Show HN: Learn how to work remotely from people doing it every day

by Jasber • 8 years ago

343 76 8 years ago

Jasber7• 8 years ago

Hey HN! Here's a small side-project I've been working on to help remote workers. I noticed when I switched to full-time indie dev, I experienced some new problems, like building discipline, habits and healthy routines. I don't like most productivity advice, as Paul Buchheit says most advice is limited life experience + over-generalized to fit your situation.

I thought a good way around this would to just tell stories about remote workers, how they got started, what they like, what they don't like, routines they've found that are helpful, etc...

So that's what the site aims to do—interview remote workers so you can learn from their experiences.

One cool thing about the site is you can deep dive specific questions, like

* What do you like about remote work? http://remotehabits.com/interviews/question/what-do-you-like....

* What do you not like about remote work? http://remotehabits.com/interviews/question/what-do-you-not-....

Let me know what you think, thanks!

Jasber7• 8 years ago

Noticed both those links are broken, doh! Here they are again:

* What do you like about remote work? http://remotehabits.com/interviews/question/what-do-you-like...

* What do you not like about remote work? http://remotehabits.com/interviews/question/what-do-you-not-...

imglorp• 8 years ago

Looks like we soaked your quota, sorry!

It's not in the Wayback Machine, is there another cache somewhere?

52-6F-62• 8 years ago

This is great. I'm currently browsing for viable, worthwhile opportunities for myself to set my girlfriend and I on the path to getting out of the city. Need more outdoors time.

I haven't worked purely remotely before outside of a couple of light projects where I was the sole eng/dev.

I'm always keeping my eyes open for new resources. Looks like it might be helpful! Good idea, and nice job.

alayek• 8 years ago

This is great!

Just one feedback - kindly reduce the CSS font-weight from 900 to something like 400-500.

Jasber7• 8 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

mmikeff2• 8 years ago

This is great, I've been thinking about doing something similar but not been able to make the time so it is good to see someone else doing it. There is quite a lot of information out there about tackling the logistical challenges of operating remotely esp for software development, great to hear other perspectives and industries.

chasd002• 8 years ago

the best thing is no commute, the energy overhead of a long commute is terrible. The worst thing is missing out on conversations/decisions being made at the office. My corporate office is in San Diego while I'm in Dallas, even though I'm a director and the buck stops with me in engineering, lots of sidebar conversations and decisions get made in Sand Diego face-to-face and not on conference calls and slack channels.

zip1234• 8 years ago

This is very difficult to address. I think people (in the office) need to buy in and use chat or email as communication mode number one. Either that or someone needs to come out with some better tele-presence for remote teams to interact with people in the office.

Tehchops• 8 years ago

We already used up your bandwidth quota?

andyfleming• 8 years ago

It would be nice to have a way to separate full-time remote employees from consultants/freelancers and part-time remote contractors.

I feel as though the constraints and consequences are very different between the two.

Jasber7• 8 years ago

Good suggestion, I've tried to tag Freelancers/Consultants where appropriate but this is something that can be improved—thanks!

senatorobama2• 8 years ago

The key difficulty for me is finding a remote job (from scratch) in a name brand company i.e listed on the NASDAQ.

bitlax• 8 years ago

A lot of major companies offer remote work, but why is that important? Are you using that as a proxy for salary?

senatorobama2• 8 years ago

How do you find them?

TallGuyShort• 8 years ago

If you're looking for folks to interview, I've been full-time remote for almost 5 years and have managed to do it quite successfully. I'd be happy to share thoughts.

Jasber7• 8 years ago

Sure! Can you email brad@remotehabits.com and we can get something setup.

geoffrey123• 8 years ago

I am looking for a remote developer role myself

https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreycallaghan

mlthoughts20182• 8 years ago

My experience after having fully remote jobs and onsite jobs in companies with satellite offices and other remote workers, as well as managing and hiring for a team that includes on-site and remote engineers, is that you are generally practicing all the same skills needed for working remotely even if you are based on-site. You have to fight through the distractions of the surrounding environment and practice self-discipline, you’ll have a video call option for every single meeting (and often even other in-office participants access the call by video rather than walking to the conference room), all “water cooler talk” is deliberately moved into a medium like Slack, other on-site people work from home often, even managers using video calls to talk about your yearly performance review.

I’m sure many people making the transition could still use a service like this for good advice.

But generally, on-site experience in many types of tech / ecommerce companies these days imparts so much of the identical skills used for remote work that you would find pretty much the sole difference is the utter bliss of not being in an open-plan office.

Similarly when hiring for remote or on-site roles, I find years of experience specifically working remotely plays no role. It does not make a candidate more or less likely to fit in a new remote role. And lack of prior remote experience rarely ever factors in even when hiring for a remote role.

In other words, most types of prior work experience already prepare you well to be a remote worker. There’s no special “being good at remote” skill that most on-site jobs fail to exercise, though some people might occasionally feel that they personally or idiosyncratically need more help with certain aspects, unrelated to what general job experience offers them.

matt_the_bass• 8 years ago

It sounds like in your opinion “no open plan office” is the sole value of working remote? As I misunderstanding your comment?

My office does not have open plan offices. Some of us work remote about 20% of the time. But I think we all generally enjoy working on site too.

mlthoughts20182• 8 years ago

That has definitely been my experience from a worker’s point of view. People assessing costs, etc., might have other opinions.

The second-biggest benefit is not spending time on a commute. And if you have child care needs or other family arrangements to tend to, the flexibility offered being at home is a benefit.

But by far the biggest benefit is that it lets you get away from working in open-plan offices.

At one past employer that had a mix of on-site and remote workers, the company had an amazing policy of letting on-site employees work from home as often as they wanted, no questions asked.

During one especially difficult design and implementation phase for a certain project, I worked from home for three weeks straight, because otherwise it was literally impossible to get the work done with noise distractions and lack of private space to think and tinker while at the office.

Personally, I like working on-site (in private offices) most of all, but the downsides of open-plan arrangements are so severe that I’d practically use any other type of working arrangement, even being fully remote, if it allowed me to avoid an open-plan office.

stockkid• 8 years ago

It was working but now I'm getting "Server Not Found" when I click the link.

I find the content very helpful. How do you plan to keep producing such good quality content in the long term? I've seen many Show HNs like this with meteoric launch getting abandoned after some months.

omnimus• 8 years ago

Well advice from one of the freelance webdevs (http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a-full...) is to start to charging 10usd. He calls it reasonable pricing. I mean i live in quite poor country but 10usd is pretty hard wow. The great twist is that he works for YCombinator backed company as lead front-end dev. Way to go lol

slow_donkey• 8 years ago

Oh boy. Please no one take that advice of charging 10/hr. Remote does not at all justify making < minimum wage

mettamage3• 8 years ago

I agree, but I do like to play devil's advocate here (just for a bit). Say you live in Thailand, what is wrong with making less? Or at least, a little less? You can still participate in the local economy.

illuminati1911• 8 years ago

How much do freelancers usually get in different countries/regions? Or on average in the US and Europe?

When I was still living in Finland (few months ago) the market rate was usually around 80-120 EUR/h => 90-140 USD/h.

wingerlang• 8 years ago

$10 is the DAILY minimum wage where I live. Surely someone without experience could use this as a starter salary without feeling bad.

PaulRobinson• 8 years ago

Minimum wage where you are is perhaps somewhat higher than minimum wage in many other parts of the World.

More than 80% of the World's population lives on less than $10 per DAY. If you live in one of those areas, and you can make that per hour, you can have a good life.

What's more, you're never going to be short of work, because people are going to look at you and realise you are the same skill-wise as the guy wanting $1k/day in London, so why not save some money and everybody is happy - even the $1k/day guy is happy because they are working for a client who values the work at that more than the client thinking "wait, I could get this done for less than a tenth of the price".

Over time (perhaps quite quickly once you've proven you can work well with clients in the EU and US), you can raise your rates, of course, and that's awesome for everybody.

It's just wise to not automatically presume that 10/hr is a bad rate for that individual in that circumstance - there's enough work going around for all of us that we can deal with the low-balling etc. from other countries.

jen729w• 8 years ago

Oh come on, that is massively out of context. The guy pretty much says it’s his first job. Look at the picture, he’s a kid. Good on him, he’s making it work. He’ll put his rate up when he’s ready.

And until then, if he’s getting real work and charging less then you then watch your backs, eh? Don’t get complacent. Don’t take it for granted. And don’t be miserable self-righteous assholes here.

Edd314159• 8 years ago

First year of college, I started working remotely for $5 an hour. Ten years later, at the same company, I’m still remote, making a decent six figures. It’s fine to start small.

taneq• 8 years ago

Yeah, at that point the lower rates account for the increased risk of hiring someone without experience. My first software job back in university was at McDonalds rates, but it paid off when, two years later, I was on (what was for the time and location) a decent entry-level professional salary while most of my classmates were unemployed due to the dotcom bust.

jamaicahest2• 8 years ago

Minimum wage here is on average $17 / hour, across all industries. I say average because there is no law about minimum wage here in Denmark, but unions are very strong and almost all employees are covered by a collective agreement, which dictates a minimum hourly salary.

mettamage3• 8 years ago

I see a ton of new freelancer make the mistake of charging $15 or more from the jump without 0 reputation to back up that value. You can't expect to be paid what you want without having a way of proving that value in some way. [1]

To give a counter point. I have done the opposite with 0 reputation, I charged between 60 to 70 euro's per hour. I now increased my rate to 75 euro's per hour, since I know a couple of bootcamp graduates who charge the same. Why do they charge the same? Well, one got into a dev shop and he quickly realized he was the best web dev and got rented out for a 100 euro's per hour.

Though per haps one difference is that I knew people who needed a freelancer now. They couldn't find anyone and I was still studying CS and therefore available. Finding clients on your own with that rate may be harder.

I think understanding supply and demand really important, as well as building trust with your client. Can you get the job done? If yes, then what's the going rate for any other freelancer and charge that.

With all that said, it is just one interview that I am quoting. It is also interesting to see such diversity in there!

[1] http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a-full...

Oras• 8 years ago

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

tomcooks• 8 years ago

Death by hugs, 509 bandwidth exceeded~

fcanela2• 8 years ago

I am getting a 509 Bandwith Exceeded error. The sites is still accesible via http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jNN8m0q...

fcanela2• 8 years ago

It seems like the cache link I previously pasted does not allow to click on deeper links on the site. Sorry. At least it helps to have a quick view to the content.

samat• 8 years ago

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

ddtaylor• 8 years ago

I am curious, what kind of provider is this and what kind of bandwidth limits could be burned through by a basic HTTPS website? I tried to do a reverse DNS but it only came up with a generic "com.remotehabits.in-addr.arpa"

I only ask this because even my very poor $2.50/mo server gets 500GB to 1TB of bandwidth allocated to it which is enough for millions of standard page loads.

duggan2• 8 years ago

Some whois sleuthing suggest a company called Conseev who operate a shared hosting service[1] with a 250MB bandwidth limit.

[1] https://www.purespeedhosting.com/shared-hosting/

Jasber7• 8 years ago

It's just a shared server, looks like I put too low of a bandwidth limit on it!

wyclif• 8 years ago

Rule #1 of remote work: never exceed your bandwidth.

Jasber7• 8 years ago

Fixed, thanks for letting me know!

chasd002• 8 years ago

I've been remote for about 5 years now. Once thing often overlooked is the perception of working remote by significant others. It took a handful of fights with my wife until we came to an understanding that from 8-5 i'm at work, even though I'm home, I'm still at work. Granted, there's give and take like with all things in a marriage but when I "leave" for work and shut the office door I may as well be 30miles away in an office building until 5.

organsnyder• 8 years ago

I'm starting a remote position on Monday, and my wife and I have had a similar conversation. I've portrayed it in similar ways: when I'm working, it should be the same as if I were still at my downtown office; but I can teleport home instantly if there is a true emergency.

xmcp123• 8 years ago

Seconding this. I've worked from home for 16 years(my whole life).

I've taken to asking my SO to treat it like I'm at an office, and not home at all. A lot of discussions end in "is that something you could do during your work day?"

throwaway284726• 8 years ago

As someone who’s not married it also isn’t good for relationships in general. Staying home all day basically makes you the least interesting person in the world. You never have any crazy stories, weird colleagues, office romances, and whatever else normal people talk about. How do you answer “how was your day” and make it interesting?

richardbrevig• 8 years ago

I know I'm unusual about this, but I really try to keep my conversations away from simply just normal happenings. I recognize this is probably a necessity to share our days, but I value people that speak about ideas more.

timlin• 8 years ago

I've been working remote from home for 15 of the past 18 years.

Taking it a step further, the biggest problem with "my door is shut, I'm at work" is that I sometimes need to open my door. Perhaps for lunch or a snack. Or just to stretch my legs and think. Just because my family sees me wandering around the house doesn't mean I'm available.

I've found that it works best to have my wife & kids email me questions/info/thoughts even though we're in the same house. I can then respond when I'm available. Sometimes via email or sometimes by initiating a conversation.

chasedehan• 8 years ago

Ha! I was working remote yesterday from my couch for a portion of the day. My wife wanted me to go to the store with her and her justification was "you're just playing on the computer"

nvarsj• 8 years ago

Oh the luxury. I live in London. No way I could afford a dedicated office room. I settle for the corner of my living room, with a good pair of noise cancelling headphones which indicate "I'm working". Seems to work, most of the time.

tluyben2• 8 years ago

My wife also works from home which makes it all good, but, during the 26 years working from home, I indeed had girlfriends who thought; great, he is home let’s go do something fun! Explaining it does not work like that is tiresome, I mean, what is so hard to understand? Also many people actually believe I am on some kind of permanent vacation. Which I find weird too as I am a hard worker and usually spend more rather than less time working than they do, but they have to go to an office so it feels more real.

johnc113• 8 years ago

Hey guys, I saw a few people quoting my interview here and I appreciate the criticism and wanted to clear a few misconceptions is the word? up!

For reference: http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a-full...

When I say charge $10 USD that is what I started charging personally as I felt it gave me the most competitive edge as I was a recent graduate and JUST starting out. The minimum wage in Puerto Rico where I live is $7.50 so it definitely made sense to me and I'm the type of person who doesn't like overselling themselves or feeling like I'm being cocky/arrogant, plus I was starting out I barely knew anything haha. It's a personality thing you know. I am however by no means saying hey charge $10 USD to start out, that made sense to me and worked for me because I was a recent graduate, have no debts and no family to support. Someone with all these things to consider $10 USD would be DISMAL to even accept and I get that. What I was trying to convey above all is be reasonable with your pricing, charge something that for you recognizes your value and needs and ALSO Values your client and their needs if that makes sense!

Also someone mentioned me being a lead front-end dev at OpenSea which YES is backed by YCombinator but I wanted to clear up one thing which is I said main dev not lead front end dev as I have been with them from early on, that title belongs to the co-founders haha I'm sorry for that confusion and wanted to clear it up, I hate taking credit where credit is not due! I am/was the lead front-end dev for a startup called freshChefs in shanghai for their food delivery app though which was an AWESOME experience!

Finally, I have upped my rates considerably from my early days starting out and now usually charge $50/hr so I definitely climbed those up over time, I just started at a reasonable price that worked for me but in no ways mean works for or should be done by everyone.

Thanks guys! And I hope the article gave you some insights and it's crazy to see it somewhere like HackerNews!

PS: I'm actually 24 and that picture was from my graduation day back in 2015 because I abhor pictures, I still have a baby face though XD

hoyin_remotes• 8 years ago

This is great website! I think we need more things like these to make it easier for people to learn how to work remotely. I have outlines some of comments in this video message I recorded for you: https://www.useloom.com/share/3e8262418d7c4f1187d3b92b037624...

Show HN: Learn how to work remotely from people doing it every day

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