101–110 of 210 posts
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.…
"I have 5-6 weekly 1:1s with different people with no agenda." Wow, five meetings a week not even counting project or departmental recurring status meetings or random crop up ones? That would totally annihilate any hope of the uninterrupted 3+ hour stretch it takes to do any real work.
here are the strategies I use to keep my calendar under control:
- try to cluster meetings together (have a 1.5 hour meeting block so I only get interrupted once)
- block off 4-hour chunks of “focus time” in my calendar. People are good at respecting that.
- add an “end of day” block on my calendar at 5:30pm EST every day. This means that people know not to schedule things with me after I’m done for the day. Sometimes it’s unavoidable because 5:30 EST is 2:30 in the home office, but people always ask if it’s okay to schedule something after my end of day.
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…
> In regular companies, you usually have direct manager, human resources, office manager, cleaning personnel, legal department, IT support, etc... It's interesting to me that you didn't have those! Is that because you were working for small startups? I work for a pretty large company, so I have a manager, HR, a legal team, and IT support. I can't go see the IT folks in person obviously, but they have occasionally mai…
- Unexpected physical 1-1 with an HR in a meeting room about your problems.
- Cleaning and organization of your working space. Even if this represents only 10 minutes a day this can represent half a day at the end of the month...
- And more generally everything that goes through email / chat / calls tend to take more time than if you just go to see the person and ask.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Others have recommended a bunch of services. I'm going to recommend that you also take a look at your conferencing hardware. A good speaker/microphone/camera set up can really make a difference. You need to spend at least $200 (but can spend upwards of $1000). I'd recommend looking at the Logitech BCC950 (about $200) or one of the Jabra Speak table conference mics (about $100 but you also need a camera). Polycom IP p…
> Jabra Speak table conference mics My experience with them is that they are not that great - you need to be wary of being close to them and speaking in their direction or they'll have trouble picking up your voice.
Bingo: "My current theory about this is – as long as I work on a team with a lot of other remotes, everything will be fine. " reality is, if your team is 80-90% not remote, forget about career advancement. People who show up have two things, a) they want to advance their careers so will use proximity to their advantage and b) don't understand why they can't be working remotely. Plus of course processes and culture ar…
That's quite a sweeping statement - and doesn't resonate with me at all. I fit that statistic, but I work in a company that has a mature process for career advancement and that also has multiple sites scattered across the world. I cannot claim that remote work has held me back career-wise. That is, I'm still quite early in my career, maybe the wall comes later.
It has, however, likely steered my career away from management (and thus towards the technical track), which I'll happily admit does not bother me in the slightest :)
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…
I had this issue as well, but managed to solve it by renting an office with a few of my remote working friends. This resulted in best-of-both-worlds: I could still go to the office to work with tech people (and grab coffee, lunch) while noone really cared if I came in. Also the city I was living in was decently small which meant 15 min "commute" with bike if I wished.
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…
Answering emails, reviewing docs, project management drudgery at all hours is oppressive.
The asynchronous nature of the medium you think is understood but it is not always at all times.
I had to change my thinking that my inbox is always zero priority. I choose what to focus on. In the evenings I only do email if that is what I want to do.
Not always possible if there is someone elses anxiety to deal with. I was motivated to help because it was a rare human connection that I didn't want to strain. But I eventually learnt expectation setting is a key skill to master.
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.…
Imagine how open the highways would be if this was how everyone worked/lived.
Clear the highways. Save the planet. Work from home.
After working remotely for 4 years I am switching back to the office at least 3 days a week and moving back to our company HQ in the States. Hardest challenge for me was staying in shape, because I lacked self-discipline to workout and eat healthy, but funny enough work didn't suffer and it was the most productive period in my life. It gets extremely easy to start slacking (no pun intended) and not do your work out.…
> Hardest challenge for me was staying in shape, because I lacked self-discipline to workout and eat healthy, but funny enough work didn't suffer and it was the most productive period in my life. How do you expect that will be fixed by spending more time in the morning and at the end of the day commuting to work?
I work for a company of close to 3000 that has maybe a dozen remote workers. Most of which are sales people, a few workers that work on site all over the country and then me, a developer/analyst.
As a general rule, the company allows occasional remote work for select teams (mostly just IT), but as a whole, it's against remote work. I am the only developer (or IT for that matter) that is full remote.
Working for a company that is NOT a remote friendly company is an absolute challenge. Here are a few of the additional challenges you deal with above and beyond the normal remote work. - missed conversations. they happen way more in an office that doesn't have remote workers
- no advancement possibilities. I'm already sr. so I don't care)
- jealousy issues. not a real problem aside from I can't tell people I am working in another state for the winter
- you are an inconvenience to everyone. every meeting requires the phone or remote desktop just for you
- all processes have to take into account 1 remote worker
- missed team events, although I attend most of them since I only live 1.5 hours away (most of the year)
- VPN... if there are issues, I am the first to know
- expectation of 8-5 m-f. Although I actually prefer it because routine is good and sets defined work/life time
Ultimately, if you are not sure if you would like to be a remote worker, I wouldn't recommend it at a company that isn't at least 50% remote (or at least the team you would be on).