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Comment by rreyes1979 | Hacker News Reader

rreyes1979

15+ years remote consultant here. I have never stepped into an office for work during this time. All work from home (sometimes cafes). I can confidently say that most of the time, I've been considered one of the most productive workers on the teams I've been involved with. There's nothing that prevents productivity on remote work that can't be handled with the right tools, skills and attitude. More so, once you (and your team) learns to handle it, working from home can be even more productive than working on an office (worked on an office for the first 5 years of my career and those were a lot less productive). Ask me anything.

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Ok, I'll ask the big question: How do you deal with politics? Specially when you are the only remote person in the team. Do you feel you have a disadvantage to someone that works in person when it comes to being recognized and growth?

They are a consultant, so they just move on to the next client and let the perms deal with the politics.

The nature of the work changes automatically when you’re this remote (I am too). Results start to matter much more than how people experience you (although that’s pretty important as well). You’ll get given work that has clearly defined inputs and outputs, or given goals that have defined or obvious success measures.

This allows you to bypass the politics situation pretty well. Interact professionally with the people you need to, get your work done, and get your social and drama needs met elsewhere, like with real friends and family :-P

Isn't that itself a problem though? My issue with remote working is it feels more like I'm a code factory that doesn't get to have input on big picture/design stuff very often. Maybe some people like that though...

What part of remote limits your big picture involvement? How does office working enable it?

Unless you're in a very small company, the "big picture" probably involves people on different floors, in different building, and in different locations--continents even. In many respects, communicating remotely can break down location-based silos in many cases.

I'm not talking about the "big picture" on the scale of the entire company, but more just my team and possibly the 2 or 3 teams we work most closely with.

If half the team is wfh it just seems like those in the office will be in the loop more consistently, especially if the team lead is also in the office. There's a lot of questions I feel comfortable asking casually if the person I want to ask is nearby but not by sending them an email or during a meeting.

I personally don't like living my life by chances (of overhearing important conversations, or anything). I do think small talks and self-start initiatives are important for work satisfaction. I will try to facilitate that by proactively reach out to coworker and probing around what they find interesting. I do that in on slack as much as or even more than in person.

There is this bot on slack called donut that every company I've been uses. Basically it prompts 2 or more random people to catch up every week or how often you think not annoying. I don't think I had more than that back in the office days but you could send slack messages to people how often you want if you like more.

In my team, most of the times, anything important needs to be sent to the channel for transparency and more chance of getting picked up. Private messages are not expected to be as important nor get an immediate reply so people won't feel bothered when you send one. Then there are also things more purposefully async such as github issues and wikis.

In an office environment you can walk around the floor, pop into other people's convos or meetings, learn news and rumors from water cooler conversations. You can do this organically when you see people having a break.

In a remote environment you have no idea if you're interrupting someone when you give them a call, so you need a proper reason to call someone. People discuss things in closed conference calls, chat rooms and email chains, so if they don't invite you you will never learn about any opportunities yourself.

Big picture socially and politically, no. Although you do get a rough sense of the power structure pretty quickly. But in terms of the work you’re doing, the amount of influence you have depends on the quality of the organization. If leadership takes suggestions from golf buddies you have a problem, but all ideas are being considered this is a non-issue. You won’t get invited to the boss’s house parties, but your designs / architecture can get implemented if the org knows what it’s doing.

I think your perspective is different because you're probably more senior than I am. I feel like I benefit a lot from listening to the more senior development on my team and by listening to my boss reason about the decisions he's making.

If you're very confident in yourself and your work though this probably is less of a problem.

This is true. I have noticed the non-senior folks struggling a bit, especially the ones who need help and guidance in their day to day work. The been-there-done-that people who already have family and social commitments outside of work have it a little easier.

Not OP but will give my uninvited experience. I have also been remote a majority of the last 10+ years of my work life.

Politics is tricky. I have/had to do a lot more public relations. Starting/running book/video clubs, making time for 1:1s with coworkers, I even did a 2+ year stint of starting off the morning slack chats with a dad joke, that was very appreciated. There are many ways to be productive, but I had to find ways to stay noticed, likable, relevant, and appreciated outside the pull requests. As my former manager said, if no one remembers who you are, you will become just a line item on the payroll.

Your experience is certainly invited :)

I think your experience is really interesting, because as a dev our work can be hard to measure, unless you're working on something huge and very visible, so this interpersonal part of the work becomes very important, kinda like your manager said, you have to be remembered for something more than just "that guy we pay to make code".

Remote for the last 6 years for me. Pre-pandemic was also the only member of team that was remote.

I do something pretty similar. Friday's I will somewhat regularly send a dad joke or meme. These of course stay non-political and very SFW.

On a somewhat serious side. I try to regularly send "tips". If I learn something that I think is beyond cool I'll send an email teaching that new cool thing. If it can't be done in an email I'll setup small sessions to teach that over Zoom. I prefer Zoom because it's more impactful as far as being "seen" and not just another email.

Relaying what I've learned (even basic things) works really well, at least my regular 1:1's and reviews support this view.

Not OP but in case it's interesting:

I was a remote employee (IC) for about 12 years, and this was a recurring problem. I was one of a handful of remotes in a global team across several time zones, so at some level everybody had to deal with this problem: I didn't have a good handle on the office politics in the US, but the people in the US had just as tenuous a grip on the office politics in Singapore, and so on.

Somehow it usually worked out OK, but we had a director who was very good at shielding us from the more distracting stuff, and we were working on a chronically understaffed, mission-critical, unglamorous, profitable product, so it sort of attracted "just do the work" types.

The OP, however, is a consultant, which brings a very different set of political considerations. Last time I did remote consulting, which was a long time ago, the biggest thing you had to worry about was budget.

Was the $2M project going to get $5M next year or $1M and why? If it's $5M you'd better be able to offer more services or they might push you out in favor of a bigger shop; if it's $1M you'd better make sure you have an internal champion to make sure you still get some of the work; and if you think you can't influence the decision you're not paying attention.

Back then, consultancies would have people on staff just to take all the meetings and drink the drinks and press the flesh and know these things. I'm talking about shops with maybe 10-20 people. I don't know how it works now, but I would bet tomorrow's lunch that whoever still has those people makes more money than whoever doesn't.

(I was a solo consultant, and my lunch was a lot more modest.)

I worked for a small consulting company (not software development). We and other small shops--at least anything bigger than solo practitioner--pretty much all had a client services/sales/business person even if, at the end of the day, the real relationship was with the individual consultants.

At a previous job during 2018-2020 I was the only remote worker. In that time I got two promotions, two large raises, and some RSUs as an additional "thanks for being a great dev" bonus. If you keep communicating with stakeholders on a somewhat regular basis, "sell" your skills when talking to them, and you do a great job that sets you apart from everyone else, you'll get recognition either way.

I got a 35K raise recently - and all I did was ask - at my current job where 90% of the people are remote. The entire time I've been employed here, I've made sure to constantly mention to my manager how much I've improved things; that's what I mean by "sell your skills".

Basically from my experience, it's made no difference whether I'm in the office or working remotely; my value is recognized all the same.

EDIT: BTW I'm not a "Rockstar Dev" or any bullshit like that. My skill level is either on par or slightly lower than my colleagues. I just make sure to focus on solving tangible business problems and keep constant open communication with my team or stakeholders.

Did you start your career as a remote contractor? Or, did you spend those early years on-site in a more traditional setting?

Training new employees (literally new graduates, but also new to team) can be more difficult with remotes. There are probably solutions, but having hired both remote and on-site employees, it was definitely easier to bring the on-site employees up to speed.

I fall into the "there's some value to co-located teams" camp, but I also believe that value is WAY overstated by most managers and senior leadership. In my perfect world, my team would all be located near enough to the office to come in when it makes sense, but free to work remote most of the time.

What's your experience with a combination of remote desktop &/or using something like VS Code Live Share?

Given the choice between a traditional setting or remote, I much more prefer the remote session with those tools.

-- I'll admit to being biased towards remote but with an understanding many things do work better when together (physically).

Pretty good. My team is scattered up and down the east coast (US) and heavily uses Zoom to collaborate. For most work, this is fine. The two places I find tools lacking are...

1. White-boarding new systems/features. I find value in having the team in the same conference room and being able to use an actual whiteboard. So far, I haven't found a virtual whiteboard that was anywhere near as usable. I don't mean for pseudo-coding, but quickly sketching UIs or system architectures, where coworkers can walk up and edit each others work in real-time.

2. Onboarding new employees. Both for "water-cooler" socialization and ease of having the new team-member access other team member for whatever questions they have (Slack and other tools are most of the way there for the latter, but there's still something to be said for reading facial expressions and getting a "feel" for somebody).

And I freely admit some of that may just be my own biases. I've hired remotely and locally, both successfully, and with my company spread across 3+ continents, I'm used to remote collaboration.

I've worked with remote team-members for 20 years now. The tools today are light-years better. Heck, when I started at this company, many of the remote employees didn't even have stable internet connections - that was "fun".

>White-boarding new systems/features.

Although tools like Google Docs actually replace whiteboards well for many purposes, I'm not sure why someone hasn't developed a better tablet-based collaborative tool. I admittedly haven't looked at what's out there recently but you'd think--even given admittedly limited surface area compared to an in-person whiteboard--someone could have given a better run at this.

Not to come across as a Microsoft fan boy (I work with MS focused Shops mostly), but the MS Whiteboard tool is pretty solid for a simple collaborative tool that has worked well in small teams when I've used it. I'm sure there are similar tools with more advanced features but sometimes simplicity is best, such as a real white board.

>White-boarding new systems/features

I find miro works well for this.

I'll strongly agree with #2. Physical presence is tough to beat in forming a relationship. But I do think spending lots of time communicating with someone online can form fairly good relationships.

#1 I'm curious what you've used & where it's come up short. I have had good luck there.

I'd love to get your take on two challenges I've encountered:

(1) Being the only remote person on a team. It was really hard to get other members to include me in meetings, etc. Perhaps your status as a consultant prevented such exclusion?

(2) Inability to stand at the same, physical whiteboard during technical discussions / design sessions.

> There's nothing that prevents productivity on remote work that can't be handled with the right tools, skills and attitude

Firstly, congrats! It's something I'm working towards myself, and the pandemic looks like it will be a significant opportunity to try and achieve it.

However, perhaps you're minimising your expertise here and the learnings and experience that the employer and the worker need to go through to make it work.

Anything to share here?

If productivity was the only measure of work success, I’d agree with you as being a good case study.

There are some cool studies about what a “valued employee” is, in a sincere sense, depending on remote v in person.

Remote - linkers, info sharers, result generators.

In-person - basically all the people<>people skills you’d expect get valued.

I’d love to find this study again, but it provided a nice framework for me to think through how to succeed based on the workplace type.

Did you start by consulting for people you'd worked with in the office?

How did you develop clients with whom you've never worked in an office at all?

(I consulted many years ago, sometimes remote, but everyone wanted to see me come in eventually for meetings, so I'm very curious.)

How did remote work 15 years ago differ from remote work now? I imagine a lot of the tooling and infrastructure modern remote workers depend on now didn't exist back then!

Wht do you think the execs/owners at your client companies retain onsite staff instead of hiring only more people like you?

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