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Practice

Five Nonobvious Remote Work Techniques

By Thomas A. Limoncelli
Communications of the ACM, November 2020, Vol. 63 No. 11, Pages 108-110
10.1145/3410627
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virtual conference call, illustration — Credit: Getty Images

This article reveals five nonobvious techniques that make remote work successful at Stack Overflow.

Remote work has been part of the engineering culture at Stack Overflow from the outset. Some 80% of the engineering department works remotely. This enables the company to hire top engineers from around the world, not just from the New York City area (40% of the company worked remotely prior to the COVID-19 lockdown; 100% during the lockdown). Even employees who do not work remotely must work in ways that are remote-friendly.

Comments

Martin Smith

October 26, 2020 11:32

Great tips! Love #4 especially but all are good. I do volunteer work for a citizens association and we're meeting via Zoom. We recently gave up on trying to run "mixed-mode" meetings (see #1) for several reasons but still hope to work this out in the long run.

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