On Habré, and on other resources, you can find hundreds of articles that glorify remote work in all ways. And how could it be otherwise: life is almost without Mondays, alarm clocks and with quite far-seated bosses. It would seem, live and rejoice, sit at the PC in a stretched T-shirt, change to a home exercise bike, do not worry about whether you eat pizza with colleagues beautifully, do the work in a more comfortable mode. And do not listen to office gossip and drink cool tea or coffee.
I never thought so. I loved the office and this calm concentration of the workplace. I thought it would never happen to me. But the remote has happened. Two years already. And I am writing here, to my beloved Habr, my very subjective post - simply that there is a second side to this, as it turned out, the neck medal.
Adme.ruI, the manager, and the undoubted advantages of remote work
I am 35. I am not a programmer and not an engineer, rather, I am a manager in the field of engineering. Prior to that, he worked as an engineer, then as a head of the promotion service (and it was awesome!) At an international IT company. But the salary in our millionaire is far from the millionth, so the capital company lured me quite easily for two reasons: an interesting and close to soul and brain project and a decent wage to live in my city. Moving to Moscow is absolutely impossible for me for very personal reasons. Yes, frankly, and does not pull. So, they met me and gave the go-ahead to the remote work.
Euphoria was not a second. There was an alarm: I could not work at home, too many noisy people, 4 people for three rubles - too much. Need a place. All right, we will decide with a place - there are coworkings (I learned this word only two years ago). For now, we will think positively and evaluate the advantages. They are, and I will be the last bastard, if I do not reveal the objective advantages.
- Finance. Receiving a salary just below Moscow in a similar position, in your city you feel not only like a boss, but still at a decent level. Of course, the situation is changing, but more on that in the minuses.
- Health. If you respect yourself and do not sharpen everything, because almost no one looks at you, you have the opportunity to warm up a little, do not hesitate, once again go out into the street and fill your brain with oxygen (in the office you would chat during this break). At first, I, of course, sharpened, but then pulled myself together and now I feel that a walk instead of lunch with colleagues has benefited. And instead of dinner - kefir, fruit, everything.
- Time. You manage your time more than ever: you can redistribute tasks, work at a comfortable pace (most importantly, do the work honestly and in good faith) - not because time is shifted, but because you don’t spend part of it on meetings (often in the office are endless), you do not get distracted for chatter and office tea, you do not answer the small questions of colleagues (relevant for developers and managers).
- The organization of the workplace. You can fill up the desktop, hang a poster with AC / DC or Ilon Mask, put a vase with apples, a teddy penguin or build a stack of necessary books - no one will pay attention to your table and your personal disorder / order / world order and will not laugh at who / what inspires you
- The organization of the thinking process. Everyone loves to work under something different: music, radio, Dudyom, or lectures on the theory of probability. In the headphones, of course. In the office, it eats traffic and for this you can get a comment, a suggestion, a yellow card. Not because there are those who allocate 300 MB of traffic for a week (yes, there is such a thing in IT) or someone is sorry for a piece of unlimited, but because you can prove that he was listening to the background, especially if it was YouTube or VKontakte. By the way, I work under Paul Moria, awesome. When work is more routine - under the talking room (radio, YouTube, online lectures in Russian).
A good set of benefits, you see. Of course, I can say that I forgot about the effective interaction with the coworkers, about the opportunity to work from home in a thunderstorm or frost, about working even with Bali, etc. Well, this is partly a myth. And it did not affect me, why - below.
And now about the experience and disadvantages
I am not an introvert and not an extrovert as a whole - the behavior depends on a particular person. I can hang on the project alone and refuse the help of the team, I can get everyone started for days and move towards the goal. In general, an ordinary person. Therefore, the minuses are purely my experience, and I will be terribly happy to read about yours in the comments and find something for myself.
So, subjectivity in subjectivity is a minus of distant work.
- Office. I have been to our capitals many times and saw coworkings there - I won't even describe it, it's cool and not so expensive (Muscovites were especially lucky). What turned out to be four coworkings in our city: a workshop for creative people (you sit and the potter's wheel spin around you, play the guitar, embroider, discuss the design of the children's sports mat, vape and conduct personal growth training), a cafe with per-minute payment (already it is clear that it is impossible to work there), a place in the office of a company that has five tables and a semi-basement base with three programmers. I started with the last one, but it was closed and I moved to the last but one with all the consequences: I am only a guest, I cannot influence the noise level and how my table is moved. It would be possible to rent a mini-office, but for some reason 90% refused to rent an individual due to fire safety (they say there were cases), and 10% had such a face and such a state of the rooms that it is better not to get involved.
- Interaction with colleagues. Glory to the Internet, we have everything - e-mail, 100,500 workers and informal chats, CRM, project and task management system, etc. It is very, VERY helps to work remote. I can safely say that we even resort to telephony quite rarely - communication is prompt and productive, everyone is always available. But the piece of iron is a piece of iron and no virtualization of the chatroom will replace short and lively communication, brainstorm, rally at the end of the sprint, a direct question and discussion. It is even worse when new ones come, but you have not seen them yet during the next business trip - for them you are as real as Skype or a bot.
- Iron self-discipline. Remote work is RA-BO-TA. That is, in the work schedule of your company, with lunch at the right interval, with mandatory participation in all the necessary projects, with accountability and responsibility. This is not freelancing. Many do not understand this. To work in working mode and to be essentially a micro-office of the head company, an iron discipline is needed: believe me, at first it is difficult to force yourself not to oversleep or be late. I didn’t have any problems with it, but my coworking colleagues did and still do: they work almost 4 hours from strength. True, their conscience does not torment them, they just have an otmaz generator on their deadlines, you can write and do the application.
It's them :-)
- The attitude of colleagues. As I have already said, for most colleagues you remain virtual with all the consequences: your opinion is the tenth, your illness is perceived as a short-term technical failure, some do not even suspect that you are. There are two important problems: a) within the team, something cool and effective can be worked out; b) any conflict occurs in the key in which the opponent READ your words in the chat. There is no way to convey intonation, semitone, openness or, conversely, categorical. Your voice is in the head of a colleague, but does not belong to you. You need to take care of yourself triple, and it kills the nerves.
- Tools for work. I feel good - I am a sysadmin in the past (okay, okay, padawan sysadmin), then a network engineer and it's not difficult for me to repair the computer, return the Internet on a common router, fix software and hardware failures, etc. But if you don’t own all of this, you don’t have much to count on, if you are not in a cool coworking and such problems are not included in the payment. Sitting in a strange office, you are for yourself. And behind the broken mouse you go not to the admin one, but to the store.
- Career prospects. You're virtual, which means you can't open up on all 100 - even if you are a mega programmer, DevOps god and marketing guru. In fact, you fall out of the assessment: yes, they value you, but you are not rated. Here as with children: what is growing up with a grandmother, that one is closer to her.
- Wages and bonuses. The salary due to the previous item changes once a century - simply because the manager is not fully prepared to appreciate you and your work, because you still have a suspicion that you are not working on something. For the same reason, there may be no bonuses if, for example, they are tied to KPIs that include specific indicators.
- Working hours. If you work well and responsibly, then remote work necessarily bangs your notorious worklife balance, and takes up the entire amount provided. For example, I work at the weekend, nervously do something with the tablet, standing in traffic, and even forgot to go on vacation. But this, of course, depends entirely on you: how much time you are willing to give to the cause.
- Coworkers. I was surrounded and surrounded by programmers, managers, business coaches and salespeople of something like 1C for small ones. In short, people without particularly common interests, with varying degrees of sound work (salesman tryndit, programmer screaming via Skype in English, the coach conducts training for half-steak). In general, if you caught a communal apartment or watched a movie about it (especially famously described in “Pokrovsky Gates” and “Dandies”), then in a co-working non-metropolitan level (which with segmentation and partitions) you will get it. Sometimes fun, occasionally - even useful.
- Loneliness. Sooner or later there are attacks of total loneliness, awareness of uselessness and isolation. It hurts so much that you even feel it physically. At such moments you remember where the resume is and sometimes even update it. It is during such periods that the risk of conflicts and misunderstanding, insults, and accusations is high. And it does not happen to you only if everything is in one place. If you give your soul to work, it will happen. Such periods need to be lived through, distracted, and found motivation (I have projects myself, with which I am ready to devote my life). I wrote this article at this moment.
The world of communications has given us freedom, endless freedom of choice, work, implementation. He took from us the value of human communication and interaction, the value of this: to gather and solve by brainstorming in five minutes. Together it is joy for someone, for someone - the load. In any case, this is an interesting experience. Despite all the disadvantages, I am not sure now that I can say for sure whether I am ready for office work. But this is only related to projects that I don’t want to leave under any circumstances.
And how are you?
UPD: if you read this article, be sure to read the comments - it turned out very cool discussion, with a lot of positions and tips. And many thanks to all the commentators for such an invaluable response!