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Working remotely, 4 years in

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Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#71

Post by nul_byte »

katzgrau wrote: post #61
bkovacev wrote: post #46

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.…

Agreed. Been WFH for six years and around year two I was probably the least healthy I'd ever been in my life. I had been waking up naturally around 8am every day which I thought was amazing, but I generally liked to be online by 9am so there wasn't much time to fit a workout in. At year three I started waking at 6am to fit in 2-3 hours of personal improvement time, primarily working out and reading. Unless it's an em…

I think its more about priorities to be honest. I work from home and I am currently getting towards the end of a training plan that will have me running an ultra marathon. Working from home has been a huge plus in achieving that, as time I would have spent commuting, has instead been spent running.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#72

Post by jamiegreen »

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.…

What do you do, if you don't mind me asking? (I am assuming developer, but interested to learn more specifically your niche/years of experience)

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#73

Post by cagenut »

"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.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#75

Post by toomanybeersies »

Obviously everyone is different, but I could never work from home. I really need social interaction to get through the day, I struggle even in my office of 8 people.

I used to work in a coworking space of 250 people, and I loved it. If I'm being honest it's not great for productivity, but socially it was amazing. It was also a really good way to meet people and make new friends, which was important because I moved to a new city and didn't know anyone.

I couldn't handle spending over 20 hours a day in the same building either, I'd get cabin fever. Even spending a whole weekend at home drives me crazy, I have to get out of the house.

I could totally do remote working in a coworking space, or the digital nomad thing, but not working from home. I also think that remote working works best if the whole company is remote. You can't have some people remote and some people on location, because you get an "us and them" mentality. It also makes communication difficult, an on-location team member might tell everyone in the office something, but forget to put it in Slack, as an example.

At the end of the day though, different things work for different people.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#76

Post by mark_l_watson »

Except for onsite contracting gigs at Google and a search company in Singapore, I had about 20 years or working remotely from our home in Sedona Arizona. I got really tired of not having a local team to work with so my wife and I moved last summer to a new state and I took a job managing a machine learning team.

While sometime I will go back to remote work (and return to Sedona), for now I find it much better to be in an office. My advice would be to not do the same thing for too long without moving on to something different.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#77

Post by vanderZwan »

cagenut wrote: post #73

"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.

She's not counting those meetings because she doesn't have them. Nor a whole lot of other types of meetings, for that matter:

> on the remote teams I’ve been on, the the whole team has adopted a working style where all important team communication happens over Slack / video calls / email.

In other words, you're thinking of the wrong context, which is impressive since the entire article explains that different context. The part you quote is in response to:

> How do you have idle/watercooler discussions?

We are already talking about a situation without chats at the watercooler. And when she says 1:1, she refers to her earlier explanation:

> One pattern that has been incredibly valuable [to learn from my colleagues remotely] is – meet with $person (on my team) 1:1 every week for months/years and get advice from them about whatever I’m currently working on. One important thing to me in this kind of relationship is that the person be continuously invested/engaged in my work – it’s way more useful to get advice from someone who’s familiar with everything I’ve been doing for the last year than from someone just swooping in with their thoughts.

While she explains this in the context of learning from colleagues, it is also a coping mechanism for staying in the loop despite not having normal meetings.

Also, maybe it's me, but a 1:1 meeting is usually one where "real work" gets done. Ignoring that, she clearly has more than enough time for long, uninterrupted stretches of work.

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#78

Post by ganzolo »

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 hours per day to fix a bug, chances are high that nobody will realize this.

- 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.

- There is no separation between private and professional life, unless you have an office space and you dedicate yourself to go there on a daily basis (which is at the end equivalent of having an in-house job...). 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. I also have to be honest and tell you that temptation of using your working time to do private things are much higher when you are at home.

- You need to be everything. In regular companies, you usually have direct manager, human resources, office manager, cleaning personnel, legal department, IT support, etc... When you are alone at home you need to do everything by yourself, organizing/cleaning your space, negotiating your vacations, dealing with your personal issues, etc...

So now, let's analyze the most common issues of working in an office is... ... The time lost in transportation.

Right now in my new office job, I am spending around 1h30 everyday to get ready and to travel back and forward to the office. At first I started to see that at pure waste. But actually this is not that bad. The days weather is good, I am biking to work and also doing sport, days weather is bad, I drive listening to music and relaxing.

With the biggest advantage of not thinking of job as soon as I leave office, I will definitely never go back to remote work!

Re: Working remotely, 4 years in

#79

Post by ytoi »

nul_byte wrote: post #70
bkovacev wrote: post #46

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?

More freedom requires more self-discipline. When you are doing things like everyone else the systems are built for you. When you aren't you have to build those systems yourself, which can be harder than people think.
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