{"id":2265,"date":"2019-03-16T16:49:57","date_gmt":"2019-03-16T20:49:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/?p=2265"},"modified":"2019-07-19T10:26:17","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T14:26:17","slug":"unexpectedly-joining-the-distributed-workforce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/?p=2265","title":{"rendered":"Unexpectedly Joining the Distributed Workforce"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After an unusual set of circumstances, my company has shifted its IT and software development staff into a distributed workforce even though all of us are within a local drive of the office.\u00a0 Previously other terms were used for this type of work, like working from home or working remotely.\u00a0 But it is so much more than that.<\/p>\n<p>The distributed workforce is becoming a common buzzword now, describing people who rarely or never come to a physical office.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a new world for me, but not for my wife.\u00a0 She worked for a company in Pittsburgh for a year, before we decided to move back to Florida.\u00a0 She had proved herself to be quite an asset, and the company allowed her to take the company laptop and other equipment with her and give it a try.\u00a0 It has worked quite well for her.<\/p>\n<p>Matt Mullenweg, the co-creator of WordPress blogging\/content management software, has produced a video on the distributed workforce <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=x6fIseKzzH0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>. His new company is 100% distributed workforce.\u00a0 Ironically, my wife has been working for over 18 months in Florida and there were 14 people in the office when she left Pittsburgh for Florida.\u00a0 There is now only one person in Pittsburgh who goes into the office, so the idea has even caught on with her company.<\/p>\n<p>So after about two months in the distributed workforce, here&#8217;s what I have found:<\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Good<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">You get a certain part of your life back by losing the commute to the workplace<\/span>.<\/em> Another part of this is lowering the stress from rush hours, overly assertive drivers (aggressive is a label), accident delays and other negatives to a regular commute.\u00a0 There is also a savings in fuel costs, toll road costs, and maintenance (less wear and tear), although those costs won&#8217;t totally go away.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em>You can choose where you work, at pretty much anytime<\/em><\/span>.\u00a0 The terms &#8220;working from home&#8221; and &#8220;working remotely&#8221; are too narrow, so the distributed workplace implies any place other than a fixed location:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em> You can decide to spend sometime in another location and just work from there<\/em>.\u00a0 My wife and I recently went to Kansas City, where our daughter goes to school, to have some time with her and take care of some chores at the house.\u00a0 Some of my coworkers have or will shortly be working from out of country&#8211;just to have a change of pace.\u00a0 I often see distributed workers just hanging out for an hour or two at a Starbucks or other place with free WiFi.<\/li>\n<li><em>A group of your co-workers can decide to work in a public area for several hours to collaborate in person.<\/em> I recently did this with some coworkers to coordinate the final stages of a project for deployment.\u00a0 It was a newer marketplace with a microbrewery and food shops, and we went in the middle of the week when the volume of shoppers was low.\u00a0 The merchants were happy to see us and others with laptops showed up in the marketplace.\u00a0 This gave me a fresh perspective on the value of the buy local movement.<\/li>\n<li><em>Your home office is your own environment, which gives you a lot of control.<\/em> Being a software developer, immersion is a key aspect of developing code.\u00a0 I worked for 8 years in a Microsoft-like environment, which was private offices with a door.\u00a0 Closing the door was only done to block out the rest of the office for some immersion time.\u00a0 This gets really good in a home office, because people can&#8217;t just walk up to you and disrupt you when you are immersing.\u00a0 Also, in areas where there is no office, it is amusing to see the 50\/50 split among the workers who want overhead lights on or off while working at their workstations.\u00a0 The home office eliminates that debate.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3><strong>The Bad<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><i><u>Initializing<\/u><\/i><em style=\"text-decoration-line: underline;\">\u00a0social contact becomes a proactive effort<\/em><\/span>.\u00a0 In the office environment, people often initiate conversations by simply coming into contact with another by chance. Because the distributed environment eliminates this chance contact, there has to be some initiative to create some chance contact.\u00a0 At a minimum, companies generally plan some kind of team activity when everyone can relax together.\u00a0 This is a good reason to set up a permanent video conference called &#8220;the water cooler&#8221; so that people can just check-in outside of scheduled meetings, say hi and chat with whoever is there.<\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">It requires diligence to keep up with all the things happening on the team, and to report all the things through more formal channels in the team<\/span>.<\/em> Similar to chance conversations, being distributed also eliminates hearing about something from another conversation nearby which should have been communicated.\u00a0 The &#8220;water cooler&#8221; open video conference can sometimes help with this, and can be a good measure of where documentation or communication is lacking.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em>It requires a high level of self-discipline<\/em><\/span>.\u00a0 While I list this under the bad part, it is only the adjusting or re-adjusting to the lack of immediate personal feedback.\u00a0 It is not too difficult if you&#8217;ve worked independently before, but leaving the office environment where your team is physically present will require this shift.<\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">If you are not in the habit of exercising, get started as soon as possible<\/span><\/em>.\u00a0 For some people who are not involved in regular exercising, working in the distributed workforce can actually remove the only form of exercise they have: walking to the office.\u00a0 Where we live, we have a community pool and a nice 1.5 mile walk we can take daily.\u00a0 Find whatever works for you and do it.\u00a0 It helps to avoid feeling isolated when you are not often around your work team, and the exercise is always good for your health.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Good or The Bad &#8230; Depending upon your situation<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em>The home life can not interfere with the office time<\/em><\/span>.\u00a0 My wife and I are now empty-nesters in middle-age, so this is not a problem for us.\u00a0 She has her office in the front of the house, I have mine in the back.\u00a0 The only time we see each other when we are working is when we take a cappuccino break, or sometimes even lunch.\u00a0 If my kids were still living at home (especially under the age of 5 or 6), this could be a challenge to manage.\u00a0 Still, I&#8217;ve seen some people manage it amazingly well.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Some final thoughts on why this is growing into the norm for a lot of companies<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The idea of work following the sun (as Electronic Data Systems used to refer to work transferring from one team to a team on the next continent on a near constant basis) has been around in some valid form since the 1990&#8217;s.\u00a0 Remote working is not new.\u00a0 But there have been several events in technology and culture which have made wide adoption of this work phenomena possible:<\/p>\n<h3><strong><em>The switch to SaaS (Software as a Service) and the extensive adoption of the cloud.<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>As a software developer, it was difficult to envision, even just 5 to 10 years ago, being able to write code and manage build processes while outside of a secure office environment.\u00a0 The build servers were generally in some restricted part of the company, and the development and testing process stayed on corporate owned and managed servers&#8211;often in the corporate facility itself.\u00a0 The production servers, where the product was deployed and served the public, was the first place the code was operated outside of the corporate IT department.\u00a0 Usually, this was on hosted servers in one or more data centers.<\/p>\n<p>With the advent of the cloud, and Software as a Service impacting even the coding and build tools (Azure, Amazon S3, GitHub), source code and build processes now exist outside the company&#8217;s IT department hardware.\u00a0 The IT and DevOps folks are just tenants of a larger system in the cloud.\u00a0 In fact, in my current position, I don&#8217;t use a VPN except on rare occasions to directly access a server on Azure or a corporate server with legacy info which has not yet been transferred to a SaaS service.<\/p>\n<p>So while distributed work was enabled by the tools software developers built, now even the development process itself is distributed work.<\/p>\n<h3><em>The incredible growth of high speed internet between continents<\/em><\/h3>\n<p>Back when the United States began military action in Afghanistan after the September 2001 attacks, I remember the almost comical transmission delays when a news agency (CNN, etc) did a live report from the scene.\u00a0 Since the primary signal transmission went over a few satellites to transit over the continents, the delay was often 2-3 seconds.\u00a0 Most inter-continental internet traffic still traveled over satellites at the time as well.\u00a0 The delays were annoying, but I do remember it being fodder for a Saturday Night Live skit about two comics separated in Afghanistan and the United States were trying to do their routine over the &#8220;live&#8221; link.\u00a0 It was more irony for me, in that the same timing disruptions they experienced in trying to do their routine in the skit, was something I was experiencing when talking to overseas teams in India at the time.<\/p>\n<p>A signal travelling to a (geosynchronous) satellite has to travel 22,236 miles, and the round trip is 44,472 miles.\u00a0 When you consider that the speed of electricity is 182,000 miles\/sec, that&#8217;s almost a quarter of a second travel time.\u00a0 If it has to travel over multiple satellites, it&#8217;s roughly 1\/4 of a second per satellite.\u00a0 And in a phone call or video call, that&#8217;s just the delay from the microphone on the far end to the speaker on your end.\u00a0 That same delay occurs when you answer back.<\/p>\n<p>About four months ago, the company I now work for contracted with a company in India to do some coding.\u00a0 And as we did work with them over video links using Zoom, it was immediately clear that something had radically changed.\u00a0 The timing delays were gone&#8230; all of them.\u00a0 I was so pleased with how much the absence of timing delays made the conversations more natural.<\/p>\n<p>Curious to what had caused this, I did some quick research.\u00a0 The reason it has improved so much is that today 97% of all intercontinental internet traffic is carried by an undersea <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">fiber optic<\/span> cable.\u00a0 <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><em>97 percent<\/em><\/strong><\/span> !\u00a0 How far we have come in just over a decade.\u00a0 Undersea cables (copper) have been around for many decades, and were designed for telegraph and telephonic transmission across continents.\u00a0 There has been a substantial amount of effort to lay undersea <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">fiber optic<\/span> cable to increase the speed and capacity between land masses.<\/p>\n<p>When the undersea fiber optic cable is used, the travel distance from Florida to India is about 10,000 miles.\u00a0 In addition, when the signal changes cables during its route, it does so at a junction box right in the cable. This increases the travel distance only by yards or feet&#8211;not by multiples of the entire distance.\u00a0 This cuts the one-way time for the signal to travel down to between 5\/100ths to 10\/100ths of a second, making the response time difference very noticeable.<\/p>\n<p>To get an idea of the extent of underwater intercontinental fiber-optic connections, <a href=\"https:\/\/submarine-cable-map-2019.telegeography.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">check out this map<\/a>. The cables represented by a grey color are not yet operational and have the planned date of launch next to their name.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>In conclusion<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The distributed workforce is one of the gems of the global village envisioned long ago, and should be embraced.\u00a0 It opens up a world of possibilities.\u00a0 And I really like it.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>A side note<\/strong>: My wife and I worked (not distributed) for the same company from 2007-2015.\u00a0 We are now both distributed workers working from home, but for different companies.\u00a0 We&#8217;ve kinda come full-circle.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After an unusual set of circumstances, my company has shifted its IT and software development staff into a distributed workforce even though all of us are within a local drive of the office.\u00a0 Previously other terms were used for this type of work, like working from home or working remotely.\u00a0 But it is so much [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,30,19,31,21,20,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-life-events","category-non-technicalthoughts","category-nostalgia","category-politics-and-public-policy","category-technologynetworking","category-technologythoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2265"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2332,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265\/revisions\/2332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}