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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?

#51

Post by thingamarobert »

Iv wrote: post #37
thingamarobert wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very practical piece of advice! Thanks. This is roughly the picture I had in my mind about how to progress. My mother (who is a full-time consultant now) did this. She'd work at the government office during the first half of the day, then offer consultations during the rest of the day at a private establishment. She carried this on for several years and finally, when she retired from government service, she went in…

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 time…

My situation is very similar, actually. My wife and I are of different nationalities and would ideally like to have the flexibility to move to each others home countries when needed and still be able to work without much hassle. She's making an effort on her part, and this is a part of my effort :).

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

#52

Post by tboyd47 »

I have been in software development for about 8 years and I have worked remotely for 4 of those. My opinion is that there is no way to have a fully remote-only working career in software. It is a perk that you may be able to get in some situations, but it is never guaranteed. Executives have this image in their mind of developers swiveling their chairs around and bouncing ideas off of each other, or sharing key insights randomly at the water cooler, that they just cannot give up (even though I believe it is a complete fiction). They have many names for this, like "synergy," "collaborative environment," etc. It's a specter that will haunt you as long as you choose to tele-commute.

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

#53

Post by junto »

I've been remote working for 12 years. My opinion as to a successful remote working relationship is as follows:

  - Trust. You need to build it on both sides. Your employer
    needs to trust you to deliver what they expect. You need
    to trust your employer to build their team to include you 
    even though you're sometimes not so visible.

  - Space. Get yourself out of the home office and into a 
    local coworking space. You'll thank me for it, otherwise 
    you'll go slowly crazy at home.

  - Daily contact. Make sure you have daily contact with 
    other members of your team. If you're Agile, then a daily 
    standup by video feed helps people to remember you exist!

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

#54

Post by kejaed »

codingdave wrote: post #39

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 lif…

To add to this, I've had interviews for remote positions where it was a bit of problem that I hadn't done remote before. I've seen this in many remote job posts too, companies hiring for remote positions aren't fond of having it be the first remote job for the applicant.

If you have previous remote experience, make sure to highlight it.

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

#55

Post by mohsinr »

thingamarobert wrote: post #14
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.

Exactly I am in same situation. I work remotely, most of my work is to private repo on github.

I have set it up so that my private contributions are shown in my profile progress chart, no access to private data but activity looks good sign.

Good luck :-)

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

#56

Post by saganus »

pionar wrote: post #36
pimterry wrote: post #21

One thing to look out for is remote-first companies, not just remote-ok companies. Zach Holman has a good post on this: https://zachholman.com/posts/remote-first/ If you're one of few people in the company working remotely (or worse: one of few in your team), you get cut off really easily. Remote practices won't be up to scratch (because most people aren't using them), meetings will happen in person and dialing you i…

Yes. Management remotely when everyone else is co-located is even worse. For instance, there was a nasty bug discovered late last week, and I didn't find out about it until Monday morning, and that's MY team. I feel like I look like an idiot to my superiors, and is one of the reasons I'm moving back to be co-located. I started at this company in the office as a developer, and went remote after about 3 years because o…

You probably considered this already but, could you move to a technical management position?

I understand that working remotely while having to manage people can't be easy either way, but could being in the tech side make it easier or not really?

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

#57

Post by mathattack »

If you are skilled you can find it. A couple thoughts:

1 - Go where it's the norm.

2 - If you can't follow #1 then be attached to your desk and phone. People won't give you the benefit of the doubt if you take 30 mins to return a call or email.

3 - Do what you know. It is tougher to learn on the job remotely.

4 - Deliver tremendous value and make sure people know it. People need to know why you're invaluable.

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

#58

Post by ChemicalWarfare »

There's some great info/thoughts in this thread already. I'd add that different people would define "Successful career" differently.

If what you're after is essentially setting yourself up for being a "valuable resource no matter if onsite or remote" then as long as you're on top of your game tech chops - wise and there are companies out there willing to allow ppl with your skillset to work remote - you'll be alright.

For some ppl "successful career" entails getting "more responsibility" in their roles which is basically corp speak for getting into management/team lead positions. If that's your goal then your best bet would be looking for a "remote first" type company where everyone/most everyone is remote. Sure, you don't have to do this right away but keep in mind that it's very rare for a distributed tech team to be hiring external team leads/managers etc.

One other thing I'd add from my personal experience. Teams that aren't remote first but are looking for remote folks out of necessity (as in lack of "local talent") are not only more stressful to be on if you get the gig - they also tend to place the bar higher for remote candidates so one- get ready for hackerrank type challenges and two - have a github profile you won't be ashamed to share with the potential employer :)

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

#59

Post by bubbleRefuge »

Remote worker here for the last 3 months pulling a silicon valley salary. Here is how it happened. 1) Domain/specialization. Thought I've got generalist skills as well, have lots of years in a specialized category of enterprise software. 2) Flexible Company. My employer has a small minority of remote developers. 3) Negotiated it up front. I felt the initial offer was below what I wanted and was worth and they were not the type of outfit that payed very high by valley standards. They wouldn't budge on salary so I proposed remote at the salary there were offering. They countered with remote after one year. I said ok. Busted my butt for one year and here I am back in my home state where I can afford a decent house.

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

#60

Post by misiti3780 »

I started a consulting company about 6 years ago, worked on site with a few clients, and eventually they just didnt mind me not being there as long as the work got done. So now I have complete autonomy to come and go as I please.

I usually spend at least one week in the office because I like the routine and my gym is right there, but 75% time is spent working from other places.

Moral of the story: If you consistently deliver, I dont see why this should be a problem, as long as you dont want to work for a big corporation (FB, GOOG, etc)

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