I've worked for over 30 years only remote on one thing or another... most of this guy's points are on the money.<p>Unless it's enforced to share information properly, if some people are in an office and others are not, there are two classes of political animal created immediately and that will affect everything.<p>Unless I missed it, he didn't get into how variable work really is... this 10h thing is kind of a crock for the kind of work I do anyway... sometimes you are blocked on the one thing you have to be doing and it's difficult to focus on things that are of secondary importance just because you should be working. Other times you're being paid, but there's nothing to do for one reason or another. You can usually find useful things to do but at these times, they already know the situation. They want you to just note it, keep your head down and do something you can do yourself that should be somewhat helpful, and pick up immediately the thing is unblocked.<p>It's just not always possible to move things forward for 10h each day... be transparent about it. Sometimes if it's an architectural or philosphical issue, you need to study it and then do something else while your brain thinks about it. Some days nothing is going to move forward no matter what you do because of your personal state... you learn to recognize it and let it go... tomorrow or the day after you'll be back in triple force and more than make it up. The people who are paying you usually care about results not hour by hour but week by week. So long as it's all happening on that scale everyone's happy.
So one thing that isn't mentioned in this article that I think is incredibly important is making sure you maintain a social life outside of work.<p>When working at an office you tend to spend time with your coworkers outside of work and that is something you don't really get an opportunity to take advantage of when you're remote. Be sure to make some effort to get out of the house and be social in some form. Otherwise it becomes too easy to become isolated and you can suffer because of it. It also helps with counteracting the problem of overworking, since you have other obligations in you day that push you towards wrapping up work for the day.
Remote work taught me that working in batches can really drive up my efficiency. 2.5 hours at the start of the day, a half hour break, then another period of work about the same length, and then finally one more. I find this breaks up things and allows the 'down time' to settle in my head so I can come back and prep to get "in the zone" for another two hour purely focused work period. All that ties in wonderfully to his routine keeping, which is a great template to work with.<p>It helps to shut off all notifications on your phone or computer as well, including email.
This was very well written and helpful to me as a newly remote employee. The tone in this article is very pleasant and uplifting. I especially like your point about having mental triggers to establish routines. When I worked in an office, I struggled most with others triggering me into unpleasant behaviors. Now that I'm remote, I feel a great burden has been lifted and I'm free to set my own habits in time. Thanks for sharing this!
As someone who has worked remotely for not quite a decade myself, there are a few other points I'd consider essential. The big one is remote workers being left out of meetings. "Oh, you can't make it then? We'll just make you optional and fill you in later." Except it doesn't work.<p>If someone's not there, they get no <i>input</i>. They don't get to correct any facts that are incorrect or out of date. They don't get to bring up a point or principle that's important <i>in the moment</i>, before people start taking sides on what might be a moot point. The quality of the <i>output</i> is usually awful too. The "catch up" often doesn't happen at all. If it does, it's usually just a few action items and open issues. It doesn't capture the ebb and flow of the conversation - what people spent the most energy on, what the points of contention were, pros and cons that flew by so fast nobody wrote them down (but could later turn out to be crucial). That stuff matters as much as the bullet points, not just for the topic under discussion but to understand how people go about their business and thus how to work effectively with them. Maybe even to coach them on how to present their ideas more effectively. As a senior engineer that's something I'm supposed to do, I enjoy doing it, I can if I'm there, but if I'm "optional" that door closes.<p>There's an art to making meetings effective for people who are remote. If you're remote yourself, expect to spend a certain amount of time coaching and coaxing your team mates on this stuff. They'll usually welcome such advice IMX. People mean well, they just don't have the right knowledge or habits yet. It's worth it to become an advocate and mentor for effective remote or cross-site meetings. Everyone will benefit, but especially you.<p>There are other fine points to do with time zones, the effect that an 80ms delay has on our unconscious "who speaks next" protocol, and more, but I feel I've gone on long enough.
The most important thing for remote workers is to tell them they have to give up subtext/implied context because it gets lost over remote channels very quickly. This is probably the hardest I've found. I've asked people who are not skilled in being explicit to throttle their attempts to initiate comms and watch how people are skilled in initiating and to try to learn from them.<p>For example, don't start a conversation off with "Hi", or "Can I get your help with that problem yesterday?" Or even "We're having difficulty resolving JIRA-2341" Rather, immediately narrow in on the specific, crisp question you need answered. Subtext and context can only be used when you expect someone to supply it. Senior people on my teams know to call this out, even if they know what the other person is talking about.<p>Also, everyone has to have ipads with pen or some type of drawing tablet for white boarding sessions. A camera pointed down at a whiteboard works well too.<p>Remote is very doable, but everyone has to be all in, and those who do not communicate properly can destroy the effectiveness of remote culture very quickly. And if they are the senior technical talent on your team, they can do it all the faster. Especially if they are co-located in an office as they'll communicate via non remote channels and vital discussions will get lost / unrecorded.<p>The other problem is there is pretty senior talent that doesn't look for remote work because they've learned to use charisma to short-cut and speed up getting things done rather than making complex arguments about things they already know to be true. This is in my opinion is the greatest blockage to making remote more effective than people wasting time and risking their lives by driving every day into an office.
Remote work needs development.<p>We have a long history of work in the Office, a History over 100 years long, with a significant fraction of the population working there. Lots of companies have experimented and risked with different approaches of management and few remain.<p>That is not the case with remote work. We don't really understand it yet.<p>Writing down "remote is not for everyone" implies that we know everything about remote working and our particular model or management style is THE only one, which is not.<p>It implies that the worker is not prepared for remote when probably it is the company who is not.<p>In fact, with remote work you can measure the output of each worker way better than in traditional working conditions. Instead of measuring a worker punching in and out and then buying at Amazon or doing facebook at work, you can measure actual work.<p>In the future, there will be companies that will specialize at remote work, for example they will come at your house and prepare a room for working remotely without distractions, and they will do it, not you, because they know what they do, just like your dentist, and your company will pay the bill.<p>Lots of things will change, but we are yet in the mindset of Office work, and can not see it.
> Usually, people who fail at remote work tend to either lack the self-discipline it requires, or they are simply socially oriented and thrive being around other people. In the latter case, working from a shared office can help, but even then, if you lack the self-discipline and habits required, you are likely not going to thrive. While there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, young people (early 20s) tend to struggle more with this than people who have reach their late 20s and early 30s.<p>These are probably valid points, but it pigeon holes the employee. There are lots of reasons remote work may not work out for someone. The organization matters as much as the individual. One terrible boss can be hell for a remote worker who does not have presence in the company.
I've been working fully remote for a little over a year now. I enjoy the freedom it grants me to live where I want, but the main issue I have is feeling like I'm not meeting enough co-workers and having some sort of network while I'm still new in the industry (and fear of not learning enough).<p>It's also quite annoying to have a laptop that doesn't even have an SSD in it, and having to email IT or someone from a different group and never hear back without sending 3+ follow up emails. It would be easier to walk and go see them if I were just working there.<p>One thing I learned from my first remote job was to examine how your direct manager treats remote work, and that will quickly tell you how your experience might turn out. My boss communicated with me hardly ever (even to relay requirements for new projects), and frequently stayed up all night to finish stuff.
This is great advice. Being a remote worker the advice on having time in the morning to yourself before starting and a shutdown is super important. Another aspect I found is to get dressed up even if it is just wearing jeans as it mentally shifts you from leisure to work.<p>The Deep Work in the morning to really dive into a single thing is important even just for self-discipline. But it does take a while to really hone this and as he said remote work isn’t for everyone. It feels like it’s better suited for introverts than extroverts.
I can't work remotely. Wife and kid constantly sneak in and before you know it she is sitting on the floor and my daughter is jumping on my lap. It's useless to fight it... better go to the office. Can other family men in here get this done? I am curious
Most of this seems obvious to me.<p>I've been working mostly or completely remotely since October of 2001. For a brief period in there, at one startup, I had an office in an incubator a few blocks from my house, but after 6 months or so we decided it wasn't a good use of money, and everyone went remote.<p>The only other "exception" is my current job, which I've had for almost 12 years. We've never had office space anywhere, so it's been 100% remote EXCEPT that early on, we did a lot of travel to client sites.<p>We haven't really done that much AT ALL since about 2010/2011, owing to the greater acceptance of remote presence/screensharing tools, and that's been awesome. I haven't seen my boss in a year. I have coworkers I talk to (skype/voice/email) daily that I have never met in the flesh, because they're in other cities.<p>For us, this has worked VERY WELL. We all mostly work a normal day for our timezone, though obviously sometimes there are extended hours.<p>The only downside for us that I can really see is that we can't really hire fresh or inexperienced devs. There's no water cooler. You can't go sit with $senior_dev_guy for a day to get a feel for things, or learn the stack, or whatever, so we tend to only hire midcareer or later folks. OTOH, we also have absurdly low turnover, which means hiring doesn't come up THAT much anyway.
>Either you’re remote-only or you don’t do remote at all. Lots of companies brag about giving their staff the freedom to work remotely.<p>I've worked on three different "remote" teams now and I think the author's point is spot on.<p>The first time we did it everyone was remote, scattered across different states in America. It was a great experience. Everyone had a ton of freedom and flexibility and there was a lot of trust across the team.<p>The next two teams I worked in had each "division" headquartered in different regions. Design was based in one area, Engineering in another, product in another. It was so much worse. The people I worked were wonderful but we just couldn't develop the trust needed to build at the pace the market demanded.<p>How I describe the issue now is that we thought we were a "remote team" but we were actually just a handful of employees working remote from HQ. The HQ was wherever the core work was being done at the moment (usually with engineering) and the rest of us were just remote employees.
The article has some good advice. I've been working remotely for 2 years and here are my observations:<p>- When you work from a coworking space with others, it's easier to meet people and make friends. They are not your colleagues which removes certain "fakeness" from the relationship (you are not force d to spend time with someone, no office politics, no boss-employee dynamic, no zero-sum games like promotions).
- It could be a good idea to spend a few months working together and then transition to remote work.
- Use Block Site and block youtube.com etc. on your work machine
- Don't stay at home 100% of the time. Work from a cafe from time to time.
> remote is not for everyone<p>I view this as a problem. Everyone should be able to work remotely in tech, especially in 2019. Office and commutes should be legacy concepts. What do we need to do to enable better and more remote cultures? Society has currently adapted to Office norms, with regards to working hours, interpersonal interactions etc. With the rise of remote work and indie work we 'll need to develop new ways to live.
My biggest fear regarding remote work is career progression. It seems that the author is a founder, so this isn't an issue for him, but my anecdotal evidence tells me that remote workers are left behind in terms of promotions and professional growth.<p>This might be less relevant for remote only companies, but I would need to see it first hand before I become less sceptic.
The information flow, specifically the lack thereof, and even more specifically the lazy/disorganized/maybe-even-passive-aggressive way it was (not) handled, ended up being the primary disadvantage of the remote arrangement for me. If you get a chance to work remotely, make sure management is fully committed to the idea, and to all that it entails. If they subscribe to the "blurt things out and wander off" management style, and people just kind of yell out whatever's bothering them in the office, that's already a pretty bad sign, but see if they're willing to promise to document everything in writing. If they're not willing, or they have any misgivings at all, you're probably better off staying in the office.
Pretty strong article. As someone who has to manage onsite/offsite people( non IT thought), the flow of information is essential and it's very hard to balance it.The people in the office will always have more access to additional info unless there are some processes in place to balance it.<p>Also,what the author of the article doesn't mention is client ability to work remotely. I'm currently dealing with one: cc'ing everyone on everything ( <20 people company,all sit in the same room). Emails are often without much sense and you have to reiterate again and again.<p>There's a category of people who can't write and express themselves well,which makes them impossible for remote jobs.
I recently started remote work for a company I've been working for ~3 years and it's been great so far, I'm more productive and I feel I just have more energy overall.
But the reason I think it's been great is that I already know people I work with quite well, I have a lot of slack conversations with my teammates so I don't feel left out or lonely at all (well, so far at least, it may be too early to say).
I do wonder if the experience is different when you start remote for a new company from the beginning?
From 20 years experience, mostly nodding along except that engineers are easier to manage remotely than sales. Depends on who is doing the managing, not inherent in the job
I've been working remotely and concur with the author's thoughts. Freedom can also be a curse in disguise. Cannot emphasize more on self-discipline and getting a separate room as the office in the home.<p>Also, socializing! I was pretty introvert as a person. Would hardly initiate conversations with strangers. Now I get cravings to just go outside and meet friends. I cope up with this by attending meetups and catching up with friends in the evenings.
In the "remote only or not at all" argument, I think it's really up to the leadership to set the example. You can have an office, but if the leaders of the company stress how important it is to work remotely, this will be ok. The employees just need to understand how all remote workers feel; when they have to go through the same patterns as remote workers do, then these habits get adopted well into the culture.
Thanks for this post, Viktor. A lot of this hits home.<p>You inspired me to write up my own experiences of 10 years in remote work <a href="https://theremotedev.com/10-years-remote/" rel="nofollow">https://theremotedev.com/10-years-remote/</a>
From a UK perspective, my question is how do you find roles that allow remote work? It always seems to be a blocker and I end up having to take non-remote roles to pay the bills.
How does it work with time zones in a remote company? Is everyone allowed to live anywhere they want? Do they usually restrict the time zone the employees live in?
I hate the idea of the yearly summit. People working remotely may have health or social issues on a greater average. There is a benefit to face to face but requiring the team to fly to remote locations yearly makes a local company with a normal christmas party seem more attractive.