Ask HN: What's your experience with remote working? as employees/employers?

I was able to work remotely (exclusively) for 2.5 years from 2004-2007. I was able to live in two different, beautiful places, and moving was a non issue. My work schedule was totally random - I would wake up whenever I wanted and simply skip "work" days at random going to hike, but despite this it was, in terms of output, one of the most productive periods of my life.

However, after that period I simply decided to quit, because of the totally absent social life. Now I waste 2 hours a day in commute and waste time in useless meetings setup by some random executive. I'm also paid less comparatively, and have more expenses. I still wouldn't go back. I now discuss openly and face-to-face with great colleagues, work with great problems together, share great ideas, etc. Choosing a good job is so much more important.

I would still happily work remotely one, two days a week. Just for the convenience. Or maybe in small periods throughout the year. Still, I will never work remotely again.

During the period I worked remotely, I was able to knew/meet a lot other people that worked remotely all the time (some since the '90!). We all had, more or less, the same problem: we all scored incredible amounts of hours (compared to normal workers) despite the absence of both work pressure and schedule. We tended to be a bit extremists in quality (of course, you had all the time to think about the best solution), which wouldn't work well with normal colleagues that had to struggle with time constraints. I didn't understand that at the time. Because of your derailed work schedule, you generally tend to be less social even if you have good social contacts. In the end it's a self-inflicting problem: you are less active socially, you dedicate more time to your work, etc etc. It's actually quite difficult to find balance. I couldn't in the end.

Employers should take note, because working remotely sorta-implies a very dedicated person. Being able to work without any social pressure is difficult if the worker is not a motivated person. Un-motivated persons will basically quit by themselves after just weeks (I saw it happening a lot).

It also boggles my mind that employers (and this happens mostly in EU) still don't grasp that concept. Regulating work hours, presence, etc is stupid unless your job is depending on a regulated schedule itself. People slack right in front of the monitor all the time. Allowing people to work from home it very beneficial: it actually increases the production (less time wasted in commute, colleagues, etc). But of course, it really depends on the people that you hire, and how willing are you to thrust these people.

I've worked as a (semi-)remote employee for the past 2.5 years for a HUGE multinational software company. Here's a braindump of experiences:

- I work in Ireland and my colleagues are in the US. The time zone difference is generally handy because I can work in the mornings and they come online around 1:30pm. So my afternoons (or their mornings) are when meetings and scrum calls happen. I don't attend any meetings outside my core work hours, and I'm rarely even asked to. I'm not sure a wider timezone difference would be suitable

- I actually work from a subsidiary office so I have people to get lunch with, even though I don't have any work contact with them.

- Things are usually scheduled around a US working day so, for example, nightly builds were scheduled to run in the early morning so they hadn't finished by the time I started work. And then I'd be trying to download them just as the corporate network start to get saturated by the US employees starting work.

- My line manager is here in the office but functional managers are in the US. This creates odd situations where I can phone-in sick but my teammates don't get informed. Or where my annual review is done in the US but the salary/bonus must come out of an Irish budget.

- "Ramping-up" on the product was pretty hard because if I got stuck in the mornings I had to wait until the afternoon to get some answers. Once that product learning curve is over and you become more autonomous it's much easier.

- There can initially be some resentment from US employees that their jobs are going to Ireland (an uncomfortable truth) and it can be difficult for me to know that an experience engineer has been "resource actioned" because I'm - Many of my US colleagues are also remote / working from home but this is actively being discouraged. If fact, we all (US in-office, US working-from-home, and me in Ireland) had to attend a rather tactless meeting which listed the disadvantages to remote working: poor career progression, no management visibility, loneliness, poor team cohesion, communication problems etc. It's not like this was my choice!

- Tools: primarily email, instant messaging and regular conference calls. We also have get defect and version control notifications by email.

- I think things would be easier in a non-corporate setting because we'd have the flexibility to choose better tools: something campfire-ish, Git, some visual story planning / Kanban board, perhaps video conferencing over Skype, ambient webcams so you can see each other etc.

- I'm not sure if I'm a typical programmer: I dislike making phone calls and generally prefer to talk face-to-face with people. You get to pick up on subtle little clues (are they bored? are they stressed? are the busy? are they saying yes but only reluctantly?) which are lost in non-visual mediums.

Edit: I work in a very quiet open-plan office and this makes phone calls much harder. Ideally remote workers should have a private office so they are comfortable speaking on the phone. Particularly important if you want to conduct annual reviews over the phone!

- Having said all that, I'm seriously considering moving into remote freelancing or trying to find a permanent remote position but most job sites are focused on location-centric jobs. Any good pointers?

I'm from the Philippines too (Taguig), and when I was just starting I was paying for 2 connections. Right now I just maintain one (dsl), and during outages and other emergencies I go to cafes with wifi. Generally I try to work on a cafe once a week to minimize the isolation.

There must be a share whiteboard app for iPad/Android?

A few years a go I co founded start-up in the US while living in the UK. The other two founders both lived in the west coast, and I worked remotely. In the beginning it was fairly straight forward as it was only the three of us and another contractor from Russia. I developed the app, the contractor developed a component we needed and the other two were busy getting the business side together. When we got funded things got more serious as suddenly our little startup became a bigger company with offices and employees etc. I would basically do a 9-6 work day, and the Americans would clock on at around 5-5:30PM. We'd have a little overlap to talk about what's new over skype and I'll clock off. That was the theory of it but in practice I ended up chatting to them on skype at various hours as they sometimes needed information from me. This worked OK for me but I personally like being in an office and interacting with people. You become a recluse when you spend your days cooped up at home. Having said that, today I still try to do at least one day of home working to keep a balance between home and office.

The main problem I found in remote working are distractions from family, kids etc (who forget you're physically at home but mentally you're not), and a side effect to that problem is that because you sometimes get gaps in your workday you end up stretching the day into the night, blurring the boundary between home and work time.