How to Work Remotely

Why do I work remotely?

I lived in London, UK for many years. My family live in France. At a given point I wanted to rejoin them.

Modern technology allows me to work remotely and enjoy living with my family.

I don’t have the stress of commute. I can work more and get less stressed because I don’t have the continuous interruptions I have in an office.

You may want to work remotely for a lot of different reasons.

Is your reason that you need money to pay your bills?

When working remotely you need to love coding otherwise what will motivate you when nobody is around?

There is no love in coding to pay the bills.

You may let fear motivate you. But fear makes you stupid and you need your brainpower untouched to solve problems.

What remote employers want from you

You need a specialization. It’s hard to get things done being a generalist.

If you are a software developer, you need to focus on a language or two and a small set of tools. Just to keep yourself trained and updated on a language will take a lot of time.

You won’t convince your clients that you can do everything, they won’t believe you.

They don’t want you to tell them what you can do, they want you to show them what you can do.

Put your code on GitHub, write articles, have a professional website and make a GitHub repository with the code you wrote to build it.

You are your own project manager

There should always be at least four hours of overlap between your working time and the one of everyone else in your team.

Yet for four hours you are on your own. Do you have project management experience?

I managed a team of eight with not just a deadline, but a dread line. Every day of delay carried a penalty of 5,000 Euro.

My company trusted me so much that they sent me to work abroad for a project where to miss the deadline meant to lose a millions Euro deal.

When working with a London client, he trusted me with working at home for a long time.

You can join an open source project. This will tell a lot about your ability to manage your work.

Good at writing

Remote workers write a lot.

When you have a question for your team, don’t rush to ask it.

Show that you are well-organized and know how to work remotely.

Rarely what you need to know is urgent and for that there is the phone.

Put your questions together and ask them when you meet your team in a video conference.

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(full article: How to Work Remotely)