9 ms·

WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (of organization). -- For the buddi

WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in a company (of organization). -- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea? -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. -- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great. -- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great. -- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible. There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation. For some people, remote working is really not good. And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and competition) may change...

chadash 6y ago
> And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Yup... once everyone is remote anyway, won't take too long for some manager to decide to offshore work to cheaper countries. Even if that doesn't happen to you, if it happens to enough people elsewhere it'll bring salaries down for everyone.
- thesizeofa 6y ago
  Just how incompetent are you if you can easily be replaced by a cheap inexperienced worker in india?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  The D community is all over the world. We're used to that!
- sJ646U9k6c6gME9 6y ago
  Offshoring is not a new concept, and everyone knows it doesn’t work. How come offshoring hasn’t eaten my lunch yet?
  - thesizeofa 6y ago
    Because you got skill and s/he doesnt. Hence it launches attacks on foreigners.
  - bluedino 6y ago
    For many people it has.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    Because the pandemic is forcing literally _everybody_ to work their tails off to figure out how to make remote work succeed. Once managers master that (and they will because they have no choice), it's a tiny, tiny jump to offshoring.
    - redisman 6y ago
      Are you talking about hiring professional software engineers full-time from other countries? I think that is actually plausible and I've seen it work at multiple companies. Buying services from a "offsourcing" shop on the other hand - always a complete disaster or literally more time managing them than to build it yourself.
- rbg246 6y ago
  They have had that option for twenty years already. It hasn't happened because cultural fit is super important to a business if it wants to create a quality product. Look at the areas where the services have been outsourced to overseas, it's support and maintenance of products and services, generally post-sales support where they don't care about the quality of the service or it's a company with a natural monopoly and they care more about saving money than providing a good service. Having a hand picked team with unique interlocking skills is what creates a quality product, you can't do that if you are outsourcing entire teams overseas, you have no control on who you are hiring and quality. Or at the least these problems are super difficult to overcome and probably the cost to overcome them is too much for anything less than a global company to get any savings out of doing. PS I've totally generalised to make a point, there are 1000s of exceptions I am sure.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I disagree. Time zone, communication, and cultural familiarity are still factors. Practically speaking if you’re an American dev, your biggest competition isn’t someone from Ukraine or India, but rather a fellow American that’s moved to Iowa.
jankotek 6y ago
》For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. And working at office with 1 hour drive home, makes those parenting obligations somehow easier?
- ianhowson 6y ago
  Yes. - Small children don't really understand "mummy's working, talk to me instead." Interruptions are death to productivity. Children can't interrupt you if you're not present. - Most daycares are closed or at reduced capacity. - Nanny services are harder to find and come with risks. - Time at the office is time resting from the kids, and time at home is resting from the office. If it's all one place, there is no rest. My wife and I are finding it easier to alternate childcare instead of try to do everything at once, and being out of the home during the work time gives rest and focus.
  - jankotek 6y ago
    But daycare closed is a different problem. If childcare would be closed, and you still had to commute to office... WFH saved you in this case.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      Sure, but childcare being closed and the requirement to work from home are being caused by the same thing this time. Childcare being closed in regular times is a rare occurrence; while it's annoying, people manage to work around it. Yes, that can be stressful, but it's just for one day out of however many. Right now it's every day. If childcare was running at normal capacity but parents were still working from home, they'd be a lot more productive and less stressed out.
      - jankotek 6y ago
        Not really, many people still have to go to work, even with childcare closed. WFH is a privilige, not burden.
slavapestov 6y ago
> -- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great. You're right, everyone who doesn't live in San Francisco is just mindlessly churning through tickets all day.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  I can't even imagine how huge a chip on your shoulder you must need to interpret the parent comment so ludicrously.
- Cyphase 6y ago
  The commenter didn't say anything about where developers live. A very small percentage of the world's software developers live in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, and a very small percentage of the ones who don't are working, remotely or otherwise, for companies based in those areas. Also, they didn't say mindlessly churning through tickets, they said working on concrete tickets.
mumblemumble 6y ago
> -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% Only up by 50%? That's impressive.
ericmcer 6y ago
I try to fight my primal instincts of jealousy, etc. but it really feels like a lot of the 'butts in chairs' type people like human resources, various managers, etc. have slowly cut back to basically responding to emails/messages and maybe working a few hours a week. If that is your definition of WFH being great than it is definitely going great for them. As a dev it has kinda shredded my desire to do large scale unpredictable projects and made me pick up predictable boilerplate type work. One is easy to demonstrate progress on, the other is more abstract. This is also slowly eroding my passion for engineering so I may need a rebalancing.
- ci5er 6y ago
  If so: Get promoted. I love it, because it has cut my commute down 10 hours/week and my dedicated meeting time 10 hours/week. That's 20 hours. Now I can dedicate 5 hours of that to taking walks or naps or cooking healthy food. 5~10 hours of that for more work. And 5 hours for the company. Generally a win for everyone, I think.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  It’s coincidental to my section of the universe you mention what you did in the first paragraph: You are the third person this week I’ve heard make some commentary to that effect or another: “anyone else feel like WFH has made work easier for everyone else BUT engineering? My tickets haven’t slowed down an iota yet support and product queues are lower than I’ve ever seen them on the (Trello) board”
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    Other than initially temporarily getting pulled in to work support for Citrix for our large organization converting from almost 100% onsite to 100% remote with almost everyone who had been desktop dependent getting Citrix access overnight, I feel like WFH has made work as a dev easier. It hasn't reduced expected velocity, but it has reduced meetings that should be emails, drop-in interruptions, distractions from people doing conference calls on speakerphones in an an open office, facilities issues, and commute stress.
slykar 6y ago
> For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible. Working remotely for a small company with a few people from around the world and it's going fine. We are in contact when we have to be. I can cut distractions when I need to. No open space office bulshit. I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone. In any case, you need a space to work. If you WFH you should have a space for work. I strongly believe that employers should pay you more so that you can afford an additional room. This should not be a cost cut for the employers. They should just pay you instead of paying the insane office rent. WFH is simply different from working at an office. It will be hard for some people to learn a new way, but this major change could even redesign our cities.
- konjin 6y ago
  >They should just pay you instead of paying the insane office rent. Or pay the shareholders instead. Or the CEO. Or ... you are a cost center for your company. Why would they pay you more than the minimum anyone than they would for any other cost center? That said you should negotiate for an extra room as a part of doing business. >I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone. I finally got emacs connected to the corporate email server. My productivity went up 100% overnight. I'm debating setting it up for slack.
  - sjtindell 6y ago
    I get what you’re saying and business is often like that, but buying employees computer equipment for their home office is common for example. Tech is also on the cutting edge of pampering employees in exchange for better work. Why not an increased salary for more space at home.
  - andybak 6y ago
    > Why would they pay you more than the minimum anyone than they would for any other cost center? Maybe because you're a resource and not a cost center? It's not always the case - some job roles are fungible - but I don't think that's the case with a typical HN denizen. Let me put it another way. Why is paying the CEO more a better use of money to paying an employee more? Doesn't that build in a lot of assumptions about untapped value? And (at risk of getting out of my depth) paying the shareholders isn't the always the right thing to do. Don't most tech companies avoid giving dividends in favour of using the money to improve the share price? Which brings us back to employees and their potential value...
Shivetya 6y ago
and here I find the fact I no longer have the stress of traffic to offset most of my concerns plus it really is beneficial to my wallet. So yeah, there are pros and cons but the parenting one is not truly fair in that the arbitrary handling of schools across this country is maddening in its own right. people who tend to be good at managing their own time are usually good at dealing with the children being around.
bluedino 6y ago
The small company CEO is a big one. Motivating people remotely is tough
paulryanrogers 6y ago
- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. This is not only WFH. I've done WFH before the pandemic and it was fine. Daycare and nannies are usually an option in normal circumstances. This seems like pandemic-from-home to me.
- pdfernhout 6y ago
  Agreed on pandemic-from-home making things hard for parents suddenly trying to work from home and homeschool at the same time. And here is another aspect the article author may not be aware of: "How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult" https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friends... "Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. "Land use," as it's rather aridly known, shapes behavior and sociality. And in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built."
ashtonkem 6y ago
> For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible. I’d argue that this not working is a good thing. “Force of personality” isn’t a scalable thing, it tends to inexorably tie a company to the failings of one person, and easily transitions into a cult of personality.
visarga 6y ago
Another thing that got wiped out is the distinction between companies that have nice offices and those that don't. Some companies invested a lot in the workspace and now they are back on the same line with everyone else.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hkt 6y ago
I'm a working parent and I don't want to go back. The hideousness of commuting has been brought home to me, all the time I spend away from my kid shown up for what it is: wasted. If I have to quit and find permanent remote work somewhere, I will. Ultimately I don't feel responsible for the careers of the juniors, and feel they're being used as an excuse - the main thing about the cities is it's possible to meet people you want to meet and do anything you want to do. This includes tech groups, which provide social and professional opportunities. I've been to plenty myself, and wonder if it couldn't be the mainstay of progression and networking now.
chewz 6y ago
> -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. Why have kids if spending time with them is such a burden?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Because kids are a long-term investments in happiness. Also, they're not that big of a burden when you have access to institutions such as grandparents, babysitters, daycare, kindergarten and schools. All of which got shut down due to pandemic.
  - chewz 6y ago
    This of course I understand. My comment was just a remark that there must be something wrong with our culture if spending time with ones own children is so unbearable for so many people without delegating most of the duties to others.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      It's been like this since the dawn of history. Parents depended on others for child rearing. It's been said that minimum viable reproductive unit of humans is a village. Parents aren't really supposed to be spending all that time with their children, 24/7, alone, with no support group. It's doable, but not pleasant. It never was.
hindsightbias 6y ago
You’re never going to find your next leader on slack. Young organizations are going to tend towards collapse while most old organizations are paralyzed but can coast longer on the inertia of pre-existing structures.
civilized 6y ago
People really don't seem to think the working parent thing through. Unless there is a stay-at-home parent, commuting to an office does nothing to eliminate childcare-related disruptions of your work time. It just makes you completely dependent on institutional child care, regardless of the pandemic related risks to your family. And what kind of lame company culture only allows the proles to come into contact with Very Important Senior Team Members via "fortuitous" in-person collisions? For God's sake, just Slack them. IME in-person meetings are so overrated. They always end up at "yeah we should totally do these things" and nothing actually happens. Honestly people, there is nothing you can do in an office culture that you can't do equally well in a remote culture, if you take the time to adapt. But the people who don't understand or care how to adapt will continue to propagate their urban legends about the unique magic of fortuitous shoulder taps, hallway collisions and lunch meetings. Whatever.
golergka 6y ago
Oh, and for a senior developer from a eastern europe with excellent english, communication skills and previous remote experience, this is a godsend.

chadash 6y ago

> And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote. Yup... once everyone is remote anyway, won't take too long for some manager to decide to offshore work to cheaper countries. Even if that doesn't happen to you, if it happens to enough people elsewhere it'll bring salaries down for everyone.

thesizeofa 6y ago
Just how incompetent are you if you can easily be replaced by a cheap inexperienced worker in india?
WalterBright 6y ago
The D community is all over the world. We're used to that!
sJ646U9k6c6gME9 6y ago
Offshoring is not a new concept, and everyone knows it doesn’t work. How come offshoring hasn’t eaten my lunch yet?
- thesizeofa 6y ago
  Because you got skill and s/he doesnt. Hence it launches attacks on foreigners.
- bluedino 6y ago
  For many people it has.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  Because the pandemic is forcing literally _everybody_ to work their tails off to figure out how to make remote work succeed. Once managers master that (and they will because they have no choice), it's a tiny, tiny jump to offshoring.
  - redisman 6y ago
    Are you talking about hiring professional software engineers full-time from other countries? I think that is actually plausible and I've seen it work at multiple companies. Buying services from a "offsourcing" shop on the other hand - always a complete disaster or literally more time managing them than to build it yourself.
rbg246 6y ago
They have had that option for twenty years already. It hasn't happened because cultural fit is super important to a business if it wants to create a quality product. Look at the areas where the services have been outsourced to overseas, it's support and maintenance of products and services, generally post-sales support where they don't care about the quality of the service or it's a company with a natural monopoly and they care more about saving money than providing a good service. Having a hand picked team with unique interlocking skills is what creates a quality product, you can't do that if you are outsourcing entire teams overseas, you have no control on who you are hiring and quality. Or at the least these problems are super difficult to overcome and probably the cost to overcome them is too much for anything less than a global company to get any savings out of doing. PS I've totally generalised to make a point, there are 1000s of exceptions I am sure.
ashtonkem 6y ago
I disagree. Time zone, communication, and cultural familiarity are still factors. Practically speaking if you’re an American dev, your biggest competition isn’t someone from Ukraine or India, but rather a fellow American that’s moved to Iowa.

jankotek 6y ago

》For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. And working at office with 1 hour drive home, makes those parenting obligations somehow easier?

ianhowson 6y ago
Yes. - Small children don't really understand "mummy's working, talk to me instead." Interruptions are death to productivity. Children can't interrupt you if you're not present. - Most daycares are closed or at reduced capacity. - Nanny services are harder to find and come with risks. - Time at the office is time resting from the kids, and time at home is resting from the office. If it's all one place, there is no rest. My wife and I are finding it easier to alternate childcare instead of try to do everything at once, and being out of the home during the work time gives rest and focus.
- jankotek 6y ago
  But daycare closed is a different problem. If childcare would be closed, and you still had to commute to office... WFH saved you in this case.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Sure, but childcare being closed and the requirement to work from home are being caused by the same thing this time. Childcare being closed in regular times is a rare occurrence; while it's annoying, people manage to work around it. Yes, that can be stressful, but it's just for one day out of however many. Right now it's every day. If childcare was running at normal capacity but parents were still working from home, they'd be a lot more productive and less stressed out.
    - jankotek 6y ago
      Not really, many people still have to go to work, even with childcare closed. WFH is a privilige, not burden.

slavapestov 6y ago

> -- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great. You're right, everyone who doesn't live in San Francisco is just mindlessly churning through tickets all day.

wutbrodo 6y ago
I can't even imagine how huge a chip on your shoulder you must need to interpret the parent comment so ludicrously.
Cyphase 6y ago
The commenter didn't say anything about where developers live. A very small percentage of the world's software developers live in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, and a very small percentage of the ones who don't are working, remotely or otherwise, for companies based in those areas. Also, they didn't say mindlessly churning through tickets, they said working on concrete tickets.

mumblemumble 6y ago

> -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% Only up by 50%? That's impressive.

ericmcer 6y ago

I try to fight my primal instincts of jealousy, etc. but it really feels like a lot of the 'butts in chairs' type people like human resources, various managers, etc. have slowly cut back to basically responding to emails/messages and maybe working a few hours a week. If that is your definition of WFH being great than it is definitely going great for them. As a dev it has kinda shredded my desire to do large scale unpredictable projects and made me pick up predictable boilerplate type work. One is easy to demonstrate progress on, the other is more abstract. This is also slowly eroding my passion for engineering so I may need a rebalancing.

ci5er 6y ago
If so: Get promoted. I love it, because it has cut my commute down 10 hours/week and my dedicated meeting time 10 hours/week. That's 20 hours. Now I can dedicate 5 hours of that to taking walks or naps or cooking healthy food. 5~10 hours of that for more work. And 5 hours for the company. Generally a win for everyone, I think.
dvtrn 6y ago
It’s coincidental to my section of the universe you mention what you did in the first paragraph: You are the third person this week I’ve heard make some commentary to that effect or another: “anyone else feel like WFH has made work easier for everyone else BUT engineering? My tickets haven’t slowed down an iota yet support and product queues are lower than I’ve ever seen them on the (Trello) board”
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  Other than initially temporarily getting pulled in to work support for Citrix for our large organization converting from almost 100% onsite to 100% remote with almost everyone who had been desktop dependent getting Citrix access overnight, I feel like WFH has made work as a dev easier. It hasn't reduced expected velocity, but it has reduced meetings that should be emails, drop-in interruptions, distractions from people doing conference calls on speakerphones in an an open office, facilities issues, and commute stress.

slykar 6y ago

> For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible. Working remotely for a small company with a few people from around the world and it's going fine. We are in contact when we have to be. I can cut distractions when I need to. No open space office bulshit. I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone. In any case, you need a space to work. If you WFH you should have a space for work. I strongly believe that employers should pay you more so that you can afford an additional room. This should not be a cost cut for the employers. They should just pay you instead of paying the insane office rent. WFH is simply different from working at an office. It will be hard for some people to learn a new way, but this major change could even redesign our cities.

konjin 6y ago
>They should just pay you instead of paying the insane office rent. Or pay the shareholders instead. Or the CEO. Or ... you are a cost center for your company. Why would they pay you more than the minimum anyone than they would for any other cost center? That said you should negotiate for an extra room as a part of doing business. >I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone. I finally got emacs connected to the corporate email server. My productivity went up 100% overnight. I'm debating setting it up for slack.
- sjtindell 6y ago
  I get what you’re saying and business is often like that, but buying employees computer equipment for their home office is common for example. Tech is also on the cutting edge of pampering employees in exchange for better work. Why not an increased salary for more space at home.
- andybak 6y ago
  > Why would they pay you more than the minimum anyone than they would for any other cost center? Maybe because you're a resource and not a cost center? It's not always the case - some job roles are fungible - but I don't think that's the case with a typical HN denizen. Let me put it another way. Why is paying the CEO more a better use of money to paying an employee more? Doesn't that build in a lot of assumptions about untapped value? And (at risk of getting out of my depth) paying the shareholders isn't the always the right thing to do. Don't most tech companies avoid giving dividends in favour of using the money to improve the share price? Which brings us back to employees and their potential value...

Shivetya 6y ago

and here I find the fact I no longer have the stress of traffic to offset most of my concerns plus it really is beneficial to my wallet. So yeah, there are pros and cons but the parenting one is not truly fair in that the arbitrary handling of schools across this country is maddening in its own right. people who tend to be good at managing their own time are usually good at dealing with the children being around.

bluedino 6y ago

The small company CEO is a big one. Motivating people remotely is tough

paulryanrogers 6y ago

- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. This is not only WFH. I've done WFH before the pandemic and it was fine. Daycare and nannies are usually an option in normal circumstances. This seems like pandemic-from-home to me.

pdfernhout 6y ago
Agreed on pandemic-from-home making things hard for parents suddenly trying to work from home and homeschool at the same time. And here is another aspect the article author may not be aware of: "How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult" https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friends... "Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. "Land use," as it's rather aridly known, shapes behavior and sociality. And in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built."

ashtonkem 6y ago

> For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible. I’d argue that this not working is a good thing. “Force of personality” isn’t a scalable thing, it tends to inexorably tie a company to the failings of one person, and easily transitions into a cult of personality.

visarga 6y ago

Another thing that got wiped out is the distinction between companies that have nice offices and those that don't. Some companies invested a lot in the workspace and now they are back on the same line with everyone else.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hkt 6y ago

I'm a working parent and I don't want to go back. The hideousness of commuting has been brought home to me, all the time I spend away from my kid shown up for what it is: wasted. If I have to quit and find permanent remote work somewhere, I will. Ultimately I don't feel responsible for the careers of the juniors, and feel they're being used as an excuse - the main thing about the cities is it's possible to meet people you want to meet and do anything you want to do. This includes tech groups, which provide social and professional opportunities. I've been to plenty myself, and wonder if it couldn't be the mainstay of progression and networking now.

chewz 6y ago

> -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible. Why have kids if spending time with them is such a burden?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Because kids are a long-term investments in happiness. Also, they're not that big of a burden when you have access to institutions such as grandparents, babysitters, daycare, kindergarten and schools. All of which got shut down due to pandemic.
- chewz 6y ago
  This of course I understand. My comment was just a remark that there must be something wrong with our culture if spending time with ones own children is so unbearable for so many people without delegating most of the duties to others.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    It's been like this since the dawn of history. Parents depended on others for child rearing. It's been said that minimum viable reproductive unit of humans is a village. Parents aren't really supposed to be spending all that time with their children, 24/7, alone, with no support group. It's doable, but not pleasant. It never was.

hindsightbias 6y ago

You’re never going to find your next leader on slack. Young organizations are going to tend towards collapse while most old organizations are paralyzed but can coast longer on the inertia of pre-existing structures.

civilized 6y ago

People really don't seem to think the working parent thing through. Unless there is a stay-at-home parent, commuting to an office does nothing to eliminate childcare-related disruptions of your work time. It just makes you completely dependent on institutional child care, regardless of the pandemic related risks to your family. And what kind of lame company culture only allows the proles to come into contact with Very Important Senior Team Members via "fortuitous" in-person collisions? For God's sake, just Slack them. IME in-person meetings are so overrated. They always end up at "yeah we should totally do these things" and nothing actually happens. Honestly people, there is nothing you can do in an office culture that you can't do equally well in a remote culture, if you take the time to adapt. But the people who don't understand or care how to adapt will continue to propagate their urban legends about the unique magic of fortuitous shoulder taps, hallway collisions and lunch meetings. Whatever.

golergka 6y ago

Oh, and for a senior developer from a eastern europe with excellent english, communication skills and previous remote experience, this is a godsend.