What is the biggest challenge have you faced as a remote developer?
Due to this pandemic, many of us working remotely. Despite remote work transforming, as a developer what are the difficulties you've faced during the work?
Due to this pandemic, many of us working remotely. Despite remote work transforming, as a developer what are the difficulties you've faced during the work?
Isolation.
I'm normally quite happy working as an individual contributor and enjoy having some autonomy on a project, but working remotely has broken down some of the more essential, unstructured communication that I need to be productive and happy.
I think a lot of this is not due to remote work, but due to working remotely for a company that has no intention to be remote after the pandemic. A lot of effort and process goes into building a really effective remote environment.
Hey Gary, yes agree with your point but some people don't like WFM working model.
Communication is everything.
Teams that can get away with short task descriptions and acceptance criteria in person. When those same teams go remote, its a problem. It forces more calls and chat messages which drives down productivity. I would wager its the single biggest factor in productivity loss for newly remote companies.
Simple things like a detailed merge request with examples, expected outputs and how to setup the environment to review it will save hours.
Its a skill everyone of us needs to nuture. Pays dividends for solo and small company indie hackers.
But how developers of forever remote companies come out of this communication issue? Any idea?
I guess it starts with you. The whole "be the change you want to see" and if the culture doesn't change. Move on. Life is too short to work somewhere with values that don't align with yours.
Totally agree, it's a skill.
Being able to explain your thoughts concisely in a written form, provide a proper actionable description of the task is priceless.
We found that working remote revealed a lot of holes in how we collaborated and ensured nothing fell through the cracks. It's easy to chalk that up to being due to remote work, but the reality was that we were getting away with things that were already problems. So the first challenge was mentally re-framing all the challenges as either old problems that had been revealed from the context-change, or as things that were simply different (not worse) about remote work that needed examination.
We spent a ton of our time talking through and collaborating on ways to improve work management and the social aspects of work, and that sometimes felt like a drag.
Our current main challenge actually comes from what remote work has allowed, which is a lot more scheduling flexibility. We're trying to make it so that everyone can work in their own most productive manner, which also means hours. Figuring out what should stay synchronous, how to handle collaborations, how to reliably handle hand-offs, etc in that context has been a huge challenge. It still is. Not a bad challenge, but constantly knowing that there's probably a better way just around the corner creates a sense of instability.
We've changed our primary work-management tools twice since starting work-from-home, seeking things to help us solve these problems. But each time we adopt a new tool, it reveals new things we could try we hadn't thought of. So we change AGAIN, and then at some point the tool starts holding us back from where we've now ended up. It's a bit of an endless game. It's the sort of thing that I mostly enjoy, since stability makes me feel stagnant, but it is a big stressor for the team overall.
I couldn't agree more with this. My experience has been the same.
Remote was just the straw, not the problem.
Great response.
Hi Adam, would you mind reviewing our tool [Simply5 CloudLAN] (simply5.io) - Which helps to share your localhost with your team & debug code more easily.
I’m not looking to sell anything, but since you have so much expertise as a developer and tried many tools, I’d love to get your advice on our product & the high-value issue you would solve with it from your experience.
The company I work for is quite liberal when it comes to structuring my day. I can start a bit later and work a bit later or split my day into multiple chunks, which is great because it gives a lot of flexibility.
A problem I ran into with this is that I had no idea how much time I worked. As a consequence, I ended up working way too much to make sure not to slip behind. This situation wasn't ideal because I couldn't relax after work or spend enough time on my side projects.
I tried tracking how much time I spend working, and that helped me being ok with leaving work behind. I think setting boundaries and knowing when it is ok, to walk away is what made the difference.
I liked it enough that I'm building an app around it to make the process of tracking time more convenient.
I think most of us facing the late work issue/work without boundary. From my experience, there is no need to work for 8+ hours, work an hour with full potential & without distractions there is no need for overtime working. ( It works for me but don't know about everyone work nature)
Congratz to ur new app that u are building, looking forward to use it:)
I’ve worked as a remote software engineer just about all of my career. Going for 6 years.
I was never a fan of the office politics, moving to work remotely removed all of that fuss. But there were times working from an office was fun, specifically connecting with others during lunch. I had a small group of co-workers where we would go out and discuss random tech stuff and just general nerdy things.
Now that I’ve quit my job and working as an IndieHacker full-time I’m looking for communities that support that similar environment. IndieHackers is a great community. I’m also looking at 30DaysInPublic for next month to help with staying accountable.
Great, please share your Twitter account, ll follow you to know your 30dayinpublich experience if you share there:)
Ha, I don’t think I really answered your question about biggest challenge. For sure staying disciplined. There are times when working remotely dragged and I would get distracted. It’s funny because even with these distractions. I still managed to get my work done on time. Go figure!
You always work individually or work with a team?
Socialization.
Communicating with teammates is a bit tiring. Huge difference when you do interaction f2f vs over zoom call. former drain out your energy.
Agree, most of the developers feels the same.
Could you try Simply5 CloudLAN ( simply5.io ) - It helps to share your localhost with your team & debug code more easily and also reduce CI/CD process.
I am not marketing anything right here, it's my humble request to try it out and know your feedback.. It helps to understand our product-market fit and which are the expecting features from developers like you. This helps us a lot so we don’t build the wrong thing.
For sure you have to strengthen your discipline and learn how to deal with distractions of all sorts.
Besides, I feel a productivity boost rather than a slow down thanks to the remote work. It might sound a bit cliché but I believe that work is not the place you go to.
Another thing is that I was already working fully remotely before pandemics so the team didn't have to switch into remote mode under the pressure. I can imagine it could be a bit chaotic in another case (which can simply affect the overall team productivity).
Agree with your points Raf, Thanks for sharing.