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Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

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Re: Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

#11

Post by lil1729 »

dwightgunning wrote: post #6

The fundamentals of being a highly effective and valued team member and employee are actually the same. That said, perception is reality and being remote does add some friction to certain aspects of the job and the way the team works. If you take a proactive approach these can be managed or overcome, leaving you with just the benefits of working remote. Things that come to mind: - Written communication: Crisp emails…

+1 to all the points made.

I have been working remotely for a while now. These are the things I learned.

- time difference matters. It is better if there is some overlap with at least some people in the team.

- "showing up" (via various communication channels) have more value at one of the places I worked than the actual work.

- I was consistently rated less compared to others because my interactions were only over video, once or twice a week and via chat channels and it could never make up for face-to-face communication. This is highly subjective. At another place, I never had such problems.

- Expect to add a lot of stress in your life (again subjective).

- Pair programming with colleagues over video/google-hangout can be extremely valuable.

- video calls mostly suck, especially if you have low upstream bandwidth (which was the case with me).

- make plans to travel and stay with your colleagues for a week or so, once in a few months.

- "everyone being remote" is better than one or two people alone being remote and the rest in a central office. That way, the company is "set up" for remote working and people take care to put everything online in a wiki etc.. Not so, with a centralized office with only a few people working remotely.

- It is also very easy to get burned out working more hours, especially if the other side is in an overlapping your day. It happened to me many times. This needs fixing at org level and should meet the expectations of everyone.

HTH.

Re: Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

#13

Post by mohsinr »

I suggest in spare time contributing to open source. This will build a good profile for prospective employers from future. As working remotely you may not be visible much in scene, however if you have strong presence in open source space, you will stay visible and prove how much you get done being self motivated. And any future company , most remote employers love self motivated, accomplished team members. And your online open source contributions helps validate that.

Re: Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

#14

Post by thingamarobert »

mohsinr wrote: post #13

I suggest in spare time contributing to open source. This will build a good profile for prospective employers from future. As working remotely you may not be visible much in scene, however if you have strong presence in open source space, you will stay visible and prove how much you get done being self motivated. And any future company , most remote employers love self motivated, accomplished team members. And your o…

This is a very good point! I do collaborative work regularly on GitHub but on private repositories of the company with their assigned GitHub account. I should look into how this history can be joined with my public profile which has very little activity as I do other programming on Gitlab and Bitbucket.

Re: Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

#15

Post by anovikov »

If you know what you do, pay attention to tennis. There's quite some money in tennis predictions. I know people who don't really know a lot about data mining and don't have a formal education in the field (and some of their 'math apparatus' sounds absolutely lame and laughable) who are making mid to high six figures in tennis. One guy even switched there from such an obviously attractive field as poker - a guy who already has an an excellent lifestyle from passive investments alone, and he's 32. If you can apply real data science there, and big data approach, mining a lot of data about tennis player, tournaments, surfaces, etc. etc., you can probably make millions. This isn't some temporary thing: bookies can't make better quality lines because they aren't offering odds reflecting real probabilities, they offer odds reflecting people's likelihood to bet on either side - and these are different things. And lines at betting exchanges are influenced by bookies, who make the bulk of the market, anyway.

Re: Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

#16

Post by bbcbasic »

anovikov wrote: post #15

If you know what you do, pay attention to tennis. There's quite some money in tennis predictions. I know people who don't really know a lot about data mining and don't have a formal education in the field (and some of their 'math apparatus' sounds absolutely lame and laughable) who are making mid to high six figures in tennis. One guy even switched there from such an obviously attractive field as poker - a guy who al…

No. It's a zero sum game. Might be some hay while it's sunny but It'll dry up once you have big well financed teams throwing enough IQ and compute power at it.

Re: Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

#18

Post by thingamarobert »

saurabhjha wrote: post #4

I have been working remotely for a few months now after spending many years in offices and I agree I am much more productive. You might want to check out https://www.toptal.com You might also like reading this book "Remote" written by BaseCamp founders. I read it last weekend and I think it's great.

Thanks! I'm about to order the book. And the website is also very interesting.

Re: Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

#19

Post by 0xmohit »

lil1729 wrote: post #11
dwightgunning wrote: post #6

The fundamentals of being a highly effective and valued team member and employee are actually the same. That said, perception is reality and being remote does add some friction to certain aspects of the job and the way the team works. If you take a proactive approach these can be managed or overcome, leaving you with just the benefits of working remote. Things that come to mind: - Written communication: Crisp emails…

+1 to all the points made. I have been working remotely for a while now. These are the things I learned. - time difference matters. It is better if there is some overlap with at least some people in the team. - "showing up" (via various communication channels) have more value at one of the places I worked than the actual work. - I was consistently rated less compared to others because my interactions were only over v…

  "showing up" (via various communication channels) have more
  value at one of the places I worked than the actual work
Reminds me of a Dilbert strip:

  When you don't have anything to do, walk fast and look worried.
  Carry a notebook, it helps.
I even heard a coworker say: "It doesn't matter whether the work gets done as long as you are worried about your work."

Re: Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

#20

Post by philippeback »

I have been working remotely for some time now (years).

I am not doing it all the time as I like to be around people every once in a while (but having decent noise cancelling headphones for surviving those open spaces).

The key thing is indeed discipline.

Current tools support this fully. The level of proficiency with these tools directly affects the quality of the interactions. This includes their use by the other parties.

In 2014, I spent my whole year working on a project remotely, from idea to release and support. It was super nice and paid nicely.

It is important to be part of an open source community I'd say as it helps in asking trusted people about various things. In that regard, Slack is working well (as is Discord). Appear.in is also very useful.

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