I have worked remotely as a software engineer since 2017. Way before the pandemic I enjoyed the benefits of having full access to work a room away. Throughout the years I found that being successful as a remote worker requires special attention to certain details and in this post I want to highlight them for you.
Don’t Be A Robot. Be A Human.
Have a face. Have a nice professional portrait picture of yourself. Don’t be just a name on a profile icon, a photo of your dog, or some icon of your favorite soccer team.
Always turn your camera on if you are in a meeting. People want to meet people.
Have a real name. Your MMORPG nickname SnakeVenon was cool but you should now use your first and last name.
The Setup Matters
There are plenty of information online on how to get a good setup. But make sure your camera, mic, and room lighting is good.
You must look professional. Do not be the person that takes calls from their bedroom bed wearing their pajamas. Work is serious matter, a lot of people derive their life’s value and purpose from work.
Get inspired by Youtube influencers and their setups.
Communication Matters
Avoid implied communication. Be explicit as possible.
Over communicate. Do not ghost. You won’t last any job if your team only hear from you once a day.
Over engage. Be in multiple contexts. Help others. Be in multiple conversations. This is only possible in the digital world and makes your presence felt.
Always prefer writing. Write down everything, specially decisions made in meetings. This helps maintain others in context of what’s going on. Again, in an office people will naturally meet and discuss things, this doesn’t happen in the digital world so you need to document things to make it easily shareable.
Relationship Requires Intention
You need to intentionally cultivate relationship by caring about others personal life.
For some reason working remotely distances you from others, maybe something about being in the same room forces those interpersonal moments to naturally happen. Remotely this requires more intentionality.
In remote work we don’t casually meet in a space. Every time you meet someone it is over an intentional meeting with a time limit. I don’t know why but this causes us to not let conversation naturally flow. Thus the requirement of being intentionally interested in others personal life.
Anything else I say here will likely spill over onto the realm of being a software engineer so I’ll end this post here. If I think of anything else I’ll update it afterwards.