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6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

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Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#11

Post by lukethomas »

rubayeet wrote: post #5

I am a recent remote developer and I found these insights to be very valuable, especially the "going out of your way to be human" one. I was in senior/lead position and part of my responsibilities were to mentor younger (professionally speaking) engineers and make sure the team is executing effectively. While these are not explicit responsibilities in my new gig, I wonder how would one go about doing them as a remote…

I built this (fridayfeedback.com) to help leaders understand what's going on w/ their teams. Most customers are remote teams/organizations. I've also managed remote teams before so can understand where you're coming from.

Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#12

Post by notacoward »

A lot of good advice here. As a full-time remote worker for several years, I'd add just a bit of a twist, but that's more to reinforce the overall message than to undermine it.

(1) Be as available as possible ... but no more. There's no shame in needing focused "in the zone" time too. Just be clear about when it is, and what level of urgency should be required to interrupt you anyway.

(7) Go outside ... and find other venues for socialization. Both are important. If you're not having real-life non-work conversations with somebody every day, even if your day is full of videoconferences and light-hearted text banter, you'll get out of practice. When you do have to interact with people that way, you'll come across as a bit weird. I've seen this in myself, and I saw it in my mother (who often lacked such contact for different reasons) until we moved her into assisted living. Conversation is a skill. Like many other skills, when you do it better you get more satisfying results, and the way to get better is to practice frequently.

Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#14

Post by teuobk »

Another idea that has worked well for me: get a dog.

It can get lonely working alone at home; dogs keep you company. It can be easy to stay in the house all day; dogs are a good reason to talk walks outside. It can be easy to let the workday roll into the evening; dogs get hungry for dinner and let you know, which serves as a reminder that, yes, you should stop work for the day.

Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#15

Post by SirLJ »

Obviously the guy is newbie in this and excited, but as someone who is working from home for a long time and in the office before hand even longer (on 2 continents), all those points are just a common sense and applicable for both working form home and from an office. The only exception is the video camera: I did try this with my team few years back (bought special cameras, using corporate software) and there is no benefit whatsoever and usually someone will always have technical problems, pixelations, dropped connections, it is a just a distraction and not worth it and completely waste of time...

Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#16

Post by 49531 »

A lot of the negatives listed here can be mitigated with companies taking a little ownership of having remote team members.

For instance, being as available as possible is not fun 100% of the time. While timezones may separate you, if a company enacts something like "core hours" when everyone is required to be available you make it possible for remote employees to disconnect for a while.

Nonetheless, great advice here.

Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#17

Post by 49531 »

teuobk wrote: post #14

Another idea that has worked well for me: get a dog. It can get lonely working alone at home; dogs keep you company. It can be easy to stay in the house all day; dogs are a good reason to talk walks outside. It can be easy to let the workday roll into the evening; dogs get hungry for dinner and let you know, which serves as a reminder that, yes, you should stop work for the day.

Having recently gone from living with others to alone I can say having my dog has made it a wonderful experience. She makes me go outside several times per day, and brings me back down to reality when I'm caught up in my work.

It's also a great way to stave off loneliness :P

Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#18

Post by pavel_lishin »

nottorp wrote: post #8

If you want to be treated equally you have to join an organization where the majority of workers are remote. Otherwise you run into crap like "make yourself available all the time". If you're the only remote employee, the OPs advice is pretty good, but I'd add "look for a real remote company" to it. Also... video chat? What's it for? In a remote context you get those very useful text based communication tools that co…

> Also... video chat? What's it for?

Being able to have a quick discussion, and being able to rely on audio and visual queues to carry on a conversation - as opposed to typing something out and waiting for to other part(y|ies) to respond.

Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#19

Post by smdz »

7 years successfully working from home (4 for my employer, 3 years being self-employed).

I have only one advice - Be responsible for your work and for yourself.

> 1. Be as available as possible.

I would highly discourage this advice. That is you setting up yourself for abuse. This happens with office employees or clients - you have to set limits and NOT respond even if you are right there. You can add a couple of hours extra, but thats it. Exceptions to that should be rare. Unless your code bug is going to cost somebody their life - everything else can wait.

7. Go outside

> Highly recommended. Preferably spend some time under the sun (or go out during the day)

3. Go out of your way to be human

> Usually it does not work. And people at the other end start feeling awkward. Some human interactions are just hard on a phone or chat or video. I prefer staying in touch with friends/family/community around me. Any amount of remote interaction is just that "remote". Good remote teams do not force themselves to develop a human touch. On the other hand, remote teams can sometimes develop amazing work coherence

Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten

#20

Post by tea-flow »

Change your surroundings regularly.

I joined a co-working space and split my time pretty evenly between my home office and the co-working office.

This enables me to get some of the day-to-day human interaction of an onsite job (feels more normal). Remote work can be isolating and this is (in my opinion) one of the cures.

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