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

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

#91

Post by earl »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #27
earl wrote: post #7

Working as a data scientist with a remote boss: communication was much more difficult. No telephony or software solution came close to standing on front of a shared whiteboard. Which sucks, because I really wish it did. Maybe what we need is actual The biggest win I've seen is with ops teams. I hope I'm not betraying any confidences, but a previous employer had an international ops team so as the americans were going…

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

Yeah, there's whiteboard apps. I want a shared whiteboard. Ideally at least 4 feet by 4 feet. The key feature is both parties can draw and erase and the marks appear on both boards. I'm pretty sure I could talk employers into buying one for the office and one for each remote worker, especially with the arbitrage opportunities around different housing costs. Also, in my experience video cameras trained on whiteboards seem not to work that well because of glare.

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

#92

Post by iopuy »

hopeless wrote: post #67
Swizec wrote: post #2

I work remotely as a freelancer and my experience has been nothing but awesome. I'm from the CET timezone and the people I usually work with are either in PST or EST so there's a 6 to 8 hour time difference. Here are some of the benefits I've observed: - I'm a night owl, so I can directly communicate with the people paying me - even though I like long mornings, I still have at least 5 hours to work before employers w…

svn isn't too bad and often goes hand-in-hand with Java-based projects. My hierarchy goes something like git > jazz > svn > cvs > Clearcase.

Upvoted due to the fact "All other source control > Clearcase"

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

#93

Post by hippich »

dragons wrote: post #68
hippich wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are already comfortable with remote working, why not to become independent consultant, rake up your compensation 2-3 times and spend 1/2 - 1/3 time on client's project and other time on traveling/hobby/family and learning/researching? No matter where you live, once you get enough references and track of success - you will get this 2x - 3x rate easily.

why not to become independent consultant ... once you get enough references and track of success ... What are the steps one takes to get to this stage - to become an independent consultant? From what I've heard, it doesn't sound easy. Companies (apparently) prefer dealing with large body shops, not individuals. To get work as an IC it seems like you need inside contacts? Or maybe you need special, in-demand skills? M…

In my case I started as IC. I accidentally choose Drupal for a blog for me and my friends. I found Drupal architecture fascinating and started playing more. At the same time I registered at oDesk.com doing some small stuff for people - fixing perl auction software, writing Delphi tool to parse some pdf file to excel spreadsheet, etc. I started from $8/hr there (I am from Belarus - it's more or less enough).

At some point I found a job posting where client wanted to build simple social site - forum, posts, Q&A. I applied and recommended Drupal as a base. I was still novice, but I "felt" it was good enough long-term wise. By this moment I was charging $15/hr - this is after 3 months after starting at oDesk.com

After another 3 month I was top one for Drupal on oDesk.com and was charging $35/hr for Drupal projects. I felt pretty self-confident in this area. Also, I figured out there much more to learn - I continued. After another 6 months I stopped to apply for new contracts since existing clients kept me quite busy. By this time I was charging $50/hr. For someone from Belarus (where average monthly salary is $250) getting from $8/hr to $50/hr is pretty good.

So. You already have expertise (which I was lacking back in the time). You now need to find place to look for Java contracts (I am not sure oDesk is good place for this. May be eLance?). If this skill is not work good for IC area, learn new skill. Seems like ruby/php/python/nodejs is popular with remote contracts. Stick to it. Eventually you will build clients base and you will not need to market your self that hard. You will be able to choose projects and work as much as you want.

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

#94

Post by herval »

Vivtek wrote: post #51

I've worked remotely since 1995. The main problem was, is, and shall ever be communication - but that's the same if you're face-to-face. I actually communicate better via email and forum than face-to-face, so remote work is good for me. Especially in freelancing situations, it's a natural fit for how people like to do business; you have to organize yourself more carefully than if you were simply sitting next to your…

How do you deal woth the isolation? I worked remotely for around 3 years and in the end I was begging for an office. Desperate need to see other human beings...

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

#95

Post by zuzur »

I've been working remotely from France for French, US and UK based companies since 2002, and one thing that I feel has been overlooked in this thread is the importance of the setup for a telecommuter.

If she doesn't have a quite, separate room with appropriate IT equipment (UPS, printer, backup drives, etc) and furniture (desk, proper chair on which you can sit for hours, etc), the telecommuting project is doomed from the start.

some of the companies i've worked for gave allowance to help setting up your home office and it was plain great. My telecommuting was a personal choice, so i invested a lot to buy my own equipement and never regretted it for a minute.

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

#96

Post by dragons »

hippich wrote: post #93
dragons wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not to become independent consultant ... once you get enough references and track of success ... What are the steps one takes to get to this stage - to become an independent consultant? From what I've heard, it doesn't sound easy. Companies (apparently) prefer dealing with large body shops, not individuals. To get work as an IC it seems like you need inside contacts? Or maybe you need special, in-demand skills? M…

In my case I started as IC. I accidentally choose Drupal for a blog for me and my friends. I found Drupal architecture fascinating and started playing more. At the same time I registered at oDesk.com doing some small stuff for people - fixing perl auction software, writing Delphi tool to parse some pdf file to excel spreadsheet, etc. I started from $8/hr there (I am from Belarus - it's more or less enough). At some p…

hippich, thank you so much for telling your story. I will give it a try!

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

#97

Post by Vivtek »

herval wrote: post #94
Vivtek wrote: post #51

I've worked remotely since 1995. The main problem was, is, and shall ever be communication - but that's the same if you're face-to-face. I actually communicate better via email and forum than face-to-face, so remote work is good for me. Especially in freelancing situations, it's a natural fit for how people like to do business; you have to organize yourself more carefully than if you were simply sitting next to your…

How do you deal woth the isolation? I worked remotely for around 3 years and in the end I was begging for an office. Desperate need to see other human beings...

I grew up on a semi-remote farm in Indiana, so I actually prefer isolation and good books. Plus I have a wife and kids (and neighbors and extended family), so human contact isn't actually a problem. And honestly, back when I was working contract in Indy, the people I worked with were shallow and kind of stupid, mostly.

So it helps to be a curmudgeon.

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

#98

Post by r4vik »

skrebbel wrote: post #88
r4vik wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't talk for TDD, BDD, MDSD. But after working with git/hg on all my projects for half a year, I'd flat out refuse to work on anything that used SVN now.

Genuine interest: why? I felt the same, until I realized that I also want continuous integration, preferably as continuous as possible. This means that if my coworker works on a feature that somehow affects what I'm working on, I want to find out now , not in a week after he merges his feature branch. If there's a single central repository anyway (continuous integration, remember), plus you want people to share with…

CI is a good argument for centralised source control, and like you say it is possible to get 90% of the benefits just using git-svn (I have done in the past).

The real power for me is the branching, especially shared branching.

My workflow is like this, each dev has their own github repo which is up to date with whatever is in their local repo.

So even if someone is working on esoteric weird crap, I can see it (ircbot telling you about commits) and I can pull it.

For CI we have a server that is also running a git repo of it's own. Anyone can push branches to it and they'll get put through CI.

So I can now take my branch, pull 3 or 4 peoples feature branches merge them locally then push to CI repo to see if anything is broken. If it is, I can fix some of it and push it back to whoever needs to know if there is something I don't understand.

It's a joy.

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

#99

Post by r4vik »

iopuy wrote: post #92
hopeless wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

svn isn't too bad and often goes hand-in-hand with Java-based projects. My hierarchy goes something like git > jazz > svn > cvs > Clearcase.

Upvoted due to the fact "All other source control > Clearcase"

never used SourceSafe I see

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

#100

Post by lazyatom »

supar wrote: post #21

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…

s/thrust/trust/ :)
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