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 don't feel much lonely - I can always chat with neighbors - everybody knows everybody here in the village. Or I can drive to the city whenever I feel like.
I love the fact that I've never used an alarm clock (except when I need to catch a flight or something). And yet I am always getting up earl and full of energy. I often nap during the day, which I love, and would be hard to do in an office. I sometimes disappear for a couple of hours to do some work in the garden. And I sometimes check on work on weekends. Overall, the flexibility about how you spend your time and where you live is what makes remote work worth it. You also need the discipline though.
I enjoy similar comforts, but prefer to live in major cities. I've been working remotely for 17 years, and in that time I've lived in Brookyln, Seattle, and now Chicago.
No alarm clocks, ever. No driving unless I need to haul something. No commutes. I refuse to deal with rush-hour. I truly enjoy naps and long lunches and have no set schedule - sometimes I'm up nights, sometimes days.
I could very well move to a farm-house in the country, but I think I'd lose my mind. I truly enjoy city life, as a personal preference. I used to think I wanted to be a "nomad", but it turns out I really enjoy my sit-stand desk with three monitors, a comfortable chair, and everything just how I like it. I'm far more productive than I ever have been while on the road. Instead, I prefer taking long breaks with my wife to travel without any work-related devices.
I'm not always incredibly healthy when it comes to eating, exercise, and extra-curricular activities, but mentally I generally feel I'm in far better shape than most of my peers who deal with the bustle of a daily on-location occupation. I have the utmost respect for their ability to carry on every day. It's just not for me.
You just described a large part of my dream lifestyle. Coming from a rural setting, the city life gets a little old after a while. I love the city and love visiting and the convenience of everything, but other opportunities for sport and exercise can be limited. And god do I miss being able to bike 5 minutes and ending up in the countryside. If I can get myself further north or toward the mountains comfortably, I will.
Please do share how you managed all of that—it helps to have insight!
Discipline is key. I coded in college to avoid competing for a retail job. You get in grooves and forget to eat or go out and next thing you know you're nocturnal.
After cramming 2 decades of work in the next one, I burnt out and worked remotely from a cabin in NC. I was a network engineer so fast net hours from a major city and I was king
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!
I've been working remotely for about 8 years, and I have to say it's a challenge. I have great colleagues and a great manager and we work on stuff we care about, so I am in no position to complain.
However, all things being equal, I would much prefer to be in the office 3 days per week (not 5!). For all the advantages of working remotely, the social isolation is extremely unnatural and not good for you. Today, for example, I will chat with my personal trainer at the gym, and have a couple phone calls, and that's it for human interaction on a Monday.
Also, while heads-down coding is probably better in the home office, brainstorming and whiteboarding and collaboratively figuring stuff out is way better in person.
> First, I have 5-6 weekly 1:1s with different people with no agenda
That's a great plan, and I wish it were realistic for my team. We've done things like that but they always fall apart once everyone gets really busy. I'd love to blame the 6 time zones but it's not that.
Funny, when I was younger and worked remote on a couple of startups, the isolation wasn't that big a deal. But I went out almost every night, and one (hopefully) outgrows that.
Anyway, good article, and I hope the author continues making the best of a good but tricky way of working!
I have been working remotely for approximately 17 years now and has always seemed quite normal to me. I grew up on a farm where my parents worked predominantly from home themselves, so that may have given me a model to follow. Really, when you think about it, when we were a primary agrarian society, working from home was the norm. There are probably a lot of good lessons to be found in history.
Having worked at home for around a year now I have to say I completely agree with your summary. I used to dream of 100% WFH and now realise I am not cut out for it psychologically.
I seem to thrive with a certain level of interaction. Companies I've contracted for remotely have been great but it has been extremely isolating. Where I felt like I had a good handle on the overall direction of things when I worked in an office, moving this 100% to slack and google docs has left me often feeling more like a cog on one piece than a part of the overall project.
I will be coming up on my 10 year mark for working remotely this summer.
Are you truly isolated?
At work: no 1:1/group chat or video conference? We are on chat all day and dive into video or a phone call for brainstorming. I don't have that sense of isolation. Heck, some days I feel like I've wasted too much time interacting with work mates on chat.
Off work: I understand you can't hang out with your buds every night of the week but it would be an odd day if I did not talk to at least one of my friends on the phone or Telegram or play a video game together. Kids change things and they are less available to "do stuff" but we still talk almost daily. Weekends are still there to get together or an occasional after-work dinner.
Have you tried seeking out some clubs of a hobby of yours? Sports, board games, maker/hacker spaces, volunteering?
My vacations which I look forward to are still the ones where I turn off all communication and seek isolation where its just me and the wife out in nature away from other humans.
Depending on the type of work, I find 1-2 days a week working from home to be optimal. It provides good concentration time, but I don't think I could ever consider fully-remote work, it's just too lonely. If you're not good at seeking out social interaction when you're already feeling depressed (like me), it sounds like it just wouldn't be compatible at all.
I'm at around 8 years as well and have the sames as you really. I love working from home, but social isolation is a thing. I should have probably had those 5 to 6 1:1's. Whilst I'm in a team, my skill set is different from all theirs, so mine would be almost purely social chats.
Certainly by Friday evening I need to be outside and chatting to people. I've recently discovered a couple of friends are working from thome, so considering trying to spend a day working from their home and perhaps vice versa. Keeps the convenience of avoiding the commute into London but gets a little social time and some other people to bounce ideas off.
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. You tell yourself "oh let me just push this feature, fix this bug or communicate about a new feature". Work gets prioritized and everything else is put aside. That actually damages your productivity in the long run and the chance of burning out is far bigger than if you dedicate time to do other things.
Took me a while to recognize the trap I was in - I felt obligated (no peer pressure, but just the fear of missing out) to always be online, answer emails or slack messages. Of course, my mental and physical health suffered due to this FOMO.
Since I have about six months before I get back to the office I promised myself to tackle these things by doing:
- Fix morning routine by working out, cooking and taking time to do other things (read, play video games, hobby)
- Snoozing notifications at 6pm my time.
- Learning to say "It will have to wait 'till tomorrow".
- Spend more time outside of my apartment at night.
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 emergency, I'm not doing anyone else's stuff within those 2-3 hours. I also go to sleep around 10, which takes some getting used to.
Today I'm the most physically and mentally healthy that I've ever been. I actually live close to NYC but the train / ferry commute would take those critical two hours away. Going to keep my current system in place as long as I can.
These last couple weeks, and my first two years of work, I think I've hit my best groove by waking up at 06:00, optionally going for ~20-30 minutes in the gym, and jumping straight into work. When I delay eating until at least noon (so fasting for at least the eight hours I spend in bed, plus six or more waking hours in the morning), I tend to maintain a healthy body weight and feel little or no gnawing hunger.
I'm currently working from home, and it seems to work even better at home than it did full time with an office commute, and I clock out more or less whenever I feel like it (which is less often than I would've guessed).
I've spent the last year at home, and these last two weeks have been literally an integer factor more productive and enjoyable. I've enjoyed it so much that I currently work somewhat on weekends as well, by choice.
> 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?
Could you elaborate a bit more on your morning routine plans? I’d like to get up earlier and do more productive things before I start work (I’m remote and flexible), but as it doesn’t get light here until 8am at this time of year, I find it really hard to get up early.
Most career stories are unique and driven by the circumstances and the person involved. So one's experiences may be very different from another's.
My experience working remotely for 10 of the last 13 years is that it suits me very well and leaves me feeling _differently_ than when I worked in an office.
I don't know if I can say I'm happier, but I'm generally more satisfied. I work MUCH harder and I work MANY more hours. Both of these are sort of my choice, but my behavior is driven by my goals to succeed with whatever project I am on or have defined. Thus, I don't know if I'm overall happier; but I feel less like I am just wasting my life compared to when I burned hours in an office at a much lower productivity.
Another difference (for me) is that the kind of projects I work on and the clients I work for give me a greater chance of financial success at this point in life compared to a more typical job. It may not be a greater pay-per-hour result when you factor in the hours I work, but I have much more opportunity to be part of a winning ($$$) outcome than I did in the corporate world.
And finally, one of my favorite perks is that I can work from anywhere in the world. It's not always easy to work for a month from a Caribbean island while squeezing in scuba certifications, but it makes life a lot more interesting than walking into the same building every day.
I doubt I'll ever walk into an office again for anything more than a week or two at a time. Finances aside, that gives me the feeling that I have _won_ the rat race.
I've also worked remotely for 4 years now, but in a company where remote workers aren't that common. I absolutely love it - I love the autonomy, the lack of office distractions, etc.
I think the key things for me are
- Love your work, motivation then comes for free
- Communicate a lot, as the article says. Personally I'm a fan of written communication, as I find that is frequently more impactful. Easier to share, and so on.
- 1to1s are also great
- Have someone in office you can talk bullshit with over text chat. That helps a lot with the isolation and staying on top of office gossip.
- Being remote naturally encourages a more independent working style. Being forced to solve problems myself and actually think has been great for me. Not being in office provides the calm and quiet to do exactly that!
- A lot depends on your manager. Mine is trusting and accomodating, and I very much appreciate it.
- Finally, having a good internal network in the company is important. Putting in the travels to get some face time is important, as written communication gets a lot better after having met.
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 aren't going to be tailored to remote folks.
The only time I've ever been able to make this work was when the manager was also remote.
> reality is, if your team is 80-90% not remote, forget about career advancement.
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 :)
5 years for me, and counting. I'm so much happier and more productive, especially since where I work went to an open plan office: bright, noisy, visual distractions everywhere, speakerphones on every desk, little "huddle" tables in between developer desks in each 4-or-5 person "cube".
I have no problems connecting with people on Lync (or more recently HipChat). Interactions are via phone, email, Confluence and Jira.
I get to have a home-cooked lunch with my wife every day. I save all the time I'd spend commuting and dealing with interruptions. No money spent on gas. No getting sick from people coming in and spreading germs (something of an epidemic right now at my office).
I'm pretty sure at some point I'll be forced to give this up, but man, it's been a fantastic ride so far.
14 years as 100% remote... living in the middle of nowhere, 40 acres of land to run around and enjoy (fly huge model planes at lunch time, fire up the bbq with the wife and fams, etc etc) and life is good. I have a reclining workstation that has helped for a number of reasons, but it's made from a chair that's light enough to carry out to the back porch when the weather is nice. Some companies like to take a little off the top of your pay due to being remote, but if you go looking in the right spots you can get remote work at bigger city salaries. Even when the pay was shorted a little, the lifestyle more than makes up for it.
...make sure that you get enough personal interaction (the hardest and most important depending just how "remote" you are), and make sure that you appreciate the lifestyle perk that it is, and be happy.
As much as I love it, it's really not for everyone... I've seen some people be allowed to go remote, move away from the office, not be able to deal with the remoteness and quit. It happens.
I have worked remotely for three years. Here are my tips:
Slack is your best friend but if you chat for more than a minute straight about something technical call your collegue otherwise you will lose your time.
Written language is not spoken language. Sometimes misunderstandings can arise.
Do separate your work environment from your daily life. If your house is small, like mine, light off your computer during lunch otherwise you will find yourself reading some docs, checking some code, etc.
Video conferences are not phone calls. When my team need to stay focused everybody have appear.in open in the background.
Always dress like you will dress if working in your office.
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.
Almost 10 years for me. The main thing from this post I would emphasize is the point about the company culture. My current employer is all remote, and so support for and integration of remote engineers is natural for them. By contrast I worked at another small company where the engineering management admitted remote employees only reluctantly. Meetings were a nightmare, and the remote attendees could often not even hear or see what was going on. Every now and then the SVP in charge of the group would remind us all that having remote employees meant "twice the effort for half the results." This was the same person who told me during our interview that he only considered remote engineers because it wasn't possible to find good engineers in the small southern city they were located in ("they" meaning the company; the SVP himself was located on the west coast and commuted). Needless to say I didn't last long there.
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.
I've been working remotely for close to 20 years, but it's all been a bunch of short contracts (days to months).
I've worked with people from all over the world across many different time zones. Email, Google Hangouts / Skype, IRC and Slack are all what I use on a regular basis to communicate with clients and it works out well.
I offset working alone from my place of residence by going outside a bunch of times per day for exercise and talking with people around the neighborhood. I also try to goto local tech meetups when I can.
Overall I would say I feel happy and generally feel like I'm making the best use of my time. I don't think I would trade this life style in for anything (within reason :D).
I have been self employed, working from wherever, for just shy of 7 years now.
Overall the experience has been life-changing in a positive way, and I would highly recommend people try this arrangement at least once in their careers to see if the tradeoffs give them an advantage.
Here are some benefits, in no particular order:
- I have the flexibility to rearrange my days so I never have to take time off work for things like shopping, errands, appointments, visits, meetings, and even events I want to attend during the day
- Because I can choose when I work, I am able to capture my most creative and productive times during the day for work, and spend my downtime doing chores or things that require little creativity
- By changing my surroundings according to my mood, I can 'hack' my productivity to a small extent (going to a lively environment when I feel unmotivated, isolating myself when I need to focus and block out interruptions, etc)
- I don't have a set wake up time, nor a set bed time. If I need to work late one day and it works to my advantage to stay up later rather than break, I can 'push' my next day back
And here are some downsides, in no particular order:
- You can go a little stir-crazy working from home too much, the onus is on your to get out of the house and surround yourself with other people to stay social
- Sometimes you will find yourself pushing life out of the way to make room for work because of the same flexibility that lets you push work out of the way for life sometimes. Not having set hours is a blessing and a curse at times, but overall beneficial
- It can be hard to gauge how you stack up to others if you're not seeing other people doing the same kind of work as you are. Some people are self-starters and compete against themselves for continual improvement, but if you lack in this area it can be a struggle to not stagnate and get too comfy in your role
For me, the benefits have far outweighed the downsides, and I can't imagine ever going back to the 9–5, butt-in-chair-all-day kind of work arrangement. I feel that by working remotely I am doing my best work ever, and I have the freedom and flexibility to improve myself too!
Best thing about reading more and more success stories of working remotely online is, for someone hoping to make the jump eventually, that there does indeed seem to be a trend.
I'm not sure there's much valuable advice however, as the way you should set up your process seems pretty obvious once you really decide that including remote workers is a high priority.
I have worked remote for the last 3 years and in the office for the 10 years before that at the same company. I can definitely say I will never work in an office again if at all possible. Remote work is definitely not for everyone, but for those of us that prefer it, its more important than pay or benefits. I won't rehash what others have said, but i do have an experience that may be different than most.
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).
I am suprised that at 3000 people the company doesn't have offices all over.
I worked mostly remotely for one Bank - mostly because I arranged to have 2 desks and then slowly moved home and worked from the different offices. I love face to face sometimes and remote (full concentration) other times.
Again I find that a lot of people can't handle it. Like a basic rule should be that you should respond within 1-30 min to any chat message.
[+] [-] ibz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enobrev|8 years ago|reply
No alarm clocks, ever. No driving unless I need to haul something. No commutes. I refuse to deal with rush-hour. I truly enjoy naps and long lunches and have no set schedule - sometimes I'm up nights, sometimes days.
I could very well move to a farm-house in the country, but I think I'd lose my mind. I truly enjoy city life, as a personal preference. I used to think I wanted to be a "nomad", but it turns out I really enjoy my sit-stand desk with three monitors, a comfortable chair, and everything just how I like it. I'm far more productive than I ever have been while on the road. Instead, I prefer taking long breaks with my wife to travel without any work-related devices.
I'm not always incredibly healthy when it comes to eating, exercise, and extra-curricular activities, but mentally I generally feel I'm in far better shape than most of my peers who deal with the bustle of a daily on-location occupation. I have the utmost respect for their ability to carry on every day. It's just not for me.
[+] [-] padobson|8 years ago|reply
Imagine how open the highways would be if this was how everyone worked/lived.
Clear the highways. Save the planet. Work from home.
[+] [-] 52-6F-62|8 years ago|reply
Please do share how you managed all of that—it helps to have insight!
[+] [-] thathappened|8 years ago|reply
After cramming 2 decades of work in the next one, I burnt out and worked remotely from a cabin in NC. I was a network engineer so fast net hours from a major city and I was king
[+] [-] criddell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] openfuture|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamiegreen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albertzeyer|8 years ago|reply
This sounds like something which would be hard to do with a family.
[+] [-] thenaturalist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allsunny|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ganzolo|8 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] biztos|8 years ago|reply
However, all things being equal, I would much prefer to be in the office 3 days per week (not 5!). For all the advantages of working remotely, the social isolation is extremely unnatural and not good for you. Today, for example, I will chat with my personal trainer at the gym, and have a couple phone calls, and that's it for human interaction on a Monday.
Also, while heads-down coding is probably better in the home office, brainstorming and whiteboarding and collaboratively figuring stuff out is way better in person.
> First, I have 5-6 weekly 1:1s with different people with no agenda
That's a great plan, and I wish it were realistic for my team. We've done things like that but they always fall apart once everyone gets really busy. I'd love to blame the 6 time zones but it's not that.
Funny, when I was younger and worked remote on a couple of startups, the isolation wasn't that big a deal. But I went out almost every night, and one (hopefully) outgrows that.
Anyway, good article, and I hope the author continues making the best of a good but tricky way of working!
[+] [-] randomdata|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaymzcampbell|8 years ago|reply
I seem to thrive with a certain level of interaction. Companies I've contracted for remotely have been great but it has been extremely isolating. Where I felt like I had a good handle on the overall direction of things when I worked in an office, moving this 100% to slack and google docs has left me often feeling more like a cog on one piece than a part of the overall project.
[+] [-] chrisan|8 years ago|reply
Are you truly isolated?
At work: no 1:1/group chat or video conference? We are on chat all day and dive into video or a phone call for brainstorming. I don't have that sense of isolation. Heck, some days I feel like I've wasted too much time interacting with work mates on chat.
Off work: I understand you can't hang out with your buds every night of the week but it would be an odd day if I did not talk to at least one of my friends on the phone or Telegram or play a video game together. Kids change things and they are less available to "do stuff" but we still talk almost daily. Weekends are still there to get together or an occasional after-work dinner.
Have you tried seeking out some clubs of a hobby of yours? Sports, board games, maker/hacker spaces, volunteering?
My vacations which I look forward to are still the ones where I turn off all communication and seek isolation where its just me and the wife out in nature away from other humans.
[+] [-] fredley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sshagent|8 years ago|reply
Certainly by Friday evening I need to be outside and chatting to people. I've recently discovered a couple of friends are working from thome, so considering trying to spend a day working from their home and perhaps vice versa. Keeps the convenience of avoiding the commute into London but gets a little social time and some other people to bounce ideas off.
[+] [-] bkovacev|8 years ago|reply
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. You tell yourself "oh let me just push this feature, fix this bug or communicate about a new feature". Work gets prioritized and everything else is put aside. That actually damages your productivity in the long run and the chance of burning out is far bigger than if you dedicate time to do other things.
Took me a while to recognize the trap I was in - I felt obligated (no peer pressure, but just the fear of missing out) to always be online, answer emails or slack messages. Of course, my mental and physical health suffered due to this FOMO.
Since I have about six months before I get back to the office I promised myself to tackle these things by doing:
- Fix morning routine by working out, cooking and taking time to do other things (read, play video games, hobby)
- Snoozing notifications at 6pm my time.
- Learning to say "It will have to wait 'till tomorrow".
- Spend more time outside of my apartment at night.
- Dedicate more time to my SO.
- Learn Elixir/Erlang during the weekends.
[+] [-] katzgrau|8 years ago|reply
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 emergency, I'm not doing anyone else's stuff within those 2-3 hours. I also go to sleep around 10, which takes some getting used to.
Today I'm the most physically and mentally healthy that I've ever been. I actually live close to NYC but the train / ferry commute would take those critical two hours away. Going to keep my current system in place as long as I can.
[+] [-] microcolonel|8 years ago|reply
I'm currently working from home, and it seems to work even better at home than it did full time with an office commute, and I clock out more or less whenever I feel like it (which is less often than I would've guessed). I've spent the last year at home, and these last two weeks have been literally an integer factor more productive and enjoyable. I've enjoyed it so much that I currently work somewhat on weekends as well, by choice.
[+] [-] nul_byte|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] fyfy18|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blunte|8 years ago|reply
My experience working remotely for 10 of the last 13 years is that it suits me very well and leaves me feeling _differently_ than when I worked in an office.
I don't know if I can say I'm happier, but I'm generally more satisfied. I work MUCH harder and I work MANY more hours. Both of these are sort of my choice, but my behavior is driven by my goals to succeed with whatever project I am on or have defined. Thus, I don't know if I'm overall happier; but I feel less like I am just wasting my life compared to when I burned hours in an office at a much lower productivity.
Another difference (for me) is that the kind of projects I work on and the clients I work for give me a greater chance of financial success at this point in life compared to a more typical job. It may not be a greater pay-per-hour result when you factor in the hours I work, but I have much more opportunity to be part of a winning ($$$) outcome than I did in the corporate world.
And finally, one of my favorite perks is that I can work from anywhere in the world. It's not always easy to work for a month from a Caribbean island while squeezing in scuba certifications, but it makes life a lot more interesting than walking into the same building every day.
I doubt I'll ever walk into an office again for anything more than a week or two at a time. Finances aside, that gives me the feeling that I have _won_ the rat race.
[+] [-] yAnonymous|8 years ago|reply
(ง'-')ง
[+] [-] therealdrag0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mailshanx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plekter|8 years ago|reply
I think the key things for me are
- Love your work, motivation then comes for free
- Communicate a lot, as the article says. Personally I'm a fan of written communication, as I find that is frequently more impactful. Easier to share, and so on.
- 1to1s are also great
- Have someone in office you can talk bullshit with over text chat. That helps a lot with the isolation and staying on top of office gossip.
- Being remote naturally encourages a more independent working style. Being forced to solve problems myself and actually think has been great for me. Not being in office provides the calm and quiet to do exactly that!
- A lot depends on your manager. Mine is trusting and accomodating, and I very much appreciate it.
- Finally, having a good internal network in the company is important. Putting in the travels to get some face time is important, as written communication gets a lot better after having met.
[+] [-] mettamage|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justonepost|8 years ago|reply
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 aren't going to be tailored to remote folks.
The only time I've ever been able to make this work was when the manager was also remote.
[+] [-] plekter|8 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] g051051|8 years ago|reply
I have no problems connecting with people on Lync (or more recently HipChat). Interactions are via phone, email, Confluence and Jira.
I get to have a home-cooked lunch with my wife every day. I save all the time I'd spend commuting and dealing with interruptions. No money spent on gas. No getting sick from people coming in and spreading germs (something of an epidemic right now at my office).
I'm pretty sure at some point I'll be forced to give this up, but man, it's been a fantastic ride so far.
[+] [-] keyboardmonkey|8 years ago|reply
...make sure that you get enough personal interaction (the hardest and most important depending just how "remote" you are), and make sure that you appreciate the lifestyle perk that it is, and be happy.
As much as I love it, it's really not for everyone... I've seen some people be allowed to go remote, move away from the office, not be able to deal with the remoteness and quit. It happens.
[+] [-] program|8 years ago|reply
Slack is your best friend but if you chat for more than a minute straight about something technical call your collegue otherwise you will lose your time.
Written language is not spoken language. Sometimes misunderstandings can arise.
Do separate your work environment from your daily life. If your house is small, like mine, light off your computer during lunch otherwise you will find yourself reading some docs, checking some code, etc.
Video conferences are not phone calls. When my team need to stay focused everybody have appear.in open in the background.
Always dress like you will dress if working in your office.
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] markbnj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nickjj|8 years ago|reply
I've worked with people from all over the world across many different time zones. Email, Google Hangouts / Skype, IRC and Slack are all what I use on a regular basis to communicate with clients and it works out well.
I offset working alone from my place of residence by going outside a bunch of times per day for exercise and talking with people around the neighborhood. I also try to goto local tech meetups when I can.
Overall I would say I feel happy and generally feel like I'm making the best use of my time. I don't think I would trade this life style in for anything (within reason :D).
[+] [-] houqp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blauditore|8 years ago|reply
> Before we get into the struggles of working remote, [...]
but then never gets around to describe those struggles. I wonder what they are.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ratsimihah|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] err4nt|8 years ago|reply
Overall the experience has been life-changing in a positive way, and I would highly recommend people try this arrangement at least once in their careers to see if the tradeoffs give them an advantage.
Here are some benefits, in no particular order:
- I have the flexibility to rearrange my days so I never have to take time off work for things like shopping, errands, appointments, visits, meetings, and even events I want to attend during the day
- Because I can choose when I work, I am able to capture my most creative and productive times during the day for work, and spend my downtime doing chores or things that require little creativity
- By changing my surroundings according to my mood, I can 'hack' my productivity to a small extent (going to a lively environment when I feel unmotivated, isolating myself when I need to focus and block out interruptions, etc)
- I don't have a set wake up time, nor a set bed time. If I need to work late one day and it works to my advantage to stay up later rather than break, I can 'push' my next day back
And here are some downsides, in no particular order:
- You can go a little stir-crazy working from home too much, the onus is on your to get out of the house and surround yourself with other people to stay social
- Sometimes you will find yourself pushing life out of the way to make room for work because of the same flexibility that lets you push work out of the way for life sometimes. Not having set hours is a blessing and a curse at times, but overall beneficial
- It can be hard to gauge how you stack up to others if you're not seeing other people doing the same kind of work as you are. Some people are self-starters and compete against themselves for continual improvement, but if you lack in this area it can be a struggle to not stagnate and get too comfy in your role
For me, the benefits have far outweighed the downsides, and I can't imagine ever going back to the 9–5, butt-in-chair-all-day kind of work arrangement. I feel that by working remotely I am doing my best work ever, and I have the freedom and flexibility to improve myself too!
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] inertiatic|8 years ago|reply
I'm not sure there's much valuable advice however, as the way you should set up your process seems pretty obvious once you really decide that including remote workers is a high priority.
[+] [-] embersdev|8 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] anthony_barker|8 years ago|reply
I worked mostly remotely for one Bank - mostly because I arranged to have 2 desks and then slowly moved home and worked from the different offices. I love face to face sometimes and remote (full concentration) other times.
Again I find that a lot of people can't handle it. Like a basic rule should be that you should respond within 1-30 min to any chat message.