Remote Pairing: Advice from a Programmer who has been working remotely for the past two years.

By Nick McLarnan

Menlo Innovations and businesses across the world are beginning a sudden experiment with remote work. Many people (ourselves included) want to know: How do Menlo’s processes work remotely? Menlo and I have been “running the experiment” with remote pairing for two years, since my wife and I married and moved back home (for her) to Russia. I’ve found that the most interesting challenges to remote pairing aren’t technological, they’re behavioral. Here are two challenging aspects of remote pairing and some behaviors for addressing them:

1. Remote pairing hampers non-verbal communication. When remote pairing, even with a video chat, lots of valuable information gets lost. Body language cues are easy to miss. You can’t point and gesture to explain things. This may seem like a small thing, but consider how you communicate trust. Maybe it’s a relaxed posture, a warm, genuine smile, or a careful consideration before offering an alternative. How often do the words “I trust you” mean the exact opposite. Trust is the fundamental basis of a good pairing, and we usually communicate it non-verbally! Confusion, discomfort and other important pairing signals are similar. These pieces of information may not be necessary to get today’s work done, but they are vital to long-term success of a team and the culture it builds.
   One behavior that I find helpful is replacing passive non-verbal communication with active verbal communication. I try to verbally check-in frequently with my partner to gauge if they understand what we’re doing (and, more often, if I understand what we are doing.) These check-ins can be explicit (“Does all of that make sense?”) or can take the form of simple guidance questions (“What’s next?”, “What’s a good name for this?”, “What do you think?”)
2. Distractions in my computer. For me, the computer is distraction perfected, there’s always one more article to read, one more new site to refresh. Pairing is a crucial practice for me to limit distraction, but what about when I only share one screen with my partner? The social motivation to stay focused disappears when I know that my partner can’t see what I’m doing.

Some behaviors I use:

• Treat the ‘shared’ computer as my only computer. Full-screen the remote desktop. Open my email on the remote machine if I need it.
• Notice the specific way I distract myself and put up some technical barriers. These don’t usually need to be hard to bypass just enough to give my brain enough time to say “Hang on, I don’t need to do that” For example: I use Chrome for work and Firefox for personal use. In Chrome I use an extension to block any news site I would open without thinking.
• Ask my partner at the beginning of pairing to hold me accountable and keep me on task. This creates some emotional safety for my partner to ‘call me out’, and explicitly communicates trust. It also serves as a self-reminder and makes me more likely to keep myself focused, because I know they’re watching.

My experience has been that the technology of remote pairing isn’t as important as the way we use it. The technological challenges aren’t the ones causing the most pain, they’re just the easiest ones to see. So before setting out to find a better screen sharing tool, consider if there’s a different problem you could solve.

But if you do find a tool with good support for Mac, Windows and Linux, good handling of dual monitor setups and a pricing scheme to let me affordably work on a constantly rotating set of hosts with minimal setup time, let me know…