Go for it – Remote work is everything

Recently, many friends have written articles to share the experience of remote work, and some have achieved good results. It is believed that remote working will reach more people and have greater social significance in a country with extremely uneven development in the region.

But I find that there are a few articles missing that can help you quickly build up a basic overview of telecommuting, which is crucial because telecommuting is not simply “sitting at home and working” : As a new form of work, there are many different types of remote work and many pitfalls that are easy to take for granted. Understanding these issues can help you avoid taking too many wrong steps when you first try it.

As a remote worker who has worked Solo Freelancer, remote Startup, remote outsourcing, and many other types of remote work, I think I have enough to share:

Before I start, it’s important to note that while remote working is now, I’m not going to tout remote. This article will try to be objective and neutral in order to help you rationally understand the pros and cons of telecommuting. It will not be a nearly perfect description of telecommuting like the so-called bible of telecommuting, Do-over 2. After all, telecommuting has its own special issues to deal with at home.

There are many kinds of remote, so don’t take it too narrowly

To know a thing, the first thing is to start with classification. In my opinion, telecommuting can be done if the work hours and location are flexible enough that you don’t have to go to the office every day. So remote work can be categorized in the following dimensions:

• The number:

  • One man: With greater freedom comes greater cost.
  • Less than 10 people: pure remote collaboration, not a big problem.
  • More than 10 people: Remote collaboration becomes exponentially less effective as the number of people increases. Note, however, that we are looking at the number of units that really need to collaborate. For example, if a remote outsourcing team has more than 100 people, but they are divided into groups of five, it won’t be a problem.

• Time:

  • Normal working hours: For example, in Tower, the entrepreneurial team is faced with relatively exciting market competition, and everyone needs to cooperate efficiently. Therefore, it is not possible for some people to work in the daytime and some people to work at night, and they cannot be contacted when they need to be contacted. Everyone’s working hours are basically the same as working hours and weekends are off.
  • International work hours: Some collaborative remote jobs require online and timely communication at certain times of the day and freedom at other times.
  • On-demand requirement: it means there are no fixed rules, and it emphasizes task-oriented. When necessary, everyone can work overtime together, and they can arrange freely in off-season, which is often seen in outsourcing teams.
  • Total freedom: Basically, only one freelancer can do this, even if it’s day and night.

• Team dispersion:

  • In one city: This was the case when Tower just started his long-distance work. Although they usually work at home, they are all in Chengdu. The parties can happen at any time.
  • In one country: After the members of Tower expanded to all parts of the country and even abroad, it was more difficult to assemble the full staff. However, it can also take the form of occasional group travel work, such as ichord wrote Tower’s trip to Yunnan and DeepDevelop’s upcoming trip to Thailand. They are still looking for a full-time designer, if you are interested.
  • Transnational: As mentioned earlier, people need to find times when they can be online at the same time to collaborate.

• Business:

  • Trendy entrepreneurial projects: trendy entrepreneurial projects are particularly not suitable for remote, because in China, it is bound to face more incentive competition, fighting explosive force is not the strength of remote collaboration.
  • There are high barriers: for example, the technical requirements are quite high, others are anxious to affect your business, everyone remote work a bit slower, a bit more comfortable, it is possible.
  • Having a good cash flow, such as consulting outsourcing or education, or whatever it is you want to do to get rich, is a great way to do it over a distance because you can’t do it in a hurry.

• Treatment:

  • Salary: same as normal work.
  • By project: More common in remote work, may be more effort, but also lack of security.
  • Base salary + commission bonus: This is actually a great way to work remotely, combining income with the flexibility and freedom of the job itself.

To sum up, you will find “wow, there are so many different types of remote work”. We should not only see if it is suitable for us, but also see if the situation is suitable for remote work, and estimate the difficulty of remote collaboration in advance.

Difficulty estimation methods for remote collaboration

The main factors that affect whether a company is suitable for remote working are:

• Requirements for communication and cooperation: As we all know, remote communication is inefficient. No matter how well the tools are used, it cannot equal the need for “face-to-face communication”.
• Whether the industry is competitive or not: Companies in remote working state are more like long-distance runners, with stable team composition, low operating costs and strong persistence ability due to the high happiness of their members at work. In a competitive environment, the need for rapid expansion and accelerated development, like a long-distance runner running a sprint, is not appropriate.

The difficulty of smooth communication and cooperation is positively correlated with the number of people, the degree of dispersion and the degree of freedom of time:

Difficulty = number of people to work with x how much freedom each person has to spend their time x how scattered members are

This formula, combined with the type of business, gives you a pretty good idea of how hard and whether something you’re trying to do is remotely appropriate.

Some truth and advice about remote

You don’t really go where you want to go

Many people’s first reaction is that they can go anywhere after working remotely, but that’s not the case. Don’t forget that people are social animals, and there’s no substitute for “face to face,” especially when it comes to good peer communication, which can sometimes be enormously enlightening. So from the perspective of personal development:

• Being in or near a first-tier city means you can have direct access to more of the best teams and people more easily. This can have a huge impact on your career.
• In second-tier cities, there are still local industry circles and some good peers, but at the same time, the cost of living is much lower.
• Because the Internet industry is by nature highly centralized, cities below the second tier have few industry circles. So socially speaking, living in Zhengzhou or Nanchang (which you don’t know very well, for example) isn’t much different from living alone in a mountain village.

If you are in the early stages of your career, personal advice is not to stray too far from the industry’s core.

Note: Here is the division of the first and second tier cities from the perspective of industry development. Taking the development of the Internet industry as an example, more and more people may think that Shanghai is the second tier, while Qingdao, Ningbo and other second-tier cities with developed overall economy may not be the second tier at all in terms of Internet.

All or none at all

The key is that everyone should maintain good habits of remote collaboration, such as good network conditions and skilled use of various collaborative tools, which are crucial to ensure the efficiency of remote state. And when only a few people are remote, it’s hard to get everyone to hold tight, and it’s easy to have a lot of face-to-face communication between people who are in the same group, putting remote colleagues in a position of unequal information.

Don’t overlook the details of collaboration

For example, in a multi-person meeting, there is no way to ensure that everyone is paying attention. In a longer meeting, there is no way to ensure that everyone is just hanging up. One-to-one, relatively good, but video is definitely better than no video, even if it is only 5% improvement, think about how many times we have to communicate every day, years and years will be a big difference.

In Tower, even if there is a problem with the video, we will try our best to debug it before continuing. Forming a habit is often the best solution.

For example, if two or more parties do not respond to messages in time, this problem will be particularly serious. For example, when A seeks B, B is not there, and B seeks A again. One or two more days will pass, which is A huge loss of efficiency. If everyone responds as soon as possible, there will be a better atmosphere.

For example, not updating in time. To-do is just one of the tools To be used, which plays a great role in information synchronization, but if all of us do not develop the habit of updating in time, it will be a little meaningless. So again, it is important To form a habit collectively.

A small increase in efficiency in each detail will greatly improve overall efficiency.

In fact, Tower does well in all these aspects, and as a collaborative tool itself, a good luthier is not destined to be a bad musician. Therefore, even remote luthiers can achieve good results in a market with great competitive pressure, which can be regarded as a special case, and it is difficult for ordinary entrepreneurial teams to achieve.

Remote designer needs special attention

As I am a designer, I would like to make a special mention of this area:

• Design jobs that require a lot of communication are not suitable for remote work: Forget this, if you’re a product designer and have meetings all day, you might as well give up remote work.
• Remote workers prefer well-skilled designers: The more steps your skills can cover in the workflow from product planning to landing, the more communication costs will be reduced. For example, if you can directly adjust the details of a front-end colleague’s implementation, it will be much faster than if you can sort them out one by one, especially if you can’t stand behind them when working remotely.
• Therefore, we should be more proactive in understanding technology: remote teams tend to be more technical and pure Internet oriented, so it is more important to understand technology, for example, at least learn GitHub.

It’s not like you can’t go back to the office once you’re remote

The last thing I want to say is that to look at things in a dynamic way, it’s not that you can’t go back to the office for the rest of your life. It’s probably just a phase in your life, even if it’s years away, when the time is right, you can get together with your buddies and fight side by side every day, like some of my friends. So:

• You can start to try more boldly and add an experience to your life. If you don’t adapt to it, you can go back to the office. If you enjoy it, congratulations.
• At the same time, however, it is recommended to anticipate the possibility of change. If you are married and have children in a third-tier city, it will be much harder to end your remote search for an office job than in a first-tier city.

A link to the

Some support remote working company: yizaoyiwan.com/companies more content about work remotely, can focus on: git.oschina.net/greatghoul/…