6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten | Hacker News Reader

6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

dev.to

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The more I read about others' experiences with remote work, the more it seems that it depends heavily on whether the company embraces remote work, accepts it, or merely tolerates it. The resulting experiences really need context. Unless a company is truly committed to remote work, it's going to be an uphill battle.

Much of this advice is true in every context, but much of it reads like it's coming from a place of fear and having to prove your worth and presence. I imagine that if you're one of very few remote employees of a primarily centrally located team that makes sense, but it feels really unhealthy.

Half of our team at Wildbit is remote and across many time zones that make meetings difficult at times, but it doesn't feel anything like this. Even the half of the team that's based out of HQ spends a lot of time working from home.

We also activley promote disconnecting and not being constantly available to get focus work done. And everyone's encouraged to not be constantly available because that makes it nearly impossible to get the most important types of focus work done. So in many cases, team members are explicitly unavailable. We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond.

Another thing that makes a difference is that we strive to incorporate the remote team into the daily life around the office. We have team retreats once a year. Everyone regularly spends some time in Philadelphia at HQ. And we have someone who spends a lot of time dreaming up ways to incorporate the remote team so we're not so disconnected. It's a constant effort on everyone's part to ensure we're supporting and fully embracing remote work as a single team.

> We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond.

Those are some of the advantages of email. It also has virtues of being searchable, transactional, naturally organizeable, recorded, and shared.

But how do you respond to the issues of its much higher latency and lower bandwidth? A 5-minute in-person conversation can communicate a whole lot more than 5 minutes writing an email. And while documentation and detail are great, a long, thorough, technical email can cost a lot of money. How do you control for these problems?

Does the loss from writing long emails offset the loss of productivity from disruptive and focus-breaking in-person communication?

Not OP, but the first 3 months of my current job were remote. It was mostly on our backend and frontend teams to realize that meaning/nuance might be lost in an email or slack message and to hop over on google hangouts (what we personally used, but replace that with phone, skype, &c.). Maybe if there's immaculate documentation and tests, then fully asynchronous communications can be achieved, but, from my experience, there's hiccups where synchronous communications need to be taken to overcome something that's blocking.

We don't hesitate to use chat or video if it makes sense. In fact, we use it frequently. We all trust each other to think about what medium makes sense for a given discussion. That way, people don't just reach for what's in front of them. It makes everything much more deliberate, and it helps reduce interruptions.

7 years successfully working from home (4 for my employer, 3 years being self-employed).

I have only one advice - Be responsible for your work and for yourself.

> 1. Be as available as possible.

I would highly discourage this advice. That is you setting up yourself for abuse. This happens with office employees or clients - you have to set limits and NOT respond even if you are right there. You can add a couple of hours extra, but thats it. Exceptions to that should be rare. Unless your code bug is going to cost somebody their life - everything else can wait.

7. Go outside

> Highly recommended. Preferably spend some time under the sun (or go out during the day)

3. Go out of your way to be human

> Usually it does not work. And people at the other end start feeling awkward. Some human interactions are just hard on a phone or chat or video. I prefer staying in touch with friends/family/community around me. Any amount of remote interaction is just that "remote". Good remote teams do not force themselves to develop a human touch. On the other hand, remote teams can sometimes develop amazing work coherence

Is the 3 years of self-employment after 4 years of remote?

If so, how did you transition to self-employed? I'm thinking of doing the same, but I'm having trouble sussing out a path to do so.

Short story, the company I worked for remotely did not encourage remote-work. And was selective at who gets to work remotely. That itself creates a lot of problems with the team and with the opportunities you get.

As this guy mentions "Be as much available as possible". That technically ends up in over-work. Management will like it, but I did not like it at all.

Having said that it was riskier for me to keep the remote job. And at one point I mistook the management call as if they were going to fire me. That forced me to build up my consulting profile and start adding consulting clients. Eventually the company did not fire me - but the workload had increased quite a lot and I had reached a point where my consulting rates were pretty good than my salary. So I thought "Why not go full time consulting" and quit the job. After a few months of downs the decision turned out to be a pretty good one.

Some transitioning advice:

1. Have 1-1.5 years of financial backup

2. Start building your profile while on job. And since you are remote, it should be easier. You will definitely get stressed and that might pay off in the long run

3. Calculate your hourly rate at job. Leave your job when you can earn at least 80% of what you earn at job within 50% of time (for at least 2 months). Also be honest to yourself and evaluate if the consulting-work counts as a one-off or something that can be achieved repeatedly

4. Be warned - remote job as an employee is much easier than being self-employed working remote

Thanks for the advice! My company is mostly remote but going through some tumultuous changes so I'm looking at my options while also trying to orchestrate a hop to another country. Maybe it's best I push consulting to the wayside after I settle in the new country. The guideline numbers you gave helped me out -- always good to have a ballpark to measure yourself against.

I've been working for three years remotely and fully agree with you. Never ever allow your job to take over your life.

I allowed, and after two years I was dreaming about eight-hour work in an office. I was a good programmer and was able to deliver results quickly. But my private life was destroyed and my mental health ruined. When I got a remote job I wasn't aware of its perils; of course, some of the problems I had was my fault.

If you want to be treated equally you have to join an organization where the majority of workers are remote.

Otherwise you run into crap like "make yourself available all the time".

If you're the only remote employee, the OPs advice is pretty good, but I'd add "look for a real remote company" to it.

Also... video chat? What's it for? In a remote context you get those very useful text based communication tools that come with automatic logging so you can reference stuff later, and you want to do video chats instead?

While fast internet speeds and more mature tools do make things better, my team still spends most of their time saying "can you hear me?" or "can you repeat that?". Meanwhile, I've never asked another team member to retype their Slack message. We use WebEx when we really have to see people's faces. But Hangouts and Appear.in have left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

"Most of their time"? I highly doubt that.

This is a really important point. Remote work works only in a fully/majority remote company. In mostly onsite companies you will most likely be the odd man out.

Absolutely. There's also a danger of resentfulness from those that aren't home based.

> Also... video chat? What's it for?

Being able to have a quick discussion, and being able to rely on audio and visual queues to carry on a conversation - as opposed to typing something out and waiting for to other part(y|ies) to respond.

This is work not dating, how about clear written statements instead of cues? :)

Edit: I suppose that if your only socialization is with co workers, you need those video chats and stuff. In that case I suggest going out and meeting friends once in a while.

During my time as a consultant in an agency I learned that human interaction helps a lot in the beginning of a new project. Getting to know all stakeholders and people working on the project fosters better understanding down the line and helps in achieving a way more smoothly running project.

I really like my alone time but I learned that the human element is not to be underestimated.

> This is work not dating, how about clear written statements instead of cues? :)

I think you're really underestimating the value of direct person-to-person communication, and how much it can help - especially if one of the team members isn't as good as written communications as you are.

It's also very helpful when multiple people need to discuss something - there's a lot less dead air, since we can typically speak faster than we can type. If I bring something up, and Bob has a comment on it, he can very obviously indicate that he's about to speak ,and then do so - instead of starting to type out a reasonably long reply only to get interrupted, or for me to wonder whether anyone's replying at all.

Written works great in something like email, but for relatively quick discussions, face-to-(virtual?)-face is still excellent.

I am a recent remote developer and I found these insights to be very valuable, especially the "going out of your way to be human" one.

I was in senior/lead position and part of my responsibilities were to mentor younger (professionally speaking) engineers and make sure the team is executing effectively. While these are not explicit responsibilities in my new gig, I wonder how would one go about doing them as a remote senior/tech lead. One thing that I miss is that having a finger on the team's pulse. I don't know if the teammates are motivated. Emotions are often filtered out of communication through email or slack or whatever. And you get a limited amount of video call time per day with the whole team. Wondering if anyone else went through the same problem and figured out a way.

I find it useful to go out of our way to schedule free time in the form of video chats. Where we just talk about stuff and catch up until something that needs to be covered comes up naturally. That is an ordinary thing that happens face-to-face. Less-so remote, so you have to go out of your way.

> I find it useful to go out of our way to schedule free time in the form of video chats.

Feels a bit unnatural to me. It's one thing to chat while you and your teammate are on your coffee breaks, vs you have to schedule that with someone. I would not appreciate if a colleague wants to setup a hangout call to just, hang out.

You can setup a video room to hangout in for 20 minutes every other day or whatever, and people can show up if they want or not show up.

I built this (fridayfeedback.com) to help leaders understand what's going on w/ their teams. Most customers are remote teams/organizations. I've also managed remote teams before so can understand where you're coming from.

Another idea that has worked well for me: get a dog.

It can get lonely working alone at home; dogs keep you company. It can be easy to stay in the house all day; dogs are a good reason to talk walks outside. It can be easy to let the workday roll into the evening; dogs get hungry for dinner and let you know, which serves as a reminder that, yes, you should stop work for the day.

Having recently gone from living with others to alone I can say having my dog has made it a wonderful experience. She makes me go outside several times per day, and brings me back down to reality when I'm caught up in my work.

It's also a great way to stave off loneliness :P

Only problem is it can make life a lot harder if you're looking to move back to office based job.

I've been working at home for about 8 years now.

It can be very difficult and it's not for everyone since you ned a lot of mental discipline.

Sometimes you need to overcome procrastination but in my case it's much more common to prevent working 12-15 hours per day and neglect every other aspect of my life.

There are days I wish I could just go to an office and leave at 6pm and say "fuck it".

Remorse and guilt are very common feelings in remote workers.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/BeingARemoteWorkerSucksLongLi...

Obviously the guy is newbie in this and excited, but as someone who is working from home for a long time and in the office before hand even longer (on 2 continents), all those points are just a common sense and applicable for both working form home and from an office. The only exception is the video camera: I did try this with my team few years back (bought special cameras, using corporate software) and there is no benefit whatsoever and usually someone will always have technical problems, pixelations, dropped connections, it is a just a distraction and not worth it and completely waste of time...

This is a lot of good advice, much of which also should be applied in a shared office as well.

I have been remote working for 7 of the last 10 years. Here's my list (in addition to what the author mentioned). Many of the PROs have two sides...

We will start with the assumption that you are ethical and honest (and ultimately, as productive as you should be).

PRO-remote

1. When something non-work needs to happen, it's so much easier to make it happen. Maybe it's the one day of the week when the rain stops, and you can go enjoy sunshine at a cafe. Or maybe the morning powder report says 12" of fresh powder! BAM!

2. So, so much time saved not commuting. And if an office commute is particularly dreadful (gridlock traffic, hot crowded subway, whatever), your quality of life improves a ton by avoiding it.

3. Pets, especially dogs, don't have to be sad and go crazy (literally) at home for 9 hours while you're gone.

4. If your partner also works from home, you have more opportunities for moments of time together (for whatever you fancy). That's valuable.

5. You can work from almost anywhere with quality internet. This can be a huge benefit!

CON

1. Your work is _always_ there. You can end up judging your non-work time against whether it was worth it, or if you should have been working (more) to get more done. This is a huge problem for me, and I frankly haven't solved it. I work 25-50% more than I should now.

2. If your partner also works from home... 24x7 with someone can eventually be a problem. A large home with lots of rooms helps, but going out solo with laptop is sometimes necessary.

3. Pets (or partner!) :). You can feel guilty for not giving attention when someone needs it - because you're busy working as you probably should be.

4. Working from anywhere (especially someplace exotic) - isn't much fun if you're actually really busy working. Then you feel you're missing out. Further, it can make you re-think what's important in life (and make you want to quit everything and live a nomad life - which maybe isn't a CON?)

For me, I'll take remote. Everything considered, my quality of life is much better working remotely.

A lot of good advice here. As a full-time remote worker for several years, I'd add just a bit of a twist, but that's more to reinforce the overall message than to undermine it.

(1) Be as available as possible ... but no more. There's no shame in needing focused "in the zone" time too. Just be clear about when it is, and what level of urgency should be required to interrupt you anyway.

(7) Go outside ... and find other venues for socialization. Both are important. If you're not having real-life non-work conversations with somebody every day, even if your day is full of videoconferences and light-hearted text banter, you'll get out of practice. When you do have to interact with people that way, you'll come across as a bit weird. I've seen this in myself, and I saw it in my mother (who often lacked such contact for different reasons) until we moved her into assisted living. Conversation is a skill. Like many other skills, when you do it better you get more satisfying results, and the way to get better is to practice frequently.

I managed a remote team for 18 years. One thing you might think about is that a lot of communication just doesn't happen naturally between remote folks. For most of that 18 years everyone was remote, we had some office space but even then it was a minority of local people and only a couple of engineers were local.

Communication is necessary between devs to make chunks of work in flight come together nicely. When you are all in the same place, you go to lunch, these topics come up, they tend to get sorted. Yes, one could argue that every chunk should have an architecture document down to the last detail, we didn't work that way, it was too slow.

When you are all distributed someone has to make sure that all the work in flight is going to come together nicely. That job fell on me as the manager and the main driver. It was a shit ton of extra communication. I had to know where everyone was and whether they were on track. Sometimes my people would self communicate but a lot of the time it was on me to know and get them to talk to each other.

By and large, it worked and worked quite well. One thing that was critical to it all was code review. We built our own system, it was a web interface to a database and repo per chunk. You could walk the diffs, comment on them, all in the web or you could clone the repo, toss in some fixup commits, push it back. The review system remembered you and had a way to show you only the diffs since the last time you reviewed this chunk. It was fairly easy to use and useful, people liked it. And it helped immensely in getting the chunks to land in the tree in good shape.

I can't say if other managers have had to pick up the communication slack for remote people, maybe that was unique to me because I was management and sort of the "dumb" architect (my people were smarter than me but they had to push stuff through my brain, much to their annoyance from time to time. The upside was that the system was pretty consistent, it was done by a bunch of people but it felt, mostly, like it was done by one guy).

If it is common for the communication load to be higher on the manager/architects when dealing with remote people you might want to think about that. It doesn't really scale, you are taking what should be a web of communication, lots of sideways stuff, and making it more centralized. My people did complain that I was the bottleneck, I don't think I could have made that model work for a much larger team. I'd have subdivide it like Linus does for the kernel.

>Ask your coworkers how they’re doing, what the weather is like, or what the mood in the office is like lately (without being too nosey). You won’t be around the office to hear the banter and water cooler conversations.

How does this work remotely? Do you actively ping people on IM and ask about their everyday life? Do you send out emails? Do you do it over meetings/videoconference?

I find that extremely hard to happen remotely as opposed in person because I never know when somebody is in the zone or not and I don't want to actively distract them with "useless chatter" for no reason. I know people who get very annoyed by these constant interrupts and I'd also find that very hard to judge remotely, I wouldn't want to become "that guy" and not even know it.

I worked 3 months remote for the first few months of my current job and, whenever we would hop onto google hangouts, the first few minutes would typically be personal/small-talk things like that. Naturally, if you're talking to someone 5x a day for whatever reason, you'll probably get down to business, but it's easy to find yourself not having talked with someone for a week.

Also, we had a "beer 'o clock" every friday around 4 where everyone available hopped on hangouts and just talked--sometimes work related, sometimes not.

I work in office but regularly communicate with an outstanding remote employee.

Any time we have an issue or project to discuss, she'll call me up and we either start or end the conversation with some scuttlebutt (5-10 minutes).

As a result of her friendliness and kindness, any time she calls or needs to ask for something I am eager to help. Likewise, if I need something from her I am not afraid at all to reach out.

It takes a lot of patience and kindness to build that relationship, and she does this with everyone - coworkers, clients, etc. Having that kind of relationship is key to her productivity.

Change your surroundings regularly.

I joined a co-working space and split my time pretty evenly between my home office and the co-working office.

This enables me to get some of the day-to-day human interaction of an onsite job (feels more normal). Remote work can be isolating and this is (in my opinion) one of the cures.

I've worked remotely and I've worked in-house and I currently work a mix of the two but only because my current company's office is quite far away from where I live.

With ten year professional experience in software in my rearview mirror I gotta say that by working remotely fulltime you miss out on so much. To be your best you really do need to be in the office collaborating and practicing your people skills. Your people skills are like any other skill, they must be practiced and sharpened each day and you really must be in the office in a professional environment to work on them. I understand life is complicated and sometimes just making a paycheque has to be enough but imo you're letting a part of you wither doing fulltime remote.

> I gotta say that by working remotely fulltime you miss out on so much

Let me fix that for you, [I gotta say that by working remotely fulltime I feel I missed out on so much because I discovered I'm really more social than introverted]

Saying you're introverted is like saying you enjoy reading more than being active. Both are healthy and liking one more than the other is not an excuse not to make sure you do both regularly.

Enjoying an activity is not equitable to one's nature.

Oh it's in your nature to be an anti social dork in a basement? Unfortunate for you!

If introvert foes not communicate with people, his (or her if you must) social/people skills will go down. Realization that they wither away or that they are useful has nothing to do with introversion or extrovertion.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that working remotely is a skill that is practiced and improved over time. Working remotely full time is very different from commuters that 'WFH' periodically.

In remote working, your git remote branch / pull request / staging app are your presence, not your chat's avatar with a green circle there.

You're responsible to reporting or asking what's obstacle or what's needed to discuss at early of the day or yesterday.

Your ideal employer can only ask you once at the end of the day how's work going, anything they can provide to make your works tomorrow non-blocking. It could have a few exception rarely.

That's from my little 3 years+ experience of remote working across 14-hours timezone difference.

Some people might like this, but in my experience working like this leads to being a code jockey and no advancement in salary or responsibility.

That's completely true to me. I don't know how many but I guess there's a ton of software developers who aren't really interested in projects they are developing, but that doesn't seem to tie with quality of works.

Personally, I haven't really interested in any product out there. I tried but there were no such a thing. I've realized that at the end of the day I'll have to build a little profitable product and start the next possible ways from there. (I know, nothing new about that realization and consequence but I still & will have to do this)

Oh good. I thought i was the only one. Not to distract from the original point of the thread but its just not interesting any more. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy solving problems using code. But gone are the days where I would like nothing more but to spend the entire weekend coding. After a while in the industry, its just more of the same.

Working remote right now and I love it. I am working sat/sun/mon/thue and it still works out with the team collaboration. Not as good as if I would be in the office though. I am simply not part of every discussion and today I was introduced to an API I absolutely would like to have had a discussion about before it was put into production.

Do you work 4 ten hour days? Did your employer let you choose your workdays?

Really interesting schedule. Could see something along those lines suiting me pretty well. Do many/any of you colleagues work weekends?

Great advice from this article in general, as I found from 6 years of working from home.

That said, there's a fine line of making yourself available and working too much.

The first position where I worked from home full time, my manager expected me to be available from 9am Eastern Time to 6pm Pacific Time to ensure I could support all available teams. His logic was that working from home allowed me to forgo my 3hrs of daily commuting and work longer hours. It was pretty clear this was not an ideal working environment.

The second position was actually harder to complain about. I worked for a non-profit with a global team of amazing people. The problem was you could log into IRC at any time and find a team member that you needed (and usually wanted) to talk to. It took discipline to say "enough" and walk away. Sometimes was harder than others, especially when everyone felt we were doing good things for the world.

Go outside

I understand why Wework works so well. There must be a non negligible percentage of their clients who get a desk just so they can leave their homes and be around others.

A lot of the negatives listed here can be mitigated with companies taking a little ownership of having remote team members.

For instance, being as available as possible is not fun 100% of the time. While timezones may separate you, if a company enacts something like "core hours" when everyone is required to be available you make it possible for remote employees to disconnect for a while.

Nonetheless, great advice here.

Thanks for sharing. What are some strategies you've used to get yourself in the zone and focused?

Bob Jones University? Really?

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