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Ask HN: Experience working fully remote in a non-remote team?

by pratchett on 7/6/21, 4:48 PM with 5 comments

I am thinking about moving to a fully remote role in my current team at one of the FAANG companies. I have been in my current team for 3 years and I have a good rapport with my colleagues.

I have been working from home for the past year so I am used to it by now. However, the rest of the team will start going back to the office soon and that will change things going forward.

Does any one with related experiences have any advice, warnings or tips to share?

  • by tossaway9000 on 7/6/21, 5:54 PM

    The worst thing about this will be all the discussions that you will miss out on that everyone will assume you know.

    Several years ago I was the first and only remote person on the team, and often would find myself with an assigned task with no details, or "talk to so and so", even worse would be working on a story only to find out some implementation detail changed and the response was "oh, we talked about that the other day". This was magnified 2x when I was also working in a significantly different timezone.

  • by dyingkneepad on 7/6/21, 9:35 PM

    So the nice thing about the current situation is that everybody is remote, so all the processes are remote-first, so remote people get included. After everybody except you go back to the office, the processes are likely to go back to personal-first with remote being an afterthought just because of you. This is where the situation starts going bad.

    You go on a meeting and you can't see the slides because they failed to connect the PC to the online system and don't mind trying because "it's just you" who is missing it. Then some in-promptu meeting happens and you don't get to participate nor read the minutes. Then it's time to promote someone and the manager decides to promote someone else since they're easier to manage/coach/etc. You will have less influence over the team than everybody else. If that's ok with you, then it's fine.

    Also, management changes (especially if/when your direct manager changes) may make remote working even harder.

  • by sethammons on 7/6/21, 8:26 PM

    I've done this. The problem will be missed communication that folks will assume you know. It will be critical to adopt and enforce or otherwise encourage good written down communication habits. Meeting summaries in emails, agendas on meetings, water cooler summaries noted in team slack channel, and having effective daily stand ups. Having your manager champion the habits is really, really helpful and I liked when mine would add to the slack channel "@seth for visibility" or adding summaries of in-office updates. COVID and remote work has really helped because all our comms are now mostly written down, and going forward, I'd expect most people to have a good appreciation of keeping communication up.

  • by brudgers on 7/6/21, 10:11 PM

    Scott Hanselman has blogged and podcast about working remote within primarily in-person teams for years.

    That’s where I would start.