bit of a random one, but I received a (non-Clojure) 3-month freelance gig offering, which includes paid housing of my choice in Amsterdam . Also rate is pretty neat, akin to USA rates. My only concern is that it sounds a bit too good to be true. I could find in google a bit about "3 month" Dutch offerings, but not a lot really.

Are these an actual thing?

(I'm not talking about generic relocation for employees - this is a freelance one)

@vemv could be true as there's a big demand for experienced developers in the Netherlands.

@vemv If it's true, then congrats on the awesome gig.

https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/a-2-year-stanford-study-shows-astonishing-productivity-boost-of-working-from-home.html

It's "N days a week at home, 5-N days a week at the office", but it's nice to see a scientifically proven result.

very cool

im definitely more productive at home and dont really feel lonely with no coworkers around.

ive had thoughts of building a “virtual office” before where each person has an always-on channel (similar to discord’s voice channels except with video as well) and a “physical” office space, and there can be communal areas and stuff. Basically an office RPG and when you enter a person’s you are immediately put in a audio/video call with them (no calling out because that shit hardly works)

Some kinds of organizations tend to fail spectacularly in distributed mode though.

yeah not for everyone obviously but i have a feeling it’s good for more than exist now

I remember working in one company where it was impossible to get anything done from home, as all the required documentation was stored in the heads of lead engineers, who were notoriously laggy in e-mail or Skype communication.

ah well that’s a different kinda problem

the company should have given those guys like a couple of weeks to write everything down without being expected to deliver other stuff at the same itme

If the management considered it to be a problem then probably they would do that.

haha yeah youre right

I work part time from home, mostly in the afternoon and I am in the office before lunch. Sometimes we have a lot to discuss (as in productive 1-on-1 meetings or pairings) and it makes sense to be in the office. But from home I am more productive too. Not being constantly disturbed by someone for whatever reason is reliefing 🙂

Also the barrier in the office to disturb someone is much lower than via Skype.

Also I use my breaks to do something useful, like cleaning some stuff up, giving my brain a break and actually moving my body instead of sitting hours straight.

I almost only worked remotely, so I might be biased. But I would argue that the organisation needs to be run remote first or you as a remote developer needs to be handed a well defined task to complete for things to work well. Being part of the org and taking ownership if you’re the only remote soul, sound difficult to me. The times I had been in an office I have struggled, maybe because of those open offices I was in, or maybe because I’m very introverted.

Our organisation definitely is not remote first, but my team lead insists on writing everything up. In our team everybody should be able to pick up any task anytime and understand what he has to do while asking only a few questions to clarify the current state. We use iTrac and Jira extensively, starting with the product manager, regular backlog groomings and everything is written up. Even email communication is attached to the according iTrac task / feature. It sucks from time to time, especially as our standups might take up to an hour sometimes, but the result is a paper trail that is understandable and task descriptions that actually tell me what I have to do.

Of course we still are encouraged to work together anytime we feel the need and this is achieved by skype. Its sufficient for what we do, although I sometimes wish remote control was faster.

This results in a very flexible workplace culture. Almost every team member of us has kids in between 0 - 13. So it happens often enough that somebody has to stay home, take a few days off, calls in sick or sick with his kids, etc.

@sveri iTrac does not seem to be very googleable. Do you have a link?

With “remote first” I was loosely thinking that things are not discussed around a lunch table, sounds like that is not the case.

i’ve been 100% remote for a year now. Sometimes stuff happens and people don’t tell me about it, but it’s ok cause I get to yell at them for it.

@dottedmag Sorry, I am so accustomed to our internal names. I referred to: https://de.atlassian.com/software/jira and confluence. We also use bitbucket now inbetween. Everything hosted by ourselves.

@kardan They tend to be discussed in #offtopic Slack channels and such.

@kardan My company is 100% remote and I've been there over eight years now. We use Slack heavily, and Skype for Business for A/V calls. On Slack we have #general for vaguely work-related stuff that everyone might want to chat about, #random for non-work chit-chat, and #random-tech for the dev teams to chit-chat about technology. Plus each team has their own channel(s) and we have several "bridge" channels, shared between two or more teams. Works really well.

I've worked almost 100% remote now for eleven years (since I quit Adobe). I tell recruiters, no company could pay me enough to commute into an office every day! (especially with the miserable traffic here in the Bay Area!)

I strongly suspect no company could pay me enough isn’t strictly true 🙂

I’ve started offering commuting, on the condition that I charge my standard hourly rate for the time spent

Moving to outskirts was never so attractive: increased amount of billed hours + cheaper houses!

@mv Good idea!

@lee.justin.m It's interesting to do the math on what a commute does to the overall hours you "work" and consider what it looks like to be paid for that time...

Long commutes have been correlated with depression and suicide.

Then again, so has dentistry. o.O

In the Bay Area, a lot of people spend two hours a day, commuting... so that's an additional 25% of your time, assuming a 40-hour work week (yeah, right). I know people who spend closer to four hours a day commuting, round here.

And commuting by car is basically wasted time -- you can't read, do email, and you can't even really just relax and day-dream (esp. with bad traffic to navigate).

but you can get angry and pretend not to eat mcnuggets, so there’s that.

Yeah, driving to work around here is a bad situation.

At least when I worked at Macromedia/Adobe, my commute was on public transit and shuttle bus so I could be somewhat productive.

i had a job where i was able to walk to work, in LA. That’s the best.

It's a 20m Caltrain ride from Burlingame to SF though, on the right train. That's what I did, when working in the city.

@jgh That's impressive for LA! 🙂

I know it worked out pretty well

@jeaye I've always lived in the East Bay -- property is just too expensive on the peninsula.

@seancorfield Well, you're buying and likely have kids.

Burlingame, in my opinion, is a perfect sweet spot between convenience, safety, and price. You can find a nice, family-owned apartment for < $2k if you look for a while. Walking distance from Caltrain and Burlingame Ave.

Only fur kids 🙂

But buying here... $2M is the lowest I've seen, for a small house.

$2k for an apartment 😞

Better than $3k or $4k in SF.

@dottedmag @seancorfield I think I expressed myself badly. I was trying to say that I would imagine it would be difficult to work as a remote developer if most of the organisation was deciding things over lunch (where you as a remote is not present). I been working remotely for the last 8+ years so fully bought into the remote thing 🙂

Heh, I used to have a job where I worked remotely Tues thru Thurs, and everybody else was in the office, which worked fairly well except when they had whiteboard meetings and forgot to turn the webcam to face the whiteboard

That happened a fair amount.

@kardan Ah, yes, being the only remote team member, or one of only a few remote folks, can be very isolating -- the on-site folks often forget to include you 😞

“Do I interrupt the flow of the discussion, or just try to guess what they’re drawing based on context…?”

Being the first remote employee is usually just martyrdom, best case they trigger an onsite referendum on remote work in general

If >50% of the team is remote or the manager is remote, it usually works well

I'm used to being able to work one or two days A week remote. Current place want all external contacted people to be there ask the time, so 5 days a week.

Yeah, my current place was already partly remote when I joined (remotely) and the new devs were in: Bay Area, New York, London -- while the existing (small) team was in So. Cal. Since that time, the rest of the company has gone completely remote. We have two devs in Seattle, one in Minneapolis. The company mostly operates on West Coast time and the rule is: "If no one can tell what timezone you're in, you can be as remote as you want" (and we have folks scattered across Europe and the Middle East now -- but they're all U.S. folks, they just happen to be on extended visits to those places).

so does that mean you have to be an extreme night owl if you live in europe?

I worked for a NY time zone company, doing 20 hours a week. I worked from South Africa, Amsterdam, and Bangkok during that time. Definitely helped that it was only 4 hours a day, so I could play with the schedule

8 hour days probably limits you to the Americas and Europe, working afternoon into night

@lee.justin.m We try hard to keep sync-up time -- meetings -- to Pacific morning hours, so it's not too bad for the Europe/Middle East folks. But we are, at the core, an American company, operating mostly on the West Coast (most employees have homes in California or Washington states).

(hence why we can only hire U.S. folks for remote work -- even if they can then travel the world while working!)