Google and Salesforce: Compute in the Cloud but Work On-Premise

There's no small irony in the fact that Google and Salesforce.com, two of the biggest cheerleaders for on-demand applications, want their employees to be on-premise. At least that's where they both wanted me to be when they talked to me about working for them.

On-demand—or more currently "cloud computing"—vendors have painted a picture of IT managers who insist that their IT infrastructure remain in the building as backward and retrograde. "Control is an illusion," they say. "Our servers are more secure than yours anyway, and more efficient." And I agree. But I think the same is true for people.

At Spanning Sync, we're essentially all remote workers. I have an office, but Larry and Byron don't work there. In fact, I'm not sure where they work, and I don't care. Likewise, they don't care, and usually don't know, where I am. Sometimes I work from home, sometimes from my office, sometimes from campus, and sometimes from a hotel room or an Admiral's Club. All we care about is that the work gets done—and it does. I would have guessed the same to be true at Salesforce.com and Google, but I would have been wrong.

A couple of years ago Adam Gross at Salesforce approached me about working for him as a developer evangelist. I said I was very interested (Salesforce was and is one of my favorite companies, and that's a role I enjoy) but that I was settled in Austin and wouldn't consider moving back to San Francisco. He said that wouldn't be a problem, since my "territory" would be "online" as opposed to a specific geographic region.

So I flew out to San Francisco, interviewed with a bunch of smart people at One Market Street, and a few days later received an offer. We negotiated the terms and agreed on a start date. But a few days after that I got a call from Adam. Marc Benioff wanted the position to be based in San Francisco, so that was the end of that. It was a huge disappointment.

Last year I had a similar (but slightly more complicated) conversation with some people at Google, another one of my favorite companies. It unfolded in much the same way: I flew out to Mountain View and interviewed with a bunch of smart people at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway. They call the role "developer advocate" to avoid the religious overtones of "evangelist", but it's the same idea. For me the position would have been a dream job. But to get it, I was told I'd need to move back to the Bay Area. This time the disappointment was even bigger.

In the end it all worked out for the best. Running Spanning Sync is the most thrilling professional experience I've ever had, and I wouldn't be able to do this if I were working anywhere else. But I hope that the way my little company works becomes more the rule than the exception in our industry. The natural place for that to happen next is at the companies that best understand the value of on-demand resources.

Comments

[Jeffrey Walker]

Ironic? Not so sure. Are people servers? God, I hope not. Although folks like you can thrive in a remote role, I think the virtual workforce has lots of flaws. The primary one is team work and human collaboration. Call me old fashioned but humans create wonderful things as physically connected teams. Things that are very hard to do virtually.

I can create a much higher performing team through physical proximity any day than through a virtual workforce. I welcome competitors who think otherwise. I also balance that with size of company and specific function of course.

jeffrey

[Charlie Wood]

Jeffrey-

Thanks for the comment. (And congratulations on reaching $100M in sales! Wow!) I agree that some forms of collaboration are better done in person, but I also think that asynchronous, written interaction (like email, wikis, etc) can sometimes produce better results that in-person meetings.

I also think certain roles within a company lend themselves more to remote work. When I was in sales (first as an SE, then as a sales rep) I was in front of customers all day almost every day. I saw the other people on my sales team in passing every now and then, and then for a few days at a sales meeting every month. (And at club. Remember those? :)

Roles that are outward-facing--like sales or "evangelism"--are well-suited to remote work. So are some internal jobs, like engineering where the requirements are well-specified.

I think the roles that are best suited to in-person, on-premise collaboration are those where the requirements and metrics are squishier.

For instance, I'm hiring a local web app developer to work on a project because I haven't come up with a clear spec. Instead I'll meet with him frequently to let the design of the app evolve. This is sub-optimal, and if I were doing my job better I'd be able to hire someone working remotely. But I'm not, and I realize that, so I'm falling back on in-person collaboration.

I'd be interested to know what roles people think are/aren't most appropriate for remote work. Jeffrey-does anyone at Atlassian work remotely?

-c

[Mark Crofton]

Hey Charlie,
My first thought was that perhaps your analogy, while clever, may not hold. However, on 2nd thought maybe it does: just as there are some apps that I'd never want to run in the cloud (I know, I know, this is blasphemy) there are some jobs that I wouldn't want based remotely. I'm happy to have my SFA in a cloud and maybe I'm ok having my CSR's remote. I'm not sure if the jobs you mention above fit into that category or not.
Jeffrey does make some valid points above. I spend a good bit of time working remotely, e.g., home, Starbucks, airports, and I view that flexibility as a major non-cash "benefit" of my current employer. However, lately, I've been the only guy dialing into conference calls when everybody else is in the room. With less travel going on, I'm not partial to the many informal interactions that go on daily. I definitely feel more out-of-the loop and less visible. It's too early for me to tell if this is going to have any negative consequences for me. I generally remain a big fan of allowing folks to work remotely, but I'm not sure it's the right answer for all positions or at all times.
Mark

[Charlie Wood]

Mark-

I think you've hit on an important point: when every member of a team is remote, things work much better than when some/most of the team works in the same office and only a few people are remote.

Clearly, the people who work in close physical proximity are going to have different interactions with each other than they will with the remote people. That can pose a problem for team dynamics. (In fact, I think this was the main problem with the Google job.)

It's also true that all-remote teams may work well among themselves, but will have a more distant relationship to teams that are on-premise. At the 10-year Vignette IPO anniversary party I attended a couple of weeks ago, most of the engineers didn't know who most of the salespeople even were.

Then again 10 years ago was the dark ages of online communication. I "hang out" with lots of people on Twitter that I almost never see in person, but when I do I can pick up the conversation as though we had seen each other the day before.

-c