Experiments With Going Remote — First hand experience of an Indian
Remote work is talked about a lot in blogs and articles and they focus mostly on the promise it shows in bringing down the cost, freeing up time, reducing the mental stress and a lot of other non tangibles.
I like the promise it shows and have experimented with it a bit. Most of the articles I read talked about how they travel and work at the same time. I being an Indian, am too attached to my parents and family. More than the idea of travelling around the world the dream of being able to work in the company of my loved one’s attracts me.
I often don’t find the problems we Indian’s face with the remote work listed in those articles. The major one being lack of stable Internet connection and Infrastructure in general.
So, circling back to the point, I am going to recount my experiences and analyse the problems I faced working remotely and try to conclude what the future holds. So let’s go Down the memory lane …
Year 2009
Place — Lucknow, India
Hey Ron, how are you ? It’s been long since we last met..
(long awkward silence although I can see Ron waving choppily)
And there comes a delayed choppy hi from Ron…
Yeah, that’s what it was like meeting remotely over a video call in the year 2009. It’s been almost a decade and things have changed around the globe and especially in India. I hail from India and ever since the IT boom, the concept of remote working seemed awesome to me.
In the year 2009, I was in 9th Grade and my days were spent sitting in our school’s computer lab. I would bunk classes to help out our computer teacher with maintenance and other stuff in computer labs. And in return I got access to 2mbps internet connection (extremely high speed back then) at school when ever I wanted.
I started out writing HTML code for a relative of friend of a friend in US and later on picked some Javascript. My sister being a Software Engineer herself, taught me a few things in ASP.net (Crazy old days when I had not even heard of Linux) and I was able to hack together a barely functioning website with a database and make actual money. I still remember how difficult it was to communicate with that client in US back then.
Analysis
- Zero Infra available, internet is a luxury and it’s hard to find an internet enabled device outside the cyber cafes and commercial institutions
- Really bad time to be working remotely especially in tier 2 city
It’s been a decade since then and I have worked on many projects, graduated school and have earned myself an Engineering degree in Computer Science. Times have changed and I’ve been to more places too. So let’s recall something recent.
Year 2011 …
Place — Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India
Client — My school, with some team in Delhi, India
Due to my previous success with hacking together the website and my good grades in computers my Computer Teacher asked me to re-build the website for school because the “Professionals” that did that earlier were charging shit loads for small changes. In return I asked for legitimate note from Principal that would let me bunk the extra curricular activities and basically any other subjects I was not interested in [Sweet deal, right :)].
I worked on the project and finally when it was ready to be made live I was supposed to co-ordinate with the “Professionals” in Delhi — Over a video call and it didn’t go well because internet speed was terrible and network very choppy. Ultimately they came down to our school and the website was made live.
Analysis -
2011 not a great time to take on remote work in a tier 2 city of India. More investments needed in terms of infrastructure.
Year 2013
Place — Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
Client — A startup in US, Team distributed across globe
By this time, I’ve enrolled into college and I am near the National capital hence infrastructure is great compared to what I had earlier. I have a 12mbps connection capped to 1 GB per day for each student.
The guys I was working with were in Spain, Bangalore, Kolkata and New York. This is how a video call would go like -
Noida — Hey
Bangalore, New York — Hey guys, let’s get started. Let’s do a quick sync up
Kolkata — Hi, sorry your voice is breaking up. Let me just call Gaurav on his cell and we can continue from there.
Spain — (Camera tuned off) — Hi …
New York guy at this point would text Spanish guy to just stay on mute and he would get him up to speed later on.
So it was just Noida, New York and Bangalore now. Hmm, but we did manage to get some work done. However it gave me a global exposure and I got to know how expensive the internet services are in other places compared to India.
Spain — The guy couldn’t afford a better connection since he was also a student just like me
Kolkata — The guy could afford a better plan, it was just that there was no better deal available. He was on 4 mbps plan and that’s the best he got in that region.
New York — He had some 100 mbps connection and always told that it was very pricey but since he earned good enough he was able to afford it.
Analysis
- Lots of opportunities for remote work. With new startups coming up each day there was no dearth of work for Indian’s who could code. And the pay was good too.
- Infrastructure wise, there was now a lot better internet connectivity and the meetings were productive enough. However we did switch to normal phone calls very often
- I still needed to test out my connection before the meeting and save up on data since I had only 1 GB per day. I simply could not have meetings on the go.
- So the remote work scenario showed promise but it was still a long way to go, infra wise
Year 2016
Place — Noida, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow
Client — One in US and one in Singapore, couple of others in Bangalore
The internet scenario in India can be described something like Pre Jio and Post Jio. Before Jio started its services I was paying 378 rupees a month for 1.5 GB of data at 2mbps speed. And post Jio I enjoyed unlimited data and voice calls without any speed limits for almost a year.
Things started to change as the data became dirt cheap and average internet speed was increasing. My college installed a Gigabit connection however for students the speed was capped around 50 mbps and data was stilled capped to 1 GB/day.
The foreign clients, especially the one’s in US were no longer dreading the video calls and I often used to take calls while I was travelling or even going to a class. No more preparation to ensure a stable connection.
BTW Jio brought a revolution in cellular data, this revolution was brought in the broadband space much earlier, around 2014 by cable internet providers.
So a Big thanks to Jio, business was good and I would often communicate even with my Indian friends on google hangouts.
Analysis
- Great time for remote work, tier 2 cities hadn’t really caught up with internet speeds and the competition was less
- Pay was good and stable. Longer and bigger projects were available as the clients now had more confidence
- Overall it was positive
Year 2017
Place — Delhi, India
Clients — All across the globe
Video calling has become my default choice for communication. I no longer prefer voice calls. Thanks to our telecom regulatory authority for not putting a ban on VOIP services as some of the gulf countries. Internet speed has stabilised around 50 mbps for broadband and 5–20 mbps for cellular connections depending on the city you are in.
Analysis
- Competition in the freelance world had increased but it was definitely the best time to work remotely.
- More and more full time work is available rather than contract work as it used to be the case earlier
- Startups even when co-located are opting for remote work to save office expenses
Year 2018
Place — Delhi
I am working full time for Wingify and it has a remote team in Pune, India. They are sizing it down and moving all the engineers that need to collaborate more often to their HQ in Delhi.
It was a mess communicating with co-workers in Pune since we did not know each other much the Delhi people felt more connected to one’s physically present over here.
I was really getting riled up on this idea of working remotely full time and studying fully remote companies.I wanted to experiment working with partially remote team before taking the plunge.
BTW this was also the time when a lot of organisations started shunning the remote working. So I asked my manager for 2 weeks of remote work and headed back to my home town — Lucknow.
Everything was great, but I was missing on the learning from co-workers. People were not active on slack. I would keep waiting for a reply for hours. I often had to ring them up and ask to reply on slack.
The experience was terrible and I cut my stint short and returned to regular in office work.
I did enjoy the freedom to work from my home town but the productivity tanked. So I analysed the situation and came up with following points -
- Partially remote team is a recipe for disaster
- The team needs to be trained to work remotely and adopt the remote workers as part of team.
- If the team is going to be partially remote then the effort has to be made by everyone. You have to be very expressive and over communicate so that everyone is on same page
Analysis -
- Not everyone is trained to work remotely and it’s great if you are lone wolf but terrible if not so
- Infra is there, but unlike Foreign startups, the Indian corporates have no real benefit of keeping workers remote when at a slightly more cost they can make a more productive team.
- Cost to convenience equation is not right for existing Indian companies to go remote but the one’s starting from 0 are still liking it
Year 2019 (Present)
Place- Delhi
I “collaborate” on a few projects after office hours and I insisted on working remotely because I needed to learn more about why I failed in my first stint working remotely with my existing employer.
I see more and more people college students opting for remote work in startups and I see more entrepreneurship going on because the cost of operating a business has come down hugely because of not needing an office.
Fully remote teams are working fine but I still struggle with the teams that are co-located, I feel like I am out of loop a lot.
So still, Yay! for fully remote and Nay! for partially remote.
Analysis
- Literally the best time to work on that startup idea of yours, live close to work save on commute time and work remotely with your team working on your idea.
- Remote work is really empowering small entrepreneurs
- Software guys no longer look towards foreign companies for contract remote work. Pay is almost equally good for remote work in India.
Conclusion
- Fully remote is the way to go, it’s going to bring in a lot more people into work force.
- Remote work is also changing the gender dynamics at work place. More and more men are opting for remote jobs to be stay at home dads and Women coming out to work in office
- The future is very bright, earlier for jobs people had to move to business centres and capital cities but now I often see people working from tier 2 cities to and taking a pay cut. Essentially driving down the cost to company.
- Only contract remote work was available a few years ago but now there are a whole lot of opportunities out there.
- Not a lot of non software work but I see a handful of opening for remote back office work and data entry jobs and that does not seem to change a lot in future
I am very hopeful that in a couple of years I would be back in my home town working at a job I like from the comfort of home and in the company of my loved one’s
