Life as a Remote Software Developer

Splendid!

Yup, this is me working from a bathtub. But let me get back to the beginning.

I work for Automattic, a 1000-person company spread across over 70 countries. My colleagues are around the globe - some of them work from a camper, driving across Southern America, some of them tried catching an internet connection from a cruise ship and majority work from the comfort of their homes.

If I had to summarise remote work in a sentence, it would be:

It just makes sense.

When you think about modern office work, it is a bit peculiar. For lack of a better example, let’s imagine Facebook:

Now here is a company that says you can foster real relationships online. They create a product focused on communicating with your friends, and they even sell (and use) a version of it designed for work.

And yet, they force people to pay truly mind-boggling Silicon Valley rent, sit in traffic and get into the office to sit in front of the computer.

If your work happens on the computer, it can be done remotely.

You choose.

The most significant personal advantage of remote work is not the lack of commute or the ability to work from home. It’s the ability to work from wherever you feel like.

I know the stories of nomads, freelancers, and business owners are quite flashy and inspiring. But its easy to dismiss them - they are usually single people, with no commitments, roaming the world. How could someone with a mortgage, family, and obligations do this stuff?

I am married (to an amazing woman who also works remotely), have an apartment in Warsaw, Poland (yes, with a mortgage) and I take care of my grandparents pretty often. In fact, I decided to stay in Poland because they would be lost without me.

And yet, here is what remote work has allowed us to do just this year:

We flew to South Africa for almost a month.

My wife had a company meeting in Cape Town. We decided to stay for a while, working, and traveling.

I have no words to describe South Africa, but here is an elephant:

We spent a week in Crete, working from an all-inclusive resort.

All while working every day. When they take care of the food, cleaning, etc you have plenty of time to work AND sightsee. Even though it was not technically a vacation, we felt rested afterward. And maybe a little heavier.

We worked from a campground in Banff, Canada.

It's one of the most amazing places on Earth and iPhone hotspot was enough to get solid work done. We worked and lived in an RV.

These are nice, flashy examples. But there are plenty of day-to-day benefits as well:

• I can visit my grandpa during the workday
• Our colleagues enjoy spending time with their kids daily. Naturally, this requires certain boundaries, but taking even a few minutes to talk with your kid when they get back from school will be something you won’t regret down the line,
• I can cook a healthy meal or go for a run instead of having cookies and a 7th coffee in the office

With great power comes great responsibility.

More choice means you have to be more deliberate and thoughtful. If you like being told what to do in every situation, you won’t like remote work.

Since there is usually much less oversight (it's tough to micromanage people over the internet), you have to be the one that will identify, decide and work on the stuff that you should be working on. The boss won’t stand over you and tell you exactly what to do today.

Sometimes this uncertainty is challenging, and we lose a few candidates during the application process because they are not used to that.

Your coworkers will be far away. This may sound like a good thing - no annoying phone calls on the open space, no unnecessary pleasantries.

But we are all still human beings, not a bunch of task-performing robots. Social interaction matters and perceiving your colleagues as people is surprisingly important when it comes to getting the job done.

Tools like Slack and Zoom help a lot. Thoughtful chats and video calls are immensely valuable, but that's not enough.

Our company flies us every 2-3 times to one location for week-long „meetups” where all these water cooler discussions happen. I always come back amazed at how brilliant, funny, and inspiring my coworkers are. It alleviates a lot of annoyance over day-to-day issues.

But you have to supplement your human interaction on your own. When you commute to the office every day, you spend time around people. When you start working from home, you are on your own. Initially, it’s excellent, but after a while, It gets to you.

I drop in a WeWork 1-3 days a week to see the familiar faces. It makes me much more productive, but if I were to spend a whole week there, I would get much less done.

Also, lacking daily face-to-face contact with coworkers, I am much more diligent about contacting my friends in Warsaw.

The neat thing about having a flexible schedule is that you can meet someone during the day. That is why I am really popular among my friends with kids since it’s hard for them to go out in the evening.

The tools

Since I am working on payment systems for WordPress.com, I code in JavaScript and PHP.

• I have a Macbook Pro
• At home, I have an external monitor with a keyboard. I have Magic Keyboard 2 since it has precisely the same layout as MBpro, so when I travel its no different
• I use PHPStorm
• Slack for chats
• Zoom for calls
• Github for code.