Justin Carmony » WordPress

Making a Distributed Workforce Work

Justin Carmony — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:30:16 +0000

I’ve been mulling over this blog post in my mind for quite awhile. I’ve been working exclusively for distributed companies since 2008. Also know as telecommuting and virtual workforce, it basically is when you have employees working for you regardless of location. Whether it is home, a co-working space, or another office space they prefer, its when an employee can work for a company other then the office.

I’ve met and talked with several companies that have had a great success with this approach. Toni Schneider, CEO at Automattic, has written about the 5 reasons why your company should be distributed.

But on the flip side, I’ve met a few developers, managers, and owners who have horror stories of how it “didn’t work out at all.” They talk about how these workers were too distant from their team, how they didn’t communicate well, and struggled to get them to produce.

These are legitimate concerns and challenges face businesses. However, I think there is one key thing businesses can do to help minimize these challenges and make their attempts to bring in a distributed workforce a reality. At to show how it can be done, we’ll use our fictional company, Muppets Software Inc:

Our Example: The Muppets

Muppets Software is a company that produces the finest websites. They have a small office out in California and are doing pretty well. Their team consists of:

Kermit – The Manager

Fozzie – Lead Developer

Rizzo – Junior Developer

Gonzo – Lead Sys-Admin

Miss Piggy – Sales

Things are going very well, but they are getting too busy, and to expand they need to bring on another developer. After a great deal of searching, they find an excellent candidate:

Beaker – Awesome Developer

There is only one problem, he lives in New York and can’t move to California. But he seems perfect, so Kermit decides to try having him be a remote worker. Fozzie and Rizzo think he’ll be good, so they hire him. It starts off pretty well at first, and they assign Beaker to help Fozzie with the new Sesame Street website. They decide to use a ticket system to help better manage what they need to get done, and set off to work.

After a time it seems Beaker would drop the ball and not get something done. It would be 4 PM in California, and Fozzie couldn’t get ahold of Beaker, so he would just have Rizzo do it. The next day Fozzie talked to Beaker, to find out Beaker hadn’t been in the impromtu meeting where this change was requested and didn’t know about it.

As time goes on, Gonzo starts to get annoyed with Beaker. It seems he would always come into the office with a list of things asking to be done. Since company policy says only Gonzo can make changes on production servers, he is suppose to be the only one to do it. Fozzie and Rizzo both have access to the production servers, and they have an unspoken agreement that the developers can make small changes to production servers as long as they stick their head in Gonzo’s cube and run it by him first. Of course, Beaker is unaware of this fact, so he continues to write requests to Gonzo.

Its coming down to crunch time with the Sesame project, and Miss Piggy is worried that they’ll miss their deadline. She keeps asking for last minute changes to make the site better for the client, so several nights she buys pizza for the office and she stays up late with the Developers to work overtime. She even calls Beaker to have him help out, but he is always the one to leave early, and seems the least effective out of everyone.

After the Sesame project, Gonzo, Fozzie, Rizzo and Miss Piggy talk with Kermit about their concerns with Beaker. They say he is a nice guy, but its been hard working with him. They say there isn’t one big incident, but rather it is just an overall vibe.

Kermit calls up Beaker and has a nice chat with him. Beaker says he feels bad the others feel this way, and shares some of his frustrations as well. He has a hard time staying up so late with the team on these late-night pushes, and many times tickets aren’t updated with the information he needs. Kermit sees his point, but doesn’t really know what to do to solve the problems. They’ve talked many times about keeping the ticket system up-to-date, but when things get busy, its so easy for the in-house employees to forget.

What to do?

I’ve seen and heard these problems, and I’ve even been in Beaker’s shoes in the past with a short-term project.

The bottom line is that it boils down to a problem with communication. It is so hard for remote developers to keep up with everything when there is a lot of communication that is happening outside of his reach. He isn’t at lunch with the other co-workers, or around the water cooler. He listens mostly to the meetings since it is so hard to get a word in without being there.

So what would be my recommendation? Turn your entire company into a distributed company.

Wait, what? I’m not suggesting a company immediately close it’s offices. But allow the rest of your employees telecommute as well. I’d say at least 3 out of the 5 days a week.

As a manager, this is a scary thing. But what this does is naturally change the communication channels. So instead of awkward channels of communication forced on the employees to use, these channels become the channels of communication that empower their own work. They get to enjoy the benefits of telecommuting, regardless of where they live, just like Beaker.

When everyone uses the same channels of communication, all of a sudden being 10 miles away or 1000 miles away does not matter. It will become a much more natural process to send emails, update tickets, and chat online. Even when people are in the office, these channels will tend to stay the primary methods of communication.

Almost all of the most successful distributed companies are 100% distributed, not just 10%. I really do think that is the key. Even with Dating DNA, where I lived in Utah and the rest of the team (all 3 of them) lived in San Diego, we were a very distributed team. Our iPhone Dev only met face-to-face with the owner/project manager of the company once or twice a year, even though they lived 15 minutes from each other. Even when we go to expand our team, I like knowing that if we found the perfect match for a new employee, we can hire them regardless of physical boundaries.

Now, this isn’t a silver bullet approach. There is a lot more to making a distributed workforce work. However, I think the key is for this paradigm shift in thought: we’re not just hiring a remote worker, we becoming a distributed company.

Video – Demystifying CSS & WordPress

Justin Carmony — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 19:19:28 +0000

The great guys at Pole Vault Media and WordPress.tv have put up a video of my Demystifying CSS & WordPress talk.

Speaking at WordCamp SLC

Justin Carmony — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:32:55 +0000

I have a few posts I need to write, but wanted to quickly mention I’ll be speaking at WordCamp SLC this saturday on Demystifying CSS & WordPress. They have a bunch of other great sessions lined up. Looks like there are only 8 tickets left, so if you want to go, hurry up and register!

Scheduled Posts in WordPress

Justin Carmony — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:33:35 +0000

So I’ve already had a few mess ups with the scheduling of posts in WordPress, where I on accidentally schedule it for an odd time, or publish it immediately. So I’m trying to find a plugin to help me keep track of scheduled posts. I’ve found a plugin for my dashboard, so it shows what it upcoming, but doesn’t help me easily manage them. What I’m looking for is something that allows me to re-schedule my posts quickly. Lets say I have 7 scheduled posts, one for each day. Now lets say some major news breaks, and I want to blog about it. But I want it to be current, and not wait 7 days by putting it at the end of my schedule. I could publish it immediately, but then I want to bump my entire schedule by a day.

So over the next few days I’ll be checking out a few plugins, but if you know of a plugin that can mass edit schedule times, that’d be great. If there isn’t anything out there, maybe some day I’ll have to make one. Anyway, thanks for the help in advance!

New Blog Design

Justin Carmony — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:08:21 +0000

I’ve finally gotten around to putting up my new blog design. It based off the Carrington theme for WordPress. It isn’t 100% complete yet as I have a handful of more tweaks to do. The archive pages aren’t formated correctly, and I’m sure I’ll find some more changes to make. I’m still playing around with the side menu to find a nice balance for all the content there.

Recursively Add New Files to SVN

Justin Carmony — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:51:33 +0000

One great thing about running Windows is TortoiseSVN. I makes managing my SVN so easy. One of the problems I’ve ran into on other systems was I had been working for several hours. I would have dozens of new files and with TortoiseSVN it would show me a list of all the new files and I could hit “select all” and commit. However, on Mac I haven’t found an SVN client that I like, so I just use the terminal commands. There are also times, like when managing a WordPress installation, that WordPress and its plug-ins could auto update. I wanted to be able to add all the new files on the linux server back into the svn.

I never could figure out how to do it until I read a comment at a blog post:

svn st --ignore-externals | grep ^? | sed 's/\?/svn add/' | sh

Man, shell is just awesome. This is better than the first suggestion of using “svn add –force *” because it would add ignored files as well. Hope this helps someone and makes them happy like I am now!

WordPress 2.7 – I Love It!

Justin Carmony — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:41:34 +0000

All I can say is I love the new version of WordPress. It makes my life so much easier! I love the new control panel, and it just works. I didn’t have a single problem navigating the new layout. It is fantastic.

100th Blog Entry – First Year of Real Blogging

Justin Carmony — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:03:48 +0000

This is my 100th entry into my blog, and 25 days before my first year mark for writing on my blog. It’s been a great experience, and I’m starting to see some real traffic. I’ve found that publishing meaningful content, whether a simple bug fix, or a full blown tutorial, can be very satisfying. Seeing the handful of thankful comments has been great, and even the contentious comments have been fun.

I thought I’d write some of my thoughts on my impressions of my first year of blogging. I’ve tried to blog several times before, wrote maybe three or four entries, and then never used it again. I think one of the reasons I had so many problems was that I spent the majority of my time setting up my blog, verses using my blog. I spent the majority of the time tweaking my blog, customizing themes, installing plugins, that I kinda burnt out before I even got writing.

This time I set up the blog, picked a theme, and then started writing. I slowly made changes to the theme and plugins over time, instead of a huge up-front investment into making the blog. Another big difference is before I was blogging with the idea of becoming this big programming blogger. My focus was on “what can I do to drive the most traffic?” This time around, my focus has been on “what do I want to write about and share today?” There hasn’t been this huge concern about generating a huge audience. The irony is that when I started to focus on blogging for myself, the more traffic I got. The more meaningful my entries, the more people liked them.

Some months I had lots of creative juices and wrote 15+ articles a month. However, when I got really busy, or just didn’t feel inspired, I didn’t let it get to me. Only 2 posts in a month? Oh well, it isn’t the end of the world. When I had this attitude, I ended up not feeling guilty about not writing, and the next month or so I would write more.

The year 2009 holds lots of potential, as a blogger, a developer, and an entrepreneur. Dating DNA, my current full time project, is going very well. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’ve been able to do a whole lot with very little. I think we’re very close to exploding with user sign-ups. CEVO has been going very well, and I’ve been able to help move them to a more robust infrastructure. I’ve been enjoying my time with the Utah PHP Usergroup, and gave a presentation this last month. I thought it went really well.

Only time will tell, and while the country might be in a recession, I think the future looks very bright.

WordPress Carrington Theme – I’m Impessed

Justin Carmony — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:43:04 +0000

I just read over at Matt Mullenweg’s blog about the annoucement of the Carrington Theme for WordPress. For those who don’t know, WordPress is a PHP/MySQL based blogging system and is the one I use for my blog. I’ve installed the Carrigton Theme and I really like it. Over the next few weeks I’ll be checking it out and playing around with it. I’ll keep everyone posted!

Update: I guess some people are having an issue downloading the Carrington theme, so I’ve uploaded it to download from my site. Hopefully it won’t kill my bandwidth, but I should be good.

Downloads: Carringon Theme for WordPress

WordPress & OOP

Justin Carmony — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 02:55:21 +0000

I’ve been hacking around with WordPress these last few weeks, and I’ve loved using it so far. My only concern has been that WP seems to be coded with the desire to be compatible with PHP 4.3. I just wonder when WordPress will take a OOP approach to it’s design. It would make things more simple for new developers.

I would love for WordPress 3.0 to have an OOP approach. I would love for one of the goals of WP 3.0 would be for it’s OOP core would be taken and used in another other website. A great example would be with a Dating Website I’m working on. It would be great to be able to have members have their own blogs and we could have it 100% integrated with our system. Right now I feel like it would take a lot “hacking” methods to get it to work, and when upgrades to WordPress would come it would be hard to upgrade. I really think WP needs to bite the bullet and make the change to OOP.

My wish list for WordPress 3.0 would be:

OOP Based System – When making a plugins and themes, I think this would make it a lot cleaner and more straight forward.
WP Core API for custom blog system (i.e. site integration)
Graphical Stats System – I would love to watch my stats live on my blog.
Browse & Install Plugins/Themes from WP Control Panel – this would be awesome if from my WP control panel I could browse plugins, etc, and then click an “install” button and have it download it via FTP and install it. This would just be cool.

How would you make WordPress more OOP like?