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Working remotely, 4 years in

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Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#151

Post by ivl »

padobson wrote: post #108
ibz wrote: post #67

5+ years here. Definitely not looking back to go to an office. After doing the DN thing in Asia for a year, I bought a farm house in my home country in Europe and moved over here. Being able to live in nature instead of in a city is an amazing, life changing experience. I often have people over visiting me - either friends or couch surfers. Planning to AirBnB the barn as well, which I converted into a nice big loft.…

Or I can drive to the city whenever I feel like. Imagine how open the highways would be if this was how everyone worked/lived. Clear the highways. Save the planet. Work from home.

And spend much less money on commuter infrastructure. If a highway can realistically be cut down to two lanes per direction instead of three, there's less to maintain.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#152

Post by ahtu123 »

izacus wrote: post #106
ganzolo wrote: post #78

I had a totally different experience from the author of this article. Maybe, this was due to the fact that I was working remotely for 4 years with different startups maniacs. Biggest issues were : - Nobody sees how much you are invested into your day to day work. They just see bunch of commits / builds and the little gray or green presence indicator on your messenger app. But if you are struggling for 3 days x 10 hou…

> - You're constantly alone. Even if nowadays we have great communications tools, the reality is that you'll spend 95% of your time alone in front of a computer in an empty apartment. I am excluding working from coffee shops because of the noise and bad setup (chair/table), this can only work once in a while. I had this issue as well, but managed to solve it by renting an office with a few of my remote working friend…

It's a fine fix but many companies don't pay for that so you're out $200+ a month in a large city. It also gets complicated if you take the home office deduction

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#153

Post by ahtu123 »

sotojuan wrote: post #87
ganzolo wrote: post #78

I had a totally different experience from the author of this article. Maybe, this was due to the fact that I was working remotely for 4 years with different startups maniacs. Biggest issues were : - Nobody sees how much you are invested into your day to day work. They just see bunch of commits / builds and the little gray or green presence indicator on your messenger app. But if you are struggling for 3 days x 10 hou…

> Being in the same place where you live and work makes it very challenging to not think of job in your private time or vice-versa. Can you expand on this? I do not work remotely right now but as programmers, we're problem solvers. Often times I leave the office after 8 hours but the problem I was solving is still in my head through the night. However, I do not open work stuff over the weekend or in the evening unles…

Imagine it's 8pm and you try to work 9-5. You get an email or slack message, you just quickly glance at it and it sounds like there's a tiny fire somewhere in the system that you know how to fix/respond to. It's very easy to sit down on the computer since it's literally a few feet away and get sucked into an 30-90min debacle multiple times per week. I use the same computer for games/internet time and work so that definitely doesn't help. I just don't have room to set up another desktop since my home office has a nice desk, monitor, chair already.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#154

Post by ibz »

criddell wrote: post #150
ibz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a satellite connection. Unlimited traffic for 100EUR / month. Much more than I would pay for internet in a city, but hey... And yes, it is reliable and quite fast bandwidth wise. The ping time is not that great though (which means there's always a small delay when you talk to somebody). Has never been an issue though, and I do Google Hangouts every day!

Is your uplink via satellite as well, or is that over a different channel? And can it stream Netflix?

Yes, also satellite. Here's what I am using: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooway (from a local reseller)

Never understood this Netflix thing. Guess because I'm not into TV series and the movies I watch are likely not there. But I can stream Youtube just fine. If that helps. ^_^

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#155

Post by Dunedan »

BillFranklin wrote: post #7
yla92 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use zoom ( https://zoom.us ) and works quite well. Beside that, I heard a lot of good things about Jitsi ( https://jitsi.org )

Yeah, Zoom has been good for us. It's good quality, and you can still see other participants during a presentation. On the free plan there's a one hour cap to meetings, which is ideal as nobody wants to be in a meeting longer than an hour.

> It's good quality, and you can still see other participants during a presentation.

I regularly use Hangouts, Slack calls and Zoom and I totally agree. Especially quality of Slack calls is awful. Just earlier today we had a call, where audio was delayed ~2s while video was perfectly fine.

And Zooms grid view is so nice. I wonder why their competitors don't offer the same functionality.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#156

Post by albertzeyer »

ibz wrote: post #67

5+ years here. Definitely not looking back to go to an office. After doing the DN thing in Asia for a year, I bought a farm house in my home country in Europe and moved over here. Being able to live in nature instead of in a city is an amazing, life changing experience. I often have people over visiting me - either friends or couch surfers. Planning to AirBnB the barn as well, which I converted into a nice big loft.…

Do you have a family? What is the job of your partner? Do you have a school nearby for kids?

This sounds like something which would be hard to do with a family.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#157

Post by brightball »

cpayne624 wrote: post #149
brightball wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing...it's the typical response because it's true... If pairing periodically is enough of a burden on you that it would cause you to interview elsewhere, it really seems like you're overthinking the impact.

You’re being dogmatic. Assuming that something works for everyone because it works for you, and if they say it doesn’t, it’s because they “don’t understand,” is wholly closed-minded.

I have to ask...what is your expectation of working on a development team? How do you feel team members should learn from each other? What process would you use to help get junior developers up to speed faster?

These are the questions that periodic pairing answers with the lowest possible negative impact to members time.

Now, if you get into an environment that is 100% pairing all the time, or two people at the keyboard taking turns with an egg timer, etc...that can be a huge pain and I'd totally understand not wanting any part of it.

Watching somebody code while you drink a cup of coffee at your desk and offering the occasional "you know, if you do such-n-such it will be a little cleaner" or "I think there's a function that already does what you're writing"...is pretty low-impact.

EDIT: I read through your comment history and see that you were with Pivotal. IIRC they are a pairing all the time shop (I seem to remember seeing a presentation at some point). I can completely understand how that would suck.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#158

Post by Buttons840 »

padobson wrote: post #108
ibz wrote: post #67

5+ years here. Definitely not looking back to go to an office. After doing the DN thing in Asia for a year, I bought a farm house in my home country in Europe and moved over here. Being able to live in nature instead of in a city is an amazing, life changing experience. I often have people over visiting me - either friends or couch surfers. Planning to AirBnB the barn as well, which I converted into a nice big loft.…

Or I can drive to the city whenever I feel like. Imagine how open the highways would be if this was how everyone worked/lived. Clear the highways. Save the planet. Work from home.

How can we make this happen? I've been thinking of this as a potential startup idea. What hardware/software can we build that would make companies feel comfortable with many remote workers, and also ensure those remote workers are able to collaborate and work efficiently?

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#159

Post by sotojuan »

ahtu123 wrote: post #153
sotojuan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being in the same place where you live and work makes it very challenging to not think of job in your private time or vice-versa. Can you expand on this? I do not work remotely right now but as programmers, we're problem solvers. Often times I leave the office after 8 hours but the problem I was solving is still in my head through the night. However, I do not open work stuff over the weekend or in the evening unles…

Imagine it's 8pm and you try to work 9-5. You get an email or slack message, you just quickly glance at it and it sounds like there's a tiny fire somewhere in the system that you know how to fix/respond to. It's very easy to sit down on the computer since it's literally a few feet away and get sucked into an 30-90min debacle multiple times per week. I use the same computer for games/internet time and work so that def…

That can happen with onsite jobs too. My solution is I don't check work email and barely check Slack after work.

If I worked remote I'd do that I do now - request a work only laptop.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#160

Post by ahtu123 »

driverdan wrote: post #127
ganzolo wrote: post #78

I had a totally different experience from the author of this article. Maybe, this was due to the fact that I was working remotely for 4 years with different startups maniacs. Biggest issues were : - Nobody sees how much you are invested into your day to day work. They just see bunch of commits / builds and the little gray or green presence indicator on your messenger app. But if you are struggling for 3 days x 10 hou…

These largely sound like problems with your ability to manage working remotely and management at the companies you worked for. > if you are struggling for 3 days x 10 hours per day to fix a bug, chances are high that nobody will realize this That's on you. You need to seek out help no matter what environment you work in. You should never struggle on something for more than an hour or two. Seek help early instead of w…

I've been working remotely for 3 years now and found some different struggles than the author. Everyone living within 1 hour of each other is quite different than being a global team. We're always struggling to fit in even really important meetings because of time differences and can only meet in person a few times a year. Asking people to do casual meetings at 6am or 8pm would not go over well.
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