It is not remote work It may not be for every business and everyone’s cup of tea. When my co-worker and I decided to build a distributed engineering team for our startup, several questions ran through our minds: Will they be effective? How are decisions made? How do we continue the tradition?
Today, we manage a remote team of about a dozen engineers, and we’ve learned quite a bit along the way.
We hope they will be successful. These are probably already applicable to startups and larger organizations.
Combine programming
In an office setting, employees have ample opportunities to interact with coworkers, and these conversations organically create a sense of authenticity. But there is no such privilege in the case of remote work.
Some of our founding friends have used services to monitor or control their employees during work hours, but we feel this is ineffective and counterproductive to building a positive culture.
An introduction to pair programming, an efficient software development technique in which two engineers work on the same problem at the same time, fosters collaboration and allows developers to have conversations like they would in an office cubicle. We will try to pair two programmers for the next period (about 10 weeks) before thinking about rotating or switching.
Some argue that pair programming is a waste of time, since if each individual can produce X output, it makes sense to produce that output twice by having them each work on separate problems.
We find this view limiting. First, pair programming results in higher quality, because two minds are generally better than one. When engineering systems are incredibly complex, it’s always a good idea to have a thoughtful “check of health,” as this prevents middle-of-the-road decisions and helps prevent downstream problems that may take time to resolve in the future. In my experience, it also leads to faster problem solutions. To illustrate this point, if problems can be solved in half the time, in the same time, the result of two programmers working as a pair will still be 2x.
