In software engineering, remote working makes a lot of sense since, most of the time, you only need a computer and an internet connection to perform your duties. There are fewer reasons to force people to sit in an office every day. As a result, it’s become an important feature of a lot of IT jobs, even here in Belgium–which in my experience isn’t always the most forward-looking job market–where remote work is common for at least a couple days a week.
I’ve been working remotely for a little more than five years now, and it doesn’t come without stress. I think it’s taken a toll on me over the last couple years in particular, especially when I went almost fully remote for a year, from June 2016 to June 2017. In that period I’ve sometimes felt like I existed in a “remote-developer black box”:
IT’S HARD TO COMMUNICATE
Communication tends to stick to structured channels when you work remotely: the chats, daily standups, maybe a few global meetings every other week, Jira for the tasks and bug reports, and lots and lots of emails.
This works well to accomplish structured tasks, but it’s easy to feel disconnected sometimes. The fact that most of this communication happens in written form or in front of groups makes them unsuitable for small talk or more informal information sharing. And it can hamper your work, as just chatting about the general atmosphere at work can deliver important information about the smooth progress of projects. Worse, it can prevent you from feeling like part of a community.
In addition, written exchanges are more prone to misinterpretation, even with people you know very well. Plus, if you already spend your day typing on a keyboard to accomplish your technical tasks, it’s annoying to have to communicate in written form, too; you end up feeling like a text-processing machine. I began to miss the coffee chats that I’d previously thought to be unproductive wastes of time. I felt detached from the team, especially when the teams I worked with were made of people working in the same place (and seemed to be having fun).