Ready for more DevOpsDays?

DevOpsDays DC will return June 8-9, 2016.

Distributed Teams

Facilitator: Adam Leff ([email protected] / [email protected])

Scribe: Adam Leff ([email protected] / [email protected])

25 participants, roughly less-than-half the participants work from home

• Some believe colocation is best
• Working remote has a cost, but the quality of life increase for some is worth it
• Full team on-sites are important
• If there’s a mix of on-site and off-site, make sure you defer to the common denominator (i.e. have most of your conversation in the medium that off-site * users can participate, such as HipChat/Slack)
• WFH offers a mostly-distraction-free environment, but still need face time with peers
• Video chatting helps, but “loss of fidelity"
• Time zone distribution allows lots of flexibility
• If you WFH, people find having a dedicated “work space” is important, both for the worker, and their family
• People are actively seeking out telework positions only
• As a hiring manager, being able to hire remote employees provides a HUGE potential pool
• On-prem location needs to provide adequate equipment to do audio/video conferencing - i.e. room systems, HD quality video, mics provided for ALL * participants.
• One participant stated the “office people” get to WFH on Friday - helped to
• Loss of a whiteboard is an issue… WACOM tablet is a nice substitute
• Big HQ + satellite office: how do you make it better? Only solution participants mentioned is full room AV systems, such as Lifesize
• Screenhero for pair programming (provides voice as well as control sharing), Floobits mentioned as well
• 1-on-1s with manager are more critical
• Manager role in conflict avoidance: be present, know when to bring people together in a different medium to resolve, act as advocate to other teams