(2007-03-23) Svn Remote Staff

Signal Vs Noise thread on why people don't hire remote staff (Distributed Team, Team Work). My experience

• I log (almost) everything I do in the TeamWiki as a real-time journal. Nobody else seems to want to write that much. So I have a hard time keeping a sense of progress, barriers, etc.

• a White Board is a lot more plastic than any typing-medium for hashing out weird cases

  • first you have the shared visual process of working out a problem on the board: WebCam?

  • then you have the saving/distribution of your document - maybe you use FreeMind for a Mind Map, more likely you use MsExcel or HTML for a table. Right now I just leave that whiteboard alone for a week. I guess you could use your Digital Camera, but I don't find resolution to be great for that.

• Trust, accountability, etc. - it would be great to have found all team members through some process that let you build trust before you "hired" them, but I've never had people like that. One exception: I hired Les Orchard on a contract basis for some stuff based on email dialogues coming from his blogging. That worked out great. But would I have considered hiring him as full-time/remote? I don't know.

• While most people spend most of their times on one-man projects, they can find themselves working on a new section of stuff a couple months later. We willingly pay the overhead, in a Start Up with constantly shifting market requirements, to have interruptions that keep us all informed of broad Context we may need later. This is a form of staff development in being able to understand the business everyone works for, so they can make good D And D decisions.