I've been working fully remote for about four years now.
- Commuting, public transit even in big cities leaves room for improvement.
- The open office plan. The last several offices I worked in. My laptop was pretty much right next to an adjacent co-workers. Chair to chair arms scraping.
- None of my adjacent co-workers were on my team. They were all managers for out sourced teams. In a different time zones.
- If I did need to collaborate with another team lead, there were no meeting rooms. And the wide open office space and high noise made it hard to communicate.
- My upper management, i.e. who I reported too. Worked from home most of the week. We couldn't do one on ones, or I couldn't talk to them. Because of no available meeting rooms, and as mentioned noise constraints in the open office space.
- Cost of living, why would I take the same pay in a city with four times the rent cost. With less space and amenities. When I could make the same amount remotely, and pay less rent.
As a remote employee. I can easily synchronize and work with my co-workers. No worrying about meeting rooms, or back ground noise.
I have a proper desk, and work area for development.
I can work in the environment that works best for me. Whether it's at home, or in a coffee shop researching.
I feel trusted and not micro-managed.
I don't need to stress about errands, and other daily activities.
If I do need face to face with my co-workers. We travel and see each other for in person sessions, very rare.
I'm not against on site, or in office. I'm just not interested in traveling over twenty minutes one way to work. For a non optimal office environment. That makes me less productive, than if I was at home.
It's not for everyone, and trying to fit it all one way won't work.
The other issue is tooling, and processes. Investing in the proper communication tools, zoom, slack, etc. Then having a strong documentation, and less tribal knowledge. Making it easier to work from any where.
The hard part is finding remote jobs.
The last architecture / design I wrote. Was done from my phone while waiting at the DMV.
I've worked remotely for 3 years in a biotech startup and have very similar experiences. However, I do travel one week a month, usually to the office, but sometimes to present our science. I think in-person time is useful if limited.
I negotiated a full-time work-from-home arrangement with my employer, then moved out of state to a place with no local tech industry. I think that fear of being helpless if I lost my job ultimately helped me to excel. I used time in the morning before work to start a freelance business where I would expand upon my skillset in a way my job didn't offer. Successes in that led me to pitch new technology to my employer. Over time I was promoted several times and am now lead architect.
I've since moved back to the home office where I work on-site 3 days per week (at a slight detriment to my productivity mostly due to our open office plan), but those 10 years of being home 100% of the time were huge for my career. While remote work has gotten more popular, I still think it's the best kept secret in boosting developer productivity.
An interesting aside: Our lease is up in about a year and there's talk that we'll just scatter at that point and all work from home without any home base.
I was remote at my current job for approximately 1.5 years until it abruptly ended. I was asked via e-mail (completely out of the blue) to return back to campus within the next 2 weeks. When I returned I found that they have allocated a nice little cubicle for me beside a bunch of employees who enjoy taking personal calls all day long. To say my productivity plummeted would be an understatement.
A few months went by and my manager told me that the higher-ups wanted me to be in an office (no clue as to where this order came from) so I didn't complain at all. This is not typical where I work. Offices were almost always reserved for Directors and Executive Directors so it was a bit of a shock. It even had a window! They told me I needed to be moved in by Friday (it was Monday). I moved 15 minutes after I was told the news.
I've now been in my office for 3 weeks and wish for my remote life to return. I have a light that buzzes loudly above my head that must be unfixable as our facilities seem to ignore my complaints. I also found that my room temperature is based on the average of the 4 nearby offices - one of which receives direct sunlight all day causing the room to be much hotter than average. As a result, the A/C is running in my office when it is currently 46F outside (but at least he's comfortable)...
I spend my day sitting in an uncomfortable chair (at-least it's ergonomic - according to the stickers), working on an under-powered laptop that requires administrative access to install software (...I work in a software department).
The good news is it's 4:30pm and I'm heading home for the day! Unfortunately I live an hour away...
Being deliberately cynical: Employers need to make some kind of concessions to attract workers, they'd rather die than offer something like a four day week whereas remote work both retains the same general expectations in terms of what's produced (perhaps a bit more if your employees have been treating the commute as part of the work day, as they should imo) and they're probably able to sell themselves on some dream future where they can hire developers even further away for much less and swap any one out with another whenever they want.
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Fully remote work surely only works in companies who hire no junior devs? Where are they supposed to build up their skillset if they haven't already got a network of developer friends? This seems like the biggest weakness of remote work at the moment from a company perspective.
From a personal perspective I do have questions about what happens a society where huge swathes of people will be able to almost totally evade social interactions and interpersonal relationships from day to day. I definitely would be best with a mix of remote and on-site if only to stop myself from going a bit weird.
Well written article. I have worked remote on and off since 2004. I think you can perfectly do your job remotely. There is a social function that offices fulfill since we are social monkeys. Full remote work can lead to isolation.
The open office plan is not efficient and leads to less collaboration than traditional private offices. Most of my clients are not local so one will work remotely no matter what.
"I'm working from home today because I need to be able to focus on this project."
I'm going to start using this as a reason on my Work From Home request. Ever since our company has started requiring to add a reason, I keep inventing excuses when really I just can't be productive in our open office.
Cheap, connected whiteboards that feel snappy, cheap conference mics that can cover a mid-size room while filtering out the reverb, always-on video communication tools (@TandemHQ is going into a good direction there).
All in all, most remote communication is still going through a single, small screen, that seems very limiting to me.
- Commuting, public transit even in big cities leaves room for improvement.
- The open office plan. The last several offices I worked in. My laptop was pretty much right next to an adjacent co-workers. Chair to chair arms scraping.
- None of my adjacent co-workers were on my team. They were all managers for out sourced teams. In a different time zones.
- If I did need to collaborate with another team lead, there were no meeting rooms. And the wide open office space and high noise made it hard to communicate.
- My upper management, i.e. who I reported too. Worked from home most of the week. We couldn't do one on ones, or I couldn't talk to them. Because of no available meeting rooms, and as mentioned noise constraints in the open office space.
- Cost of living, why would I take the same pay in a city with four times the rent cost. With less space and amenities. When I could make the same amount remotely, and pay less rent.
As a remote employee. I can easily synchronize and work with my co-workers. No worrying about meeting rooms, or back ground noise.
I have a proper desk, and work area for development.
I can work in the environment that works best for me. Whether it's at home, or in a coffee shop researching.
I feel trusted and not micro-managed.
I don't need to stress about errands, and other daily activities.
If I do need face to face with my co-workers. We travel and see each other for in person sessions, very rare.
I'm not against on site, or in office. I'm just not interested in traveling over twenty minutes one way to work. For a non optimal office environment. That makes me less productive, than if I was at home.
It's not for everyone, and trying to fit it all one way won't work.
The other issue is tooling, and processes. Investing in the proper communication tools, zoom, slack, etc. Then having a strong documentation, and less tribal knowledge. Making it easier to work from any where.
The hard part is finding remote jobs.
The last architecture / design I wrote. Was done from my phone while waiting at the DMV.
I negotiated a full-time work-from-home arrangement with my employer, then moved out of state to a place with no local tech industry. I think that fear of being helpless if I lost my job ultimately helped me to excel. I used time in the morning before work to start a freelance business where I would expand upon my skillset in a way my job didn't offer. Successes in that led me to pitch new technology to my employer. Over time I was promoted several times and am now lead architect.
I've since moved back to the home office where I work on-site 3 days per week (at a slight detriment to my productivity mostly due to our open office plan), but those 10 years of being home 100% of the time were huge for my career. While remote work has gotten more popular, I still think it's the best kept secret in boosting developer productivity.
An interesting aside: Our lease is up in about a year and there's talk that we'll just scatter at that point and all work from home without any home base.
A few months went by and my manager told me that the higher-ups wanted me to be in an office (no clue as to where this order came from) so I didn't complain at all. This is not typical where I work. Offices were almost always reserved for Directors and Executive Directors so it was a bit of a shock. It even had a window! They told me I needed to be moved in by Friday (it was Monday). I moved 15 minutes after I was told the news.
I've now been in my office for 3 weeks and wish for my remote life to return. I have a light that buzzes loudly above my head that must be unfixable as our facilities seem to ignore my complaints. I also found that my room temperature is based on the average of the 4 nearby offices - one of which receives direct sunlight all day causing the room to be much hotter than average. As a result, the A/C is running in my office when it is currently 46F outside (but at least he's comfortable)...
I spend my day sitting in an uncomfortable chair (at-least it's ergonomic - according to the stickers), working on an under-powered laptop that requires administrative access to install software (...I work in a software department).
The good news is it's 4:30pm and I'm heading home for the day! Unfortunately I live an hour away...
=======
Fully remote work surely only works in companies who hire no junior devs? Where are they supposed to build up their skillset if they haven't already got a network of developer friends? This seems like the biggest weakness of remote work at the moment from a company perspective.
From a personal perspective I do have questions about what happens a society where huge swathes of people will be able to almost totally evade social interactions and interpersonal relationships from day to day. I definitely would be best with a mix of remote and on-site if only to stop myself from going a bit weird.
The open office plan is not efficient and leads to less collaboration than traditional private offices. Most of my clients are not local so one will work remotely no matter what.
I'm going to start using this as a reason on my Work From Home request. Ever since our company has started requiring to add a reason, I keep inventing excuses when really I just can't be productive in our open office.
- People tend to conflate remote work with async work. Most companies, managers and also developers don’t actually want to work async though.
- The tooling isn’t there yet.
- People expect that being remote means being undistracted and invisible which feels good but harms social cohesion
All in all, most remote communication is still going through a single, small screen, that seems very limiting to me.
i.e. A can see (at least) one of B's screens, and B can see (at least) one of A's screens at the same time as talking to them.
That's the tool I'm missing to be able to work productively remotely.