Another story of the remoter

    On Habré a myriad of articles about remote work. Life stories, demonstrations of successes / failures in this difficult matter. But despite this, I constantly continue to stumble on the fact that people confuse remote work with freelance. Reading the next article on this topic, I realized that you can’t wait any longer, someone is wrong on the Internet and you need to urgently express your experience on this issue as quickly as possible so that the phrase “remote work” does not give rise to the “freelance” association in my head ".



    Freelance


    For the first time, I thought about freelance, when in 2014 the ruble began its rapid decline. Before that, of course, there were also thoughts to look in the direction of various sites, to try yourself in this role, but there was not much enthusiasm, the employment was comfortable, growth was visible, interesting projects, an excellent team - what else is needed. But when in distant 2014 I began to hear from friends who worked on freelance exchanges how their income in ruble terms was growing without any movements on their part, I became thoughtful. And when I decided to go on vacation and converted spending from euros to rubles, I finally realized that something needs to be done.

    I registered at the then oDesk (now Upwork), found the first client who needed a similar experience and got to work. At first, everything was great - the clock was magically converted to dollars at an excellent rate, the project was done, everyone was happy. But after a couple of months, the client suddenly ran out of funds, the project was stopped in the middle, I was told about the following: “If funding appears, we will definitely continue, thanks for the work.”

    It was decided to continue the experience, but, unfortunately, with the subsequent two clients the stories were similar (more complicated, but this is not for the current article). Also, I realized that if you take a lot of work, then there is no time for growth. Yes, income has grown, but it’s very easy to find yourself in a financial trap, and spend all your time only on the implementation of new features / fix bugs (forgive me for my tracing of English words). Before that, I worked in a good company, where a lot of time was devoted to the professional growth of developers (high-quality reviews, regular meetings, retrospectives, conferences, etc.). And here you were left completely to yourself, and you need not frail discipline, so as not to become limp and continue to develop professionally.

    From here follows the first important point about freelance - discipline. If you do not have the proper discipline, or you do not want to devote a significant part of your time to this, then I would refrain from freelance. Without discipline, you risk, at best, losing your qualifications after a few years, and at worst, losing your motivation for continuous development.

    The second important point is the lack of any stability. You cannot be sure that the project will not end tomorrow and you will not need to look for a new client again. If you know how to manage finances and keep a safety cushion, then there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not pleasant either.

    And the third important point is the ability to independently build your own work schedule, where you want to work from (in my case, just from home). For various reasons, it was much more pleasant for me to work from home than in the office (starting from the fact that I stopped spending an hour every day transporting, and ending with the fact that I could eat homemade food and forget about business lunches).



    Telework


    After some experience of freelance, I realized that I much more like a permanent job, when I do not need to look for new customers. When there is a strong team, colleagues with whom you can debate on different working and non-working issues. When you are more or less sure that tomorrow and in a month you will have a project, there is an understandable plan for the development of the company, you can share its values ​​and feel that you are doing something really important. On the other hand, I really enjoyed working from home.

    Accordingly, we are smoothly moving to the fact that you can get all the bonuses from freelance, but get rid of its negative aspects, just by choosing a remote work. Yes, to find a remote job with income in a harder currency, you will have to try a little more than when looking for freelance, but, on the other hand, you do not have to do this often.

    Remote work in a large company usually implies that from time to time you still need to be in the office to establish contacts, discuss global plans, but usually this is a relatively small amount of time. Otherwise, you are left to your own devices. It is worth mentioning that everything, of course, very much depends on specific companies. Hereinafter, I talk about more or less stable companies, with an average staff of developers (10-100 people) and good working conditions (from my own experience and the experience of my friends).

    Thus, let's say you find a good company with a constant income, a decent staff of developers, well-established processes, and the ability to work remotely. Life seems like a fairy tale. But there are still a few points that you should think about before opening Google / Linkedin and looking for similar options.

    Workplace

    Also, as in freelance, it is very important to build the most comfortable workplace. Unlike the office, you need to think for yourself how to isolate yourself from external annoying factors (especially if you have a family / children). If possible, it’s ideal to make yourself a separate room for an office, and sometimes it may be more profitable even to rent a separate office / apartment to reduce contacts with your home (yes, there are still coworking, but I don’t think it’s convenient ) Try to immediately explain to your wife / husband / children that this is also work, it requires 100% concentration and can not be distracted. It is especially difficult to explain that at work you are sometimes distracted (you read the Habr / news / ...) and this is also part of the work (i.e. you cannot do, for example, household chores instead).

    timetable

    In office work, even with a flexible schedule, there is an unspoken schedule when you come / go from work. Usually, people do not deviate much from him. Most often, people get used, for example, to come at 12 and follow this schedule. With remote work, this is a little more difficult. More often than not, you have no external reason to start working at a specific time. And the worst thing is that there is no reason to finish working on time. Therefore, in my experience, processing at remote sites happens much more often. You know that you don’t have to go out of the office and just work until this damn function stops falling. And when she stopped falling, you look at the clock, you understand that it is already one in the morning, and you should sleep. So close to burnout. Therefore, my advice here is to draw up a more or less clear schedule. Decide for yourself

    Motivation

    If your team hasn’t accepted regular phoning, discussion of pressing issues, then it’s very easy to lose motivation and understanding what is happening in the team and the company as a whole. When you go to the office, whether you want it or not, you hear the news of the team, plans and goals of the company. When you sit at home and close ticket after ticket, it is difficult to understand how important this is. Here, of course, in many respects everything depends on the team leader (or your immediate manager, if the team leader is you). If regular calls with the team are not accepted at the company, then, firstly, you can try to introduce them. Try to explain why this is important and worth the 30-60 minutes spent per week. I think that any adequate leader, at least, will try to implement this practice. Secondly, You can establish communication with several employees and communicate directly with them regularly. Thus, you will feel part of the team and the likelihood of losing motivation will be lower.

    Finance

    Despite the fact that remote work is much safer than freelance, the likelihood of a reduction in the remoter is still higher than the employee in the office. Moreover, most often, remote work involves work on a contract basis, without all the delights of the labor code (compensation to remote workers upon dismissal is usually minimal, if any). Therefore, it is worth reading at least basic things about financial literacy and how to be prepared for an unexpected reduction. Also, if you work for a foreign company, you will have to get acquainted with currency control and all its charms in the Russian Federation. It is necessary to lay some budget for the maintenance of the IP account, various commissions for foreign exchange transactions, electronic accounting. Nowadays, this is all done very simply,



    Instead of a conclusion


    Of course, I did not talk about all the intricacies of remote work in this article, but I hope that I covered the most important points. The main goal was to show that remote work is not at all the same as freelance, and that there are slightly different rules of the game. Accordingly, everyone decides for himself which game is most attractive to him. Someone likes to find new customers, expand the list of contacts, work for themselves. Someone likes to work in the office, have a classic work week, direct contacts with colleagues. And someone wants to have something in between.

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