Posts tagged: TIPS

I’ve been a full-time remote worker since 2010.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought big changes to things involving face-to-face contact – like going to an office for work. Since this sea change has gotten more engineers (and employers) to think about remote work, I thought I’d share some tips on how to find and keep remote gigs.

This was written with junior-level engineers in mind, and is more about full-time employment than freelancing. Hopefully it has useful bits for others as well.

A couple weeks ago I accidentally replaced our live, production database with a 17-hour old snapshot.

I had intended to target a test server, not production. I didn’t realize what I had done for an hour or so, and by that time I had already left work. (I was actually out walking my dog. Not a good setting for managing a production crisis.)

Here’s how my team and I handled it.

Non-engineers want to know: what happens when a big bug is found in your software, and the bug is causing real users real problems, and you’re the one who wrote the code?

Engineers do sometimes write bad code, and sometimes it makes it into production, it’s true.

But shipping production software involves a lot more than writing code. It goes beyond that one engineer. That engineer is not the only person who saw or ran that code.

When we were growing our team of Python devs at CMG, I was involved in a lot of interviews. I really enjoyed it, meeting and hiring interesting and talented engineers.

I’m not a big fan of quizzing people on technical minutiae in interviews. I do think that asking some questions about technical likes and dislikes can be very illuminating though.

For example, “What’s your favorite standard library module?” (My favorite answers are itertools or functools, but anything that shows they have hands-on appreciation for the depth of the standard library is good.)

I’ve been working as a remote software developer for over five years now. I gather that some outfits do this better than others. In case they’re useful/inspirational for anyone else, I want to highlight the key things that have made this workable for so long. The key idea: Treat your remote workers as first-class, full-fledged members of the team.

• Have a chat server which everyone is connected to whenever they are working. IRC, Slack, whatever. Logging into this server is effectively showing up at work. If your group is big, give each small team its own channel, but have a common one too. Make it OK to have random chitchat there, just like people do in the break room or hallway.
• Ask of every meeting or group event: How do remote workers participate? Encourage this mindset in all managers and anybody who arranges meetings of any sort. Stream video for presentations. Solicit questions from remotes.
• Don’t keep critical information on a tackboard, whiteboard, fridge, or other physical thing that only in-office employees can see (and change).
• If you do something fun for in-office employees, match it for the remotes. (My employer took on-site employees to see the new Star Wars when it came out; they sent $50 Fandango cards to us remotes.)
• If you can afford it, fly everybody to work together at the same location for one week a year. (If your main office is suitable, great. If not, rent, or take everybody to Hawaii or something.) My employer has done this and I consider it a crucial part of my long-term enjoyment of the job. I know the people I work with not just as nicks and avatars and work product, but as people I’ve hung out with (and worked next to) also.