Ruby on Rails Developer

[Tony Seminary]

We are looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer that would be interested to work in a relaxed working environment that rewards creativity and the desire to learn. It’s a pretty laid back organization, and you would help extend and maintain their current portfolio of external-facing web-based applications. They are so laid back that after you prove yourself and develop trust internally, they *might* let you telecommute from time-to-time. If this sounds interesting to you, and you’re interested in working for a company that is in the personal growth industry, please send me your resume to to...@itmotives.com. Thank you!

[markus]

> They are so laid back that after you prove yourself and develop trust
> internally, they *might* let you telecommute from time-to-time.

So I may be an outlier here, but it's 9:30 and so far today I've
interacted with people in five different location in Oregon, two in
California, two outside the US, and another half dozen or more that I
don't really know or care where they are physically located.

With code mostly on git and generally being deployed to remote servers,
meetings as often on skype/G+/etc. as in person, my sense was that in
the web-dev world telecommuting was the norm and "they *might* let you
telecommute from time-to-time" sounds like the antithesis of laid back
("We want a web site, and we've already picked out the room we want to
keep it in!")

Does that match with most people's experience?

-- Markus

P.S. I'm not disparaging the advantages of having shared space, for
pairing, etc. but most of the places I've work gave up the "devs are
like stevedores and must cluster around the ship they are loading"
analogy ten or twenty years ago, if they ever even had it.

[Ward Cunningham]

Distributed tooling has always been a struggle. It gets better every year. Some groups get it sooner than later. Open source projects have led the way having been largely distributed for decades.

We have a Federated Wiki hangout every Wednesday at 10am Pacific. Its the meetup I look forward to every week. Drop-in visitors are always welcome.

http://bit.ly/SFWhangout

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[Sam Livingston-Gray]

I'd reply in more depth, but I'm on Maui and still waking up. In an hour or so, I'm going to pair with someone in the Portland office on a different team, and next week I hope to do some pairing with my teammate in India. No wifi in the condo, but fortunately work shipped me a Mifi right before I left. ;)

--
(Sent from phone; please excuse brevity.)

[Andrew Ettinger]

What's your setup for pairing up remotely, out of curiosity?

[Jesse Cooke]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 10:38 AM, Andrew Ettinger <sillyde...@gmail.com> wrote:

What's your setup for pairing up remotely, out of curiosity?

Recently I've used wemux + vim + Google Hangout + Campfire and it worked *really* well. I could even listen to my own music (quietly though) while pairing.

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 7:38 AM, Andrew Ettinger
<sillyde...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What's your setup for pairing up remotely, out of curiosity?

vpn+ssh+wemux+(vim|emacs), augmented with some form of audio chat (I
like iChat, but Skype works okay too) and IM for pasting links across.
Haven't found video to be terribly useful, but if the home office
ever digs up some iPads, I'll give 'em a try for dedicated
telepresence.

I keep meaning to push the tools to github.com, but right now they
have a few references that only make sense internally, the user admin
stuff only works on OS X, and there's no emacs support. (We've only
got two people on my team who use it, and one of them is in India and
never gets to pair.)
-Sam

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 7:24 AM, Sam Livingston-Gray <gee...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd reply in more depth, but I'm on Maui and still waking up. In an hour or so,
> I'm going to pair with someone in the Portland office on a different team, and
> next week I hope to do some pairing with my teammate in India. No wifi in the
> condo, but fortunately work shipped me a Mifi right before I left. ;)

[Disclaimer: this is my own opinion, not necessarily that of my
(unnamed but easily discoverable) current or previous employers.]

As much fun as the above was to write, my current experience has
definitely not been the norm. I've had some jobs where I've worked
from home (or CubeSpace, RIP), and some jobs where the expectation was
that work was mostly co-located. My last job had 5-8 devs primarily
in the same space, and that definitely had its advantages for ad-hoc
pairing. The camaraderie on that team was also excellent, though this
was probably as much a function of its composition as its location.

There are definitely tradeoffs in distributing teams, too. At any
given point, I'm not sure I could give you a complete and accurate
roster of who's on "my team"; I'm still not entirely sure what "my
team" is. That's partly distribution, partly rotation, and partly
sheer size, but still.

As for identifying with the company overall, there were [at least] six
of us at Aloha Ruby Conf. I had a great time at the conference, had
some good conversations, and paired with some brilliant developers,
but none of those were with people I (nominally) work with. I saw one
person I'd interacted with briefly during a company hackathon, had one
or two chats with my manager's manager, and was briefly introduced to
three more developers. (Admittedly, I get more chances to meet
coworkers than most of the people at conferences, so that was probably
the right mix for me, but still.)

-Sam

[Audrey Eschright]

On the topic of remote work in general, I thought this lit review of research on what does and doesn't work well was interesting: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cahrs/research/upload/Spring2011_CAHRSRemoteWorkReport.pdf
It'd be great to see something that like that covered practices at smaller companies too.

It's been over five years since I regularly commuted into an office, but before and during that time, I've worked with people who were very comfortable with remote employees, and those who weren't. As Sam says below, there are tradeoffs, but I think most of the issues that come up really have less to do with the work (writing code) and more with developing communication practices that create a healthy work environment, whether you're in the office or not.

Audrey

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 7:38 AM, Andrew Ettinger
<sillyde...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What's your setup for pairing up remotely, out of curiosity?

https://github.com/livingsocial/ls-pair