Hotel rooms look alike no matter where you go.
Travelling again
Oh the boredom.
As my current project is getting ready to go on vacation, I am putting in one last trip to Poland to start another sprint. We have reached sprint 8 and we can start to see the end. Of course we still have a lot of work in front of us before we release to production, but the main chunks of code are close to being done.
Having travelled a fair the last couple of years, I try to remember why I thought this would be so cool to do back in college. In all honesty, it doesn’t get easier to leave the family, even though it is a very short trip with only one overnight stay. Could it be that I am getting old, fat and comfortable?
Regardless, I have a,song and dance show tomorrow with the development team, which should be fairly straight forward. Famous last words I guess.
I will try to find time to blog about my experience with outsourcing development.
How I work
Now, I know I am not a unique little snowflake in the way that I normally do my work, but I saw an interesting blog post Mikkel Hippe from Tradeshift, that made me think about how I work. TRadeshift is a fierce competitor of ours, but that should not keep me from pointing out things that I agree with now should it?
The blog post is basically about the advantages of remote workers. I am not a remote worker as such, but since most of my team is located in Manila, and since I sometimes have to work out from outside the office, I rely heavily on various communications tools, many of which are mentioned in Mikkel’s blog post.
For me, the biggest issue is being as close as possible to my team. Normally I would use Skype or Windows Live Messenger, but since that is a no-go due to foolish corporate policies, I rely on go-to meeting most of the time. This is not a very good solution for keeping a 1:1 relation with your developers, so I make sure to use Office communicator as much as possible. Hopefully we will get the upgrade to Lync, which should quite a bit better. The voip in Communicator is not that good, and the webcam support makes everything too slow. I have a sneaky suspicion that it has something to do with our network, but I can’t be sure.
The thing about Lync is that I can use it on my Windows Phone and my iPad. Because of the time difference between Copenhagen and Manila, I have to be pretty flexible when it comes to my work hours. And since I am not always on the computer, it makes sense to use the phone and the tablet. The same thing goes for email. I have my Exchange mail on my phone and iPad well, which as me to respond quickly to emails, essentially making sure the team does not momentum because they are waiting for me. Especially the Windows Phone experience is really good. Actually, it is probably my most important tool these days.
The downside to all this is of course that I am “on” most of the time, which pretty much sucks. However, it affords me some more flexibility on terms of work/life balance and the time I spend in the office. For me, being in the office actually means that I am less productive, because I get interrupted so much, and because I keep my calendar open, people have no problem booking for half days at a time. Being remote some of the time makes it possible for me to manage my time better and ensure that I meet my deliverables according to schedule.
Does work really have to suck?
Before I get going on my rant here, let me just point out that I am not bashing anybody here, not even my own employer. And if I am bashing anyone, it is “the man” who in this case is synonymous with big faceless corporations here everything is systemized and all actions are controlled by over-zealous managers and time sheet keepers.
So anyway, I was reading this article on my iPad earlier, which talked about why people in Seattle all of a sudden wanted to work for Amazon again.
Amazon has been a cornerstone in Seattle for more than 15 years now, but it wasn’t always seen as a great place to work.
Employees talked about long hours and a pressure-cooker atmosphere, and the core business — e-commerce — didn’t seem very sexy.
What a difference a couple of years can make.
Over the New Year’s holiday, I visited Seattle for the first time since late 2010. A bunch of people in the tech scene told me the same thing: Amazon is THE place to work now.
Here’s why….
Source: Matt Rosoff @ Business Insider
I have been a huge fan of Seattle’s for many years. In fact, so much so that I did part of my Master’s degree there (well, close to anyway) and married a woman from Seattle, to whom I have been married now for almost eleven years. That is still not the point though. As it states in the article, Amazon has a new HQ close to downtown, which is walking distance to pretty much everything. Furthermore, there are all kinds of Googlesque benefits for the employees, which is also a nifty thing I’ll admit. The really interesting thing though, is how the local area area has developed explosively since the move, because so many people now work there.
And so I wonder. I wonder why that kind of approach has never really taken off here in Denmark. I mean, I for one have never heard of any company that takes really makes a point out turning the HQ into a place where people actually want to spend their time. For that matter, I have never really seen any places in Denmark, where the campus has been designed to allow people to be creative or innovative.
In my younger days when I was a consultant I visited a lot of customers and I never encountered anything but standard Lenovo PCs, Nokia phones and crappy coffee. There’s nothing wrong with Lenovo or Nokia at all, actually the both make some really cool stuff, my is this though; everything is so standardized around here. We use the same tools, we runs our businesses the same way, and we never really seem to actually create something new. Considering how we consider ourselves well educated in this country I find it a little odd that we do not have any real startup culture here.
My stipulation is of course not right. We do have start ups here, that seem to approach the whole business life somewhat different than the bigger guys. Tradeshift and Podio are really good examples of companies that do not adhere to “the rules”; companies that are not afraid breaking some norms in order to do new things, and do them differently.
Perhaps it would be easier to make the employees “live the brand”, be more efficient or even more loyal to the company.