Working remotely, 4 years in

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 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.<p>Biggest issues were :<p>- Nobody sees how much you are invested into your day to day work. They just see bunch of commits &#x2F; 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.<p>- You&#x27;re constantly alone. Even if nowadays we have great communications tools, the reality is that you&#x27;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&#x2F;table), this can only work once in a while.<p>- 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.<p>- 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&#x2F;cleaning your space, negotiating your vacations, dealing with your personal issues, etc...<p>So now, let&#x27;s analyze the most common issues of working in an office is... ... The time lost in transportation.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;ve been working remotely for about 8 years, and I have to say it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s it for human interaction on a Monday.<p>Also, while heads-down coding is probably better in the home office, brainstorming and whiteboarding and collaboratively figuring stuff out is <i>way</i> better in person.<p>&gt; First, I have 5-6 weekly 1:1s with different people with no agenda<p>That&#x27;s a great plan, and I wish it were realistic for my team. We&#x27;ve done things like that but they always fall apart once everyone gets really busy. I&#x27;d love to blame the 6 time zones but it&#x27;s not that.<p>Funny, when I was younger and worked remote on a couple of startups, the isolation wasn&#x27;t that big a deal. But I went out almost every night, and one (hopefully) outgrows that.<p>Anyway, good article, and I hope the author continues making the best of a good but tricky way of working!

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.<p>Hardest challenge for me was staying in shape, because I lacked self-discipline to workout and eat healthy, but funny enough work didn&#x27;t suffer and it was the most productive period in my life.<p>It gets extremely easy to start slacking (no pun intended) and not do your work out. You tell yourself &quot;oh let me just push this feature, fix this bug or communicate about a new feature&quot;. 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.<p>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.<p>Since I have about six months before I get back to the office I promised myself to tackle these things by doing:<p>- Fix morning routine by working out, cooking and taking time to do other things (read, play video games, hobby)<p>- Snoozing notifications at 6pm my time.<p>- Learning to say &quot;It will have to wait &#x27;till tomorrow&quot;.<p>- Spend more time outside of my apartment at night.<p>- Dedicate more time to my SO.<p>- Learn Elixir&#x2F;Erlang during the weekends.

Most career stories are unique and driven by the circumstances and the person involved. So one&#x27;s experiences may be very different from another&#x27;s.<p>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.<p>I don&#x27;t know if I can say I&#x27;m happier, but I&#x27;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&#x27;t know if I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>And finally, one of my favorite perks is that I can work from anywhere in the world. It&#x27;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.<p>I doubt I&#x27;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&#x27;ve also worked remotely for 4 years now, but in a company where remote workers aren&#x27;t that common. I absolutely love it - I love the autonomy, the lack of office distractions, etc.<p>I think the key things for me are<p>- Love your work, motivation then comes for free<p>- Communicate a lot, as the article says. Personally I&#x27;m a fan of written communication, as I find that is frequently more impactful. Easier to share, and so on.<p>- 1to1s are also great<p>- 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.<p>- 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!<p>- A lot depends on your manager. Mine is trusting and accomodating, and I very much appreciate it.<p>- 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: &quot;My current theory about this is – as long as I work on a team with a lot of other remotes, everything will be fine. &quot;<p>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&#x27;t understand why they can&#x27;t be working remotely.<p>Plus of course processes and culture aren&#x27;t going to be tailored to remote folks.<p>The only time I&#x27;ve ever been able to make this work was when the manager was also remote.

5 years for me, and counting. I&#x27;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 &quot;huddle&quot; tables in between developer desks in each 4-or-5 person &quot;cube&quot;.<p>I have no problems connecting with people on Lync (or more recently HipChat). Interactions are via phone, email, Confluence and Jira.<p>I get to have a home-cooked lunch with my wife every day. I save all the time I&#x27;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).<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure at some point I&#x27;ll be forced to give this up, but man, it&#x27;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&#x27;s made from a chair that&#x27;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.<p>...make sure that you get enough personal interaction (the hardest and most important depending just how &quot;remote&quot; you are), and make sure that you appreciate the lifestyle perk that it is, and be happy.<p>As much as I love it, it&#x27;s really not for everyone... I&#x27;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:<p>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.<p>Written language is not spoken language. Sometimes misunderstandings can arise.<p>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.<p>Video conferences are not phone calls. When my team need to stay focused everybody have appear.in open in the background.<p>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.<p>I used to work in a coworking space of 250 people, and I loved it. If I&#x27;m being honest it&#x27;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&#x27;t know anyone.<p>I couldn&#x27;t handle spending over 20 hours a day in the same building either, I&#x27;d get cabin fever. Even spending a whole weekend at home drives me crazy, I have to get out of the house.<p>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&#x27;t have some people remote and some people on location, because you get an &quot;us and them&quot; 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.<p>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 &quot;twice the effort for half the results.&quot; This was the same person who told me during our interview that he only considered remote engineers because it wasn&#x27;t possible to find good engineers in the small southern city they were located in (&quot;they&quot; meaning the company; the SVP himself was located on the west coast and commuted). Needless to say I didn&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;ve been working remotely for close to 20 years, but it&#x27;s all been a bunch of short contracts (days to months).<p>I&#x27;ve worked with people from all over the world across many different time zones. Email, Google Hangouts &#x2F; Skype, IRC and Slack are all what I use on a regular basis to communicate with clients and it works out well.<p>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.<p>Overall I would say I feel happy and generally feel like I&#x27;m making the best use of my time. I don&#x27;t think I would trade this life style in for anything (within reason :D).

Any recommendation for video conferencing? We are using hangout and it is not reliable at all :(

The author initially writes,<p>&gt; Before we get into the struggles of working remote, [...]<p>but then never gets around to describe those struggles. I wonder what they are.

I have been self employed, working from wherever, for just shy of 7 years now.<p>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.<p>Here are some benefits, in no particular order:<p>- 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<p>- 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<p>- By changing my surroundings according to my mood, I can &#x27;hack&#x27; 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)<p>- I don&#x27;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 &#x27;push&#x27; my next day back<p>And here are some downsides, in no particular order:<p>- 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<p>- 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<p>- It can be hard to gauge how you stack up to others if you&#x27;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<p>For me, the benefits have far outweighed the downsides, and I can&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;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&#x27;t rehash what others have said, but i do have an experience that may be different than most.<p>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&#x2F;analyst.<p>As a general rule, the company allows occasional remote work for select teams (mostly just IT), but as a whole, it&#x27;s against remote work. I am the only developer (or IT for that matter) that is full remote.<p>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&#x27;t have remote workers<p>- no advancement possibilities. I&#x27;m already sr. so I don&#x27;t care)<p>- jealousy issues. not a real problem aside from I can&#x27;t tell people I am working in another state for the winter<p>- you are an inconvenience to everyone. every meeting requires the phone or remote desktop just for you<p>- all processes have to take into account 1 remote worker<p>- missed team events, although I attend most of them since I only live 1.5 hours away (most of the year)<p>- VPN... if there are issues, I am the first to know<p>- expectation of 8-5 m-f. Although I actually prefer it because routine is good and sets defined work&#x2F;life time<p>Ultimately, if you are not sure if you would like to be a remote worker, I wouldn&#x27;t recommend it at a company that isn&#x27;t at least 50% remote (or at least the team you would be on).

I think working remotely has it&#x27;s pluses and minuses. I&#x27;m a few years in and have only had one in-office programming contract.<p>The positive is that I am entirely focused on GSD. I&#x27;m not sure about everywhere, but the place I was in-house at was fairly sparse and focused as well. I dread the thought of ever working at a place with pool tables or other distractions.<p>Working remotely puts a lot of trust in my work. They trust that I&#x27;m doing what I say I&#x27;m doing when I track hours. I&#x27;ve never had an issue disputing hours, so that&#x27;s not a negative.<p>Working remotely pegs you as one of the smart ones. Apparently I earned the right to work remotely? I don&#x27;t know, it&#x27;s just work to me, but I also do a lot of short-term contracts, so the image is probably different.<p>This leads to the big downside. Out of sight, out of mind, out of personally caring. This somewhat goes both ways, but it&#x27;s difficult to make text friends. Humans are simply wired for face-to-face, and I don&#x27;t think Skype really replaces that.<p>This causes some problems with impedance. If I ask a question, I would need an answer right away because that&#x27;s likely a blocking issue. If everyone else is on lunch, in a meeting, and so on, it leaves me hanging.<p>A positive is seeing a whole lot of codebases. It really helps you understand where you and everyone else is in the pecking order. It also brings up a lot of issues surrounding the meaning of good -vs- bad code, experts programmers, and so on. Exposure has shown me that these concepts are murky at best.<p>A negative is that some companies try to pay lower, selling remote work as a benefit. It isn&#x27;t. I often have to split my day and work odd hours to keep myself on the same page as everyone else, nullifying whatever inconvenience I gain from not going to and from a local company.<p>But, really, it all comes down the company that you are working with. It is obvious when they haven&#x27;t worked with outside developers, so I think it&#x27;s a lot more about the company than the actual ability to work remotely.<p>Remote work is just work, and I don&#x27;t think that, outside of direct human interaction and speed of communication, there is a significant difference between in-house and remote. Either way, code is written and shipped.

Does Stripe (presumably where they work) still allow full-time remote work? I looked at their job board and it seems like none of the job posts are for remote positions.

It&#x27;s great to hear that some people manage to love working remotely. In this case, there&#x27;s &#x2F;some&#x2F; difference in time zones (3h). Generally, people don&#x27;t seem to mention the time zone difference in the commentary each time articles like this gets posted on HN, but I&#x27;d actually love to hear where people are working remote from&#x2F;to, since there can literally be a night and day difference.

8 years in here. The team you work with really makes the difference. Not sure I ever plan on moving to in-house.

&quot;I have 5-6 weekly 1:1s with different people with no agenda.&quot;<p>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.

On the subject, what are the best places to find remote jobs? (I&#x27;m a linux oriented senior sysadmin, currently going to school for data science)

I worked as an online freelancer for 6 years. I can relate to the story. Yes its scary and chalenging shift of career.

I just graduated from college any tips on landing the first remote work?

The whole reason remote work is feasible, is that the problems we deal with, as well as the politics of the companies we work for, transcend place. In other words, it’s the same as working in an office as far as the actual work and the working relationships are concerned. Sure you video chat more, and eat lunch together less, and try to find ways of addressing that difference. But, in many ways it’s the same. I wish I felt as ecstatic as some of my fellow commenters here claim to.<p>But ultimately, it’s just another way of working, and the basic unpleasantness of working in corporate America&#x2F;tech industry remains. Don’t get me wrong, I relish the ability to do my laundry when nothing is going on. But it’s not really that different, and the things that bum me out about working are mostly not to do with office space, though I do lament the move to open offices.

Just playing the Devil&#x27;s advocate here.<p>These days I work with a person who was working remote for around 5 years or so. He now works with us full time. There are somethings you forget and forgive me for saying this, you also gain a lot of bad habits. The worse among them being ability to work with a team and collaborate. You also lose out on learning from technical discussions, practices going on in the industry, colleagues who share things. And most important of all ambition that comes from peer pressure. You sort of lose out on so many things that it will hard to start working with a team again.<p>Sure if you are at the top of your game, you can drive things on your terms. But please rethink your stance. Also, its quite hard for long term remote workers to start working with teams. Many bad habits crawl to the workplace. Most important of them being dysfunctional communication, sometimes its as simple as committing code and writing documentation.<p>Remote workers can be bad cultural fits for almost any culture. Simply due to the fact that they are exposed to none.