Hacker News Reader

Comment by fendy3002 | Hacker News Reader

Is remote overtime that bad? I guess I'll consent to put work at 10 hours a day (1 hour break included), in exchange of 1 hour commute time.

I wanna try remote working, wonder how it'll goes through.

View on HN

Personally, I tend to work much longer hours when I'm remote.

Some of that is that the commute is shorter, so I can start work earlier and stop it later without while keeping the same amount of time at home.

Some of that is that my lunch breaks are typically much shorter. I don't have to take time to go to a restaurant if I fail to pack a lunch in the morning, and I'm much less likely to spend a while after lunch just chit-chatting with my colleagues.

A big part of it is that I just don't mind working longer hours when I'm remote, because the experience of working is more pleasurable - fewer distractions, I can listen to music without headphones, the lighting is much more pleasant (I made sure to give myself a window office at home), the people furnishing my home office were kind enough to buy me a chair that doesn't make my back ache, etc. etc. At an office, when the end of the day rolls around, I can't wait to get out of there. Working remotely, I'd rather finish up whatever I was in the middle of before shoving off for the day.

I assume you don't have a wife and kids around your home office? Because in my experience it's much harder to train them to let me concentrate than colleagues.

The opposite for me. You can tell your child to be quiet and respect your space. It’s a political gamble to tell the VP Sales that taking calls all day next to your desk is impacting your ability to focus.

Also, get a locking door for your home office. Kids will learn that locked door == parent is working.

Doesn't even have to be locking, just closing. The general convention at our house is that closed door means "send me a text message or ask the other parent", open door means, "sure, come say hi".

It's been a day or two since I've had a closing door at a co-located office, so I'm not used to being able to implement such a policy in that kind of work environment.

(I'd also add that there's no quicker way to recharge your batteries than to pop out of the office to spend 10 minutes building a block tower or whatever with your kids. 14/10 much more effective than bitching about work with your colleagues in the office kitchenette.)

I think consenting explicitly to a 10 hour day would be a mistake. Remote work shouldn’t be a privilege you pay for with more work. When I work from home I generally set a goal to finish something that day. If it takes longer than 8 hours I’ll do overtime but if I am done at 2 pm I may also call it a day.

I tend to take time off during the day. I find my most productive time is usually around 18-21, so I’ll work 10-15 and 19-21

I agree. Enforcing on your personal productive hours can be a good thing for remote work. In the office you have to force yourself to get into the zone which sometimes could prove impossible: noise, meetings, etc.

It really depends on the company; the culture is a huge issue. Be wary of any company where remote workers are not a big percentage of the employees - it will be a constant, up-hill battle against negative perception. Even the best companies, against their best intentions, will tend to view equivalent remote employees as more negative than their local counterparts. It's just human nature to place people we can see and easily interact with as more important than those "others". I think a good chunk of that goes away once established, and everyone knows you, but even then I think there's a stead decay in your reputation that you need to fight against.

As for the personal effects of remote work, I find them almost entirely awesome, but I have a wife and son that I can interact with, but who are also out of the house during the day. You get to schedule your day more in your liking. I'm more productive first thing in the morning, and then once again in late evening. In the afternoon, I prefer to get up and move around more, as I get sleepy. Plus, you can generally live a heathier life, as you can go for walks, exercise, do chores, etc. when you are having lulls in productivity.

I'm back to a local company now, and switching from local to remote to local has definitely highlighted a lot of the differences. It's sooo much easier to maintain perception when you are local; if your manager or others have concerns you can see it and chat with them about things quickly and easily. My local boss knows why things might be taking longer, because I'm talking to him, intermittently every day.

It's also easier to come up to speed when working locally, a 15 minute face-to-face talk is easily worth an hour of remote slack/video chatting. Not to mention that text chats (even with slack) tends to suffer a lot more from misreads and misunderstandings of intentions. If you and I meet in the morning and I see you are cranky because you were dealing with your upset toddler all morning, I'm probably going to commiserate with you a bit before asking you tech questions, or I might skip them for now. Over Slack, I don't know that, and so I'm likely going to accidentally bug you and you, against your best desires, are going to respond more curtly, which will rub me the wrong way, then suddenly everything is more negative.

Definitely, the best way to do remote is to either know your boss ahead of time, or do local work for a while (months) and then transition to remote. Then the trust is built up, the tech transfer has largely happened, and generally everyone gets to know each other better first.

But when it works, I find it awesome.

Have any other tips on how to fight the decay in reputation while working remote?

I would consider the largest risk with remote work to be "out of sight, out of mind" for consideration of promotions or even job referrals by colleagues.

I very much have the personality for remote work and largely like to figure out things on my own but the drawbacks feel significant enough to keep me in the office for now...

The ideal is to work remotely for a boss that already knows you. If not that, then I would focus very strongly on the adage that you need to make your boss look good. If you can do that, then your boss will sing your praises. I (unknowingly) had a boss that wasn't doing that at my last position, and it was probably the main thing that caused things to go poorly.

To avoid problems with intentions, put a rule or something? so everyone must expect that every comment comes from good intentions.

Why?

1 your reducing your effective hourly rate - and presumably your salary is less for remote. 2 It Development is a salaried role so you in theory have no fixed hours.

Because I prefer it rather than commuting. On the other hand, I believe that my effective working hour shall be unchanged (ex: 4 hours a day for usual programmer). The rest (additional hour) shall be filled with analysis, discussion or chit chat beside taking short breaks during working hours. Don't know though, haven't done any remote working.

Well I work locally as opposed to commuting to London I don't work extra hours locally for free because of that.

I've been working remotely for about nine months now and use my kids kindergarten schedule as my hard stop so don't accidentally overwork. Other peoples experiences might be different but I think guarding my work/life balance is much easier working remotely.

I work from home.

My schedule is:-

6.50am wake up

7.00am start work

12.00pm lunch

1.00pm start work

5.00pm dinner

6.00pm start work

9.45pm get ready for bed

10.00pm sleep

I don't have any distractions (except the occasional quick read of HN, when I need a short mental break), don't own a tv, no kids, wear the same clothes, I eat the same meals daily and I wear headphones and listen to music.

I'll do this for 90 days and then relax on the schedule somewhat and then repeat for another 90 days.

Let me tell you. It's actually quite interesting on what you can accomplish with 13 hours of work (91 hours a week) available to you.

Elon has it right. In a compound interest sort of way, what you can achieve in 90 days (with this schedule) is akin to someone else taking 6 months or more to do the same.

Of course it means no social life. But that's for later on.

Then one day you're crossing the street, someone on a car can't see you behind their A pillar, and this was all for nothing =/

Life is happening right now, not later on. Vision acuity, muscle tenacity, disposition, hell, even liver performance – these won't wait for you :-)

What are you working for, actually?

I have never in my life been paid nearly enough to spend this much time working. The physicians I know literally making 4x my salary aren't consistently working this much, so you must be quite well-compensated.

How long have you been doing this? And I'm confused on what you mean by "Of course it means no social life. But that's for later on." - Do you have a spouse or significant other? Do you not think that having social interactions are important at all points in life?

This whole schedule is super bleak and reads like an intro to a dystopian novel

Just curious how long you were able to maintain this routine for? Personally, I would only last for about 1 week on this type of routine, and my body and family life would just fail on me. Not something I personally wish to put at risk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com