
Working remotely, 4 years in - samdk
https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/02/18/working-remotely--4-years-in/
======
ibz
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.

~~~
padobson
_Or I can drive to the city whenever I feel like._

Imagine how open the highways would be if this was how everyone worked/lived.

Clear the highways. Save the planet. Work from home.

~~~
Buttons840
How can we make this happen? I've been thinking of this as a potential startup
idea. What hardware/software can we build that would make companies feel
comfortable with many remote workers, and also ensure those remote workers are
able to collaborate and work efficiently?

~~~
bproven
The comfort level would be: are you completing your projects on time? Good.
You are not? (b/c goofing off at home instead of working) Goodbye! That would
do it.

~~~
Buttons840
That's something employers have been able to do for thousands of years, and
yet working remotely remains fairly rare. So I don't agree that "that would do
it".

~~~
bproven
I don't know, I really think at its core it is that simple. I worked remote
for 12 years as a developer, sysadmin/devops (multi-hat deal with a small
company) with no issues whatsoever. I got my projects done. It does require
discipline, good communication skills and a bit of organization, but if you
don't have those skills already you are bound to fail in any endeavour IMO.
But you are correct it is not common. Probably b/c historically: 1) there is
the belief if we can't see you you are screwing around 2) Employers do take a
chance that they are getting someone who does not have the skills to thrive in
that type of environment (who wants to spend all the resources hiring/training
to find out)

EDIT: Also if you have the skills to work remote (or partial remote) you will
never want to go back to the old "must be in the office every day" job again
;)

------
ganzolo
I had a totally different experience from the author of this article. Maybe,
this was due to the fact that I was working remotely for 4 years with
different startups maniacs.

Biggest issues were :

\- Nobody sees how much you are invested into your day to day work. They just
see bunch of commits / builds and the little gray or green presence indicator
on your messenger app. But if you are struggling for 3 days x 10 hours per day
to fix a bug, chances are high that nobody will realize this.

\- You're constantly alone. Even if nowadays we have great communications
tools, the reality is that you'll spend 95% of your time alone in front of a
computer in an empty apartment. I am excluding working from coffee shops
because of the noise and bad setup (chair/table), this can only work once in a
while.

\- There is no separation between private and professional life, unless you
have an office space and you dedicate yourself to go there on a daily basis
(which is at the end equivalent of having an in-house job...). Being in the
same place where you live and work makes it very challenging to not think of
job in your private time or vice-versa. I also have to be honest and tell you
that temptation of using your working time to do private things are much
higher when you are at home.

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

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

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

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

~~~
sotojuan
> Being in the same place where you live and work makes it very challenging to
> not think of job in your private time or vice-versa.

Can you expand on this? I do not work remotely right now but as programmers,
we're problem solvers. Often times I leave the office after 8 hours but the
problem I was solving is still in my head through the night. However, I do not
open work stuff over the weekend or in the evening unless there's an
emergency. Do you find yourself doing work stuff after your working time or
just thinking about it? Also, do you have a work computer and a personal
computer, or both in one? Back when I first joined my company was cheap and I
used my personal laptop for work, and it made it hard to ignore work stuff
when I wasn't in the office.

~~~
ahtu123
Imagine it's 8pm and you try to work 9-5. You get an email or slack message,
you just quickly glance at it and it sounds like there's a tiny fire somewhere
in the system that you know how to fix/respond to. It's very easy to sit down
on the computer since it's literally a few feet away and get sucked into an
30-90min debacle multiple times per week. I use the same computer for
games/internet time and work so that definitely doesn't help. I just don't
have room to set up another desktop since my home office has a nice desk,
monitor, chair already.

~~~
sotojuan
That can happen with onsite jobs too. My solution is I don't check work email
and barely check Slack after work.

If I worked remote I'd do that I do now - request a work only laptop.

------
biztos
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!

~~~
randomdata
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.

------
bkovacev
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.

\- Dedicate more time to my SO.

\- Learn Elixir/Erlang during the weekends.

~~~
nul_byte
> 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?

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

~~~
bkovacev
Exactly this. Building systems that work for myself has probably been one of
the hardest things and is taking a lot of trial and error.

------
blunte
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.

~~~
yAnonymous
>It's not always easy to work for a month from a Caribbean island while
squeezing in scuba certifications

(ง'-')ง

~~~
andrewflnr
Is that a fisticuffs emoticon? I'm stealing it.

~~~
blunte
In this case I think it's a _flex muscles_ illustration. Either way, it works!

------
plekter
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.

~~~
mettamage
Question: how does promotion work within the company you work remotely at?

~~~
plekter
Yearly reviews, where high performers get recognized and promoted. My career
progression has matched that of my peers, so I have no complaints there.

------
justonepost
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.

~~~
plekter
> 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 :)

~~~
justonepost
In rare instances it'll work if you're incredibly in the top 5% of gifted.
But, the thing with that, is only 5% of engineers are in that group.

~~~
plekter
So you see it as a general career progression impediment - even the gifted
gets "slowed down" progression wise?

Are you talking from personal experience, or guessing? I strongly suspect a
lot of this depends heavily on how the talent review process works in the
company this takes place in. A gifted engineer will likely get recognized
anyways, but an average engineer will need the review process to look beyond
face value.

------
g051051
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.

------
keyboardmonkey
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.

------
program
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.

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

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

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

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

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

------
markbnj
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.

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

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

------
nickjj
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).

~~~
joncrane
What level of urbanization is your neighborhood?

~~~
nickjj
Typical suburbs. Nothing like a big city, but houses and small businesses are
all over the place.

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

~~~
yla92
We use zoom ( [https://zoom.us](https://zoom.us) ) and works quite well.
Beside that, I heard a lot of good things about Jitsi (
[https://jitsi.org](https://jitsi.org) )

~~~
BillFranklin
Yeah, Zoom has been good for us. It's good quality, and you can still see
other participants during a presentation.

On the free plan there's a one hour cap to meetings, which is ideal as nobody
wants to be in a meeting longer than an hour.

~~~
Dunedan
> It's good quality, and you can still see other participants during a
> presentation.

I regularly use Hangouts, Slack calls and Zoom and I totally agree. Especially
quality of Slack calls is awful. Just earlier today we had a call, where audio
was delayed ~2s while video was perfectly fine.

And Zooms grid view is so nice. I wonder why their competitors don't offer the
same functionality.

------
blauditore
The author initially writes,

> Before we get into the struggles of working remote, [...]

but then never gets around to describe those struggles. I wonder what they
are.

~~~
ratsimihah
He mentions being lonely during the 3rd and 8th months and provides links I
believe.

~~~
ubernostrum
_He mentions being lonely during the 3rd and 8th months and provides links I
believe._

The author's name is in large type at the top of the page.

~~~
jvns
I think on about 30% of my blog posts that end up on the hacker news front
page:

* someone refers to me as "he"

* someone else corrects them to "she"

* an extended argument ensues about whether "he" is a gender neutral pronoun, whether "they" is a gender neutral pronoun, whether it matters if you refer to a woman as "he" or not, whether the original author cares whether they're referred to as "he" or "she", and on and on and on :)

From my perspective (since I've seen this argument so many times) this
argument is very repetitive and doesn't add a lot of value to the HN comments
-- I think it would be much better if people just accepted being corrected
with "it's she" and then go back to discussing the actual contents of the
article in an interesting way (in this case, a lot of people are sharing their
experiences with working remotely and it's been really interesting to see what
everyone's different experiences are!)

so if you care about this topic I would humbly suggest that you don't comment
further about pronouns and instead maybe share your experiences with working
remotely! =)

~~~
blauditore
...and my initial question still isn't answered. :/

~~~
ratsimihah
Have you read [https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/06/06/working-
remote/](https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/06/06/working-remote/) and
[https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/06/06/working-
remote/](https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/06/06/working-remote/) ?

There might be answers in there if not in this article.

------
err4nt
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!

------
inertiatic
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.

------
embersdev
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).

~~~
anthony_barker
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.

~~~
embersdev
We have 1 primary office and then a couple of smaller offices in different
states.

I generally live by your basic rule. I actually respond better than the
majority of the people in the office.

There are two types of people i have noticed that are challenged the most with
working remote. Those that need lots of social interaction and those with
smaller kids at home. One simply hates the isolation and the other is usually
too distracted.

------
dizzystar
I think working remotely has it's pluses and minuses. I'm a few years in and
have only had one in-office programming contract.

The positive is that I am entirely focused on GSD. I'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.

Working remotely puts a lot of trust in my work. They trust that I'm doing
what I say I'm doing when I track hours. I've never had an issue disputing
hours, so that's not a negative.

Working remotely pegs you as one of the smart ones. Apparently I earned the
right to work remotely? I don't know, it's just work to me, but I also do a
lot of short-term contracts, so the image is probably different.

This leads to the big downside. Out of sight, out of mind, out of personally
caring. This somewhat goes both ways, but it's difficult to make text friends.
Humans are simply wired for face-to-face, and I don't think Skype really
replaces that.

This causes some problems with impedance. If I ask a question, I would need an
answer right away because that's likely a blocking issue. If everyone else is
on lunch, in a meeting, and so on, it leaves me hanging.

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.

A negative is that some companies try to pay lower, selling remote work as a
benefit. It isn'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.

But, really, it all comes down the company that you are working with. It is
obvious when they haven't worked with outside developers, so I think it's a
lot more about the company than the actual ability to work remotely.

Remote work is just work, and I don'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.

------
riprock
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.

~~~
jvns
I can't speak for the job board, but there are dozens of full-time remote
developers (including me, obviously), and I see remotes devs being hired
frequently.

------
scarlac
It's great to hear that some people manage to love working remotely. In this
case, there's /some/ difference in time zones (3h). Generally, people don't
seem to mention the time zone difference in the commentary each time articles
like this gets posted on HN, but I'd actually love to hear where people are
working remote from/to, since there can literally be a night and day
difference.

------
cmorgan8506
8 years in here. The team you work with really makes the difference. Not sure
I ever plan on moving to in-house.

------
cagenut
"I have 5-6 weekly 1:1s with different people with no agenda."

Wow, five meetings a week not even counting project or departmental recurring
status meetings or random crop up ones? That would totally annihilate any hope
of the uninterrupted 3+ hour stretch it takes to do any real work.

~~~
jvns
I think managing calendar fragmentation is important! Added a "calendar
management" section to the post to address this :)

here are the strategies I use to keep my calendar under control:

\- try to cluster meetings together (have a 1.5 hour meeting block so I only
get interrupted once)

\- block off 4-hour chunks of “focus time” in my calendar. People are good at
respecting that.

\- add an “end of day” block on my calendar at 5:30pm EST every day. This
means that people know not to schedule things with me after I’m done for the
day. Sometimes it’s unavoidable because 5:30 EST is 2:30 in the home office,
but people always ask if it’s okay to schedule something after my end of day.

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

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

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

------
draw_down
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.

But ultimately, it’s just another way of working, and the basic unpleasantness
of working in corporate America/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.

------
kamaal
Just playing the Devil's advocate here.

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.

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.

Remote workers can be bad cultural fits for almost any culture. Simply due to
the fact that they are exposed to none.

