The Asynchronous Hacker Handbook

with great freedom comes great accountability

What you don't need to do

• Work from a fixed office 5 days/week
• Have an 9-to-5 working schedule on a specific timezone
• Be available at any particular time of a working day (except for emergencies or explicit commitments)

What you need to do

• Make yourself as reachable as possible during working days
• Respond to any inquiry in up to 24 hours in working days (unless explicitly taking day off.) The average should be as low as possible, though. Transparency is the gateway to trust, and you can't work remotely without having trust established in your group; it's better to bring bad news earlier than to keep pushing blindly on something that doesn't have a clear progress
• Have a clear and open status for each of the working days—both past and future, it's OK if it changes the next day
• Always look for something to do, ask around, help someone ship their project faster, start one from the backlog or propose a new one
• Make your location available on each working day (for both reliability and safety)

What you can do

• Trade weekdays with weekend days if you haven't got any previous commitments (not a healthy habit)

Meetings

The async model is against meetings by principle, but there should be a means for them to happen in the remote context.

Tools

TBD

Context and expectations

Working remote is not an optimization to the classical model and does not make the process easier. It's only part of a framework for scaling a team while empowering each of its members, thus obtaining a sustainable network of people, where each person can be as important as the next one. Responsibility is split between all team members and does not fall back on a restricted set of people. This aims to remove bottlenecks commonly found in the waterfall model.

The advantages are obvious, but like with any other framework, it takes a while before reaching its full capability and becoming more proficient than before by using it. For that to happen the efforts must be not smaller, but bigger!

Are you up for the task?