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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

#41
post #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 happ…

I worked 3 months remote for the first few months of my current job and, whenever we would hop onto google hangouts, the first few minutes would typically be personal/small-talk things like that. Naturally, if you're talking to someone 5x a day for whatever reason, you'll probably get down to business, but it's easy to find yourself not having talked with someone for a week.

Also, we had a "beer 'o clock" every friday around 4 where everyone available hopped on hangouts and just talked--sometimes work related, sometimes not.

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

#42
post #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 happ…

I work in office but regularly communicate with an outstanding remote employee.

Any time we have an issue or project to discuss, she'll call me up and we either start or end the conversation with some scuttlebutt (5-10 minutes).

As a result of her friendliness and kindness, any time she calls or needs to ask for something I am eager to help. Likewise, if I need something from her I am not afraid at all to reach out.

It takes a lot of patience and kindness to build that relationship, and she does this with everyone - coworkers, clients, etc. Having that kind of relationship is key to her productivity.

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

#43
I've been working at home for about 8 years now.

It can be very difficult and it's not for everyone since you ned a lot of mental discipline.

Sometimes you need to overcome procrastination but in my case it's much more common to prevent working 12-15 hours per day and neglect every other aspect of my life.

There are days I wish I could just go to an office and leave at 6pm and say "fuck it".

Remorse and guilt are very common feelings in remote workers.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/BeingARemoteWorkerSucksLongLi...

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

#44

The 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…

We don't hesitate to use chat or video if it makes sense. In fact, we use it frequently. We all trust each other to think about what medium makes sense for a given discussion. That way, people don't just reach for what's in front of them. It makes everything much more deliberate, and it helps reduce interruptions.

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

#45

In 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.

That's completely true to me. I don't know how many but I guess there's a ton of software developers who aren't really interested in projects they are developing, but that doesn't seem to tie with quality of works.

Personally, I haven't really interested in any product out there. I tried but there were no such a thing. I've realized that at the end of the day I'll have to build a little profitable product and start the next possible ways from there. (I know, nothing new about that realization and consequence but I still & will have to do this)

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

#46
I managed a remote team for 18 years. One thing you might think about is that a lot of communication just doesn't happen naturally between remote folks. For most of that 18 years everyone was remote, we had some office space but even then it was a minority of local people and only a couple of engineers were local.

Communication is necessary between devs to make chunks of work in flight come together nicely. When you are all in the same place, you go to lunch, these topics come up, they tend to get sorted. Yes, one could argue that every chunk should have an architecture document down to the last detail, we didn't work that way, it was too slow.

When you are all distributed someone has to make sure that all the work in flight is going to come together nicely. That job fell on me as the manager and the main driver. It was a shit ton of extra communication. I had to know where everyone was and whether they were on track. Sometimes my people would self communicate but a lot of the time it was on me to know and get them to talk to each other.

By and large, it worked and worked quite well. One thing that was critical to it all was code review. We built our own system, it was a web interface to a database and repo per chunk. You could walk the diffs, comment on them, all in the web or you could clone the repo, toss in some fixup commits, push it back. The review system remembered you and had a way to show you only the diffs since the last time you reviewed this chunk. It was fairly easy to use and useful, people liked it. And it helped immensely in getting the chunks to land in the tree in good shape.

I can't say if other managers have had to pick up the communication slack for remote people, maybe that was unique to me because I was management and sort of the "dumb" architect (my people were smarter than me but they had to push stuff through my brain, much to their annoyance from time to time. The upside was that the system was pretty consistent, it was done by a bunch of people but it felt, mostly, like it was done by one guy).

If it is common for the communication load to be higher on the manager/architects when dealing with remote people you might want to think about that. It doesn't really scale, you are taking what should be a web of communication, lots of sideways stuff, and making it more centralized. My people did complain that I was the bottleneck, I don't think I could have made that model work for a much larger team. I'd have subdivide it like Linus does for the kernel.

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

#47
post #9
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…

While fast internet speeds and more mature tools do make things better, my team still spends most of their time saying "can you hear me?" or "can you repeat that?". Meanwhile, I've never asked another team member to retype their Slack message. We use WebEx when we really have to see people's faces. But Hangouts and Appear.in have left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

"Most of their time"? I highly doubt that.

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

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's completely true to me. I don't know how many but I guess there's a ton of software developers who aren't really interested in projects they are developing, but that doesn't seem to tie with quality of works. Personally, I haven't really interested in any product out there. I tried but there were no such a thing. I've realized that at the end of the day I'll have to build a little profitable product and start t…

Oh good. I thought i was the only one. Not to distract from the original point of the thread but its just not interesting any more. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy solving problems using code. But gone are the days where I would like nothing more but to spend the entire weekend coding. After a while in the industry, its just more of the same.

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

#49
post #27
post #19

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 hou…

Is the 3 years of self-employment after 4 years of remote? If so, how did you transition to self-employed? I'm thinking of doing the same, but I'm having trouble sussing out a path to do so.

Short story, the company I worked for remotely did not encourage remote-work. And was selective at who gets to work remotely. That itself creates a lot of problems with the team and with the opportunities you get.

As this guy mentions "Be as much available as possible". That technically ends up in over-work. Management will like it, but I did not like it at all.

Having said that it was riskier for me to keep the remote job. And at one point I mistook the management call as if they were going to fire me. That forced me to build up my consulting profile and start adding consulting clients. Eventually the company did not fire me - but the workload had increased quite a lot and I had reached a point where my consulting rates were pretty good than my salary. So I thought "Why not go full time consulting" and quit the job. After a few months of downs the decision turned out to be a pretty good one.

Some transitioning advice:

1. Have 1-1.5 years of financial backup

2. Start building your profile while on job. And since you are remote, it should be easier. You will definitely get stressed and that might pay off in the long run

3. Calculate your hourly rate at job. Leave your job when you can earn at least 80% of what you earn at job within 50% of time (for at least 2 months). Also be honest to yourself and evaluate if the consulting-work counts as a one-off or something that can be achieved repeatedly

4. Be warned - remote job as an employee is much easier than being self-employed working remote

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

#50
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.

This is work not dating, how about clear written statements instead of cues? :)

Edit: I suppose that if your only socialization is with co workers, you need those video chats and stuff. In that case I suggest going out and meeting friends once in a while.

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