Ask HN: How to make a career working remotely?

I've been working 40% remote (two days from home, three days in office) for just over twelve years. I'm employed as a developer, and I negotiated this arrangement when I joined the company. I have no experience of freelancing or self-employment.

As others have said, the key to making it work is trust and communication. Employers/management need to know that you are being at least as productive as you would be in a conventional office environment. And your team needs to know that you are making a fair contribution to getting things done. Each person in those groups will have a different default belief about what you are doing (working or slacking) in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Understand that, and use communication to address it.

So communicate appropriately. Some people suggest being super proactive on communication as a way of visibly signalling the effort you are making. I'm suspicious of this in a developer role, as you can end-up being thought of as noisy and self-promoting. Recognise that the way you communicate will probably need to change over time.

Find tools that work for you and your team, but don't get too preoccupied with tool selection. Its not the main issue.

Assuming an employer is open to remote working, I'd say that you need to: a) show a realistic understanding of how to make remote working work, and the problems that can occur; b) demonstrate that you are trustworthy and can work independently; and c) demonstrate that you can communicate effectively. This is going to be easier for an existing employer than a prospective one. being familiar with popular tools like hangouts/slack/skype will help.

Scott Hanselman [1] has some useful things to say about remote working. He's a PM at Microsoft.

Finally, recognise that it might not work for you. You might get lonely, or marginalised/overlooked, or just want a change. Don't lock yourself into one way of working for ever.

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/#q=remote+site:hanselman.com

Seconding that. Our company is 100% remote. Before that, I worked remotely for a company that had an office -- the difference is night and day.

I have the following rules for working remotely. It's more for contractors, so may not be directly applicable to people who work remotely for an employer.

1. More than one customer. Even if you're earning less money, two badly paying customers are better than one well paying customer.

2. Invoicing is always prompt, and payment must also be prompt. Walk away from anyone that holds onto payments.

3. Be scrupulous with the time you charge out, and be aware that if you do this, you'll find it takes 4 hours of a day to do two hours work. Use rescustime or timesnapper to monitor where your time is actually going.

4. Never turn down work.

Don't know if these are especially good rules, but they work for me. I'm on about my 5th year of being a remote worker.

Thanks!

> Congratulations on where you are!

To give you an idea of the kind of freedom you get, I am actually French, used to live in Lyon, and married a Japanese woman. When I reached 100% of remote work, I told my wife "say, wanna go live in Japan?". When I told my clients I was moving, so they should expect a 1-2 weeks of downtime on my side, I had an important client in Australia. His reaction was "Cool! Our timezones will be closer!"

I've been working for a 100% remote company for 4 years now, and I'd advise that you market yourself as someone that has done it before. Remote work is a skill set - the discipline to work a full day but not overwork, knowing the tools for communicating without seeing your coworkers more than a few times a year, and having built a space and culture in your home and family to be productive without letting the home life disrupt the work... while at the same time, sometimes you do run off for lunch with your spouse or go see a kid's activity at school, and make up the time later.

There is a whole different work ethic and discipline involved, and being someone who already knows all this is a value to a remote company. Because even though everyone can learn and figure out these details... not everyone ends up being good at being remote, so a successful history is a nice bonus when hiring.