Fully remote Research Scientist at Lunit: a 1-year review
Is working fully remotely possible? Yes, it always has been, it just was not socially accepted, then 2020 happened and companies started to be open to new possibilities.
In this article, I will tell my story and provide some pros and cons of working at a different timezone, as well as some strategies that my team and I have tested over the past year.
My personal story with remote working
Before jumping into the technical discussion, I will give a little summary regarding my personal story just for context. If you are not interested, feel free to skip it!
Joining Lunit
In 2020 I finished my Ph.D. in Germany and joined AWS, working with a team in Seattle. Due to the covid lockdown, working visas were not issued and I worked remotely from Germany. After experiencing working from home, I could not go back to the office: I was more productive at my job, worked fewer hours, and in the comfort of my home, I had more free time and spent more time with my family, ate home-cooked meals every day (essential for an Italian like me) and was generally less stressed. When I was asked to go back to the office (either Germany or USA), I decided to look for an alternative.
Despite being the first fully-remote research scientist and with a 7-hour timezone difference, Lunit decided to give me a chance. It looked like the perfect match for me: I want to provide a larger positive impact on society and the company fits well this description.
Lunit’s mission is to conquer cancer through artificial intelligence (AI). With headquarter in Seoul (Republic of Korea), the company is one of the few MedTech companies in the world that uses AI as its core product with already a large international success. Lunit tackles different phases of this disease, from screening to oncology and patient care. Lunit’s screening products already help to detect cancer in X-rays, CT scans, and Mammography, in over 1000 hospitals worldwide. I was assigned to the oncology team, where our AI can help pathologists analyze cancer biopsies faster, more accurately, and objectively, thus assisting doctors in assigning the best treatment to patients.
My 2022 hills and valleys
This year was full of ups and downs in my personal life and the flexibility provided by working from home revealed to be particularly helpful in this period. If I were single and in my 20s, I would even enjoy going to the office every day, it is fun to talk to your colleagues over coffee or lunch. However, I am in my 30s, married, with a dog and at the beginning of the year we found out that we were pregnant! It is a very happy time, but it also means doctor appointments, baby shopping, and more… Then, the third trimester was particularly difficult: my wife needed lots of rest and I was left handling everything that required walking 🚶🏻♂️.
Finally, our baby was born healthy, but some complications forced us often in and out of the hospital and going to several doctor visits in between. For me, this meant driving to the hospital on a moment's notice, and being stuck in an office would have made my life harder.
What about my job?
During the first half of the year at Lunit, my teammate and I spent a few months testing and fine-tuning the remote working setup. This prepared us for the harsh times when my personal life became more demanding. I argue that being used to working with a flexible schedule from the beginning helped me to be as productive during the second half of the year as I was during the first half.
WFH Evaluation
Just because working from home (WFH) fits my personality and lifestyle very well, it does not mean that it is for everyone. In this section, I share the pros and cons that I see in remote working so that you can judge based on your situation.
Cons
I am a “bad-news-first” kind of person, so let’s start with the cons (sorted by importance)
- Human interaction: I loved joining my colleagues for a “quick” coffee break, having lunch together, playing the occasional table soccer game, and maybe going out for dinner after a long day. These little interactions build up over time, can create real friendships, and furthermore instigates “talk shop” which keeps the motivation high and inspire new ideas.
- Home environment: not everybody has at home a quiet, bright, large room with a beautiful view. Often life at home is distracting, other times the comfortable sofa is calling for you 🛋. Or you just bought that new videogame you want to play… c’mon, just for 5 minutes…
- Always at home: during the covid lockdown, we have discovered that spending all your time at home is not as good as it sounds. From time to time, we enjoy a walk, go shopping downtown, or whatever we do. Personally, I like going to a Café and having a piece of cheesecake.
- Different timezone: in case your team is overseas, you will feel more isolated due to the timezone difference. Sometimes you might get stuck on a problem and need to wait for the day after to get some help. Also, company-wide meetings are always in the timezone of the headquarter and it will be harder to keep up.
Pros
- Human interaction: spending time with your colleagues is fun, but if you could choose, wouldn’t you prefer to spend it with your family? Unfortunately, the blanket is always short, we only have so much time in a day for work, leisure time with colleagues, or family.
- Home environment: you choose the working environment (table, chair, …). When you take a break, you can rest comfortably on your sofa/bed or make a coffee/tea/hot chocolate with your own machine. You don't need to worry about milk, left out of the fridge on Friday, then put back in on Monday, which ruining your trip to Croatia... (true story 😅)
- Always at home: when WFH you avoid commuting or spending a long time getting ready in the morning. This is all time you saved that can be spent doing things you actually enjoy.
- Different timezone: knowing that you won’t get any messages or emails for half of your working day, you will have “real” focus time (not just an empty space on your calendar that everybody ignores). This is where the boost in productivity comes from, if well managed. Moreover, in case you need to write your teammate regarding a problem or create an issue ticket, you will think twice before bothering other people since they cannot answer right away anyway. So you try to solve it yourself, saving colleagues’ time and learning something in the process.
Have you noticed how the pros and cons are the same? My point here is that every aspect of working from home or in the office has pros and cons, and you need to choose which one fits better your personality and personal situation.
Tips and Tools
If you do choose to work from home, here are some tips and tools for you.
Working tips and tools
- Be mindful of the situation and proactive: Don’t passively accept the situation hoping things work out, but try to foresee possible recurrent issues and actively seek solutions with your manager. Have a conversation with your teammate and make sure they are comfortable with your WFH status.
- Documentation for async/offline communication: share your work, results, and conclusion often, if possible on a daily basis. Write comprehensive documentation that can be understood without your explanation, containing as many details as possible. Structure your documents for easy ready: motivation, goal, related material, experiment settings, results, personal comments, and, if relevant, code and steps for reproducing the results. (Not only your teammates will be happy about it, but your future self will be thankful). Use tools that help you structure your document and allow you to add comments to facilitate async communication.
- Over-communicate: in parallel to documents, make heavy use of messaging tools like slack. Don’t be shy, if you produce some interesting results, find new insights or simply read something exciting on Medium, share it with your teammates! Memes are great tools for breaking the ice when slack is quiet.
- Good practices for Remote meetings: Everybody should join the meeting with their laptop and turn on the camera, independently if in the office or at home. At the beginning of every meeting, test the microphone in the office from at least two speakers, more times than not you can only hear one side of the room. As a remote attendee, do not be afraid to ask the speaker to adjust the shared room microphone, or switch completely to the speaker's laptop. Whenever possible, make time to ask remote audiences questions since it’s harder for them to “raise your hand” 🙋♂️ without breaking the flow of the discussion.
- Weekly updates: being all in the office, my teammates know what everybody is up to, and I would be the last one to know about a new cool project or results. To avoid this, we have set up a weekly update log where each member of the team writes what they have been up to last week and what they are planning to do next week in a very informal language. This is all done offline, with no need for wasteful daily stand-ups or daily meetings. In truth, many people forget to write it, so they need some incentives. To make it more fun, we added “meme of the week” and a “secret song of the week” which is only accessible to people who write their updates.
- Weekly team meetings: this was already in place when I joined, but still I find it extremely helpful. Once a week our team meets to discuss major updates for the team or a single project. Everybody is encouraged to share their work.
- Weekly casual chats (donuts): it is important to connect with your teammates outside of the formal setting of the job. To encourage this, Slack has a nice add-on called “donut” where you can set up a periodical 30-min chat within your organization. We have used this almost from the start and it has helped me a lot in learning more about my team on a personal level. Furthermore, it helps to connect with colleagues that you wouldn’t otherwise talk to because, for example, are not directly in your project.
- Hardware: your colleagues will only know you from your online calls, so make sure to invest in a good webcam and microphone. Nowadays you can get both for around 100 dollars in total. Make sure to have good, stable internet. If the main router is far from your desk, try using a powerline, it works extremely well for the price, and mount a second router close by.
- Posture: Don’t be cheap when it comes to the keyboard, mouse, and chair. The keyboard and mouse do not need to be expensive but make sure that they are (semi-)orthopedic so that your posture is correct otherwise you will really regret it in the long term. The same goes for the chair, you might need to invest some money: Avoid any chair below $500 or you will end up buying a new chair every year while being uncomfortable and risking your back. Regarding the desk, I would recommend a standing desk which is now very popular and you can find it for $300 on Amazon, but let’s be honest, nobody really stands at the desk… so I guess it’s up to you.
Lifestyle tips
- Time management: (this is a hard one) it is often difficult to separate working time from personal when in WFH. To avoid working the whole day and night, make sure to separate the physical space where you work from your personal space. If you don’t have an extra room, define a table/desk only for work. If you have two laptops, use one solely for work. In my case, I tend to use the laptop for work and the tablet for personal stuff. Some people find it easier to separate the time by placing a physical object on the desk when it’s time off. The simplest way is to set a specific time on your calendar, for example, no work after 5 pm or something… (I am currently breaking this rule right now, not sure I can advocate for that… 😅)
- Have a routine: since the space between bed and workplace is small, you might have the temptation to jump out of bed in the morning and start looking at emails. Before you know it, it’s bedtime again... This becomes very stressful in the long term, so try to create a routine to force some “me” time in between. For example, have breakfast at your favorite cafè or just go for a short walk before jumping into work; force fixed coffee breaks every 2 hours; never have lunch at the PC; etc…
- Get a dog: obviously, this is not for everyone, but it works great for me. Dogs need to be walked 2/3 times a day, for over an hour in total, which sounds like a chore but has major hidden benefits. So having a dog forces you to get out of the house, get some air and take your mind off work, maybe get some playtime in. Even if I don’t feel like it, rain or snow, I have to walk my dog, which not only keeps my energy up but forces a smile here and there. Moreover, when someone else takes care of the dog for a week, I typically gain a couple of kilos very quickly… apparently, it helps me get my 10 thousand steps in every day 😉
The other side
It is easy to talk about productivity from the comfort of your home when you only hear one side of the story. So, let’s hear it from the colleagues sitting in the office:
Seonwook Park (Ph.D.), Team leader
“As Biagio writes, remote work is not everyone’s cup of tea. Fortunately, not only was Biagio already an effective remote worker, but he was also proactive in making sure that communication constantly flows, within and across teams. His efforts have improved our on-site members’ communication skills too and have contributed greatly to improving our culture.”
Mohammad Mostafavi (Ph.D.), Peer researcher
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change” (Stephen Hawking) Being forced to try remote working in 2020, our mindset gradually adapted to the new normal by changing our work habits to alternatingly online and offline settings, though it was never an easy task to handle emotionally. Thanks to Lunit’s intelligent culture, working virtually is only limited to the laptop, internet connection, and a fresh mind. We are free to join from home wherever home is defined all around the globe while keeping the mind fresh and emotions safe when working from the heart as I did a couple of times from Iran. This success story of Biagio working remotely bloomed well in our team, thanks to his creative suggestions, and the considerate openness of all other team members.
Heon Song, Peer researcher
“It’s true that it sometimes feels like he is a virtual Youtuber and it’s a pity that he can’t eat the wonderful Korean-style carbonara. However, I think working with him is not that different from working with other people offline. By simply adjusting the regular meeting time in consideration of the time difference, we were able to consistently share research results with him and plan a new study.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, WFH is not for everyone, there are several disadvantages, especially when in different time zones. Still, if you manage the downsides, there can be a big upside, especially when it comes to flexibility in your personal life. I have been very lucky to find a company like Lunit willing to experiment with me, and I am very happy with my team, which adjusted very quickly and is trying its best to make me feel an integral part of it.
