The biggest lesson I've learned is that working remotely is a skill that is practiced and improved over time. Working remotely full time is very different from commuters that 'WFH' periodically.
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
#32The more I read about others' experiences with remote work, the more it seems that it depends heavily on whether the company embraces remote work, accepts it, or merely tolerates it. The resulting experiences really need context. Unless a company is truly committed to remote work, it's going to be an uphill battle. Much of this advice is true in every context, but much of it reads like it's coming from a place of fea…
> We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond.
Those are some of the advantages of email. It also has virtues of being searchable, transactional, naturally organizeable, recorded, and shared.
But how do you respond to the issues of its much higher latency and lower bandwidth? A 5-minute in-person conversation can communicate a whole lot more than 5 minutes writing an email. And while documentation and detail are great, a long, thorough, technical email can cost a lot of money. How do you control for these problems?
Does the loss from writing long emails offset the loss of productivity from disruptive and focus-breaking in-person communication?
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#33I've worked remotely and I've worked in-house and I currently work a mix of the two but only because my current company's office is quite far away from where I live. With ten year professional experience in software in my rearview mirror I gotta say that by working remotely fulltime you miss out on so much. To be your best you really do need to be in the office collaborating and practicing your people skills. Your pe…
> I gotta say that by working remotely fulltime you miss out on so much Let me fix that for you, [I gotta say that by working remotely fulltime I feel I missed out on so much because I discovered I'm really more social than introverted]
If introvert foes not communicate with people, his (or her if you must) social/people skills will go down. Realization that they wither away or that they are useful has nothing to do with introversion or extrovertion.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it useful to go out of our way to schedule free time in the form of video chats. Where we just talk about stuff and catch up until something that needs to be covered comes up naturally. That is an ordinary thing that happens face-to-face. Less-so remote, so you have to go out of your way.
> I find it useful to go out of our way to schedule free time in the form of video chats. Feels a bit unnatural to me. It's one thing to chat while you and your teammate are on your coffee breaks, vs you have to schedule that with someone. I would not appreciate if a colleague wants to setup a hangout call to just, hang out.
You can setup a video room to hangout in for 20 minutes every other day or whatever, and people can show up if they want or not show up.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#35In remote working, your git remote branch / pull request / staging app are your presence, not your chat's avatar with a green circle there. You're responsible to reporting or asking what's obstacle or what's needed to discuss at early of the day or yesterday. Your ideal employer can only ask you once at the end of the day how's work going, anything they can provide to make your works tomorrow non-blocking. It could h…
Some people might like this, but in my experience working like this leads to being a code jockey and no advancement in salary or responsibility.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#36Thanks for sharing. What are some strategies you've used to get yourself in the zone and focused?
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#37>Ask your coworkers how they’re doing, what the weather is like, or what the mood in the office is like lately (without being too nosey). You won’t be around the office to hear the banter and water cooler conversations.
How does this work remotely? Do you actively ping people on IM and ask about their everyday life? Do you send out emails? Do you do it over meetings/videoconference?
I find that extremely hard to happen remotely as opposed in person because I never know when somebody is in the zone or not and I don't want to actively distract them with "useless chatter" for no reason. I know people who get very annoyed by these constant interrupts and I'd also find that very hard to judge remotely, I wouldn't want to become "that guy" and not even know it.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#38This is a lot of good advice, much of which also should be applied in a shared office as well.
I have been remote working for 7 of the last 10 years. Here's my list (in addition to what the author mentioned). Many of the PROs have two sides...
We will start with the assumption that you are ethical and honest (and ultimately, as productive as you should be).
PRO-remote
1. When something non-work needs to happen, it's so much easier to make it happen. Maybe it's the one day of the week when the rain stops, and you can go enjoy sunshine at a cafe. Or maybe the morning powder report says 12" of fresh powder! BAM!
2. So, so much time saved not commuting. And if an office commute is particularly dreadful (gridlock traffic, hot crowded subway, whatever), your quality of life improves a ton by avoiding it.
3. Pets, especially dogs, don't have to be sad and go crazy (literally) at home for 9 hours while you're gone.
4. If your partner also works from home, you have more opportunities for moments of time together (for whatever you fancy). That's valuable.
5. You can work from almost anywhere with quality internet. This can be a huge benefit!
CON
1. Your work is _always_ there. You can end up judging your non-work time against whether it was worth it, or if you should have been working (more) to get more done. This is a huge problem for me, and I frankly haven't solved it. I work 25-50% more than I should now.
2. If your partner also works from home... 24x7 with someone can eventually be a problem. A large home with lots of rooms helps, but going out solo with laptop is sometimes necessary.
3. Pets (or partner!) :). You can feel guilty for not giving attention when someone needs it - because you're busy working as you probably should be.
4. Working from anywhere (especially someplace exotic) - isn't much fun if you're actually really busy working. Then you feel you're missing out. Further, it can make you re-think what's important in life (and make you want to quit everything and live a nomad life - which maybe isn't a CON?)
For me, I'll take remote. Everything considered, my quality of life is much better working remotely.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#39The more I read about others' experiences with remote work, the more it seems that it depends heavily on whether the company embraces remote work, accepts it, or merely tolerates it. The resulting experiences really need context. Unless a company is truly committed to remote work, it's going to be an uphill battle. Much of this advice is true in every context, but much of it reads like it's coming from a place of fea…
> We even promote email as one of the best ways to communicate because it's less disruptive and let's people stay focused until they're ready to come up for air and respond. Those are some of the advantages of email. It also has virtues of being searchable, transactional, naturally organizeable, recorded, and shared. But how do you respond to the issues of its much higher latency and lower bandwidth? A 5-minute in-pe…
Not OP, but the first 3 months of my current job were remote. It was mostly on our backend and frontend teams to realize that meaning/nuance might be lost in an email or slack message and to hop over on google hangouts (what we personally used, but replace that with phone, skype, &c.). Maybe if there's immaculate documentation and tests, then fully asynchronous communications can be achieved, but, from my experience, there's hiccups where synchronous communications need to be taken to overcome something that's blocking.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#40Bob Jones University? Really?