johndavid9991

You know the core fundamentals of programming, and you simply need to be retrained. You may start with this basic JavaScript course to refresh your skills. If you are interested in learning more about training opportunities that could eventually land you to a better job, I will be happy to guide you.

Whenever I feel fear of failure, I watch this video, and it might help you too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkTf0LmDqKI

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As we work with our clients from the US, we also work closely with their employees - that part still gives the feeling of remote work for us. Most of our team members or employees live 10 to 40 minutes' drive away from each other, so it makes sense to make the change and work in the same place. We have three people who live far away, so they still work remotely with us, but we mostly put them on projects that do not require much team collaboration.

Remote work could be perfect for individual contributors, but it's still full of challenges for people who work on teams.

There's been a lot of buzz lately about remote work. I have been working remotely since 2012; the challenges of remote work are not new to me. I work with 30+ people, and our clients are in different timezones. Our team includes full-stack developers, designers, product leads, and other support staff.

First Challenge: Schedule of work hours or team availability. Back in 2012, each member of our team started working from our respective homes. We started with seven team members; it's a small team. Initially, people are productive while we work as individual contributors. However, efficiency and productivity dropped very low when we started to work on the same project because everyone has the flexibility to choose when they want to work as long as they complete the required hours per week. We partially solved this by setting standard work hours that everyone in the team will follow.

Second Challenge: Quality of work is affected by many factors. Working alone remotely is initially fun, but eventually, employees feel lonely. Keeping focus at work is also hard due to distractions, like games, social media, house-related errands, etc. Monitoring employees' honesty on work hours and work done is also a challenge. Since our team mostly live in the same town, we decided to work in the same place. We converted my whole dorm into an office, removed the walls, joint the rooms, and made it look like a real office. Centralizing our distributed team to work in the same place doubled or tripled our team's efficiency and productivity. You can imagine how it made it easier to do daily standups, do design planning, pair programming, code reviews, etc. Employees became happier, and the bond between got stronger; we also eat meals together, we go on retreats, we play games together, our employee retention rate is 90% since we started. Over the years of working remotely, we have also built a tool that we use internally to manage and monitor employees and projects.

Now with the Corona Virus, our team is back temporarily in working from home, and most of us can't wait to start working together in the office again.

Finally, Some Privacy: After 10 Years, Giant Pandas Mate in Shuttered Zoo -https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/world/asia/panda-mating-h... lol

Trifecta: Taiwan reports zero new coronavirus cases for 3rd time - https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3918074

Thanks again Peter.

Thank you, Peter. My follow-up question is if my company don’t survive the covid-19 crisis. Can my approved H-1B petition be transferred to another company?

Hi Peter, I am from the Philippines, and I got an H-1B petition last 2019, which is valid until Sept 2021. I cancelled my scheduled visa interview last 2019 due to family reasons. I am still working with my employer and working remotely as an independent contractor with them. My question is if I can still use the H1B petition later this year or early next year before it expires (depends on when the Covid19 crisis ends). I got denied twice before back in 2017 and 2013 for B1/B2. Now, I have enough ties in my home country, married with two kids, and have travel history to Japan and Singapore. Do you know if my previous denials for the B1/B2 visa would affect my H1B approval?

Thanks Peter.

P.S. We applied in YC last year but did not make it to the final round. But still, the feedback we got from YC enabled us to pivot quickly which we found to be very valuable.

There were previous reports suggesting that this could not be the case, is this an updated findings and should we really count on it?

I'm from the Philippines and we are changing the world remotely.

I started as a trainee for Junior Software Engineer level working with a startup in Silicon Valley.

The best thing about it is that in just 3 months, I was able to learn HTML and CSS, Bootstrap, jQuery/JqueryUI, PHP, MySQL, OOP in PHP, MVC using CodeIgniter, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, Setting up Linux Server from Scractch, SVN, Git, Agile Project Management and a lot more. My mentor is really good teacher and at the same time "to struggle is to learn".

After two years, we have 9 more team members, an office. We have built our own LMS to train more people remotely. We have bootcamps running in MV and Seattle. We also have consulting projects. We are working with other entreprenuers and helping them with their startups.

Gmail, ASANA, Skype and screen sharing tools make the world flat for us. Gives us the feeling that we are working in one place.

The best advise that I could give to others will be 3 things:

1. Have focus and Love your work. If you don't love what you are doing remotely, chances are you will not focus. 2. Company is about the people not the revenue. This is very critical in a remote setup, you must value your teammates as if they are your family. 3. "What Gets Measured Gets Managed" - Peter Drucker. We have daily reports, we measure hours spent and assigned story points to each task.