Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help
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I've been working for home for the first time. I got quite a nice contract deal with an old friend of mine who is effectively my boss.
I am working with two other developers. Sprints are fortnightly. Documentation is almost non-existent at the moment.
I am working on a somewhat large project, there is no tests at all.
Frequently I find I am basically sidelined almost all the time by the two other devs as they are busy. I don't want to create problems in the team, but it is really frustrating when you are struggling with an issue to be given answers like this:
We did that to make it work.
Or
The coding standard doesn't allow that
When there is no coding standard defined.
I am getting quite frustrated with the lack of communication and when I do have some it is rather obtuse.
I dunno how to approach this, without feeling like I am being an asshole.
Any constructive suggestions would be great. Thanks.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
The coding standard doesn't allow that
When there is no coding standard defined.
"Okay, I didn't know that. Can you show me where the coding standard defines this?"
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@Rhywden They haven't documented anything unfortunately. I use ReSharper and follow the C# developer guidelines.
But for frontend code they wanted for example for me to use SCSS and not CSS.
It is just a case of "do they have put comments in my PR"
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@sweaty_gammon Then basically you need to tell them that you need some documentation on the guidelines as you're working from home. And that they also need to discuss things with you before writing said documentation.
If that does not work: Escalate. Tell your supervisor that you're less effective because you have to rewrite things due to unclear requirements.
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@Rhywden That sounds fair. Thanks.
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@sweaty_gammon have you tried asking them to be more expressive in their explanations?
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Here's my take on WFH situations: if you're treating it special (either you the WFH person or they the in-office people) you're (the company/your team) doing it wrong. Even if it's just for a day.
If you would pester somebody in person at the office, in the same situation you should be talking to them on IM or the phone. Not email.
Much of what you described sounds like would be the same problem even if you were in the office. In that case what's been suggested so far seems reasonable.
You mentioned the WFH part so I figured I'd touch on that since nobody else had.
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@Gąska I have specifically said that. It was forgotten about after we were face to face. It is like that I don't exist once I am not in the room.
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@mikehurley Everyone works from home. However I am much farther away so I can only come into the office once a fortnight. The other devs are an hour away so they are in the office more often and see each other more often.
I am sorry that I didn't make that clear before.
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Sounds like it's just a crappy workplace overall. To fix it probably needs more authority than you have and more time than what your contract is for.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
However I am much farther away so I can only come into the office once a fortnight.
That's closer than the remote devs I work with. I'm in the Bay area - at one point we had 2 people on the east coast, 2 in the rocky mtns, and a couple in Russia. We tried to get together (except the Russians - they're contractors) one or 2 times a year.
That said, we tend to treat Slack as our "talk over the wall with each other" medium. It's worked pretty well - but I do think it's because our personalities blended fairly well... Your case shows that doesn't always happen...
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@dcon It is just difficult when you get such an obtuse reply to a question.
I could just say "Well that doesn't answer the question" but then everyone get aggravated and that isn't productive.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
@mikehurley Everyone works from home. However I am much farther away so I can only come into the office once a fortnight. The other devs are an hour away so they are in the office more often and see each other more often.
I am sorry that I didn't make that clear before.That's a bad situation.
The best practice regarding remote work is, you either go full remote or full on-site. When you have a mixed team, like in your case, you inevitably end up with face-to-face workers forming their own clique, and remote people being sidelined.
Try going to the bosses and having them institute a daily 5 min conference call. That would then become your chance to clean up the air and get answers in a setup where you are harder to ignore.
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@cartman82 It is just difficult when you have been working for less than a month.
I wasn't included in a call yesterday and when I asked some questions in a group chat I was brought in immediately. So I don't think it is intentional.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
I wasn't included in a call yesterday and when I asked some questions in a group chat I was brought in immediately. So I don't think it is intentional.
Of course not. It's just the natural consequence of communication having a low barrier between one group of people (on-site team) and high barrier towards the other (remote workers).
All things being equal, people will take the path of least resistance. and they will tend to communicate more and better with people where communication is easier. Thus, the gap will form.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
@cartman82 It is just difficult when you have been working for less than a month.
I wasn't included in a call yesterday and when I asked some questions in a group chat I was brought in immediately. So I don't think it is intentional.
It’s also the only right time to escalate - if you are ineffective the next 6 months because of timidity, then what ?
At least raise the flag that this is a problem - and keep bugging them.
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@cartman82 said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
All things being equal, people will take the path of least resistance. and they will tend to communicate more and better with people where communication is easier. Thus, the gap will form.
But occasionally it reduces the communication level of that one person enough that everyone else can get more work done. (Thinking of some of my cow-orkers…)
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I dislike the whole work from home thing that most companies allow now.
A: I want attention and nothing beats having the person there to slag.
B: It usually ends up being very inconvenient. A two minute chat in the office is usually an hours over the phone or slack even with a screen to point at. I'm shit at communication at the best of times. Having the extra barriers just makes it twice as difficult.
C: projects that have WFH people usually take longer and are more prone to cockups in my experience.
D: everything turns into a an hour long meeting instead of ten minute back and forth conversation at a monitor.Having it as an occasional fallback is useful but IMHO it shouldn't be the norm.
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@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
B: It usually ends up being very inconvenient. A two minute chat in the office is usually an hours over the phone or slack even with a screen to point at. I'm shit at communication at the best of times. Having the extra barriers just makes it twice as difficult.
C: projects that have WFH people usually take longer and are more prone to cockups in my experience.
D: everything turns into a an hour long meeting instead of ten minute back and forth conversation at a monitor.None of these have to be true. It's perfectly possible to function remotely.
I prefer to be in the office over WFH but as I'm the only person on my team who works in that building then it makes no difference if the other people are in their house or office or another county or (like a lot of meetings I have) another country.
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@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
I dislike the whole work from home thing that most companies allow now.
A: I want attention and nothing beats having the person there to slag.
Only works if you're actually in the same office. Here everybody is distributed across 10 or so different offices. The likelihood of working in the same office as other team members is pretty low. At that point, it doesn't matter whether they're at home or in another office - they're equally not present.
B: It usually ends up being very inconvenient. A two minute chat in the office is usually an hours over the phone or slack even with a screen to point at. I'm shit at communication at the best of times. Having the extra barriers just makes it twice as difficult.
Fuck you, I'm busy. If you want to talk, you need to book that hour on my calendar anyways. I'm not going to let you walk up and butt in at some random moment.
C: projects that have WFH people usually take longer and are more prone to cockups in my experience.
I've yet to see evidence of this. (And no, I don't WFH.)
D: everything turns into a an hour long meeting instead of ten minute back and forth conversation at a monitor.
Per (B), being in the same office doesn't solve it from being an hour-long meeting.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
B: It usually ends up being very inconvenient. A two minute chat in the office is usually an hours over the phone or slack even with a screen to point at. I'm shit at communication at the best of times. Having the extra barriers just makes it twice as difficult.
Fuck you, I'm busy. If you want to talk, you need to book that hour on my calendar anyways. I'm not going to let you walk up and butt in at some random moment.
I'll bare that in mind if I ever need a 2 second acknowledgment from you, you uncivil cretin.
C: projects that have WFH people usually take longer and are more prone to cockups in my experience.
I've yet to see evidence of this. (And no, I don't WFH.)
More anecdotal than anything empirically based but the Agile consultants the office like to rabbit on about being in the same office too and they all weren't full of shit. If you have anything empirically based, post it. Especially if they go deep into day to day. I always suspect there is a good project manager behind these stories. That's also anecdotal from me.
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@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
Agile consultants
@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
weren't full of shit
Unlikely
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@DogsB More seriously though - everyone WFH isn't logistically different from people being based in different offices, and lots of companies manage that one. It's 2018 and there are like a billion collaboration tools that make it possible.
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@loopback0 said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
@DogsB More seriously though - everyone WFH isn't logistically different from people being based in different offices, and lots of companies manage that one. It's 2018 and there are like a billion collaboration tools that make it possible.
Yeah, it's a lot easier and better than it use to be but my experience has being that it's still a barrier and not as good or as much fun as having the whole team in the office.
I have a preference for working in the office together but I wouldn't dismantle the concept because a lot of teams and projects wouldn't exist without it. The extra flexibility is nice but I will always push for teams sharing the same physical space though.
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@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
I dislike the whole work from home thing that most companies allow now.
A: I want attention and nothing beats having the person there to slag.
B: It usually ends up being very inconvenient. A two minute chat in the office is usually an hours over the phone or slack even with a screen to point at. I'm shit at communication at the best of times. Having the extra barriers just makes it twice as difficult.You sound like a bad coworker.
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@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
I dislike the whole work from home thing that most companies allow now.
A: I want attention and nothing beats having the person there to slag.
B: It usually ends up being very inconvenient. A two minute chat in the office is usually an hours over the phone or slack even with a screen to point at. I'm shit at communication at the best of times. Having the extra barriers just makes it twice as difficult.
C: projects that have WFH people usually take longer and are more prone to cockups in my experience.
D: everything turns into a an hour long meeting instead of ten minute back and forth conversation at a monitor.Having it as an occasional fallback is useful but IMHO it shouldn't be the norm.
That's why it's important to get yourself familiar with the work so you can confidently work independently in order to "work from home".
When you're doing works that requires frequent intra-team communication, you had better work at office for a while before things cleared up.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
Frequently I find I am basically sidelined almost all the time by the two other devs as they are busy.
Have you tried putting those devs on the blockchain?
Documentation is almost non-existent at the moment.
Documentation is really helped by putting it on the blockchain.
there is no tests at all.
The blockchain is built upon tests!
without feeling like I am being an asshole.
It's okay to be an asshole, as long as you're backed by the blockchain
Any constructive suggestions would be great.
........ oops.
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@Lorne-Kates Yes I was arguing a point on another thread but I wasn't rude. I don't see how it relates to this one.
The only thing it has proved is that I won't bother paying much attention to you after such a comment. Have a good day sir.
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A response to everyone on this thread except for @Lorne-Kates who was being an asshat over a disagreement on another thread that isn't remotely related to this subject.It is easy to be nasty.Thanks for all the help and suggestions on the subject. I took them all on board before a meeting Tuesday when I knew I would be meeting the other devs.
I had a good chat with the two developers on site. I actually ended up helping them on some of their major code management issues.
They had a real problem understanding some of the finer points of git. I ended up moving them towards this:
It isn't perfect but it is better than what they have now. Tweaking can be done later.
Also they were just really over worked so I don't think anything was intentional. One of devs is basically going in January which is a shame.
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@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
everything turns into a an hour long meeting instead of ten minute back and forth conversation at a monitor.
You can screen share in slack, skype, teamviewer etc ... How is it really any different?
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@sweaty_gammon said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
everything turns into a an hour long meeting instead of ten minute back and forth conversation at a monitor.
You can screen share in slack, skype, teamviewer etc ... How is it really any different?
I find the lag really frustrating. Also being able to actually point at what you're talking about is actually quite handy. Not to mention being able to drive instead of discribing vocally what you want them to try.
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@DogsB I am the only person at work that uses git bash.
I was showing them how to do some stuff and I opened VIM and I literally had one of the guys write " WTF " over my screen in pink paint while I was sharing a screen.
It was instantaneous as much as it mattered. So sorry I don't think you were using it correctly or you are just bitching for the sake of it.
The criticism are overblown for the most part IMHO from what I've heard so far.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
@DogsB
It was instantaneous as much as it mattered. So sorry I don't think you were using it correctly or you are just bitching for the sake of it.The criticism are overblown for the most part IMHO from what I've heard so far.
Maybe when we have 10tb internet everywhere and it actually is instantaneous. Also vr where you can actually point at what you want them to look it will be viable and not just useful as a stop gap
I'm not actually bitching for the sake of it. Noone has actually addressed the problems in an optimal fashion. You want to work in a sub optimal manner go for it.
Another caveat I'll add is if somewhere wants me to work from home on a regular basis they can also pay part of my rent. Although I think that falls into the category of me asking them for that.
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@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
Another caveat I'll add is if somewhere wants me to work from home on a regular basis they can also pay part of my rent. Although I think that falls into the category of me asking them for that.
I kind of feel like if someone wants me to come into the office all the time they should pay for all my gas. And maybe all of my car payment, too. Working from home is such a massively awesome benefit.
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@boomzilla They do. It’s part of your salary.
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@boomzilla said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
@DogsB said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
Another caveat I'll add is if somewhere wants me to work from home on a regular basis they can also pay part of my rent. Although I think that falls into the category of me asking them for that.
I kind of feel like if someone wants me to come into the office all the time they should pay for all my gas. And maybe all of my car payment, too. Working from home is such a massively awesome benefit.
That's why I suspect it comes under the heading of expenses I should add to my paycheque. :)
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Working from Home, Other Developers too busy to help:
@boomzilla They do. It’s part of your salary.
:whargarbl.wav:
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