> If you're not good at written communication, or you work with people who are not good at it, remote work will be miserable.
I had a pretty poor team leader a few years ago with a bums in seat type job. He would never write anything down and teh result was quite frustrating. The spec used to change frequenty and he would come and verbally tell me it. then he would change it again, then again. A week or two later when I actually got around to implementing teh said feature I would ask him what he wanted done,
"I thought we talked about that."
"Yes we did but you changed your mind 4 times and I can't remember what the conclusion was."
I used to regularly ask him to put things in writing, but he was usually to lazy to deliver on that.
So I don't think these problems are unique to remote teams.
One species of gatekeeper (control freak) won't write things down.
Another insists that if it's not documented, it didn't happen.
These challenges have confounded me all my working life.
My few truly positive working experiences happened when there was mutual trust, regard, esteem. First time it happened, I was gobsmacked. I'd read about trust, but had never seen it IRL. It was a never ending warm fuzzy bath of shared awesomeness.
I still have few ideas how to find, nurture, create trust (especially in a chaotic env). But I now know it when I see it. And when I'm not feeling it, I mostly just go thru the 9-5 motions, keeping my expectations and investments lower.
TBH, I think was somehow your fault. Before writing even a single line of code I make sure that "I" understood what is needed.
Then, if nothing is written down anywhere, I'd just sum up what I am going to implement (email, wiki, internal docs, readme whatever) and send it to anyone involved.
Check mate for for control-freak-undecided-colleagues. :)
I had a pretty poor team leader a few years ago with a bums in seat type job. He would never write anything down and teh result was quite frustrating. The spec used to change frequenty and he would come and verbally tell me it. then he would change it again, then again. A week or two later when I actually got around to implementing teh said feature I would ask him what he wanted done,
"I thought we talked about that." "Yes we did but you changed your mind 4 times and I can't remember what the conclusion was."
I used to regularly ask him to put things in writing, but he was usually to lazy to deliver on that.
So I don't think these problems are unique to remote teams.