Interview with Jacob, a Site Reliability Engineer who works remotely
remotehabits.comA few months ago I took some time off school to hack on a couple projects. Learnt a ton and even got to sell the end result for a decent amount of money. The overall experience is a net positive.
However, be warned that it can get lonely really fast. Even if you have your family around. I usually never mind being alone for extended period of times even though I do enjoy people's company. But that was something else entirely. It is a feeling, not unlike loneliness but more subtle and that can get crippling some of the time.
The thing is that even if you have people around, meet with your friends regularly, see your family etc. No one "gets" what you are doing and so you don't have anyone to celebrate with, share the burden of a task, brainstorm and challenging your status-quo, or licking your wound after things got tough. It's a bit harsh. After some time of independent work, I found myself longing to go back to school, which I did and I'm happier - and stronger - now.
Digressing a bit on startups: I think this experience tipped me off (for the future) that starting a solo company is making it harder on yourself than it has to be.
Granted remote work is different since you are connected to a team. Still, a word of caution feels necessary.
This is something that simply isn't talked about enough. We seem to live in a culture that really glorifies remote work. However, the truth is that it's actually really hard.
I made the switch more than a year and a half ago. When I did, I made a rule. See a stranger every day. This addressed the crippling loneliness that comes with the change. I lived in a really friendly neighborhood at the time, so meeting people and having real conversations was pretty easy.
Your other points made me realize how much I have taken my network of engineer friends who work in the industry. I'm going to do better at contributing to those Slack channels.
>No one "gets" what you are doing
3 years ago, I shifted from fullstack/framework web development to native mobile development. I have suffered from this exact, specific type of isolation continuously ever since I made the move.
The technical work is the most challenging, interesting, and rewarding stuff I've worked on yet in my (10 yr) career, but I have yet to find a position (across 3 companies) where I am not working in isolation fully owning and maintaining one product app by myself, with (intermittently) maybe, 1/4 of the normal input from a designer and/or a PM.
Highly recommend joining a makerspace. Our makerspace (sparkcc.org) is quite tech-focussed and attracts a lot of people with a professional or hobbyist interest in tech. I've been working remotely for > 3 years now and always enjoy going along on Tuesday night to talk with my fellow makers about projects I've been working on and technology I've been working with.
I feel that this is not discussed enough, especially how everyone will assume that you are "not really working"
Hello HN! RemoteHabits is a small site I launched here on HN a few months ago to figure out the best ways to work remotely.
I noticed when I started remote work, I struggled with a lot of basic things like habits, disciplines, routines, finding community, etc...
I wanted to learn from other people that had already done it, without prescriptive advice like "the 10 things you MUST do with remote work"—so landed on remote interviews.
We aim to release a new interview every Monday, and are always looking for interesting remote workers to interview. If you're interested head over to https://remotehabits.com/interview-me/
As an aspiring remote worker I will bookmark this for future reference. Great site.
I just got back into a regular office again after two and a half years of remote work. I really miss working from my sofa...
Working from a sofa is really bad for your posture and your small muscles, but that’s beside the point.
Why did you go back into an office? Was the choice made for you?
Previous contract ended, it was time to find a new job. The current job was great for everything, except having to commute (both good offers I had were in-office gigs). And the current job really is good, except for the frustration of commuting. I'm at the junction of what I want to do, what I'm good at doing, and what they need someone to do, which is more than I can say for the two remote gigs I had.
I value remote work precisely for the lack of structure. I am beholden to OKRs which are measured monthly, more or less.
> ... am beholden to OKRs
Appears to be hugged to death-
https://web.archive.org/web/20181105190101/https://remotehab...
Thanks, am working to keep the site up, probably need to upgrade the server!
Looks like his site is not very reliable...
It seems this remote work thing is not working out that well.
Quippy comment!
And I would agree, however the blog is not hosted by the SRE who is being featured.
Getting a 508 resource limit is hit but it sounds interesting so will be back in a few hours to try again.
Thanks for the notice, currently working with host to keep the site up!
Sounds like you could do with some help from Jacob :)