Remote Success Stories: Rishi Mohan, BigBinary

From 👋 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 Rishi Mohan, a UI Engineer at BigBinary.

Who are you and what do you do?

Hola, I’m Rishi Mohan, a 24-year-old designer from India currently working as UI Engineer at BigBinary. Apart from my passion for designing, I love to take photos, read Quora, write on my blog and build things. My latest project that I’m still working on is my personal website which I launched recently. I like to build things that solve a purpose and that I would want to use.

What appealed to you about beginning to work remotely?

I’ve worked from office and I’ve worked remotely and I choose to work remotely every single time. The reason being I used to be less productive when I used to work from the office, you just can’t focus on your work when there are so many things happening around. Someone calls you, or oh, it’s lunchtime, or there’s some meeting, and it happens numerous times when you’re productive and you have to take a break when you don’t want to. The flexibility of being able to work when you want and where you want is what I like the most about working remotely. You can be in your most comfortable zone and then all you need to do is what you love, your work.

How did you first approach the subject with your employer? Had other employees been working remotely before you?

I work at BigBinary and it’s fully remote. We are a team of over 30 awesome people and the whole team works remotely all the time, and I feel our culture is really good. I didn’t know how working remotely would turn out before joining BigBinary, but now I feel it’s far better than working from the office. I’m glad to be able to work remotely and with such a nice team.

What surprising things have you discovered about working remotely?

There are times when you’ll have a good number of productive hours, and then there will be days when you won’t be productive for days, this also depends on the thing you’re working on. This is not as surprising as it seems, but this is something I’ve discovered about working remotely.

Have there been any downsides to beginning to work remotely?

The only downside I’ve found is that you get to meet and connect with people less. In the office, you connect with peers, you share and exchange knowledge which is a good way to learn and discover new things but you can’t do that while working from home or Starbucks. The interaction is definitely less when you work remotely.

Are there any tools or software that you’ve found particularly effective?

We use Slack for team communication, Skype for calls when we’re stuck and need to discuss things and Google Hangouts for team-wide calls that happen every Thursday. We recently switched from Freshbooks to our own time-tracking and invoice app which is still in the works. These are some apps which I use frequently while working and find effective.

Anything else you’d like to add?

We work hard in our lives to achieve what we want, but most forget why we’re doing what we’re doing — they just get into what I call “the zigzag of life”, which degrades their definition of happiness. Never forget that being happy is the ultimate goal.

Rishi Mohan is a UI Engineer at BigBinary. Follow him on Twitter.