I don't have a general solution. We warn all new hires about this problem when they start. Just knowing you will go through this phase is often useful in catching the problem early. We rely on the support structure of everyone who has gone through the pain recognizing the symptoms in others early. We try to infuse some change to the working pattern of the person - like increase the 1:1 communication or have them help someone else or make them present something at a virtual brownbag or teach something to the rest of the group. These tasks help to a certain extent because new people seem to feel good when they contribute to a group. But I don't think there is any easy way other than just accepting this is going to happen and that you need to experiment your way through this problem.
I have been running a fully remote company for more than 5 years now. Some thoughts that have worked for me that are related to this guide:
a) Consistent timings - the employee choose their hours but they should try to keep it consistent through the week. This is a variation on the idea of fully flexible timings where people can work each day whenever they want.
b) We do pairing exercises (~1 hour spread over a week) to increase the 'socialize' component. The pairing can be as simple as two people (A,B) get together at the start of their day and update each other on their progress. End of the week, during the sprint call A gives B's update and vice versa. This helps break the ice because many of my engineers (and me) do not socialize unless there is work happening in the background.
c) Managers should understand that most people (in my experience) begin liking remote work and then start hating it somewhere between their 3rd and 6th month. People feel depressed and miss the environment of an office. I feel like managers should keep an eye out for this dip and assist early.
You are right. Upon, rereading - yes, this is hyperbole. I didn't intend that.
My point should have been that he can remember plays when triggered just like a high level chess player can remember positions when triggered. The expert's memory is way better than what ordinary people remember in almost any domain that requires human expertise and judgement.
This line of thinking ends up being applied only to chess, while what you are saying is true about most fields that need human expertise and judgement.
LeBron James is famous for being able to remember every shot he makes. There are cricketers who can tell you ball-by-ball plays from memory. Roger Federer remembers most of his matches. I have seen technical founders have an uncanny ability to 'remember' their code bases and figure out what to change. Boxers remember fights and sparring sessions in crazy detail. Mathematicians can do the same with papers they read ages ago.
I feel that memory and understanding co-evolve. The more you understand something, the better you remember it. The more knowledge you are able to memorize, the better you are able to understand and assimilate and create new ideas.
I am commenting because I have seen several smart people give this line about chess being about memory without realizing their professional expertise involves a great deal of memory too. In my experience, this is probably because when kids play chess, there is always this one kid trying to memorize opening and dazzle other people. Ultimately, those kids do not go on to become grandmasters. But yet, the people who lose to them think they lost because they did not memorize an opening.
I went from a full-time employee to an agency owner (literally one client and one employee for the first ~8 months). Here are some unpleasant surprises I hit along the way:
a. hiring is hard - even more so when you are small. I was lucky to start with a senior hire who had a little more experience than me. I think your first hire is more or less determined by luck.
b. delegating and trusting your hires is learned habit and takes time. I messed up badly so I don't have any tips for you.
c. you need to probably carry a larger bank balance to tide over any downs. Don't inflate your lifestyle just because you are making more money now.
d. there are several small, nagging chores that need to be done regularly (accounts, payslips, interviews, invoices, follow-ups, exit interviews, etc.). Over time, this becomes easier and you will discover good help.
e. most days will be normal but there will be a few days when you wish you had stayed as a lone consultant and there will be a few days when you are genuinely happy to be running an agency. I still struggle with this and don't have too many tips.
f. you will go through a phase where you will do almost zero technical work. The phase can last for years until you hire the right people to free you up. Just be patient - you have to navigate this phase if you want a stable business.
g. once you start and are not a failure (i.e., even if you are mediocre), you are on a treadmill that is hard to get off. You employees want to see growth and direction even if you, as the owner, may be content with a lifestyle business.
The worst recoverable mistake I unknowingly made in early days was to focus a lot more on the client and not bother about the image of my own company. We felt more like an extended team of another company than our own. I feel this is a recoverable error and that you don't need to avoid this. And as a disclaimer, I'm not in a hurry to scale so I avoided or have delayed many other problems that people more successful than me have hit.
My company maintains a very popular blog on testing. It has helped us land mutliple clients. We get a few inbound enquiries every month - usually from really small startups and/or QA directors that are looking to quickly implement test automation. After my own personal network and past clients, my blog is the most reliable source of clients. The simplest post that resulted in a client was one we wrote on how to run a Selenium test on BrowserStack using Python. The most advanced post that generated a lead/inquiry (but I couldn't close) was one on testing a Natural Language Generator.
What we write: We mainly write to make a tester's life easier and interesting - so testing, automation, tech we use at our clients and the different tools we use to test. The one other rule of thumb is that if the engineer spent more than 2 hours Googling about a problem, they should write a post about it.
Background: I established the habit as soon as I had an employee on the bench. It took over a year and about 30 posts before we saw even a little (~1k pageviews a month) traffic. It was about 18-months of regular writing (~50 posts) before we got our first client through our blog.
Pros: The habit has been a good for both my employees as well as for my business. The posts are good references for new hires and easy to pass on to our clients too. My employees also credit writing blog posts with helping them think clearer and articulate their thoughts better. We also look smart when our clients Google for something and stumble into a solution one of our engineers wrote.
Cons: The start was a slog and demotivating. Writing is still hard and time-consuming. As we grow, it is harder to sell new employees on the habit. The articles we enjoy writing barely get any hits [1].
I have this problem too - both as an employee and as a remote-only employer. I work as QA - not as a developer, though. I also work in a different timezone. I have found people start paying attention and valuing you once they start seeing you as a normal human who happens to work elsewhere and not as a "remote entity". I have tried these adjustments and I think they help:
a) make an effort to share things other than work - interesting articles you read, participate/respond in watercooler chats, post side-projects you may be working on, your favorite hobbies, post when you are stepping out and are back again, etc. This is counter-intuitive and not a direct solution, but you end up seeming like a human rather than some remote contractor. Once that happens, people start taking more interest in your work automatically.
b) get to know your colleagues, start meetings with a little bit of small talk, explicitly ask for feedback and don't hesitate to speak up if your team takes a decision that is not very remote-friendly (I've messed up plenty here!). Many teams will go out of the way to integrate you if you tell them how.
c) try writing summaries at the end of each day, week ... even if nobody is paying attention initially. Daily summaries are private and for standup while I record weekly updates on some internal wiki. I like cartoons, so I typically include some cartoons in my weekly summaries.
d) attend standup and come prepared. Your updates should be much longer and much more detailed than someone who is not remote. Days you miss standup, you should try posting your update on Slack.
e) turn on your camera for all meetings. It's another one of those habits that make remote workers much more 'real' and relatable.
f) make sure you have good audio/video and Internet connection.
This article has a random sprinkling of numbers that really do not give you the big picture. Here is some context about the outsourcing industry in India. Good stats to know (assuming the media is right):
1. the entire IT outsourcing industry is ~$150 billion large and employs ~3.9 million people.
2. the top 7 largest IT companies employ ~1.3 million people
3. I cannot calculate the exact revenue of the top 7 companies because they are part of larger groups (e.g.: TCS, Wipro). But the Top IT companies headcount and revenue
a) Infosys: ~200,000 employees ($10 billion revenue)
Stories like these come around routinely in the April-June timeframe (every year!) around appraisal time. This '56000' number is simply a random quote 5% of the entire workforce of the top 7 companies. I have seen different media outlets report the numbers as 28,000 this year to 200,000 in 3 years. Honestly, they don't know nor do I.
FWIW, I run an outsourcing testing services firm in India. I am too small to feel market trends. However, I have been reading and talking and interviewing several candidates across India. I can tell you that the tension has been palpable for the last 8 months or so. Many senior folks are feeling a quiet sense of desperation. I don't know if the media sentiment started the tension or if the ground reality is indeed going to force layoffs of senior employees.
The Reddit data set on BigQuery is excellent. My side project is tangentially related to the fact that the Reddit data set has normal folk commenting. I have been using Reddit comments to help writers research and find what normal people say about any topic [1]. So far, I have had little luck in incorporating the comment scores and coming up with something more useful than the standard bag of words search techniques[2]. I am currently working on making a more interesting/creative writing prompts ... again based on the Reddit data set.
One problem for data geeks to solve: Reddit data fits nicely into a graph structure and not so nicely in table form. It would be fantastic if someone put the Reddit data set into a graphdb and made it open.
I'm an employer that allows near 100% remote work. Remote work comes with its own set of trade-offs that need to be managed. These are the trade-offs I see with my 10-employee company in India:
Pros:
a) I can hire experienced people from anywhere in India
b) My employees do not waste time in traffic.
c) I have fewer personality conflicts to deal with ... but this could just be a side effect of being really small (~10 employees)
d) Being in the services business with all my clients abroad, my employees develop better remote working skills
e) I save on office rent
Cons:
a) It is hard to hire junior people to fit into a remote-only team in India. The 0-3 year experience crowd in India prefer being part a group and have a collegiate culture. I do not blame them - I've seen the 'in office/onsite' culture work well for them. But it hurts me as a services business because I get better margins on more junior folk.
b) Many senior people do not want to join my company - it doesn't 'feel' busy, they would like to have better visibility into their direct reports, etc. This wasted so much time during the phone screens that I have had to list 'we are a distributed team' as a con on our careers page.
c) The lack of office space is a major downer for a lot of people who would like to bring their relatives and show off a fancy office with dressed up colleagues.
d) I have heard these genuine complaints often - "we do not really know our colleagues", "we do not get together often enough", etc. I sometimes worry that we may not end up being very cohesive.
e) Remote work in India is interpreted by some candidates as 'easy work'. And it is interpreted by many people in their social circle to mean 'no work'. E.g.: "I have this errand in the middle of a weekday. Come with me. You work from home anyway."
I rarely comment but this story makes me happy enough to do so. I'm a former H1-B with an American Masters degree in STEM. I think this conviction will go a long way in making the system fairer.
Here is what happened. H1-Bs must be legally employed all (well most of) the time they are in the USA. To get past that rule, these H1-B shops act as employers and then farm out the employees to other companies. Employers need to pay H1-Bs at least the prevailing wage that is mentioned in their H1-B application. This employer did not. Instead, they reduced wages when the employees were on the bench. That is the violation that they have been convicted for. So this conviction is not that much about H1-B's replacing American workers as much as it is about an unethical employer paying his employees less than the promised wage.
Usually, people who join this kind of shop are people who have not been able to land a direct employer on their own and desperately want to stay in the USA. This judgment will go a long way in correcting the system because now all shops (and there are many!) that run this scam will close down. That, in turn, will decrease the number of people who end up applying for H1-Bs without a real employer. Hopefully, that will improve the perception around genuine H1-B VISA holders.
Chennai is my native place and yes, it's cheaper than Bangalore but by less than 20%. Can you update your profile with your email or email me, I'd like details on the $60 office space.
I am aware that good people come from all universities. For me top university is a useful filter. When hiring, especially as a small company, I need some way to filter down to a smaller candidate pool to interview. So my thinking is: better university = higher probability of finding better grad.
Your numbers on most things are way off. I returned home end of last year and setup shop this year in Bangalore. I have access to Naukri's database of quality assurance engineers and their current salary listed. I also visited campuses to recruit fresh grads. $200/mo won't get you even fresh grads from the top 20 universities in my state. $60 is no longer rent - it's about 5 to 10 times that for a 2000 square foot 3 bedroom apartment that's not in a very posh area. Setting up a partnership, including legal fees cost me around $400. Travel, you are spot on in that cheap options exist. BTW, days of 2 rupee and 4 rupee bus rides are also over. It's about 5 times that in a regular bus.
I'm giving specific numbers here mainly because there may be Indians who want to return home and start here.
I am understanding it differently, may be because after much deliberation I fell into the same position. I interpret the parent comment to mean that the questions posed are very, very relevant and worth grappling with, but knowing the answers is not a pre-requisite to work in the chosen field.
I don't know about the original commenter, but I fell into this position as being the best for me based on, "I am overwhelmed by the number of things that I need to know to make a judgement of good/bad over here, but don't or cannot know. There is too much random chance in my life to figure out how my actions play out. Until I grow wiser, let me do what that chance has laid my way, knowing fully well that I am operating in the dark."
The big, muddying parameters for me to answer 'is what I am doing right?' were:
1. In what context?
2. Over what timeframe?
The larger the context, the longer the timeframe, the more the number of competing principles I had to prioritize, often in inconsistent ways over different aspects of life. In the end, I defaulted to the original commenter's position, with the blind optimism that I would somehow, somewhere in the future get more clarity and wisdom through experience.
>>"Engineering is such a young industry that I'm not sure we've really faced (1) yet (since the number of people who started engineering in the 70s is but a drop in the ocean compared to the number in the workforce today). It'll be interesting to see how the industry has evolved in 30 years."
Do you mean 'software' engineering? Given its about a 40th reunion, it's likely the comment was about a more established field of engineering.
Key quote:
>>" Since August 2011, Mr. Kapil Sibal, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, has reportedly held meetings with the Indian heads of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and expressed concern regarding content on the sites hosted by these companies which maligned politicians and religious figures. The executives were reportedly shown content from their sites that could hurt religious sensibilities, as well as obscene images of Indian political leaders, and were told to screen user content and remove offensive material before it was uploaded."
There are a growing number of cases against Facebook and Google - the tax angle, blasphemous material hosted, minors creating accounts. To the cynic in me, all this just seems like Facebok and Google have not yet learnt to play with the the political big wigs.
Well expressed idea and worth watching. Key point is that we think of 'overhead' and 'cause' as separate things in a charity, like overhead does not count towards the cause and hence has to be minimized. This kind of thinking has led to a world where smart, talented and willing people need to make a choice between 'doing good' an having a career.