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
#2I'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 people skills are like any other skill, they must be practiced and sharpened each day and you really must be in the office in a professional environment to work on them. I understand life is complicated and sometimes just making a paycheque has to be enough but imo you're letting a part of you wither doing fulltime remote.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#3Working remote right now and I love it. I am working sat/sun/mon/thue and it still works out with the team collaboration. Not as good as if I would be in the office though. I am simply not part of every discussion and today I was introduced to an API I absolutely would like to have had a discussion about before it was put into production.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#4The 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 fear and having to prove your worth and presence. I imagine that if you're one of very few remote employees of a primarily centrally located team that makes sense, but it feels really unhealthy.
Half of our team at Wildbit is remote and across many time zones that make meetings difficult at times, but it doesn't feel anything like this. Even the half of the team that's based out of HQ spends a lot of time working from home.
We also activley promote disconnecting and not being constantly available to get focus work done. And everyone's encouraged to not be constantly available because that makes it nearly impossible to get the most important types of focus work done. So in many cases, team members are explicitly unavailable. 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.
Another thing that makes a difference is that we strive to incorporate the remote team into the daily life around the office. We have team retreats once a year. Everyone regularly spends some time in Philadelphia at HQ. And we have someone who spends a lot of time dreaming up ways to incorporate the remote team so we're not so disconnected. It's a constant effort on everyone's part to ensure we're supporting and fully embracing remote work as a single team.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#5I am a recent remote developer and I found these insights to be very valuable, especially the "going out of your way to be human" one.
I was in senior/lead position and part of my responsibilities were to mentor younger (professionally speaking) engineers and make sure the team is executing effectively. While these are not explicit responsibilities in my new gig, I wonder how would one go about doing them as a remote senior/tech lead. One thing that I miss is that having a finger on the team's pulse. I don't know if the teammates are motivated. Emotions are often filtered out of communication through email or slack or whatever. And you get a limited amount of video call time per day with the whole team. Wondering if anyone else went through the same problem and figured out a way.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#6I am a recent remote developer and I found these insights to be very valuable, especially the "going out of your way to be human" one. I was in senior/lead position and part of my responsibilities were to mentor younger (professionally speaking) engineers and make sure the team is executing effectively. While these are not explicit responsibilities in my new gig, I wonder how would one go about doing them as a remote…
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.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#7Working remote right now and I love it. I am working sat/sun/mon/thue and it still works out with the team collaboration. Not as good as if I would be in the office though. I am simply not part of every discussion and today I was introduced to an API I absolutely would like to have had a discussion about before it was put into production.
Do you work 4 ten hour days? Did your employer let you choose your workdays?
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#8If 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 come with automatic logging so you can reference stuff later, and you want to do video chats instead?
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#9If 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.
Re: 6 months of working remotely taught me a thing or ten
#10If 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…
This is a really important point. Remote work works only in a fully/majority remote company. In mostly onsite companies you will most likely be the odd man out.