My Story - I was doing freelancing stuff back in college years from my hostel room, got hooked to it and kept on doing without doing/taking any job offer. It is been 8-9 years now and it is been a good ride albeit with many ups and downs. Working from home has its advantages as you have all the freedom of thought but it do some serious damage to your social and communication skills and can make you uni-dimensional.
Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#22I'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.
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#23I met a girl the same week I started at my job in 2007. We were in San Antonio, TX and she was my upstairs neighbor and we started dating a month or two later, then got engaged after about a year and a half. This girl (now my wife) is a Captain in the US Army. When her time at this duty station was up, the Army moved us to Colorado. I told my employer (a big cloud hosting provider based in Texas) that I would be moving but that I wished to keep working remote somehow, if it were possible. As it happened, my team was short-handed and so my boss worked out a way for me to stay on as a contractor. A few months later, the company decided that they wanted to keep me so they converted me back to a full-time employee and I became the first (or maybe the second?) remote employee at my company. I recently left to work remotely for a SFO-based startup but I can tell you that my old employer has hundreds of remote workers now.
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#24Ukraine. 5 years, Java. 9 month remote now. Been with a company for a year, fell in love and decided to move to another location:) Offered to switch to remote.
Advice: * Transparency(what you're doing, when it will be ready, when you're online, etc) * Discipline(isolate yourself from interruptions and keep commitments from the above)
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#25I work remotely for one company for a year and a half. I found my current employer in a bar on a tropical island partly by luck, partly by my desire to speak about my work with random people.
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#26I have been working remotely (as a senior dev, software architect, now a CTO) for more than a decade now.
I worked for a racing-to-IPO software dev company in upstate NY that collapsed in 2002, and the connections from that spun out into subcontracting, initially for various local clients (and thus already mostly remote, sometimes on-site). Then I moved to Michigan, but kept doing the same work. Then I moved the France; ditto (included one trip to launch a project on-site, living in a hotel for 10 days... ugh).
It was tricky, working from so far away (esp. when working with a team of developers who were on-site), so I worked solo for a few years (my wife published a well-reviewed first novel, which helped a lot); we had a kid in 2009. In late 2010 I found a dev job with a Cambridge, UK-based startup, here on HN. Now I'm the CTO. All of the developers here are remote.
My in-laws are in Malaysia, so I'm working (and parenting; we have two daughters now) in Kuala Lumpur all this month.
I like this setup; it's sometimes really hard (mixing in parenting is the hard part, really).
More details/advice available if there are questions, when I have time tonight.
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is great advice, especially about getting out of the house and having a routine. I am on my second remote position and having a daily routine is essential to not falling into productivity hell. I am renting an office in a coworking space so I can have a place to "go to work" rather than working from home. It adds a routine, it gives me separation between work and home, and it's nice to have human contact over th…
Yea I used to rent an office for a few years. I learned some important things - particularly making sure that you have the right office environment for your productivity. I unfortunately rented a space before the 'coworking' revolution and got kind of trapped in an office with non-tech guys much older than me constantly bugging about IT advice, a rent barter agreement when my finances couldn't swing the overhead that…
Productivity is one of the reasons I want to make the jump to freelancing.
I currently have a full time job, and enjoy the periods where I am left to get on with my work, but all to often the non-technical users will not read error messages, and ask me stupid questions to "fix their excel". It makes it impossible to work on certain things, like learning a front end framework when you are being bugged with trivial tasks like this every half hour. (The fact we are still using excel as a data import solution bugs me as well, as I have complained about the lack of reliability for a long time now).
So freelancing would hopefully allow me to do the sort of work I want to do. I know there is a whole load of other stuff I will need to manage, but it must be better than fixing formatting issues in excel.
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#28I've done a few years on, a few years off, and a few years on. I prefer remote by far.
Other than a few odd contracts, my real beginning in remote work was when I worked at one place for a long time, became indispensable, and explained that I had to move away. They had little option but to allow me to work remotely. After that succeeded for many years, I had my experience and things became easier for the next time ... and onward.
I agree with everyone's else's comments here on the challenges and benefits, but would emphasize very clearly that it's not for everyone.
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea I used to rent an office for a few years. I learned some important things - particularly making sure that you have the right office environment for your productivity. I unfortunately rented a space before the 'coworking' revolution and got kind of trapped in an office with non-tech guys much older than me constantly bugging about IT advice, a rent barter agreement when my finances couldn't swing the overhead that…
Productivity is one of the reasons I want to make the jump to freelancing. I currently have a full time job, and enjoy the periods where I am left to get on with my work, but all to often the non-technical users will not read error messages, and ask me stupid questions to "fix their excel". It makes it impossible to work on certain things, like learning a front end framework when you are being bugged with trivial tas…
If you are a freelancer, the lame basic PC questions are still coming your way. Maybe not from collegues, but now from clients. There are always people who think you are there to help with there PC questions. Also if the hired you 2 years ago for their website.
Re: Ask HN: Remote workers, tell us how you got started
#30I've been a US-based remote worker for close to 3 years now.
I started doing contracting work in Rails while I worked full time in .NET (while going onsite everyday). I also networked a lot within the local Ruby community. When I was ready to jump to Rails full time, a friend through the community was staffing up an early stage startup with remote devs spread across the city. This was a good way to dip my toes into remote work while still maintaining local connections.
After a year of that, I jumped to a larger company to join their remote team of Rails developers (currently about 10 of us are remote). Now I'm pretty adjusted to the remote lifestyle and it would be very hard to let go of it since the impact to family life is so positive.
My advice would be to do as many others have done and start with remote contracting to see how it works. Then you can either convert to full time or find another full time role later if you need benefits. However, if you can remain as a contractor I would generally advise people to do that if your financial situation allows for it.