Telecommuting programmers – Superstars only

The first 3 years of my programming career I was a telecommuter. At that time I was entirely in favor of telecommuting for all information based jobs. In my opinion, the only reason companies didn’t allow telecommuters was because of anal managers grasping for control. Managers that didn’t trust people to do their work and foolishly thought that having you physically there made any difference. It was an outdated and pointless business model, and smarter more progressive people would excel in the marketplace over these dinosaurs.

The few times I applied to jobs and asked for telecommuting, I was told they didn’t allow it because of a lack of communication. I considered this to be a lame cop-out. Simply an excuse to justify their own anal behavior and lack of experience.

When I finally did start a non-telecommuting job, my opinion was only reinforced. I was twice as productive per unit time at home than in the office. Not only that, but at the office the computers were slower, there were a lot of distractions, I had to waste time driving to work, and I was more likely to work fixed hours than at all hours of the day as I do now. Overall, the company probably only got 1/3rd of their value for the money by forcing me to come into an office.

When I started this company my intention and initial design was to be 100% telecommuting. It was far cheaper for me to run the company, everyone would get those massive productivity games, I could hire anywhere in the world, and since people love to telecommute I could steal away the best talent from other companies.

That was 8 months ago. Now that my project is winding up I have some perspective on both sides of the issue. The truth is that telecommuting works, and it works and delivers the massive gains I always claimed it did – but only for programmers and then only for superstars. Everyone else fails miserably. A superstar has to excel in every relevant area: self-motivation, intelligence, attention to detail, communication skills, belief in the project, and organization. Since 98% of programmers are not superstars, and its very hard to tell who is and who isn’t just from an interview, you’re going to end up wasting a lot of money with bad hires, and firing a lot of people, as I did.

Self-motivation: One guy I hired worked hard the first three days, sort-of-worked the next week, then slacked off the remaining month. Emails queries just got excuses, until even under the most generous conditions I couldn’t believe it was taking him a month to write one UI screen. It’s very hard to keep motivated when nobody is forcing you to go into an office each day.

Attention to detail: The Indians failed here because of literalism, I believe due to cultural attitude of subservience. They do exactly what they think they are told, no more, no less, and don’t expect to think for themselves on any issue. Even if what they thought they were told is obviously stupid, or doesn’t make sense, they won’t think about it or bring up issues. So you just pay for a week to get some obviously wrong and useless check-in.

Communication: One guy I hired from the Ukraine would never communicate. He would take a task, guess at parts he wasn’t sure of, and work for a week only to check in something fundamentally wrong and unusable. Unlike the Indians, he would go against the written specification when it didn’t make sense, but based on usually wrong guesses as to the correct solution. Email checkups were always answered with short sentences. Over a month and a half I tried to get him to communicate – first nicely, then direct orders, finally threats, until I had no choice but to fire him. This wouldn’t have happened in an office setting, since I would have just went by his desk.

Lack-of-care: The database programmer I hired was competent technically but just didn’t give a crap. So he didn’t check for user string to server buffer overruns even when its only one line of code, implemented things the easiest, most inefficient way possible, and ultimately abandoned the work and ran with the money. People act this way for the same reason they may be loud-mouthed jerks on the internet but nice guys in person. There’s no face to face interaction, so you have much less investment.

With one exception, none of the guys I hired were truly bad such that they would fail under any circumstances. It was just that 90% of them were not superstars and were not able to cut it working over the internet.

The net result is I’m actually worse off because of telecommuting, because I got nothing at all from the fired individuals, where in an office setting I would have at least had some code to show for my money. However, my failure wasn’t the principle of telecommuting, but that I didn’t appreciate just how hard it was to find good programmers, or how only superstars would be able to successfully telecommutes. If I could do things over again, I would still telecommute, but I would be much more careful about hiring. Start with small, milestone based contracts, and don’t offer a job until an individual has proven himself.