300 words about remote work. But really about nothing.

First draft: 4m50s; final draft: 16m50s

Well, first let me say that I have been remote working for about 15 years off and on. Before it was cool and well before folks had the opportunity to do it for their full time job, I had the luxury of working remote from Hawaii, Los Angeles, etc. When I decided to get a full time job with my current company I built the clause for working remote into the contract. At the time, this was a huge luxury but after COVID, remote work seems like table stakes.

Working remote as an IC is a huge productivity boost. No water cooler talk, no distractions. It's amazing. One can get into "deep flow", start cranking on a problem around 930AM; "30 minutes later" it's 4:30PM and they wonder where the time went.
This is the kind of flow where coworkers simultaneously are annoyed that slack and emails go unanswered (immediately) but are incredulous and envious about how much work gets done.

However! When the job is constant communication with stakeholders, and endless meetings, remote work environments become intolerable and damn near impossible to do a good job with seamless communication.

This is the life we demanded. Be careful you just might get it. Global work forces, global schedules, 99.999% uptime, core hours. And I am not griping. I won't be moving from Simsbury. But what i can say is that the communication loop must get tighter. We must get better at communciation, direct and indirect, succinct, crystal clear. We must, push enough information to allow the receiver to do their job without asking for more details. We must get so good at reading, writing, and speaking with one another that it is damn near close to my reading.