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I work mostly remotely (although I do visit my clients every now and then), and many of the pitfalls in the article are real, and I had to deal with some of the
by m0zg 7y ago
I work mostly remotely (although I do visit my clients every now and then), and many of the pitfalls in the article are real, and I had to deal with some of them.
One is the ability to work whenever the hell you want. For me this led to working in the dead of the night. I'd start at around 7PM in earnest and finish by 4AM (!). If you have a family, this is not a sustainable situation, so I had to fix that. It was surprisingly difficult to fix - I'm a night owl naturally, my best work is done late in the day, the later - the better. But I go to bed at 12AM now, which isn't too bad.
Another very real issue is the separation of work and life. That I dealt with by only doing work in one place at my house. I have a separate "work" desk, and a separate set of hardware there (computers are provided by clients), and I don't do work anywhere else. I also have different login keys on client hardware and SSH password login is disabled, so I can't log into them from my personal laptop even if I want to. Finally, I have a separate GSuite account for work Gmail, and Chrome profile, and there's no "work" chrome profile on my personal laptop. This solves the problem reasonably well, without the expense of renting an office, and time sink of adding a commute. This would have been an intolerable situation if I had small kids or a needy spouse though. I'd have to rent an office then.
WRT "mental health" issues, I feel like I'm doing all right on that front. If anything, visiting the offices is more stressful than not going anywhere. It's much noisier and much harder to focus when I'm there. But I suspect the transition would be a lot less clear cut if the office arrangement were more humane, like it was at, say, MS in early 00's - individual offices where you can close the door, library noise levels. I had one of those as late as in 2009. It was heaven compared to what you get now (including at MS). I kept my door open most of the time, but when I needed to really focus, I had the option of doing so.
I think one important thing is to keep a conversation going with whoever manages you and with your direct teammates. You don't have to get into everyone's face, but a low traffic, async Slack channel is pretty indispensable IMO, as is the brief weekly report on what's been done and what remains to be done. If this is not done, it could appear that you aren't doing much: people won't naturally make the consistent effort to go and look, and even if they do, it's often not easy to see the difficulties you've experienced. I.e. you could spend a few days debugging a gnarly issue in TF 2.0 (of which it has a surprising number), and the fix might be one line. That could very easily appear like you've been slacking off most of the week if the only info the other side has about the fix is a brief blurb in the PR.
Finally, another issue is that I feel like remote is more suitable to the kind of work which is not speculative in nature, and where you can deliver results of a predictable size at a roughly even cadence. With some of the best work I've done in my career that hasn't been so: delivery was very uneven, and I'd sometimes not submit anything for weeks on end just because I was thinking of (and prototyping) how best to do what I was trying to do. I imagine that'd be problematic in a remote arrangement, especially if you change a steep hourly rate, like I do.
If someone has found a solution to this last problem, please share.
- dredmorbius 7y agoExcellent points, corresponding strongly with my experience. When I've shifted to night schedules, it's almost always been because daylight hours impose too many interruptions. Even very slight distractions can be hugely distruptive, particularly over time. These range from ringing phones to various street and environment noise (traffic, voices, landscaping equipment, construction), conversations or activities elsewhere in the household or building. Conversations by those you know are exceptionally distracting, far beyond all apparent proportion. The low chatter of a cafe can be tolerable, but a significant other, manager, or co-worker having a quiet converstation nearby will grab your attention, because it could be consequential. If you don't have full control of your workspace, you've got the added issues of insufficient working room, things not remaining where you put them, and disagreements over organisation and environment (hot/cold, light/dark, windows open/closed, music/none, metal or classical, etc., etc.). Dominion matters tremendously. The long-term vs. speculative projects issue is one that seems to hinge on trust and communications channel quality. In-person, in-office work benefits by butts-on-seats and the fact that your manager can personally and directly verify you're working on what you said you would be. Creative and speculative work is tremendously uncertain and hard to express / quantify, both as to possible value and any potential progress being made. This is one of a number of problems under the domain of what I call "manifestation", effectively, how directly manifest, tangible, or perceptible a thing is. While direct physical labour is immediately tangible (holes enlarge, wood sawed, big rocks become little oens), intellectual challenges don't lend themselves to ready visualisation or perception. A huge amount of workplace fads over the past half century (and before) have sought to address this. Most poorly. Finding a manager (or client) who has a good grasp of this might help. I'm really not one to claim solutions, though I think I've a handle on the problem. And writ large, this is the problem with remote work: it's not manifest.