That said, there are distractions at home, too, and you have to have a lot of discipline. I got almost nothing done in my first couple months of remote work, and it took me close to a year to get into the flow and develop a structure that actually felt productive. (And then I had the opposite problem of working too much because it's harder to draw a line between work and play.) I do miss the coworker comradery sometimes, but my wife and I also have a pretty big group of close friends that live nearby, so I get to socialize with people outside of work fairly often.
Working remotely is definitely not for everyone, but you would have to pay me a LOT of money to convince me to commute to an office every day.
That said, you’re away from coworkers with kids. That’s the sickness that doesn’t help immunity. But once you have a kid of your own, all that worry goes out the window. Don’t mean to be a party pooper, but its all reality out here
*also how does this remotemore site compare to triplebyte?
RemoteMore vs Triplebyte is an easy question.
Triplebyte: "Do you have remote opportunities? No. Right now, most of the companies we work with are hiring full-time in-office engineers. In the future, we hope to offer more remote opportunities."
--
On the remote work and getting sick, I don't have personal observations. I'll leave that question to others.
So I do recommend it, but it depends on who you work for - if they want you to sit at your desk for specific office hours, and be available instantly via Slack... or if they fill your entire day with calls, then you may as well go to an office, as that scenario I just described isn't possible.
The hardest part of remote working is stopping. People assume it's difficult to get motivated, but in fact it's knowing when to stop is the problem because you don't have the external cues of people around you winding up, shutting down computers, seeing the office emptying, the commute back. All these are cues to say Stop, You're Done. Without them you can just keep going, and that's not good.
I lived in the middle of the city because I hate commuting. Stop and go traffic sucks the life out of me and the stress of making connections on public transportation created terrible bookends to each day so I always tried to live as close to work as possible. Having a remote job allowed me to move out on the exurban edge where I have a much larger space, it's quieter, and I'm close to the mountains so in the summer I can get in a hike after work when I want. I would have gone further out but internet connectivity quickly goes from 1Gig down to unreliable 30Meg on DSL with a small band of 300Meg service in-between.
I do still make it a point to go out and socialize, which does get more challenging being in a less dense area where I haven't lived long enough to build up social connections. As far as work goes, most of the time it is better but being able to get a group together around a whiteboard can't be beat. Remote collaboration tools are constantly getting better and there are some pretty nice electronic whiteboard tools that would be great to have but the expense right now is too high. Hopefully in the years to come the price will go down. Overall I find working remotely to be one of the best benefits of my current job.
I'm not sure how I feel about it. In some ways I'd love to go back to remoting because it offers a lot of freedoms that can't exist in an office with other people. But the last five years have taught me that there is a lot of value in structure, routine, and especially physical presence.
The thing that tips the scales in favor of remoting for me is the lack of a commute. Commuting sucks and I hate it and it's terrible. I think if my office was a walk away (right now it's 50 minutes by car or 2h30m by bus), I would probably stick with working in the office. At least the coffee is free.
I agree, but structure and routine can certainly exist remotely, and while physical presence is great, remote video calls aren't a bad 2nd place. You just need a team culture where poking someone on Slack and asking if they have a few minutes to chat is a normal thing. I'm on and off calls with various members of my team all the time.
It helps enormously if the company you work for is remote across the board because then everybody is struggling with the same issues. If you have a team where some people are remote and some people are local, the local people often don't realise problems.
I've found most of the issues arise around meetings. I work 8 time zones away from the main office so it's an extra challenge. People often plan meetings at midnight my time (even regular weekly meetings), or they will forget to invite me. Sometimes people will make decisions in the hallway and forget that I wasn't in on it. Frequently people will optimise for being interrupted in person, but not online. If I need to talk to a stake holder, I'm often in a position where they have turned off notifications on chat and are 2 weeks behind on their email. I literally have to ping someone else and ask them to walk up to the stakeholder's office and knock on their door for me.
Another serious problem is that people who don't live online often have trouble identifying with you as a person when you are remote. I've had instances where people will get really angry with me because they imagine I'm someone who I'm not. Although video conferencing helps, even 5 minutes in person can make a huge difference. Make sure that the company you are doing remote work for has budgeted for some face time every year. Also realise that this means you almost certainly have to travel a bit, unless you live close to the office.
Again with respect to having a remote job in a not-completely-remote office is that you are going to be on an uneven playing field with your colleagues. I've had a PGM once literally try to sabotage me. It's no fun and the worst part is that there is almost nothing you can do. It is insanely easy for a single person to engineer it so that you are mostly powerless. You really need to be able to trust your co-workers in a way that you don't need to when on-site. This is one of the reasons I wouldn't recommend it for someone who isn't already fairly experienced with politics -- you need to be able to keep your cool and wait for your opportunities.
The other main downside is that you are almost certainly going to be at a disadvantage for promotions, etc. Management types trust people who they can see and talk to every day. No matter how good a job you are doing, things are going to sway towards the people they connect with. When remote, it's almost vital to make sure that you keep talking with people, and maintain communication through email or chatting. You need to make sure that your name also pops up on reports and projects so that management remembers that you exist. Again, if you haven't got the experience to know how to accomplish this, then you may have a rough time.
For these kinds of reasons, I highly recommend at least starting out with either part time remote (a few days in the office and a few days remote), or working on a full remote company. I would especially avoid working from a different time zone when working with a company that is not fully remote until you have a lot of experience doing remote work.
i was working in one team where everything was fine while i was in the office. as soon as i moved away i was cut off from all decisions because the rest of the team was so used to do things through local in-office chats instead of online.
in another company all our communication was online, and it didn't matter if someone was in the office or not.
You need okay level on both sides. Otherwise, the collaboration breaks down within 2-3 months.
so how do you vet companies against this?
We also follow up with the companies and the people they have hired to check if everything is going well.
So far, we haven't had problems. We will introduce company profiles soon, with remote info about the companies (e.g. how many remote vs. non-remote people work). We will probably also introduce some free built-in insurance for both parties as we scale.
Would you recommend a remote job over a job "on-site"?