3 ms·

I'm going to begin working remotely soon (I joined early and have worked with the CEO and other core folks before, so it wasn't that hard). Do HNers have any ad

by hndl 12y ago

I'm going to begin working remotely soon (I joined early and have worked with the CEO and other core folks before, so it wasn't that hard). Do HNers have any advice (financial, work-life balance etc)? I'm going to be earning in the US while I live in Antwerp, Belgium.

patio11 12y ago
I'd make a conscious effort to overcommunicate. Our weird little monkey brains don't handle the case "There exists another monkey in another time zone. He's part of the tribe! I would sure like to pick his nits!" all that well. You're going to miss out on a lot of the spontaneous happenings around the office which both create/solidify social bonds and also lubricate the important, consequential decisions for your work. It helps to have companies which are used to working with remote people, since they evolve e.g. email / Hipchat work cultures rather than "I think I'll just walk down to Bob's desk and ask him about that" cultures. If you're not in one of those, push for the cultural changes you'll need, while recognizing that that will be tough. I also had the time zone issue working against me, like you will. I'd sign into Hipchat (or whatever it was) when I started my "work day", say "Here's the plan for today", work my day, and then verbally sign off in the evening. This meant that every morning when folks got to work they'd see "Oh yeah, that's right, Patrick is indeed working with us, even though I'm not seeing the artifacts of that work in front of me." A company I worked at had an institution of telling everyone in the company every Friday "Here was the plan for the week . Here's what I actually did. Here's what I'm doing next week." That's a great institution for all knowledge work, but it's particularly important if you're essentially a black box. I tended to overcommunicate in those -- e.g. not "I prototyped the tour." but rather "The focus of this week was implementing the tour. I spent most of Monday and Tuesday looking at Javascript frameworks. See this page on the Wiki for my thoughts. I eventually decided on $CLIENT_SENSITIVE_INFO_ELIDED_HERE and started whiteboarding the actual tour on Wednesday. Thursday I had a meeting with Bob about actually deploying it. Current status: prototype is working in the testing environment, working on tightening up edge cases, anticipate shipping to production next Friday as planned." Minor note about working from home: I seem to be much more productive when I successfully sustain something approaching a normal schedule. I generally do my best work when I can chunk the day up. Pre-breakfast is family time, dish hitting sink through lunch is email time, context change to a cafe, cafe time is for writing, context change back to home, home time before dinner is programming time, "Honey dinner's ready" means the day is over unless there is something on my calendar for the midnight shift.
- chandraonline 12y ago
  Over communication is key. If at all possible, you should do a trip to the US at least once every 3 to 6 months and spend some face to face time with the folks you work with. This will help with the relationships immensely.
- VLM 12y ago
  "I tended to overcommunicate in those" I found a clipboard, pen, and paper to be the simplest, easiest to use, and highest productivity system for this. Split the paper up by day and make sure to fill the fraction of a page each day, that's about right. Work on it through the day and its no big deal. There is some politics involved, you don't want to explain later, perhaps at review time, why "contemplated use of XYZ technology" was not implemented. Never write down anything except what you actually completed. Your examples are good. If you don't want to use AngularJS never refer to it by name unless you can't avoid it.
  - dennisgorelik 12y ago
    "Never write down anything except what you actually completed." I disagree. Documenting and sharing failures is important too. It's useful to look back and analyze sources of mistakes, misjudgments and inefficiencies. It's also important to know for the manager to know that implementing {successfulTask} was actually fast, so it would be low cost to implement it next time.
    - VLM 12y ago
      May be a language impedance mismatch rather than actual disagreement. Everyone on both sides of review time knows that "considered the use of AngularJS" only minimally requires 10 seconds or so. So writing that down doesn't mean much. However, a completion like "implemented a helloworld class AngularJS demonstration, and determined for X,Y,Z reasons it would be inappropriate for project Q" would be totally valid. There are also corporate culture issues, nobody here gets a bonus for stuff that doesn't work, so it might be useful to separately document that data, but... Another corporate culture issue relates to coddling, some employers are like the mother duck with the ducklings following her and others are like the building trades. Some places promote useful career advice and training so discussing failures might lead to training, experiments, etc. On the other hand some places just don't care, much as I really don't care if my plumber doesn't like a certain brand of pipe wrench.

by hndl 12y ago

patio11 12y ago

I'd make a conscious effort to overcommunicate. Our weird little monkey brains don't handle the case "There exists another monkey in another time zone. He's part of the tribe! I would sure like to pick his nits!" all that well. You're going to miss out on a lot of the spontaneous happenings around the office which both create/solidify social bonds and also lubricate the important, consequential decisions for your work. It helps to have companies which are used to working with remote people, since they evolve e.g. email / Hipchat work cultures rather than "I think I'll just walk down to Bob's desk and ask him about that" cultures. If you're not in one of those, push for the cultural changes you'll need, while recognizing that that will be tough. I also had the time zone issue working against me, like you will. I'd sign into Hipchat (or whatever it was) when I started my "work day", say "Here's the plan for today", work my day, and then verbally sign off in the evening. This meant that every morning when folks got to work they'd see "Oh yeah, that's right, Patrick is indeed working with us, even though I'm not seeing the artifacts of that work in front of me." A company I worked at had an institution of telling everyone in the company every Friday "Here was the plan for the week . Here's what I actually did. Here's what I'm doing next week." That's a great institution for all knowledge work, but it's particularly important if you're essentially a black box. I tended to overcommunicate in those -- e.g. not "I prototyped the tour." but rather "The focus of this week was implementing the tour. I spent most of Monday and Tuesday looking at Javascript frameworks. See this page on the Wiki for my thoughts. I eventually decided on $CLIENT_SENSITIVE_INFO_ELIDED_HERE and started whiteboarding the actual tour on Wednesday. Thursday I had a meeting with Bob about actually deploying it. Current status: prototype is working in the testing environment, working on tightening up edge cases, anticipate shipping to production next Friday as planned." Minor note about working from home: I seem to be much more productive when I successfully sustain something approaching a normal schedule. I generally do my best work when I can chunk the day up. Pre-breakfast is family time, dish hitting sink through lunch is email time, context change to a cafe, cafe time is for writing, context change back to home, home time before dinner is programming time, "Honey dinner's ready" means the day is over unless there is something on my calendar for the midnight shift.

chandraonline 12y ago
Over communication is key. If at all possible, you should do a trip to the US at least once every 3 to 6 months and spend some face to face time with the folks you work with. This will help with the relationships immensely.
VLM 12y ago
"I tended to overcommunicate in those" I found a clipboard, pen, and paper to be the simplest, easiest to use, and highest productivity system for this. Split the paper up by day and make sure to fill the fraction of a page each day, that's about right. Work on it through the day and its no big deal. There is some politics involved, you don't want to explain later, perhaps at review time, why "contemplated use of XYZ technology" was not implemented. Never write down anything except what you actually completed. Your examples are good. If you don't want to use AngularJS never refer to it by name unless you can't avoid it.
- dennisgorelik 12y ago
  "Never write down anything except what you actually completed." I disagree. Documenting and sharing failures is important too. It's useful to look back and analyze sources of mistakes, misjudgments and inefficiencies. It's also important to know for the manager to know that implementing {successfulTask} was actually fast, so it would be low cost to implement it next time.
  - VLM 12y ago
    May be a language impedance mismatch rather than actual disagreement. Everyone on both sides of review time knows that "considered the use of AngularJS" only minimally requires 10 seconds or so. So writing that down doesn't mean much. However, a completion like "implemented a helloworld class AngularJS demonstration, and determined for X,Y,Z reasons it would be inappropriate for project Q" would be totally valid. There are also corporate culture issues, nobody here gets a bonus for stuff that doesn't work, so it might be useful to separately document that data, but... Another corporate culture issue relates to coddling, some employers are like the mother duck with the ducklings following her and others are like the building trades. Some places promote useful career advice and training so discussing failures might lead to training, experiments, etc. On the other hand some places just don't care, much as I really don't care if my plumber doesn't like a certain brand of pipe wrench.