employer or anything.

[scruple]

Yep, this is absolutely correct in my experiences. I'll chime in, since I'm a remote employee at a company that is hybrid remote/on-site but with the vast majority of employees being on-site.

Long story short: I actually started on-site but negotiated part-time remote. Then after about a year of that my spouse accepted a dream job offer on the other side of the state and so it was no question that we were moving. They wanted to keep me on and so I transitioned to full-time remote.

It has it's ups and downs. From my experience, it depends on the team and ultimately the lead and/or the manager. If they get it, it's good. If they don't, don't bother.

My last team, it was beautiful. Everything worked great. It became obvious to me after transitioning away from that team just how much extra work my manager was doing to keep his remote employees in the loop. With the team I'm on now, it's not working at all. Why? Because, as you so eloquently put it:

> the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything... If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was said.

This is exactly the problem I am facing down. About a month ago, I even tried talking to my manager about it. Even going so far as using this exact phrasing. His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips! Completely missed the point. I'm not surprised, I guess I just expected some effort.

I'm trying to remain positive but it's tiring. I can do good work and make progress but I'm with a lead who is insulating me from meetings and it feels deliberate. The few times I am invited in to a meeting, it's easy to see that he accepts and assumes credit for _the teams_ efforts. He was hired recently as a Senior, our manager wanted him to transition to a Lead, and he's actually landed somewhere around trying to be an architect. Ranting aside, when I bring my concerns up to him it's obvious that there's no attempt to better understand the issues/challenges of the hybrid approach. It doesn't help that he's never worked with remote employees before, either.

[ghaff]

>His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips!

I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach.

Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.

[nojvek]

It seems that having great speech to text would make remote teams workable. Meeting notes are automatically taken and organized into a searchable journal

[passiveincomelg]

If nothing else, that would at least be an improvement over "let's take a photo of the whiteboard after this one hour ad-hoc meeting and attach it to the jira ticket".

[scruple]

I do make trips up every quarter, and they do reimburse expenses, but they are unarguably disruptive and occasionally burdensome to my life and my family.

[mikekchar]

I think there are a couple of challenges. You are right that it is hard for people to understand how easy it is to get out of the loop. On the other hand too, if you are in a team with people who are politically motivated, it's pretty easy for them to actively exclude you if they think you are danger to their goals.

For me (being remote and even 9 time zones away), I've tried to scale back my own ambitions. It's hard because I've worked as an agile coach for a long time, so I'm used to having quite a lot of influence. I think trying to reinvent yourself to work for other people's success can be useful.

It can be a different style of political game. You need to show how they are better off with you than without you. It's not nearly as depressing as I'm sure this sounds. Just a different way of making a contribution.

[scruple]

That makes sense and it's good food for thought, thanks.

[kartickv]

I don't see why your manager missed the point. If the "vast majority" of employees are onsite, then it seems reasonable to expect the few who aren't to come visit, or otherwise change their working style, rather than the majority to change their working practices for the few. Particularly if it's the same state in the same country and not, say, a 20-hour flight from Bangalore to San Francisco.

Am I missing something?

[scruple]

Yes, I believe you must be. I'm referring to where the OP said that as a remote employee I feel out of the loop on a lot of things. So, I tell my manager that I'm missing important information about the projects I'm working on because people have these infrequent, but important, impromptu meetings and those details don't exist outside of those spoken words and their heads and his response is to tell me to come to the office more often. To do what, exactly? This is strikes me as missing the forest for the trees.

The fact is, this entire team is all on Slack and we all have email and we all use zoom. We have internal Wiki's for documentation. We have JIRA. And on and on. The point is, there are plenty of established avenues available for people to dissiminate this sort of information but it doesn't happen. I don't think that I'm asking them to modify their behavior by asking that they include their team members or to remember that they exist when they have those impromptu meetings.

[kartickv]

You ARE asking them to modify their behavior when you say that they should use Slack/email/whatever other tool for your benefit, or that they shouldn't have an impromptu chat around the water cooler because you're not around.

Since you're in the minority, you can't demand the majority change their working style for you. It's up to you to fit in to how the majority works, say by showing up in the office. Or you'll miss out important information, which will be to your detriment, not theirs.

> To do what, exactly?

To communicate with others the way they apparently prefer to communicate — in person.

And to build relationships, which lead to working smoother, and prevent misunderstandings from snowballing. It's easier to get pissed off with someone over email than in person.

There are many advantages to facetime. You can decide to forego those, but you can't tell others to, just because you want to.

[tripzilch]

> You ARE asking them to modify their behavior when you say that they should use Slack/email/whatever other tool for your benefit, or that they shouldn't have an impromptu chat around the water cooler because you're not around.

No, he was asking that already when he asked if he could work remotely. And the company said yes.

> Since you're in the minority, you can't demand the majority change their working style for you. It's up to you to fit in to how the majority works, say by showing up in the office. Or you'll miss out important information, which will be to your detriment, not theirs.

Then they shouldn't have agreed to let him work remotely. Majority or minority doesn't matter after that decision has already been made.

Maybe they should revisit that agreement if apparently they can't make remote workers fit in the team.

"No, we believe we can't make it fit with the way our teams are currently communicating" (and do not want to change that) is a perfectly legit answer to the question if remote work is an option.

However, once the decision is made, of course effort is required from all sides.

Otherwise, why even bother asking about it.

It's like applying for a job on the condition that you can't work Wednesdays because of allergies. The boss is perfectly fine with this, you can work the other 3.5 days, you're hired. And then it turns out the most important crucial meeting of the week, of which no minutes are kept, is on Wednesday. Now this is your problem, somehow. Who messed up here?

[kartickv]

This all seems to boil down to unstated expectations from both sides, which is a no-win situation. My last boss's attitude to people who wanted to work remotely was "You can do whatever you want as long as your work doesn't suffer or you don't end up disconnected", making it explicit than the onus is on the remote worker to fit in to the team.

scruple's boss should have told him that right at the interview stage, before a job offer is made. Maybe say that he expects scruple to turn up in the office for a few days every month. Or whenever a major decision needs to be made and scruple is out of the loop. Or have regular one-on-one meetings over video-conference with everyone in the team to remain connected, making up for his physical absence.

Whatever the details are, scruple's boss should have told me he'll need to make an extra effort to make up for his remote work, and both sides can then decide whether to go ahead with the job.

In the absence of that, both sides end up holding the other responsible for the problems, which is a no-win situation.

[BlackFingolfin]

I think you still missed the point: If he is there every now and then, then he still has missed all the water cooler discussions that happened while he was not there. It's not as if they will see him and say "ah, right, now that I see you, we discussed this and this last week when you are not here.".

The only way to fix this is with some concious effort to reproduce the results of water cooler discussions explictly -- and if you spend that effort anyway, you might just as well do it via Skype or Slack... He doesn't have to be on-site.

[kartickv]

It's not all or nothing. If he shows up every once in a while, he's better connected than if he never showed up. People tend to forget people who they don't see.

[scruple]

I'm not for one second suggesting they don't talk to each other and have impromptu meetings. That is absolutely ridiculous. I'm just asking that important details from those discussions find their way to the rest of the team members. I don't think that's asking a lot.

And, going to the office, those conversations will only happen to include me if they happen (they're impromptu, somewhat random) and when I'm there for 1 or 2 days at a time. When I go back home and to my co-working space I'll continue missing things. That's the point.

If the project suffers as a result of all of this, which is what is actually starting to happen, then I suppose by what you're saying here I shouldn't actually care? Heaven forbid I ask _individual people_ to keep _the team_ in the loop about the thing we're all trying to _collectively_ build.

[kartickv]

To be clear, I didn't say that you shouldn't care, or that you shouldn't ask people to keep you in the loop.

Three other people have responded to my last post. Please see those responses, since they address your points.

[Illotus]

Usually the modifying of behaviour in these cases just means writing down stuff more, which is usually beneficial to everyone.

On another note, having remote employees without supporting that type of working company wide is just silly squandering of resources. Sadly that is fairly common anyways.

[kartickv]

I agree that writing down stuff more is usually beneficial to everyone, but at times, it has felt like rehashing things that everyone who was present in person already knows, just for the benefit of remote people. That's a cost at times.

[joe563323]

> I don't see why your manager missed the point.

Dev's are missing the point of manager. Manager becomes obsolete when the communication channel is just some software medium to share text.

[snarf21]

Exactly, it requires an active investment in over communication. Hopefully someday the tools will evolve to help reduce the need for this to be so manual.

Bouncing an idea off of someone remote gets difficult. I feel bad for interrupting them and they feel annoyed at being interrupted. Culture also plays a big role in that as well.

[ghaff]

I'm not a developer but just last week I was visiting one of our locations where a lot of the people I work with are actually located. I was down there for a specific meeting but I bumped into enough people and had serendipitous conversations with them that I left saying to myself that I should really go down there more often.

To your other point, communication tools are still pretty limited. IM/Slack/IRC are good for some things though a lot of people I work with don't use them. I've yet to see anything that remotely compares to being together in a conference room for high bandwidth interactions.

[mjevans]

Or you need to get everyone hanging out in a group chatter environment (Like IRC).

[ghaff]

Unfortunately, while most/all of the tech folks hang out on IRC, it's much less used by a lot of the marketing/business people I deal with. I should use it more routinely myself but the fact is that it's not that widely used by some groups.

[konschubert]

I think what helps is to keep everybody in the team in a permanent video call during working hours. This requires suitable hardware and software (I would love to build a company producing these tools one day.), but also a considerable amount of discipline. A wordier version of my thoughts is here: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remo...

[douche]

That sounds just awful. Maybe I'm spoiled, but even when I'm at work, I go in my office and close the door when I actually have work to do. Trying to work in that kind of a panopticon style environment sounds nerve-wracking.

[pdimitar]

That sounds like a modernized version of the guy with the lash monitoring if the slaves work constantly. Like really, there are people who find that managerial technique desirable? Wow.

[ajmurmann]

I've tried this on a team that was mostly remote but on certain days located in there regional offices. It didn't really help with anything. The only conversations that took place were conversations that otherwise would have happened anyway but would have been initiated on chat and then taken to video. The only difference was that now someone walked up to an iPad and started asking loudly if the person they want to talk to is available.

[sotojuan]

It works at our company because the only remote guy is the only one in his "domain" (iOS). He probably doesn't care about the frontend watercooler chat and anything important about the backend will be mentioned in standup.

[Perihelion]

That definitely helps. I find there are other little cultural things you miss like inside jokes/shenanigans. They're not work-related but they're related to work and can make you feel like part of the team.

[sscarduzio]

God, who cares of this work jokes shit? They're never funny, it's always the boss that makes them and everyone laughs way too much. FFS, We're not friends, we don't have to be, and it's OK!

I like what I do, take pride on it and everything, but at the end of the day, my private life (where I get to choose my friends) is OUTSIDE work hours. And I'm committed to close the laptop as soon as I'm done.

I guess this kind of "school feeling", "we're on the same boat" feeling, where groups of people linger together in long coffee breaks tends to belong to corporate, especially in USA where they work stupid hours to "show off" their commitment. Utter nonsense.

One more thing that I really feel I "broke free" from (after becoming full time remote) is the ALCOHOL CULTURE. Peer pressure into drinking: company credit card on the tab and unlimited drinks (no food, otherwise it's cheating). So degrading.

[krick]

No offense, but this works both ways. I mean, this is not a secret that there is this sort of people who feel that way, and if I can see that you are one of them — I wouldn't want you to be a part of the team. I mean it strongly: if I don't need you for some very specific kind of job, no way you are hired. Even if you are great professional (but replaceable) and a nice guy otherwise.

I don't like myself this weird culture where it's supposed that you have to be always a nice guy, politely nod and smile and say "Completely agree! Except..." when there isn't a single point you actually agree on, so I often dismiss such labels as "toxic attitude". But your attitude is just that — toxic. I'm okay with people being somewhat rude and arrogant and whiny and always complaining about "why should we", but this attitude of "I have a real life outside, and here — I just work here, so fuck you all" — that makes you both absolutely unreliable and very unpleasant to have around. Unfortunately, the word "toxic" fits really well.

I've actually never had anybody to work extra-hours, but knowing that they would is significant part of what makes me care that they don't have to. Technology is worthless, people are what makes companies to succeed, and absence of meaningful relationships with your team basically renders you to be a piece of quite primitive carbon-based technology.

[VexXtreme]

You are entitled to your sentiment, but calling people and their approach to life "toxic" is a good way to alienate them and dismiss what you have to say. There are many ways to run a business, and I've run teams that have shipped multi-million dollar software entirely remotely, with minimal face time and non-work related socializing.

There are plenty of companies that manage their work in a way that minimizes the human component and maximizes the technical utility of their engineers (judged on productive output alone), almost in a way that makes the human component and all it brings with it (unreliability, politicking, emotional outbursts, backstabbing, you name it) irrelevant. In fact, my ideal company reduces face time to close to zero, because that's the only reliable way to eliminate politicians, bad actors and people who try to game the system using social skills and emotional manipulation. A nice side effect of remote work is that it automatically creates that sort of environment, unless you go out of your way to change that (but then the remote work model is probably not for you).

>renders you to be a piece of quite primitive carbon-based technology.

The fact that you don't know how to manage engineers in an entirely meritocratic, non-political environment, says more about your management abilities than anything else.

[Perihelion]

I'm in no way suggesting that people spend all of their time at work or have significant overlap between their work friends and after-work friends. However, it's nice to work with people and not robots. Some people can tolerate sterile work environments devoid of anything but neutrality, and some people can't. I'm not even saying you have to be friends with the people you work with, but being friendly goes a long way. You spend a large portion of your day with these people, so it's not a huge ask for someone to give a crap about them as people.

[problems]

I think most people have a better office experience than you. I have to be comfortable actually expressing the situation I'm dealing with when I run into troubles, be that cursing about some code or explaining why something will take longer or shorter than expected to my boss. I feel much more comfortable in a less "sterile" work environment in that way. If I'm in a work environment that's too sterile I'll feel like every error I make, every little delay detracts from my value as an employee, and that's immensely stressful to me.

That said, no one here puts in extra hours to "show off their commitment", everyone shows up when they want and dumps at 8 hours later. I've stayed late when I was buried in debugging once or twice and got told to go home by numerous colleagues. Just things like that, telling you to put it down is a positive influence sometimes. I came in the next day and solved the issue that I had spent 3 hours on the previous day in about 20 minutes.

[sotojuan]

I think the importance of that varies from person to person... I don't dislike inside jokes but also don't care if I miss them—I'm just there to do my best work.

That said, I completely understand why someone would feel differently.

[closed]

Agreed, especially RE shenanigans. I'm remote most of the time, but in the office this week, and small things like telling stories at lunch make a difference.

[rwmj]

Red Hat has 10000 employees, a large proportion being remote (including me - about half of all developers work remotely). I can assure you that remote workers at Red Hat are not out of the loop on anything.

The thing is that even if I went into the local office, I would still be "working remotely", because the development teams are distributed all around the world. Therefore everything has to be done on mailing lists, IRC, bug trackers and occasional conference calls.

[amorphid]

You have to be diligent about researching a potential employer with multiple locations, too. My last job on "on site". I learned on Day 1 that all of my teammates were all remote (or at least not in my office).

[garrettdimon]

It's definitely doable, but it has to be remote-focused. At Wildbit, we have 12 in Philadelphia and another 14 in 14 different cities around the world. They keys are in the small things.

When we do video chats, the folks in Philly call in just like they were on a home computer. They don't all get together in a big room and call in. We also make a point to run all of our conversations through group chat and project management software. And plenty of the Philly folks work from home regularly as well. Remote work isn't simply tolerated, it's put first.

The remote folks (myself included) miss out on some of the office benefits like family-style lunches and get togethers, but we all make regular trips there and get to partake. It's not purely about location either since we're spread across numerous time zones. It just takes more deliberate communication.

There's always going to be water cooler chats, but those can just as easily happen via email where nobody would see them. We have to make a point to capture and share things to the right people.

[joncalhoun]

I suspect if you want to do a partially remote team the best way would be to make an entire team of remote employees and then treat that team like a satellite office. We know those work for most companies, so as long as the team can communicate well amongst themselves I don't think them being remote will ultimately be any different for the in office workers than if they all went to an office in a different city.

[Bahamut]

I work for a hybrid remote/on-site company - we have made it work well. The most important thing I found is to make sure all of the stakeholders are present online for a serious discussion on whatever it is of concern. As soon as one is cut out of the loop, trouble starts.

[sqldba]

I sit in a very small half dozen person team in an office and still need to fight non-stop to be told what's going on.

[iamdave]

Anecdote but our team does it brilliantly. Working from home? Just let the team know via slack and go for it.

Management is onboard with it and has taken the openly stated position of "we don't care as long as you're reachable during the hours it's reasonable for someone to be online" (and the obvious: "deliver your deliverables when they're due"). In my case as the ops lead, I have additional hours but we are so well baked into slack that if someone needs me, I get pinged via mobile, reply from where I am or delegate it. Heck just last week I did a couple of deployments from 4 timezones away, tested it, and left a PR note in the channel with a link to the JIRA ticket. It got worked, updated, fixed and closed while I slept.

I wouldn't say our team made a concerted effort, we just set the expectation that if you're going to be away, let us know, and during production hours the absolute bare minimum is that you'll be reachable if absolutely needed. Heck, even if you need to leave early to take care of home stuff or what have you: go to team chat "Hey I'm taking off early to take care of thing" and go. You'll get replies like "Take it easy" and "Cya tomorrow".

Every team meeting has a join.me session for remote people to join, they speak up and contribute if asked or needed, even our stand-up comes with an auto generated Google Hangouts link that gets published to slack every morning at 10am. If you miss the stand-up or can't connect, people have been really great about just typing up what they're working on when they're available again.

Otherwise, no one really cares. I've absolutely loved it. This is one of the better teams I've worked on just by how well everyone communicates without bombarding each other. People stay out of each other's way, but will ask when they need help and there's never any fear that you wont get someone willing to at least look at a problem with you; even if they don't know the answer-I've had devs pipe up and offer ideas and a second pair of eyes. Problem gets fixed, I shoot over a thumbs up emoji and a "thank you" and we go back to our own little worlds. Read-only Friday comes along, and we go drink.

Contrasted with my last job where I negotiated the right to work remotely because the distance constituted a total four hour commute. I was consistently turning in deliverables on-time or early, conducting client calls via an expensed voip phone and getting several orders more work done from home because I wasn't waking up hours earlier than normal to make the 2 hour drive in.

That privilege was arbitrarily lost because of a few critical management slip ups (owner took a vacation with more than a couple projects open in the lurch, and left no instruction behind for me in his wake, so things failed in a big way when). Shortly after becoming an 'office worker' again and putting in 12 hour days between commuting and sitting at my desk, I was out the door.