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

I've been working from home as part of a distributed team for the last 3 years. It's great. You do have to be disciplined and intentional about a bunch of things that are more likely to happen naturally in a collocated environment, but that becomes a habit pretty quickly.

The best thing about it is that we have people on the team (myself included) who are experts we just wouldn't have been able to get if relocation was a requirement. I think this is the killer feature of telework-enabled jobs.

The problems, in my view, mainly have to do with trust and communication. With remote employees, you can't just drop by to check in on them—you have to do it over chat, skype, etc., and the same goes for communication between team members. I think a lot of employers have a sort of mental block they can't get past over this.

When I was hired, I was told I'd be visiting our offices once a quarter to check in. I think this was just worry about how a remote employee would work out. In practice, they found pretty quickly that I could be trusted to get things done, and I've never been summoned for such a "check-in" visit with my boss. We do have periodic in-person sprints where team members get together in person, and these are very important and productive times.

I am an Employee. Working since 2004 and love what I'm doing. I had pretty bad experience in some of my prior jobs because of choosing the wrong employer or the project for me. The most common mistake was getting short term contracts for immediate need of money.

But after a while I learned how to choose teams and projects too. Preferring long term contracts with the longest elimination process. An interview some trial tasks and even an IQ or math test really makes me feel comfortable about the company I am going to work with.

Well good teams always pays less, but you learn a lot. This keeps my hourly price rising since 2009 in every project.

Currently working in a team in which we have decent work hours, great developers and scrum meetings twice a week.

It probably is a cultural difference. I think in the last year or so we have maybe lost a couple of potential customers because we use a distributed team, but it's not been a major problem.

For us, our specific geography is also a factor; my business partner, who also runs 95% of our sales activity, is based in London, and his sales activity is centred around there. Our developers (myself included) are based on the north-west, where developer salaries are lower than in the south. I know that we have used that fact in sales pitches, and it has helped us win work based on that lower total cost of a project.

> that you (as employee) need to force feed status to your employer

That's what I experienced also. Make yourself heard: a simple mail at the end of the day to your team/manager will do. Ask for feedback. This is important when you are remotely attached to an otherwise locally working team, prevents ending up as "the guy who breaks CI once a month".

When you feel stuck or have the idea you feel disconnected from the flow of the team (or something stalled there) it's easy to ask for a skype/chat meeting with the group. In general I find communication not to be the problem, but it shows that bad or lacking communication locally gets somewhat amplified if you're passive because you don't share water cooler/bathroom with the team.

Collaboration. I've noticed over the past weeks that most of the job postings on various sites require on-site working, and it's because of the (mostly justified) need to be able to have a more personal connection to the worker. It has it's great merits, of course, but an employee would usually prefer remote work due to its perks, such as being able to fart where you sit, and not commute to work in what you foresaw from your childhood as a Ferrari.