I’ve been working remotely for over 3 years now. My first year I was in a team which was only partially remote — some members still visited an office every day. The next two years I spent working entirely for companies where all members work remotely. These companies didn’t even have an office.

I’d like to share with you my insights from remote work, important aspects of remote communication, and frequent failures of this particular culture.

Benefits of a remote work

Just for a brief introduction to the topic, I’ll list a couple of advantages of working remotely without any prolonged explanations. If you are interested in remote work yourself, there are lots of resources at the end of this article. Here are some of the pros of remote work:

commuting — no matter if it’s raining, snowing or extremely hot — you don’t have to drive anywhere. You just wake up, grab some coffee, turn on your laptop and start working. No traffic jams and no waiting for public transport. It saves a lot of time!

— no matter if it’s raining, snowing or extremely hot — you don’t have to drive anywhere. No traffic jams and no waiting for public transport. It saves a lot of time! flexible working hours — I mean really flexible. They are not flexible office working hours which means if you come at 10 a.m. you can leave 8 hours later. It means you can work 4 hours in the morning, then go work out and come back to work 4 hours in the evening. You may divide your time as you wish.

working place — you are not bound to any particular location on earth. You can travel wherever and whenever you want. You can spend summer in a cool place and go somewhere warmer in winter.

— you are not bound to any particular location on earth. You can spend summer in a cool place and go somewhere warmer in winter. being at home — sometimes you wait for a delivery man or maybe there is a failure to be fixed. You can stay at home, work, and at the same time get things done. Whatever it is.

— sometimes you wait for a delivery man or maybe there is a failure to be fixed. You can stay at home, work, and at the same time get things done. Whatever it is. running an errand — whenever you need to visit an office or have a doctor’s appointment, you don’t have to worry about your working hours or staying at work late. You can just stop working, go outside , run your errands and get back. You can visit a post office or a bank during the hours when there are almost no people!

— whenever you need to visit an office or have a doctor’s appointment, you don’t have to worry about your working hours or staying at work late. , run your errands and get back. during the hours when there are almost no people! taking care of others — if you have a sick child or maybe just a pet you need to keep an eye on, you can always be close to them. If your babysitter has the flu, you can take care of your baby and don’t panic about what to do.

— if you have a sick child or maybe just a pet you need to keep an eye on, you can always be close to them. If your babysitter has the flu, you can take care of your baby and don’t panic about what to do. fully focus — there are no other people to interrupt you. There are no colleagues who ask you to go for lunch or play darts with them. You don’t have to answer questions right away, and you can help them when you finish your task. No one bothers you, you can really get things done.

Just to be honest, I’ll mention a few drawbacks which may, but don’t have to happen:

social aspect — you don’t meet people in person, you cannot drink coffee in a kitchen with your coworker, you can’t smoke or just chat with your colleague outside.

loneliness — this is directly related to the previous point. Sometimes you may feel alone, you can’t chat with others or — the most important — play a table football with your teammates. You have to relax on your own.

requires self-discipline — you have to focus more. If you work at home, there may be a temptation to look through a window and have a walk, open a fridge, clean something up or turn on TV. You need to focus differently.

you have to teach your family/boyfriend/girlfriend/roommate/flatmate that you’re at work and you can’t help him/her to do the washing

Remote communication failures

In remote companies, we basically rely on online chats. It doesn’t matter if it’s Slack, Hipchat, Flowdock or IRC. Rules are the same — we write to communicate something to others.

Private messages

They happen very often. Even we have #general or a #project-specific channel, I still receive questions related to either a company or a particular project as a private message. Of course, I always redirect them to public channels or groups, but this happens again and again. I think other developers may just continue these conversations in private…

Why is it bad?

Because we are missing tons of information. If someone ask me “hey, how to setup X”, why not let others know as well? Or why not allow someone to answer this question? Maybe somebody else has a better solution? What about new guys who are about to join a project? Is it efficient to explain it again and again in private instead of having it in a chat history?

Developers don’t seem to care about others. It’s true for lots of people in general. We don’t think we can help someone else as well by discussing something in public. Maybe there’s a guy who is interested in learning new things and will use that knowledge in an efficient way? I hate seeing “ok, let’s talk in private” or “I’ve sent you a private message, check your inbox”. Even on Facebook when a discussion becomes interesting and some expert appears.

Here is some example:

I saw that literally yesterday. I was looking how to set up a search engine on Ghost blogging platform. I opened a topic when someone just asked for a help in private. He didn’t care that it may be helpful for someone else, he just wanted to have this done irrespective of others who, exactly like me, may need it in the future. OK, this guy wanted to create some kind of tutorial, but no one actually knows if it ever goes public.

I’m against discussing most of the things in private messages.

Have a look at some statistics now:

This is how conversations in teams I joined look like. Some of them are good 1% DMs (direct messages), some worse 9% DMs, but there are some teams where either something went wrong (e.g. 20% DMs) or maybe developers use it as a private communicator as well 27% DMs.

What is the reason?

I always ask someone “why did you ask me about it here?”. And you know what? People are afraid of being wrong. People are afraid of showing that they don’t know something. They want do learn something secretly, without showing to others their lack of knowledge or experience. That’s insane.

People also judge others very easily. They measure they teammates, friends or acquaintances based on what they know. Once you learn something, it’s obvious for you and you can’t imagine how one might not know that. You forget very soon how it was when you were starting out.

We could talk right now about professors at universities, doctors, politics to prove that they prefer to lie rather than admit they don’t know something. However, it’s not a topic of this paragraph.

People prefer to talk in private when they don’t know something.

Audio/Video calls (Skype / Hangouts)

Recently I joined a new team. Here’s what I saw when we proposed to drop video conversations in favor of text chats:

People working in offices are used to voice conversations. It’s much easier to communicate while seeing or just hearing each other.

It’s much harder to explain things in writing. Developers are too lazy to write a lot. You can easily spot someone who stills suggests to use hangouts instead of chat. Of course, people can be educated, but if they don’t understand the benefits after explaining them, they probably are not suited for remote work.

I know it’s not easy to show your feelings and emotions in textual conversations. You may be perceived as aggressive while you are actually just presenting your point of view. One may not understand your joke, read an illusion or sarcasm. Writing requires much more than talking. You hear a ton of somebody’s voice, you look at each other, see mimics and face in general.

I avoid video/audio conversations for the same reason as private messages.

It’s a matter of training and experience. On the very beginning, it is not that easy to understand others by simply writing with them on a chat. You can’t sense emotions and read their minds, just as they can’t read yours. Meeting someone in person helps a lot because you get to know their personality and can more easily figure out what they mean when they write something.

Semi-remote companies

There’s a problem with companies which don’t work fully remotely. Why is that? Because usually people who work in an office don’t respect these working remotely.

You may think it’s not true. You work in an office but chat with your coworkers as well. Are you sure you let them know about everything? Do you really transfer your kitchen conversation (project-related) to your favorite communicator? Do you really write down notes after a meeting? Do you seriously repeat everything you discussed in the office to a company’s chat? I wouldn’t be so sure.

I’m not saying it’s a must-have. It’s actually very hard to do. A company must follow a remote work culture, not simply let people work remotely. It’s very important to respect others, think about them and about what they cannot hear and see. Unfortunately, theses aspects are usually forgotten.

Fear of remote work

Many times, when I was trying to hire someone, I heard:

I don’t want to work remotely yet, I still want to learn.

sometimes programmers told me:

I prefer working in an office, I’m not experienced and need to have some supervision.

some also said:

I want to meet people in an office to get to know some stuff from them.

Did you notice a common aspect of these statements? People are afraid of not being able to learn while working remotely. They do not realize you can learn even more while working remotely.

Programmers have either a bad experience in working remotely (see semi-remote companies factor above) or just can’t imagine how would it be to work remotely. They tend to think that talking with others in person will teach you more than if you only “meet” them on chat.

You know already it’s not true. A culture of remote teams and sharing knowledge remains on chat. It doesn't matter you didn’t hear a particular conversation and that’s why you have no idea what’s going on. You your scroll up a couple of screen and are immediately familiar with the latest news.

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Summary

I won’t tell you how to work remotely. I won’t tell you about remote tooling either. There are awesome blog posts mentioned below where you can find lots of interesting “technical” details.

This article is supposed to point out what may cause problems in remote work and what are some of the possible fears among developers. As you read — lots of them are not valid but you won’t be sure until you try them.

Resources

If you are interested in more topics about remote work, I gathered a bunch of examples, articles, videos and books. This list is continuously being updated when I find something useful on the web or someone shares an interesting link with me.

Here’s the complete list:

https://hackpad.com/Why-do-I-work-remotely-AOqF7X3mqV0