Getting off the ground
A busy office is like a food processor – it chops your day into tiny bits.
– Remote
From the team that brought us Basecamp, ‘Remote’ is a timely book for an industry that is currently going through a broad debate regarding the topic of remote workers. At Jobber we currently hire all our workers out of our Edmonton office as we believe in the value of buiding a culture through the physical attributes of an office (though we do have flexible policies about working away from the office), but ‘Remote’ makes a strong argument for taking the alternative strategy.
This topic has been thrown into the mainstream with some large companies making very visible statements reverting their remote working policies. Certainly this is not a straightforward decision, so it is only appropriate for managers, founders, and workers to arm themselves with good research to help in making that decision. ‘Remote’ has timed itself well to try and be one of the resources used for such a purpose.
“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” – Plato
I’m currently working with a startup in Edmonton that is going through really strong growth in its team. One of the side effects of this is a lot more potential for distraction in the office (if there’s n people in an office there are n(n-1)/2 potential conversational pairs). With all this additional potential for activity in the office we’ve been thinking a lot about how to allow (and encourage) developers to reach that deep state of flow needed to produce good code more frequently and for longer periods.