Original link: http://catcoding.me/p/remote-work/
I have also experienced telecommuting intermittently for several years. From the beginning of the epidemic, I was still working in DJI and worked from home for a month. I started working at Microsoft in the second half of 2020. Because the epidemic has been repeated for two years, the company has long been a hybrid office. I usually stay at home two days a week. By 2022, I will work from home most of the time. Currently in Mysterious Ape, it is completely telecommuting, and I have never been to the company office 
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There are advantages to telecommuting, but there are also some difficulties that need to be overcome. In this article, I will summarize my thoughts on this aspect.
prerequisite
Not all teams are suitable for telecommuting, because some positions require frequent communication, and face-to-face communication will definitely be more efficient. As far as software development is concerned, if a company wants to implement full remote office, several conditions need to be met:
- Effective management, division of labor and assistance
- Employees have sufficient self-motivation
- The company’s IT support
These are indispensable, let me explain a little bit below. What is effective management? Usually, when the number of employees reaches a certain scale, management will be emphasized. However, many companies do process management instead of result management. A good way to measure output, or to squeeze employees, is a management failure anyway.
Remote work is essentially about decentralization, focusing on results rather than process. As far as pure software development is concerned, work results are relatively easy to evaluate, such as whether the functions are completed with high quality, whether the scheme and design are reasonable, etc., and the progress of the project.
If the company allows employees to work remotely, it means that they believe that employees can manage their time and progress well, and the company also has a reasonable way to accept the results. This requires employees to have enough self-motivation, and employees have enough interest in the work content. If a person has no interest or rejection in the work content, the remote situation will be even worse, because people are lazy of.
Of course, the biggest difficulty in remote communication is communication, so the number of people an employee needs to communicate with is very important. Usually a group is the unit of daily collaboration, within 15 is a relatively feasible range. It may be a bigger challenge for managers. For IC, the number of daily communication is usually within 4 or 5 people.
In addition, the company’s IT support is very important. If confidential documents are involved in the work, and the corresponding VPN and other tools are not perfect, working from home will become a disaster. For example, when the epidemic began, my remote office experience was very bad. I needed to connect to the company’s network to access certain files, and the speed was unstable. Microsoft’s IT tools are easier to use, but it will be very troublesome to connect to the production environment and servers. You need another dedicated laptop to operate. It is really wasteful to use a laptop worth more than 10,000 yuan to connect to VPN, but This is also understandable. After all, security is more important to ToB’s business, but it is really troublesome to carry two laptops every day. Mysterious Ape’s IT is specially considered for remote use. For example, the company does not provide office equipment, but it will provide some IT subsidies. Employees can use their own equipment for office work. The code is open source on Github, so the office experience is very good.
asynchronous communication
Asynchronous communication takes time to adapt, and it is more suitable for people like me who prefer text communication. In the case that timely feedback cannot be obtained, it is necessary to write a matter as clearly as possible in simple and direct words, and it is necessary to consider the information that the other party may be missing. Of course, real-time text communication is also very important. Properly communicating about things outside of work can cultivate tacit understanding and emotion with colleagues who have never met offline.
To achieve effective asynchronous communication in software development, it is especially important to write good documents. This is an important challenge for many developers. In comparison, programmers want to write code rather than words, but words and pictures are tools for expressing themselves on a larger scale. You can write them to your colleagues, or you may It needs to be written to the user. If a thing cannot be expressed clearly in words, it means that it has not been thought out clearly, and it cannot be expressed clearly in code.
Therefore, some companies will check whether the applicant has a blog during the interview, mainly to see if the person has the habit of expressing in words, and whether he can write things clearly.
In terms of tools, I think email is a good way, but relatively speaking, foreign developers are more comfortable with email. Slack and Discord are also good, but Discord feels relatively more real-time. Document collaboration tools such as Notion, Office 365, Feishu, etc. are all fine, I think as long as there is collaborative editing.
In addition to asynchronous communication, some online meetings are also very necessary, but they should not be too long, and it is better to let the participants understand the theme and related materials of the meeting before starting, which will be more efficient.
I think the stage when I have fully adapted to telecommuting is when I cultivate the ability to record my work in words. I will create a text of the day on Obsidian every day, and record what I did in chronological order, or some of the meetings I participated in. gist. Then make some annotations through tags, and summarize Todo to a fixed page. Before the meeting, I will use words to record the main points to be discussed at the meeting, and I will also record some scattered feelings.
work efficiency
Generally speaking, a person’s effective office hours are less than 8 hours, so spending time in the office is just wasting, and most of the time you are wasting time, and in some meetings, everyone is fishing.
Telecommuting can make better use of fragmented time. From my experience, if I work in an office, I usually don’t think much about work after get off work, because there is a clear boundary between going to work and leaving get off work. But in the remote office mode, this boundary will be very blurred. Maybe I am working at the moment, and I will go downstairs to pick up the courier later, or I need to pick up the children and so on. So many times, even though I am not in front of the screen, I still have some work issues in my mind. On the contrary, I think more ideas will come out in this situation. For example, people will burst out new ideas in the process of taking a bath. This is an experience that many people have.
This is also an experience I have gained in the process of doing open source, because the developers of large projects will be located in various time zones, so most of the time is asynchronous communication. If I fully understand a problem, I can step away from the screen, think about it now and then, and return to the screen when I have an idea.
Of course, ideas may also emerge when discussing with others, but in general group discussions are mainly for reaching consensus, and more good ideas come from individuals.
One of the factors that affects the efficiency of working from home is the environment. Naughty children may be a disturbance at work, but I don’t think it’s a big problem. It also needs to be coordinated with the children. Sometimes my thinking is clearer and more efficient at night, because no one disturbs me at night, and I can use more efficient time to work when I am free to arrange, so I am more efficient when working remotely.
For large companies, the overall efficiency of telecommuting is still estimated to be lossy, which is one of the reasons why large companies in Silicon Valley want employees to return to the office. But many people would rather take less money and continue to work remotely, because personally it can save a lot of unnecessary time costs, which is really suitable for employees with children.
psychological problems
I see a lot of people saying telecommuting can be lonely, and I don’t feel that strongly enough, probably because I spend so much time with my family and I have two small children. If I don’t have children, I guess I will feel lonely. Even after marriage, it is easy to be lonely, and getting along with children is a completely different model. I think this is also an important reason for human beings to have children.
But after working remotely, there is indeed a sense of detachment, as if not entering the normal rhythm of society.
The sense of detachment also comes from a smaller social circle. The communication with colleagues basically takes place online, and there are fewer opportunities to meet other people. One way I can think of is to meet old friends offline, or take the initiative to ask some people I met online to have a chat, or meet offline. Generally speaking, the older you are, the more likely you are to feel lonely, and it is not easy to make friends with each other. The people you usually communicate with are people you have known for ten or twenty years. I don’t know if other people have similar experiences. I actually found that after I worked remotely full-time, I would have more desire to talk to offline friends when I really saw them. This was probably suppressed.
Another feeling is that I am less prone to anxiety after working remotely. If I think about it carefully, I probably threw away the interference of some bad factors in the office, such as competition among colleagues. It’s not that there is no pressure for promotion remotely, but I don’t think I care so much psychologically, but more about how to do a good job and how to improve myself, because it seems that I am in a more equal state with the company in the remote situation. It’s easier to do it psychologically if you don’t tie yourself to the company and do it physically.
How to Find a Remote Job
It’s true that I’ve seen a lot of jobs being lost recently, and with more and more people around me unemployed, it’s only going to be harder to find a remote job in this situation, but that doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity.
I have summarized some jobs before, but I know that many companies on this list are not hiring now:
remote-jobs-cn: Remote jobs in China
Here’s a more comprehensive list that looks like it’s still being updated:
remote-jobs-in-china: Chinese companies that support remote work
If your English is good enough, you can try to find some remote opportunities abroad. I saw some on Linkedin. The blockchain industry is now in a bear market, so there are fewer job opportunities, but the ratio of remote work is relatively large, probably because people in this industry are indeed practicing distributed and decentralized, Web3 Jobs: Blockchain This site will There are related jobs.
Another way I can think of is to try to find some recruiting open source projects that I am interested in (there are commercial companies behind them, which can support remote) – there are quite a lot of such projects, and then contribute to the project and People in the community are familiar and gradually become remote employees. Although the process will be time-consuming, it is indeed a way.
There are many other benefits of telecommuting. For example, I can keep the fuel consumption of the car at about 6L now, because I basically travel at off-peak hours, and the traffic in many places will be much less on weekdays. It is very common to book a movie. We can also do geographical arbitrage, such as living in a place with a lower cost of living. I saw that the company has a digital nomad plan, that is, a few colleagues make an appointment to travel to some cities and places they have never been to before. I really envy such a free life, but I have two children to take care of 
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Overall, I’m so used to telecommuting that it seems like I’ll never go back to sitting in an office, and it’s a way of working that suits me.
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