Remote working – Bringing sanity to mind and lessons worth learning (opens in new tab)

This times a hundred thousand percent. I’m battling this hard right now at my workplace, some of my developers live a good 45 min drive from work and that’s just insane to ask them to be in their car for 7.5 hours/week.

So what did I do? I went “against” the company policy and had each of my team members work at least 1 day a week from home, now they’re up to 2-3 days depending on the week (humorous part is during the summer they’re in the office more cause it’s more quiet than home cause their kids are out for the summer lol)

So we’re still a “work from office” company but I run our team how I want and surprise - zero attrition in 3 years on my team, we meet most of our commitments, developer happiness/engagement is up on my team, our time to first response for production issues is great and all because of a mutual understanding that regardless of the “rules” I’ll take care of my guys/gals.

I've been working remotely for most of my children's lives. Kids learn. Yes, there are some days where they don't understand, but you teach them and everything works out fine. That is no more of a learning curve than all people go through when learning to work remotely. Communication is different, work schedules differ... kids just part of the process of learning to work well in a remote environment.

As far as flexibility goes, I prefer remote work. I'm OK with office work is the commute is short. But I hate 100% flexibility. I do appreciate the ability to make exceptions to the norm as needed, but if everyone is 100% flexible, I find that is just makes you unsure where people are going to be each day, and doesn't really focus the working habits into one mold or the other. Either way can work, but the least productive teams I've ever been on have been mixed between remote and office.

> As a hiring manager, what I’ve found is that there aren’t so many people who truly want to work from home all the time.

I think you might be surprised how many people truly want to give up 40 of their best hours a week at all. Reality is that most people need to work for an income, which, as you’ve laid out for remote work, allows them to do things that they want to do with their lives. I know many people who would quit working today if their rent was paid, food guaranteed to be on the table, and they could travel a little or pursue some other hobbies.

> Rather, what most people want is flexibility and compromise.

Yup that's all I want.

I want to be in the office for many things, and I wouldn't want to do them remotely. Important meetings, and discussions, just getting to know people, I want to be there.

et other times home to get some life tasks done easier (kids), or just hunker down and pound out some work for a while.

My love for remote work isn't "remote only" but a lot of news stories about "remote" really mix the ideas and "remote often" and "remote only" are very very different ideas for me.

I've been working remotely for over a decade. I love it because I get to spend more time with my family and have more time to work on my side business. This is mostly because there is no commute. I also have an office (I rent it myself) that I can go to if I want to get away from my house.

I really don't want a job that's partially remote. I enjoy working 100% remote. Work/life balance really depends on discipline. I turn everything off at around 5pm, unless there is an emergency.

Managers also need to know how to manage remote employees. I've run into issues where a manager doesn't know how to effectively communicate over email/skype, etc, and it results in miscommunications.

I've been working remotely for years, since before I had kids and now when I do, and it works great for me.

I get to have breakfast and lunch with my family every day, which also means I can help out with the kids.

I get more sleep, since I don't need to spend half an hour in the car (and when I do go into the office, I have to get up earlier, because traffic).

I think the key to having this work well, especially when you have kids, is to have a separate room setup as a home office, so you can close the door and be in work mode. I know it might be a luxury that not everyone can afford, but personally I wouldn't work remotely without it.

Your points are balanced and reflects quite well what I look for.

I usually have the mindset to be in everyday of the week 9-5 and that’s how I start my week.

But realistically, as the week progress, life gets in the way, I stay late one day in the office, wake up a bit late, etc. So by end of week I am always getting in around 10:30 or just working from home. Also, as honest as I can be, I deliver much more and don’t see my job as a burden/stressor if they grant me this autonomy. It is funny but my wife much rather have me 9-5 because I work less hours this way.

You nailed it.

Our HQ is outside DC and most new hires (at least one my product) are local. But, we have great flexibility - we can work from home on demand from day 1. And we regularly let employees go permanently remote when their personal situations change.

Prospective employees are always glad to hear that's one of the perks working here. Especially those that come from government contracts, where being on-site with a client is generally preferred, if not required.

> Then I had kids, and that distinction became much harder.

The solution is to rent an office for yourself, or you can work from co-working hubs if you're more on the extrovert side. Even without kids having a separate work space helps a lot in keeping the work/life balance in check.

Personally, I tend to work much longer hours when I'm remote.

Some of that is that the commute is shorter, so I can start work earlier and stop it later without while keeping the same amount of time at home.

Some of that is that my lunch breaks are typically much shorter. I don't have to take time to go to a restaurant if I fail to pack a lunch in the morning, and I'm much less likely to spend a while after lunch just chit-chatting with my colleagues.

A big part of it is that I just don't mind working longer hours when I'm remote, because the experience of working is more pleasurable - fewer distractions, I can listen to music without headphones, the lighting is much more pleasant (I made sure to give myself a window office at home), the people furnishing my home office were kind enough to buy me a chair that doesn't make my back ache, etc. etc. At an office, when the end of the day rolls around, I can't wait to get out of there. Working remotely, I'd rather finish up whatever I was in the middle of before shoving off for the day.

I think consenting explicitly to a 10 hour day would be a mistake. Remote work shouldn’t be a privilege you pay for with more work. When I work from home I generally set a goal to finish something that day. If it takes longer than 8 hours I’ll do overtime but if I am done at 2 pm I may also call it a day.

It really depends on the company; the culture is a huge issue. Be wary of any company where remote workers are not a big percentage of the employees - it will be a constant, up-hill battle against negative perception. Even the best companies, against their best intentions, will tend to view equivalent remote employees as more negative than their local counterparts. It's just human nature to place people we can see and easily interact with as more important than those "others". I think a good chunk of that goes away once established, and everyone knows you, but even then I think there's a stead decay in your reputation that you need to fight against.

As for the personal effects of remote work, I find them almost entirely awesome, but I have a wife and son that I can interact with, but who are also out of the house during the day. You get to schedule your day more in your liking. I'm more productive first thing in the morning, and then once again in late evening. In the afternoon, I prefer to get up and move around more, as I get sleepy. Plus, you can generally live a heathier life, as you can go for walks, exercise, do chores, etc. when you are having lulls in productivity.

I'm back to a local company now, and switching from local to remote to local has definitely highlighted a lot of the differences. It's sooo much easier to maintain perception when you are local; if your manager or others have concerns you can see it and chat with them about things quickly and easily. My local boss knows why things might be taking longer, because I'm talking to him, intermittently every day.

It's also easier to come up to speed when working locally, a 15 minute face-to-face talk is easily worth an hour of remote slack/video chatting. Not to mention that text chats (even with slack) tends to suffer a lot more from misreads and misunderstandings of intentions. If you and I meet in the morning and I see you are cranky because you were dealing with your upset toddler all morning, I'm probably going to commiserate with you a bit before asking you tech questions, or I might skip them for now. Over Slack, I don't know that, and so I'm likely going to accidentally bug you and you, against your best desires, are going to respond more curtly, which will rub me the wrong way, then suddenly everything is more negative.

Definitely, the best way to do remote is to either know your boss ahead of time, or do local work for a while (months) and then transition to remote. Then the trust is built up, the tech transfer has largely happened, and generally everyone gets to know each other better first.

But when it works, I find it awesome.

Why?

1 your reducing your effective hourly rate - and presumably your salary is less for remote. 2 It Development is a salaried role so you in theory have no fixed hours.

I've been working remotely for about nine months now and use my kids kindergarten schedule as my hard stop so don't accidentally overwork. Other peoples experiences might be different but I think guarding my work/life balance is much easier working remotely.

I work from home.

My schedule is:-

6.50am wake up

7.00am start work

12.00pm lunch

1.00pm start work

5.00pm dinner

6.00pm start work

9.45pm get ready for bed

10.00pm sleep

I don't have any distractions (except the occasional quick read of HN, when I need a short mental break), don't own a tv, no kids, wear the same clothes, I eat the same meals daily and I wear headphones and listen to music.

I'll do this for 90 days and then relax on the schedule somewhat and then repeat for another 90 days.

Let me tell you. It's actually quite interesting on what you can accomplish with 13 hours of work (91 hours a week) available to you.

Elon has it right. In a compound interest sort of way, what you can achieve in 90 days (with this schedule) is akin to someone else taking 6 months or more to do the same.

Of course it means no social life. But that's for later on.

Same feeling here in France.

I get 3-4 opportunities for freelance work per week in the Paris region. I couldn't find any proposing full remote work (not just one day per week) after searching for 2 months

The funny thing is that now I work remotely for a German company from France

This was ages ago, but during on-boarding for my internship for Daimler-Benz, my boss was keen to tout the flexible work schedule. IIRC, it was "you are expected to work 37.5 hours per week; you have flexibility on exactly when; we have core hours where everyone is expected to be in; those are 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM."

IOW, "we're totally flexible on when you work that other 30 minutes per day..."

I've heard that Germany has laws that limit employers' ability to monitor worker productivity. Something like, they can only monitor groups of three or more members?

I wonder if that's a reason German employers hesitate to allow workers the freedom to work unsupervised. As a remote worker myself, I know there's a greater temptation to slack off at times; knowing that I'm accountable for remaining productive is an important motivator for me.

Nordics are the same. I might be wrong, and hope to be, but most of IT is still running few generations behind.

Lol no need to look all the way at Europe even. In the US not a single one of the big techs hires remotely still, and this I believe is a big barrier to the spread of remote hiring (“if google doesn’t hire remote, there must be some good reason - so we’re not gonna do it either!”)

I want to be at a coworking space, but WeWork is pricey for my situation. A hot desk (not reserved) at my local WeWork is over $4k a year. If that cost were subsidized by my company I might use it, but it's a significant salary hit otherwise. Additionally, it's still a very loud workspace to work in. Even with daily food/drink costs, I spend well under that at the coffee shop.

Different things work for different people, but I'm also a fan of coworking spaces. I like having the social interaction, but also the knowledge that I have a guaranteed workspace, fast WiFi, power points, etc. However, I do think a lot of big coworking chains like WeWork are in danger of morphing into the corporate offices remote working is supposed to offer an alternative to. In London, I'm seeing a lot of places spring up that are more of a hybrid between a coworking space and social space e.g. private members clubs or some restaurants and bars offering a hotdesking membership. There are also a lot of new apps where you can book a space at venues with low footfall in the day. I think it's a really exciting movement to be part of!

> Even with all the annoyances I found when working from home I had a lot of trouble “stopping” — it felt like I was always at work.

I'm curious because I never had this problem...

Did you have a dedicated computer & desk for work? Did you have a work room?

I started without a work room, but I got a work laptop & desk with none of my personal stuff on it; and none of my work stuff was on my personal devices. I put these in the kitchen where I don't normally hang out much. Once I'm done working, I go to another room where most of my personal life is. I never had this feeling that I'm "always at work", and work/life balance got strictly better than it ever was with any commute.

Libraries are also great options. Downtown branches are usually sprawling and not so busy during the week.

It is great to work where you live, what is terrible is to live where you work! :-)

I agree that remote work needs a certain personality type. You need to be self sufficient but also be willing to reach out proactively when you have problems and not keep struggling in silence as I have seen before. This is a difficult balance for some people.

As far as depression and anxiety goes I get that from my current job sitting in a cube with constant noise and interruption. I feel it’s starting to really impact my mental health negatively.

In the end i don’t think remote work is for everybody. Some people will thrive with it and some people will thrive in an office. It’s good to know which you are.

I am grateful that I did not work remote at the start of my career (it was not an option offered to me), because it would have been hard to find the self-drive & hand-holding I needed at the beginning of my career all by myself. But I agree with you; remote work is better suited for people who are accustomed to working by themselves. It might not be for everyone. And I certainly do not recommend it at the onset of one's career.

I’m the same. I much prefer working from home and don’t suffer from the issues in this post. I think aside from having a personality well suited to remote work, my experience being an entrepreneur helps a lot. Nothing is more isolating than being a sole founder in my opinion. Working remote with a team is more than enough interaction for me. When I’m working in an office a lot of my time gets eaten in meetings that more often than not didn’t need to happen. Remote work forces the whole team to be more disciplined in how the work/time is structured.

I will say this advice seems highly tuned to a different generation than mine. I really don’t want my company talking to me about “self care” or playing weird slack games (slack itself is great for remote though).

I agree, I personally have no issue with working from home but both like my own company and am used to self motivating. I can imagine if you'd worked from an office for years then moved to remote work, you'd find it hard.

This is a really good point! Remote work has massive socio-political implications. Really enjoyed discussing this aspect of remote work in this podcast interview with Liam Martin, founder of Running Remote: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/s2-e10-liam-martin/id1...

But on the other hand you have to wonder about the greater social implications down the line. The invention of the car was great at first. It allowed people to get where they wanted to go faster. But as it was adopted more and more heavily, we ended up with traffic and sprawl that mean people have to spend more of their time commuting than before.

I wonder if something analogous would happen with remote work. If more companies go the remote route, wouldn't we expect them to favor employees in cheap locations that will accept less pay for the same work? And if that's the case, wouldn't more and more families be forced out of more expensive locations, even those who could afford to live there before? In other words, remote work has the possibility to exacerbate the very problems that it seeks to fix.

This. Rent for an efficiency apartment within walking distance of my work is 4k a month. I rent a 3 bedroom house 40 minutes away for 1400. The ability to work remotely helps keep costs down significantly.

I work for a startup that does not have funding. I moved from socal to Tijuana and my cost of living is about 40-60% less. I could not continue working on this startup without being remote.

In general the recommendation is that it’s best to have everyone remote. Mixed teams usually don’t work well.

I experienced the same issues at a previous company, and wrote about the (somewhat unusual) experience at https://medium.com/@RayNicholus/a-farang-geek-in-thailand-th.... After I moved to a 100% remote company, I did find that most of these issues disappeared, but I think it is still possible for remote culture to thrive at a company that isn't 100% remote, as long as the culture is remote-first.

>resentment by people who don't like making special accommodations for remote workers definitely happens.

Resentment can go both ways

Manager changes are often indicative of what I perceive to be the biggest issue: cultural attitudes towards people that are not in the office.

If the organization understands that you're a full participant and they don't blink when you say you're remote, that's great and will lead to success.

If, however, you're perceived to be tele-shirking or "wink wink remote working" because of the company culture it will be a big issue. I would say this could be resolved by some focused in-person time to talk about norms and how to collaborate and share success, but it takes a good manager to do this. If the manager wants butts in seats and remote is not a company-wide norm, then that may be what you're left with, unfortunately.

I actually think it may be a tactic for getting more votes. You get the casual upvoters who like remote and only read the headline before they clicked it. But then you can also pick up people who don't like it if they read that far in. But then you can also get some more of the pro-remotes who read all the way to the end.

I agree as I've seen this happen too many times. In future I plan to apply only for positions in companies where remote work is not optional (no offices).

It could be something like "Most people want to work remotely but cannot, and once some do, they find out about the downsides first-hand."

Have you tried a co-working space? For me it helped me a lot

I used to think I was good at working remotely, but lately have had a similar revelation. It's magnified by the fact that my entire team is remote, so even when I go into the office, it's not the team's office - it's a remote office. I can focus pretty well at home, as my kids are adults and my wife works, but this aspect of it is becoming a problem that I am looking for other ways to solve in another way than "go to the office and talk to people".

Sounds like your only social life is from work.

I am a data scientist with little to nothing in common with my colleagues (particularly on the engineering side), outside of us working for the same company. I'd rather spend my time with my wife and kids, pursuing my hobbies, and generally being outdoors. Not having to commute or waste hours pretending to be interested in my colleague's lives outside of work is a huge benefit. Side conversations occurring at the office which are beneficial are a rare occurrence - put more specifically, I am willing to risk missing out on in office perks to benefit my own life. When I hit my financial number, I won't write code, conduct analysis or do anything near a computer screen again.

Introvert here. Just being around people is usually straining. I guess I also suffer some kind of social anxiety or whateverthehellitis. It's difficult to relax and focus with people around.

When I commuted, the commute was the best part of the day because I got to relax and sit alone in my car. Stepping out of the car at the company parking lot was always nauseating.

That said I'm still glad I needn't commute anymore. Life is short, I will die. I feel like I can do better with my life than spend it sitting in a car.

Which “things that make it unintentionally difficult to attend” meetings for remote people are you referring to?

That can all easily be fixed. I'm currently working on a short term job at Statnett in Oslo. The office is all open plan but there are loads of small sound proofed rooms of various sizes that you can use for a work conversation. It's frowned upon to have a long or loud conversation at your desk. You just pick up your laptop and go to a little conference room. Some are just big enough for three people but they all have a big screen and conferencing tools.

Each floor also has an area where you can relax with a cup of tea or coffee and read the newspaper.

Desks are all motorised so you can adjust the height and use them standing if you like, the desks are not personal although those who work most of the time in the office do use the same desk all the time.

The environment is quiet, the temperature is pleasant, there are automatic blinds on the windows shut out the sun when it is too strong.

For me it works really well. If I have a meeting then I go in early, find a desk and work, go to the meeting, back to the desk and do some work, then finish the day just as though it was an ordinary office day.

But I agree, there are plenty of places (I've worked in some) where all of your negative office conditions apply.

I've worked in Cambridge MA for 10ish years and lived in JP and/or Somerville for as long, not sure what you mean by unsupported? Do you mean "long commutes"?

Eliminating dead time is definitely part of it. However if a thinking based worker doesn't feel like working, it doesn't matter if they're sitting at an office. There's no way to verify whether they're thinking about a work related problem or thinking about their vacation plans. On top of that, in a lot of cases people can get away even with just blatant non-working like reading Hacker News on their work computer. Thus it's always about trust anyway. It doesn't matter much where the worker physically is.

Additionally, it's results not methods that should be managed. You want to set goals for your workers and see how they progress. Whether they achieve those goals sitting at an office or by outsouring their work to their little nephew while playing video games, it shouldn't really matter. Ultimately what matters is if the goals are achieved, as that's why you're paying the person -- not because you want them to physically be doing some specific activity.

There are certainly people who don't do well working at home, and people who try to take advantage, but as you say, everyone is different. If anything I work more when I don't work out of an office. Not only do I spend more time at my computer--since my office setup is handy at all times of day and on the weekends--but I feel more productive while I'm doing it.

For example, at the office, if I feel unmotivated (or stressed out/distracted by the noise/chatter/other people), my only real options for a context switch are to take a walk, or get a snack or coffee, none of which really gets me going again... But at home I can easily go downstairs and accomplish something like washing the dishes or a load of laundry, which gets my mind back in the right space of accomplishing tasks. And if I'm doing that and something comes up, I'm 10 seconds away from my desk and I can be back working much faster than if I were 10 minutes away at the coffee shop.

I can sort of understand the scepticism, but it's relatively easy to see whether someone is working or not. Especially if you have tools like git, and any tool that tracks tasks/progress etc.

Also, people can work less and just exist more, albeit physically closer to you.

In the end, you'll only be able to measure the amount of work they've done similarly in both cases: remote or regular. It'll be a combination of seeing the progress, understanding the tasks and gauging whether they've been done in reasonable time, etc.

You can do all of this in the case of a remote worker.

Speaking for myself, I am vastly more productive in a remote, quiet place (home). Easily 5x more productive, or perhaps even more.

I cannot understand people working mentally demanding jobs and being interrupted all the time.

I don't like your reasoning. I think it's selfish. You can always help out for the duration that you are paid for, regardless of tempo. There's almost always work to be done - cleaning up code, commenting, refactoring, documentation (api/sdk usage, help), cleaning up tasks, responding to e-mails, and so on.

I don't think it's fair that you idle while someone is paying for your time.

Someone, at the end, organized this so you can work remotely. Someone is taking care of you financially, at the end. The least you can do is do what you have agreed/promised/been contracted to do.

This only works in a job where you have a particular definition of "done." In most knowledge work, there's always something you could be working on.

> do people actually think "infinite vacation" is a perk? I like having a fixed number of vacation days that I can take without question or explanation.

It really depends on your manager and what the fixed number is going to be.

At my last job, I had "infinite" and my boss let me take six weeks over the course of a year.

At my current job, my boss would love to let me take 6 weeks (or more), but the giant behemoth of a company sets the limit at 3 weeks (but I get another week if I stay in my job for 10 years).

The loneliness is real. I've been combatting the loneliness a few ways. I think it's important that if you are working remote, you don't have 8 hours of "butt in seat" time. If the expectations are that you need a butt in a seat for 8 hour stretches, then you probably work for a company that has a bad remote work culture.

1. make lunch plans with friends and peers.

2. go to networking meetups

3. personal development unrelated to work. take a class. start a garden, build something at home. Go to the park. Take extra walks. go to the grocery store. Do things that are really annoying to do outside of normal work hours.

I don't think I'm a cliche software dev. I don't like sitting in my cave all day. I don't play video games. I don't watch much TV. It's really important for me to get human interaction beyond the workplace.

I find that as a possible introverted extrovert, working in an office sapped my social energies and I wasn't able to socialize outside of work. As a remote worker, all of my socialization is on my terms. I get to devote my energy into people that I desire to be around, while before my energy was getting drained by small track from folks, while nice people, were not people I wanted to spend my limited energy on.

In the US it's generally frowned upon to acknowledge one considers salary a very important factor, unless one is at the top of the hierarchy. There's a reason "passionate" and "mission driven" are memes in the hiring landscape here.