I am in this boat now. . . and find it really tough. Many others I know feel the same way but it is rarely talked about. How do you get over the social isolation of being remote?
For work, you're not going to do it alone. Someone on the HR side (or just general management, if the company is still quite small) is going to have to be a willing sounding board for remote employee concerns.
On the social side, this might be supporting a policy (as Mapbox did, maybe still does) of flying remotes to the holiday and other big parties, as well as, if able, just having them in every month or two to work alongside the non-remotes and make those connections. When I first started, I'd fly from Portland to DC for a week every 6-8 weeks. It helped that I lived in DC prior for five years (before Mapbox), so it felt like a natural connection.
On the technical and process side, we had a policy of things not existing (or not existing properly) unless they were in written form. This included decisions, context, back-and-forth reasoning, announcements, etc. We used GitHub for non-code "tickets" this way, almost like an internal blog and topic-focused discussion forum. This broke down in later years, but even to the scale of dozens of people was a great way to make sure that being 3,000 miles away and three hours "behind" wasn't as isolating.
For the local community part, go to meetups. Organize a weekly/biweekly social gathering with likeminded friends or peers. Work in coffee shops or other places out of the house. I found that I went stir crazy when I first started remote, because I wouldn't leave the house and needed some human contact. Placing all of that expectation on your employer and not on yourself is unreasonable. It takes effort.
We are working on making this process more scalable at Aether’s Pro version, it is especially useful for remote companies as you mentioned. It helps that we are a remote company as well, eating your own dog food is the fastest way to improve. If you’d like to get on the pilot, hit me up and I’ll add you in.
It feels weird and intruding to me still after years of doing it, but it works. I don't feel left out, I don't feel isolated, and while I often feel like an annoyance, everyone tells me that isn't the case.
Also, make sure the communication systems work well. It's invaluable to me to be able to make a video call and just have it work, to turn that one on one call into a group call, to share my screen and notes, to know that everyone on the team has a headset and knows how to use it.
Without that, it just makes the communication that much harder, which amplifies those feelings of isolation and being an "outsider".
The commute may be up to a 1 hour for some members, but it addresses the isolation challenge.
We also try to bring the entire company together in-person once per year an at annual tech conference.
A good remote culture allows someone in any timezone to be part of it or it loses the greatest advantage of remote working.
If working together is the only social activity the person has, he's not cut out for remote work.
Culturally, the concept of remote work is not well understood in countries like the Philippines and India. The occasional social "meeting" is more to convince their family members they have a "real job" with physical place of business.
I know others who now do remote and absolutely love it. From what I understand though they are in my same situation but it just doesn’t bother them. It all depends on your personality and what you are looking for.
Perhaps find a local coop workspace where you can go meet other engineers in your situation but then is that even remote anymore?
The main reason I still don't work remote is because all the remote roles seem to pay so much less than my non-remote role(s).
Is that common? Anyone else find that?
- its a global talent pool, so in raw dollars everyone should be on a level playing field (ie, compete for SF Bay wages no matter where you are in the world since that is generally the top wage market)
- market rate for your current location (ie, whenever you choose to reside, you get paid an amount that provides a comfortable standard of living there, somewhat influenced by what local wages for your role would be - we won't round down if you're in a place where dev salaries are unusually low relative to other industries, but we will round up a bit to be competitive if you're in a market where they're high)
- "remote is a perk" so take less pay in exchange for the freedom
Personally, I currently work at a shop who is doing the second version and everyone seems happy enough with it. I'd never work somewhere who was trying to pitch remoteness as part of the comp package, and I think there are only a handful of companies out there who peg their wages to the most expensive markets in the world (I generally see this kind of position pushed by self-branded "expats" who want to metaphorically live like kings in cheap areas).
Unfortunately there are a lot of companies who have decided they're going to go remote as a cost-savings measure, and that cost-savings mentality permeates everything about the business - including trying to sell being remote as a perk with value and lower wages to go with it.
As soon as you move beyond trivial software projects the true effort is in the domain which depends on visibility and communication. You can do this with remote but I think it actually costs more outside of all but the highest tier labour markets.
We really need to work to define remote as a supply sourcing solution and kill the notion of a cost control solution, otherwise we'll never be able to build fully integrated delivery teams out of globally-distributed people.
Everyone trades things off differently. I couldnt be more happier. When i was making more money; i had more debt and less time. That equation only gets higher as you get more senior. So yeh, i couldnt care less a google grad is making more then me - i dont work for an evil company, i can work flexibly, i can do overtime without having to travel, i can literly get in my car, travel 1000miles, setup my 4g next to a beach, and goto work. When i have a children i dont have to be an absent parent.
Money / Time / Happiness. Pick 2.
Work of the future will need to be flexible. I envisage the rat race of the future being for unskilled labour.
Also, I always work from coffee shops, because I like having humans around.
One way to achieve this need to socialize is to work out of a co-working space or coffee shop.
Being out of the loop on decisions is a combination of a company with a mix of remotes and company locations who would benefit from better documentation/communications practices. In practice, it's also something remote workers often just need to be more proactive about.
The latter is really about separating work as social activity from work as work. You arguably lose something in the process but, if you're remote in a different location, you're not going to be at work happy hours, other gatherings, or software league. What you can do is join other local groups of your choosing.
They’re super pleasant and a great way to break up the day and they really help me get to know the people I work with on a personal level.
I would really recommend setting something like that up with your teammates and coworkers or at least being an advocate for such a thing!
One way of getting over isolation is to work in a share office. But even getting out to the library, or a cafe can be good. I used to work in different places, Museums with wifi, art centers, Uni's, almost anywhere.
Loneliness and isolation is often cited as a downside of remote work, but as someone who doesn't like to mix work/personal and has a healthy personal social life, I just can't see it being an issue for everyone.
- remote-first meetings; is someone is remote / in another office, everyone takes the call from their laptops. That way no one ends up being forgotten on a screen in a room full of people.
- habitually reverting to written communication, so that information doesn't get lost in 1:1 conversations. That means writing thought processes into tickets, so folks can search for things later. We worked across 3 timezones (including PT to IST, ~12 hours off) so async communication was key.
- not having a central office. "Everyone is remote" wasn't perfect, but there wasn't a true home office in the same way as my current company. For example, it was considered rude to "@here" in the general chat channel for things like donuts, because hey, many folks are in other states/countries, and don't need to hear about y'alls treats. Little things like that make a big difference in employee experience.
> it takes a real commitment from the leadership to fully integrate remote team members
This is so true. I thought this would only be manageable for relatively small companies, and that it was natural for Silicon Valley companies to loose this culture as they grow rapidly, so it's very inspiring to see this kind of commitment from a company as large as Stripe.
Bbbut the only good engineers are in the Bay Area!!!! /s
I was one of the first two simul-hire remotes at Mapbox (when the company was ~12 people) and, until I left in 2017, the longest-term remote there at seven years. I've been fully remote for thirteen years. At Mapbox, I unofficially took on the role of internal advocate for remote culture. It wasn't always easy to be remote, but as the company grew, Eric, the CEO, was fond of saying that "everyone is remote" since more and more physical hubs for work sprang up across many timezones. It was a tough balance, particularly as increasingly more work and customer opportunities centered around the Bay Area, and the spiritual heart of the company switched coasts from the official HQ in DC to the larger and faster growing office in SF.
Personally, I can't overstate how much being a remote employee and even freelancer has impacted my quality of life and my opportunities. For the most part, I was able to focus on my work and hook in to the rest of my teammates as needed. The best times of this were when the company engineering culture was very asynchronous and allowed for it. Slack and always-on expectations, as well as much more complex software in later years, made this more difficult, but still manageable.
It wasn't without struggle, though. Often it was lonely, isolating, I felt out of the loop on some decisions, I didn't get some in-jokes and nicknames, I missed the non-holiday parties and happy hours, etc. Even with that stuff aside, it takes a real commitment from the leadership to fully integrate remote team members. Kudos to Stripe for putting themselves out there and holding themselves accountable to the goal with a public statement and metrics.
The key snippet from the Stripe announcement is this:
> improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs
The future of much of the technical work that needs to happen is remote, and I'm glad to see Stripe embrace that.