Remote Work Lesson: You’re Still Human
TL;DR
Software development is a team sport. Don’t insist on being a rockstar / dev-ninja / level-99 code mage of the darkest arts. You chose to work with this team for a reason: they’re kind, dependable people.
Backstory
I fell into a trap: stuck in a feature for much longer than I had originally anticipated, I started to lose my morale. I’m hard on myself on the best of times, but this was really starting to feel like a Sisyphean task.
After several days stuck in the muck, I wore out and dropped a line to one of the devs at HQ, apologetically asking for some pair programming time from anyone one the team that could maybe spare a few cycles. His response cut right to the core of the issue:
it can feel like you have to be super independent and a superstar developer when you’re remote some times, but it’s not really the case
Right! There should be no difference between working in a shared office or working remotely. Why did I feel this?
Attitudes Towards Remote Workers
I’ve heard of people at other companies talk glibly about that one time that hired a remote worker, who was horribly lazy, unproductive, and a general waste of money. Aside from specific individuals, I honestly have a hard time believing this for the average remote worker. If anything, we feel the need to perform more acutely when we don’t have direct access to the rest of the team to get feedback in passing. I fall back on my old habits of “just pushing through it” when I should be asking to split the work with teammates.
People also don’t organically see the stress level which would prompt them to check in on how things are going, simply because they can’t see my face while I’m working. It’s much easier to assure people that the feature will be done “soon”, and rush to get it done by working crazy hours. This is not sustainable, and is seriously detrimental in the long run.
Communication, Communication, Communication
At bottom, this is about communication. Keeping in touch with the rest of the team, and being humble enough to ask for more eyes when things gets tough not only helps prevent burn out, but builds the team. Knowing who the go-to person is for different kinds of problems helps you leverage the team, and being able to joke around with everyone on Slack improves morale.
Regularly checking in with another team member (weekly or biweekly), preferably face-to-face over video chat, is extremely helpful. It helps humanize everyone involved, and makes it harder to fake that everything is okay when you’re stressed out.
Awesome People
At the end of the day, the team chose a remote worker because they’re an awesome person, and the remote worker chose the company because it’s also filled with awesome people. If that’s not the situation for either party, they need to get out. If it is the situation, then both should get the most out of each other as possible, which means supporting each other, checking in, building trust, having fun, and rocking their work :)
