Remote work without voice calls?

[Fritz Meissner]

My work is currently 100% remote and Skype is an integral part of the workflow. I'd be interested to hear what you all think about how well the workflow could happen without the voice calls. 

I think of all the misunderstood IM conversations that were quickly cleared up with a call and think, "impossible!" ... but then a lot of distributed open source development has happened without any voice interaction. Does anyone have experience with such a workflow?

Fritz

[Wiehann]

Try something like tmate, split your window at 90/10. Use the smaller area for you and partner to type into a plain text file (extra bonus is you get a history of what was discussed)

Even better - if you use Slack, set it up for IRC access so both yourself and your pair partner can run irssi in a split terminal window.

https://github.com/livingsocial/ls-pair is a pretty good resource, though not "non-audio" focused.

[De Wet Blomerus]

@wiehann between all the updates to the Railsbridge docs & this you are just killing it in the community helpfulness department.

@fritz I don't have experience with a tool for this regarding software creation, but I have outsourced lots of stuff to Bangladesh & India over email & Skype chat, if I can give you one piece of social advice is try to set up a situation where you can try it for a period of time without everyone involved feeling like you all failed if it doesn't work out. I would say put a set time on it and review after that. Say "Let's try this other tool for communicating instead of Skype, we will give it a go for X weeks and at the end get on Skype & discuss if we need to go back to Skype or not". That way if you need to pull the plug on it, it was a trial, not a new plan that everyone committed to & now have to abort, and then no one wants to try the next thing you suggest.

De Wet Blomerus

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[ivor...@gmail.com]

That is the Wiehann I know :)

[Robert Fall]

Hi Fritz,

All our employees work remotely. We hardly ever get on Skype. All our communication goes through Slack. I think it helps that we all share English as a first language and know each other. We've worked together in person in the past and I think that all contributes.

In the past I worked with someone who had Afrikaans as their first language and we would never have been able to work over a text chat application. 

I won't say we never have misunderstandings but mostly it happens with regards to tone and not content. This can  cause misunderstandings when it comes to politics and emotions and in those cases just get on a Skype call. But as far as day to day work goes I think the fact that we're all remote helps. There's no out of site out of mind syndrome because we're all out of site.

Not sure if my brain dump helped at all.

Robert

[Brendon McLean]

+1 for watching out for cultural differences.

The difference between English and French, where tone is laboriously conveyed through parenthetical caveats and self-deprecatory pre-ambles, languages like German tend to convey tone differently, relying on pronouns and grammar.  That grammar often has no English equivalent (so I’ve been told).  German IM or email can often seem accusatory and direct to the point of being rude.

And then there’s the fact that even English speakers chatting to other English speakers are often misinterpreted in the absence of facial queues and vocal tones.  I think this can all be solved by driving positivity and constructive feedback from the top :).  Negative bias in communications is a real thing (http://99u.com/articles/6991/email-etiquette-ii-why-emoticons-and-emotional-cues-work) — so we move the culture towards erring on the side of sounding overly positive 💓.

I really like this Github blog post: https://github.com/blog/1943-how-to-write-the-perfect-pull-request.  You can almost feel the tortured history of misinterpretation behind this post.  I wish more people made PRs like this.

I think online communication can work well.  But Robert’s point about misunderstandings is something to consider.

Brendon.

On Mar 9, 2015, at 11:59 AM, Robert Fall <r...@robertfall.com> wrote:

Hi Fritz,

All our employees work remotely. We hardly ever get on Skype. All our communication goes through Slack. I think it helps that we all share English as a first language and know each other. We've worked together in person in the past and I think that all contributes.

In the past I worked with someone who had Afrikaans as their first language and we would never have been able to work over a text chat application. 

I won't say we never have misunderstandings but mostly it happens with regards to tone and not content. This can  cause misunderstandings when it comes to politics and emotions and in those cases just get on a Skype call. But as far as day to day work goes I think the fact that we're all remote helps. There's no out of site out of mind syndrome because we're all out of site.

Not sure if my brain dump helped at all.

Robert

On 9 March 2015 at 10:18, ivor...@gmail.com<ivor...@gmail.com>wrote:

That is the Wiehann I know :)

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 9:44 AM, De Wet Blomerus <de...@togethertech.org>wrote:

@wiehann between all the updates to the Railsbridge docs & this you are just killing it in the community helpfulness department.

@fritz I don't have experience with a tool for this regarding software creation, but I have outsourced lots of stuff to Bangladesh & India over email & Skype chat, if I can give you one piece of social advice is try to set up a situation where you can try it for a period of time without everyone involved feeling like you all failed if it doesn't work out. I would say put a set time on it and review after that. Say "Let's try this other tool for communicating instead of Skype, we will give it a go for X weeks and at the end get on Skype & discuss if we need to go back to Skype or not". That way if you need to pull the plug on it, it was a trial, not a new plan that everyone committed to & now have to abort, and then no one wants to try the next thing you suggest.

De Wet Blomerus

<embedded image>

Website  //  Facebook  //  Instagram

On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Fritz Meissner <fritz.m...@gmail.com>wrote:

My work is currently 100% remote and Skype is an integral part of the workflow. I'd be interested to hear what you all think about how well the workflow could happen without the voice calls. 

I think of all the misunderstood IM conversations that were quickly cleared up with a call and think, "impossible!" ... but then a lot of distributed open source development has happened without any voice interaction. Does anyone have experience with such a workflow?

Fritz

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[Ian Petzer]

I think that all-text communication can work, and works best when:

1) Everyone works remotely

2) Any information that can be useful in the future is placed into more permanent structures like basecamp / wikis etc. instead of just in a chat window.

3) There is a minimum skill level to all in the team. Trying to upskill junior devs over an IM chat is going to hurt.

I've done a lot of remote work over the last few years and for me one of the things that I think really helps is having a daily video call. Just seeing peoples faces and chatting to them once a day really helps to keep everybody happy and on the same page.

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 12:31 PM, Brendon McLean <brendon...@gmail.com> wrote:

+1 for watching out for cultural differences.

The difference between English and French, where tone is laboriously conveyed through parenthetical caveats and self-deprecatory pre-ambles, languages like German tend to convey tone differently, relying on pronouns and grammar.  That grammar often has no English equivalent (so I’ve been told).  German IM or email can often seem accusatory and direct to the point of being rude.

And then there’s the fact that even English speakers chatting to other English speakers are often misinterpreted in the absence of facial queues and vocal tones.  I think this can all be solved by driving positivity and constructive feedback from the top :).  Negative bias in communications is a real thing (http://99u.com/articles/6991/email-etiquette-ii-why-emoticons-and-emotional-cues-work) — so we move the culture towards erring on the side of sounding overly positive .