Open Season is a podcast about open source issues, weighted towards the practical rather than the philosophical, and as such I tune into it regularly. Some are better than others, but I found the latest Episode 13 quite interesting for a number of reasons. They had an analyst from RedMonk on board this time, which was fascinating - RedMonk are (AFAIK) the only research firm that release their results openly rather than charging a few thousand for detailed papers, so they’re quire interesting. They talked a little about the practicalities of the Microsoft ‘we’re open, honest’ announcement of course, and largely reinforced my own thoughts on it - that while you have the ‘non-commercial’ clause in there it’s nice to have, but not really a practical shifting in the overall commercial landscape. The Zuckerberg interview came up too, as did how Grandmas really can use Ubuntu.
I also enjoyed their musings on remote working too - since I’m now working almost 100% remotely myself. The open source movement has been a standard-bearer for how remote working can work really well when done right, and I do think that with the right organisation, and the right people, it can work just as well for many tasks as cramming everyone into an office. You do lose a certain amount of social contact, which is an adjustment for sure, but I think communicating effectively and team-building across remote links can definitely still be done, it just requires a different approach and a little more effort. Open source communities that work well (and I’ll venture that Ogre’s qualifies) have built up expertise in the mechanisms for doing this, and the same approach is slowly becoming more common in commercial environments too. I don’t think you can run all projects long-term with no personal contact, but you can certainly run many of them for a long time that way, provided you find the right people, and the organisation can cope with the logistics.
The main project I’m involved in right now is almost 100% remotely developed, for example, our team members are in 6 different locations in 4 countries, and it’s actually working really well. I think it helps a lot that everyone on the lead team is a remote worker, even the project manager - so there’s no feeling of a 2-tier system. Time zones can be a positive and negative thing - on the minus side you’ve got the fact that you might only sync up for maybe 4 hours a day on IM, but on the plus side different team members can be working on something while the others are away from work, meaning you can get into work the next day and find you don’t have to wait for whatever it was they were working on - so staggered effort has its advantages too. What’s most important is that each team member has specific areas of responsibility and are mostly autonomous, so cross-dependencies are minimised. It really requires that each team member is an experienced developer & team worker already - it really wouldn’t work with junior staff who might need more assistance, training and so forth. What you lose on the social end, you gain on the ‘uninterrupted concentration’ end - something which anyone who’s had to work in an open-plan office at some point will understand. With today’s technology you’re not entirely disconnected either - IM can in some ways be more productive than over-the-desk crosstalk, in that it a) doesn’t bother anyone else, and b) can be deferred & caught up with later if you’re in the middle of something. It’ll never be as good as a chat over the coffee machine of course, but nevertheless the detachment is not as total as one might imagine.
The boundaries that this arrangement breaks down are not to be underestimated either. It can’t work for a lot of businesses that need a critical mass of people in one place, but for discrete project work, being able to cherry-pick any talent at all no matter where they’re located is a very powerful model - in the past it’s just been the logistics that have proven difficult. It tends to require a more experienced and flexible workforce (freelancers / contractors rather than salaried), and it requires absolute buy-in from the project management, but for many situations it’s ideal.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
For the most part I agree with your assesment of the virtual office. One caveat I’ve run into is working with a startup where everyone works remotely. There are so many decisions to be made, and so much polarization at times, that it becomes painful to get everyone on the same page and moving forward - even with all the online meetings, emails and IM’s.
Also, it seems difficult to get remote developers to patiently collaborate with one another. They tend to want to spend as little time as possible interacting with other humans and want to get back to their work and computers. This may sound like a good thing for individual productivity, but I don’t know that it makes for a healthy company overall. After all, many of us spend alot of time working, most of our time in fact, and if the majority of it is disconnected from other people, do we lose something? Has anyone else experienced this?
March 17th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Re startup - you’re probably right, although it depends on who is in charge. In our case the company is quite mature and thus the environment is established and direction is quite clear so not a real problem. If you’ve got a bunch of people all trying to bootstrap a company with no existing base I could imagine it’s a lot harder.
As for collaboration, I think it comes down to the people again. I haven’t had any problems with communication on the projects I’ve been involved in, but that’s perhaps because I’ve always worked with mature people who know that communication is an important part of development. We do talk quite a lot on IM and email, occasionally phone, to the extent that misunderstandings are rare, and we do help each other out when needed, while respecting each other’s time. Again, this is down to having an experienced team I think, used to working remotely - it takes a discipline and commitment to good communication.
But you do lose a lot of the social aspect, like I say - not necessarily directly related to getting work done, but it does have a cost.
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Downloaded that podcast, listened to it. Wow, so much hate for Novel and MS! Interesting points of view though, esp drawing parellels between how MS, Sun and IBM have similar things going on for some of their source releases - but MS gets more hate because they say “open source” too much. Or something.
Also very interesting to hear that grandma probably would find Windows easier then Mac, and thats why Ubuntu was an easy transition. That made me rise an eyebrow, after everything else that was being said!
Very random podcast, unsure if I’ll seek it out again or not.