Remote Success Stories: Alessio Fanelli
From đź‘‹ Remote, this is Remote Success Stories, an interview series exploring successful transitions into remote work in the technology world. Interested in transitioning to remote work? Want to chat with other fellow remote workers? Join our global remote work community at helloremote.life!
Our interview today is with Alessio Fanelli, a software engineer at SABEResPODER.
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Alessio, an Italian guy who loves coding just as much as pasta (jk pasta is the best). I’m currently a lead engineer at SABEResPODER. We empower latinos to be more informed and active participants in the U.S. society.
What appealed to you about beginning to work remotely?
I’ve always loved results driven environments, and I think it’s one of the foundations of working remotely since there’s no set working hours. While visiting New York I fell in love with my now fiancee (hey Sarah!), so I thought it’d be the best time to find a remote job that would allow me to travel back and forth to visit her!
How did you first approach the subject with your employer? Had other employees been working remotely before you?
I was really lucky because our dev team was completely distributed already, but it was also the only remote group at the company, so there were still a lot of the same challenges that come from a partially remote team (communication, non-written agreements, face to face time, etc).
What surprising things have you discovered about working remotely?
When you take away synchronous communication, lots of things change in your company culture. This has some pros (more thought out responses to questions, better documentation, no more “I’ll send that to you in a couple minutes”) but also some cons (hard to find a time for chatting with colleagues about non work stuff, you have to ping people again if you don’t get an answer after X amount of time, less “personal” feelings when talking to people since it’s a more formal environment).
Have there been any downsides to beginning to work remotely?
When the team isn’t fully remote there might be some issues with being heard from the rest of the team. I’ve noticed this when I’ve started visiting our main offices. Conversations had on Slack and email still don’t feel “final” to some people, but if you talk about it in person then it’s usually agreed that that’s the way to go.
Are there any tools or software that you’ve found particularly effective?
I use Airmail with just my work email, set emails on for all Github notifications and use that as a tracker for issues/PRs. That way I never forget about following up on an issue or stuff like that. The “Mark Unread” button on Slack is also severly underrated.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Working remotely can be a lot of fun but it also brings new challenges. I was able to travel through 20 US states + another 10 countries while doing it, but sometimes it can feel “lonely”, especially if your team is small. Whether that’s good or bad, it depends on what kind of person you are.
Alesso Fanelli is a software engineer at SABEResPODER. Follow him on Twitter.
