This is a good post. Lots of good, real-world information in there.
I’ve been a remote worker for ~9 out of the last 15 years or so of my professional career. It’s not always sunshine & roses, but it’s something that I’ve come to enjoy and structure my life around. It would most definitely be hard to go back to a traditional office, at least for me.
I’m actually going to send this article to a few peers, maybe even my manager. I live about 1h away from the office when there’s no traffic. If I want to encounter no traffic, I have to leave home at the latest at 5 AM, or no sooner than 8:45. This essentially means working from 6:00-6:30 to 15:00, or from 9:45-10:00 to 18:00. There’s also traffic on the way back.
I don’t want to get closer to the office because: this is my childhood neighborhood, I live right across the street from my parents (which is great when you have 4 kids and/or a cordial relationship with your parents), and the land + house that we have would be worth 2.5 ~ 3 times as much if I moved to a closer location.
Logistics aside, this is also much better for my concentration, I get much less often interrupted too. I need more of this.
one really cool side effect of having a remote-friendly team is that it makes it normal for people to work from home occasionally – one person on my team has kids and he’ll pretty frequently work from home so that it’s easier for him to pick up his kids from school or something, and it’s not an issue at all since half the team is remote anyway :)
My commute isn’t quite as bad as yours. When I started my current job, I negotiated the expectation that I would be working from home about half of the days. I now work from home 2 days a week some weeks and 3 days a week on other weeks. My commute is still terrible half the time, but on average it’s not a bad commute. I would phrase it as “I’m feeling burnt out because of my commute and I don’t think I can keep doing it 5 days a week for much longer. I would like to begin working X days per week from home so that I can continue to work for the company”. This doesn’t send an aggressive ultimatum, but it signals that you’re probably going to quit soon if they don’t accommodate you. If that doesn’t work, it’s probably time to find a new job.
I’ve been working remotely for a few months, although only recently full time. I love it. I feel very confident that my employer is getting much higher quality hours out of me than when I worked in an office. I feel much more productive and I believe that I am much more productive. A lot of talking that I did in an office really didn’t matter so much for getting work done. For random conversations, I just send an email to someone or talk to them on a chat, that has worked fine for me.
Already there actually :) And yes, I am more productive! But we’ll see how it works in the long run. Do I acclimate to 4 day work weeks as we did to 5 day work weeks so long ago and productivity drops once the novelty wears off?
I’m curious about how both of you ended up working four-day weeks. Does everyone at your employers do so? Are you contractors or employees? Have you always worked these hours at your current gigs or did you cut back from a five-day week?
Employed. My last job had a 4-day-week, which was increased from 3-days before. I was one of the very few not working full time, but as far as I know it never gave real problems; people learned not to schedule meetings on Wednesdays if they wanted me to show up. The initial three-day setup was because there wasn’t enough money available for a fulltime position, but even once there was enough having a full day for my own stuff (or just catching up on sleep, so I don’t have to do that on the weekend) is worth the lower pay.
And I honestly think employers win with 4 days. I’m much happier, sharper and motivated. They have to pay less, and I doubt I do less (effective!) work.
If you come from 5-days make sure they know they are better off with you in the team for 4-days then not in the team at all ;)
I’ve been working remotely from the Philippines. 4-day work weeks. So far, it’s been great but there are tradeoffs that devs need to be aware of. Generally speaking, I’m a lot more productive and I don’t feel disconnected from the team I’m part of back in the States. You have to jealously guard your work time and I’ve found it’s best to have a dedicated place to work that is free of distraction (for me that’s a spare bedroom I’ve converted into my office).
Some of what I thought would be downsides are actually advantages. Down here in the Philippines I mostly work in the evenings and early mornings when the tropical heat cools down; midday is “siesta time”, so I adjust to the culture and this also puts me closer to US workday overlap where my evening is morning in the States.
One real downside is the quality of internet connectivity if you want to work like this from the developing world. I have the best fiber optic internet money can buy but peak times here can still be a bit slow when committing or cloning repositories, and the tech infrastructure here is notoriously bad. I change my DNS servers to Google’s or OpenDNS and I can also pretty easily work around peak time lags. So no worries.
One real downside is the quality of internet connectivity if you want to work like this from the developing world.
I guess it varies quite widely by country, because when I lived in Thailand the broadband was just as fast as what I had in the US and half the price. I wasn’t even in a big metropolitan area; it was a city of 120,000. It was similar when I visited my parents in Malaysia, though they had some weird restrictions like having medium.com blocked for hosting content that exposed corruption in their government.
Yes, I’d say there are only pockets of SE Asia where this is the case, like the Philippines. In places with much more modern infrastructure (I have Singapore in mind), you can expect fast internet and absolutely no issues doing heavy downloading or uploading of work and cloud computing.
This is a good post. Lots of good, real-world information in there.
I’ve been a remote worker for ~9 out of the last 15 years or so of my professional career. It’s not always sunshine & roses, but it’s something that I’ve come to enjoy and structure my life around. It would most definitely be hard to go back to a traditional office, at least for me.
I’m actually going to send this article to a few peers, maybe even my manager. I live about 1h away from the office when there’s no traffic. If I want to encounter no traffic, I have to leave home at the latest at 5 AM, or no sooner than 8:45. This essentially means working from 6:00-6:30 to 15:00, or from 9:45-10:00 to 18:00. There’s also traffic on the way back.
I don’t want to get closer to the office because: this is my childhood neighborhood, I live right across the street from my parents (which is great when you have 4 kids and/or a cordial relationship with your parents), and the land + house that we have would be worth 2.5 ~ 3 times as much if I moved to a closer location.
Logistics aside, this is also much better for my concentration, I get much less often interrupted too. I need more of this.
one really cool side effect of having a remote-friendly team is that it makes it normal for people to work from home occasionally – one person on my team has kids and he’ll pretty frequently work from home so that it’s easier for him to pick up his kids from school or something, and it’s not an issue at all since half the team is remote anyway :)
My commute isn’t quite as bad as yours. When I started my current job, I negotiated the expectation that I would be working from home about half of the days. I now work from home 2 days a week some weeks and 3 days a week on other weeks. My commute is still terrible half the time, but on average it’s not a bad commute. I would phrase it as “I’m feeling burnt out because of my commute and I don’t think I can keep doing it 5 days a week for much longer. I would like to begin working X days per week from home so that I can continue to work for the company”. This doesn’t send an aggressive ultimatum, but it signals that you’re probably going to quit soon if they don’t accommodate you. If that doesn’t work, it’s probably time to find a new job.
I’ve been working remotely for a few months, although only recently full time. I love it. I feel very confident that my employer is getting much higher quality hours out of me than when I worked in an office. I feel much more productive and I believe that I am much more productive. A lot of talking that I did in an office really didn’t matter so much for getting work done. For random conversations, I just send an email to someone or talk to them on a chat, that has worked fine for me.
Now switch to 4 day work-weeks and be amazed that you can be even more productive!
Already there actually :) And yes, I am more productive! But we’ll see how it works in the long run. Do I acclimate to 4 day work weeks as we did to 5 day work weeks so long ago and productivity drops once the novelty wears off?
The extra time you have to let your subconscious work on problems stays. And the potential extra sleep. And the burnout-prevention.
That’s how it works for me, anyway.
I’m curious about how both of you ended up working four-day weeks. Does everyone at your employers do so? Are you contractors or employees? Have you always worked these hours at your current gigs or did you cut back from a five-day week?
Employed. My last job had a 4-day-week, which was increased from 3-days before. I was one of the very few not working full time, but as far as I know it never gave real problems; people learned not to schedule meetings on Wednesdays if they wanted me to show up. The initial three-day setup was because there wasn’t enough money available for a fulltime position, but even once there was enough having a full day for my own stuff (or just catching up on sleep, so I don’t have to do that on the weekend) is worth the lower pay.
And I honestly think employers win with 4 days. I’m much happier, sharper and motivated. They have to pay less, and I doubt I do less (effective!) work. If you come from 5-days make sure they know they are better off with you in the team for 4-days then not in the team at all ;)
I’ve been working remotely from the Philippines. 4-day work weeks. So far, it’s been great but there are tradeoffs that devs need to be aware of. Generally speaking, I’m a lot more productive and I don’t feel disconnected from the team I’m part of back in the States. You have to jealously guard your work time and I’ve found it’s best to have a dedicated place to work that is free of distraction (for me that’s a spare bedroom I’ve converted into my office).
Some of what I thought would be downsides are actually advantages. Down here in the Philippines I mostly work in the evenings and early mornings when the tropical heat cools down; midday is “siesta time”, so I adjust to the culture and this also puts me closer to US workday overlap where my evening is morning in the States.
One real downside is the quality of internet connectivity if you want to work like this from the developing world. I have the best fiber optic internet money can buy but peak times here can still be a bit slow when committing or cloning repositories, and the tech infrastructure here is notoriously bad. I change my DNS servers to Google’s or OpenDNS and I can also pretty easily work around peak time lags. So no worries.
I guess it varies quite widely by country, because when I lived in Thailand the broadband was just as fast as what I had in the US and half the price. I wasn’t even in a big metropolitan area; it was a city of 120,000. It was similar when I visited my parents in Malaysia, though they had some weird restrictions like having medium.com blocked for hosting content that exposed corruption in their government.
Yes, I’d say there are only pockets of SE Asia where this is the case, like the Philippines. In places with much more modern infrastructure (I have Singapore in mind), you can expect fast internet and absolutely no issues doing heavy downloading or uploading of work and cloud computing.
I’m in this person’s shoes as well. Everything they say is pretty much spot on.
Engage in group conversations in slack, make sure there is a #random channel or similar for “watercooler talk”.
Take a trip once or twice a year to the head office, and organize a group outing.