The Harsh Light of Remote Work

I came across the Remote Only manifesto recently, and while reading the points was struck by a common theme.

One of the major hurdles to remote work adoption is that it involves doing hard work in areas that people find tedious and hugely prefer to skip if they can get away with it.

Documenting things, standardizing things, careful and thorough written communication, having to examine carefully the work someone has produced to judge their performance, etc.

There are all sorts of ways to fudge these things when you all commute to the same building every day. You can see when someone is physically present in the building or not. You can get around poorly documented processes by tapping someone on the shoulder. The problem is, these things are all ephemeral and poor substitutes for actual value added.

Effective remote work arrangements kind of force you to get your shit together as a working group and do the stuff you really should have been doing all along.

It's like when organizations get excited about open-sourcing a cool piece of their internally developed software. Suddenly when you're about to expose it to the light for general consumption, you realize all the design flaws that have left it tightly coupled to what should be isolated systems and how you don't have a reliable build process but have relied on Jerry who "sets you up" when you join the company so you can compile the damn thing. In short, it exposes all the places where you took shortcuts instead of sticking to good software design practices.

Remote work can shine a harsh light on the flaws of an organization. Walk into the light.