Remote
Summary
Fried and Heinemeier Hansson argue that remote work produces better results than office work for most knowledge work, and address the objections managers raise against it. They wrote from a decade of running 37signals with a distributed team before remote work became common. The positive case is that offices are the worst place to concentrate because of interruptions, that commuting is a pure loss of time and health, and that hiring without geographic restriction gives access to a far larger talent pool at lower cost.
The operational content addresses specific problems. They argue for overlap of at least four hours between team members' working hours; for a bias toward written and asynchronous communication with documented decisions; for measuring output rather than hours or presence; for periodic in-person gatherings; for making work visible through regular written updates rather than through status meetings; and for hiring people who write well because writing carries most communication in a distributed team.
They address the objections directly, including that people will slack off, which they answer by arguing that the problem is either a hiring failure or work that cannot be measured; that collaboration requires presence, which they answer with tooling and overlap; and that culture requires proximity, which they argue is a claim about socialising rather than about work.
The book was published in 2013 and the pandemic produced far more evidence than the authors had. Some of that evidence complicates their case, particularly on onboarding new employees, on junior development and on the maintenance of weak ties. The tooling recommendations are obsolete. The arguments about written communication and about measuring output are the ones that have held.
Key takeaways 8
- Offices are poor places to concentrate because interruption is the default condition, which makes them worse for the work they exist to house.
- Hiring without geographic restriction gives access to a far larger talent pool, usually at lower cost than a single expensive metropolitan market.
- Remote teams require at least four hours of overlapping working time, and distributed teams without overlap fail.
- Written asynchronous communication with documented decisions should be the default, and meetings should be the exception requiring justification.
- Output must be the measure, because presence and hours are unmeasurable remotely and were never good proxies anyway.
- Writing ability becomes a primary hiring criterion, because most communication in a distributed team is written.
- Concerns that remote employees will not work are usually either hiring failures or evidence that the work has no measurable output.
- Periodic in-person gatherings are necessary, and the authors treat them as a requirement of remote work rather than an exception to it.
Who should read it
Founders and executives deciding on distributed work policy who want the practical mechanics, updated with pandemic-era evidence the book predates.
About David Heinemeier Hansson
Creator of Ruby on Rails and chief technology officer and co-owner of 37signals, which makes Basecamp and Hey.
Rework rejects the venture-funded growth sequence - outside capital, long-range plans, headcount as a measure of progress - and sets out how a small, profitable software company is run instead, from a firm that has done it for two decades. Remote, published in 2013, specifies the hiring, writing and management practices distributed teams need.
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