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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?

#11

Post by marcofucci »

bodegajed wrote: post #5

I am a remote cakephp developer from the Philippines. I have been at the most productive stage of my career. I do invest to make my work the highest possible quality. A home office so I can concentrate, I buy new equipment (iMac 24") and I have two internet connections. My main problem right now is getting burned out. I stay at home most of the time and it is quite depressing sometimes.

I'm a Django developer working from home most of the time. As you said, it is a bit depressing at the beginning but I believe that with time you start developing new activities and make friends online. I find it really productive and stimulating but it depends on your character of course.

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

#12

Post by mootothemax »

JonAtkinson wrote: post #10

I'm an employer. Quick background: We're a small Django consultancy/web app development company based in the UK. 7 people, all remote, split as three developers, one frontend dev, one designer, one sales, one administrator. I'm a developer/managing director. Our experience with remote working has been largely very positive. - It keeps our overheads very low. I think that when we remove our staff wage bill, our operat…

Hi Jon, would you be interested in hiring another Poland-based freelancer? Sorry to hijack your thread, I was trying to find a direct email address for you via your profile/linked site :)

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

#13

Post by binarymax »

I both work remotely, and manage remote employees. I have about 6 years experience doing this.

For employees: You need to set your own rules, stick by them, and have a great work ethic, otherwise you will fail.

For managers: You need to find employees that don't need to be micromanaged, and stick to the notes above, otherwise you will fail.

edit: I should mention that I love working remote. I can't imaging myself going back into an office anytime soon.

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

#14

Post by gexla »

bodegajed wrote: post #5

I am a remote cakephp developer from the Philippines. I have been at the most productive stage of my career. I do invest to make my work the highest possible quality. A home office so I can concentrate, I buy new equipment (iMac 24") and I have two internet connections. My main problem right now is getting burned out. I stay at home most of the time and it is quite depressing sometimes.

Haha, I'm in the Philippines also and I understand the need for two internet connections. Now if only I could hook up two electrical connections. Oh well, I guess I need to pick up a generator.

I have a fully self contained development environment on my USB drive for when I absolutely can't deal with down time during internet connection / electricity outages. Then I can just grab any computer at an internet cafe and be back at it. Otherwise the outages are just unscheduled breaks. I have also learned to keep ahead of the ball rather than procrastinating because the outages seem to be timed for that last minute when I can't procrastinate any more.

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

#15

Post by maxer »

I work remote as a developer- mainly doing web based stuff

Advantages- .No IT jobs locally that i like to work for (mainly high stress financial based IT jobs) .Choose where I work from- I could work from home but I rent a desk in a communal office to be around other developers/entrepreneurs .communication is cheap- use skype .if this contract doesnt work out i feel i could move on to something easier rather than being a full time employee in an office .Never met my boss :)

Disadvantages .Spec gets lost- without proper procedures i find myself sitting doing nothing as boss is nowhere to be seen .you cant nag someone when ya see them. i.e. if your waiting on an email you cant shout across the room at them - you have to lift the phone or get them on skype.

overall i enjoy the experience and some of my main issues are more internal issues- but remote working is made so easy now with the likes of gmail, pivotaltracker, skype, dropbox and google docs

edit- some of the other comments say it can be quite lonely- i work in a communal office and i go to the gym every night after office hours just to get out of the office or away from home

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

#17

Post by JonAtkinson »

mootothemax wrote: post #12
JonAtkinson wrote: post #10

I'm an employer. Quick background: We're a small Django consultancy/web app development company based in the UK. 7 people, all remote, split as three developers, one frontend dev, one designer, one sales, one administrator. I'm a developer/managing director. Our experience with remote working has been largely very positive. - It keeps our overheads very low. I think that when we remove our staff wage bill, our operat…

Hi Jon, would you be interested in hiring another Poland-based freelancer? Sorry to hijack your thread, I was trying to find a direct email address for you via your profile/linked site :)

jon@testled.com

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

#18

Post by gexla »

JonAtkinson wrote: post #10

I'm an employer. Quick background: We're a small Django consultancy/web app development company based in the UK. 7 people, all remote, split as three developers, one frontend dev, one designer, one sales, one administrator. I'm a developer/managing director. Our experience with remote working has been largely very positive. - It keeps our overheads very low. I think that when we remove our staff wage bill, our operat…

"- I think it's easy to 'hide' from the team if a developer is having a problem (either with their code, or their motivation). It's easy to coast through an unproductive day and there is often a delay in the other team members realising that a project is falling behind schedule."

I understand the code part of this problem. I think it's good to have a set estimate on how long the item should take so that as soon as you hit that tripwire you stop, send a notification out to the rest of the team, explain the situation and ask for feedback. Perhaps a good way to help with this would be to setup a "feature timer" which automatically hits an "oh shit" button and sends out the notifications automatically.

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

#19

Post by dev_Gabriel »

I live in a huge city(São Paulo) and just like most of big cities the traffic here is terrible. And it's just getting worse. Nowadays I work really close to my home, so I don't have problems with it. But I remember of taking 2 hours to go to work, 2 hours to come back. And when it rains...well, it gets much worse. It's terrible.

Working as a remote employee full time is something I need to achieve. I think I haven't found the right opportunities yet or maybe I'm looking for them at the wrong places.

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

#20

Post by tren »

I'm also an employer, I pretty much exclusively use oDesk.

I believe outsourcing will begin to play an increasingly large role in how society operates due to changes in work/life balance, increasing internet speed and availability, and the number of people working office jobs.

My experience with outsourcing has overwhelmingly been positive, however there's definitely an art to hiring a good employee. Some people who want to work freelance really shouldn't, they need too much direction or micromanagement, even if they're quite good at what they do. It brings a lot of value when your employees can think for themselves, most of the overhead of outsourcing is keeping on top of people.

One thing that people don't consider when hiring remote workers is the experience that can come with it. I've hired people who are experts in PPC. They have used screensharing to walk me through what they're doing while simultaneously delivering value to my company. I believe there is market for this type of remote training in the near future.

Incidentally, I had heard of hacker news but never read it, one of my outsourced employees really got me onto it. He's a designer from California. More than happy to share more detail if people are interested.

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