I dreamt about working remotely since last year. And I finally got it on September. I am currently working at Jumpcut and all of the engineering team is working remotely. It has been three months and I really enjoy my time here. There are pros and cons about it for sure. Some people hate it, some people love it. Here are the things I love and hate about remote working.
I was a night owl back in college. I hate waking up early and really enjoy working or studying at night. I felt like I was missing things when I slept in early. Things changed when I started working last year. I started to enjoy waking up early in the morning. Right now, I love to start to work earlier in the morning and finish early in the afternoon. Remote work allows me to do this because I can choose my own working hour. I can even take a rest at noon and continue my work after I finish resting.
I love commuting sometimes, but not all the time. I enjoy reading and listening to podcast while commuting. But since the traffic is really bad in the city that I currently live in I need to take a motorbike to work. The place is not that far but sometimes because of the traffic it can take up to 30 minutes - 40 minutes of commute time. I need to face all of the pollution also and I don't really love it. By working remotely I can remove all of those unecessary commute time!
I live in a different city with my family. I can't really spend time with them because I usually go back just for 2 days and there is not much time to spend. Now I can spend more time with them and be there for them when they need it. I guess we all want to spend more time with my family and our day to day job doesn't really allow that.
I have a lot of hobbies because I love to learn new things and I get bored easily. I could not spend time on my hobbies before because my energy was drained by the commute time and everything. I can finally spend time more on my hobbies now because I can basically do it anytime and it is the best feeling ever!
I am an extrovert so I guess that explains it. I love to talk to my coworker and spend time with them when I was still working in an office. I love our talk over coffee and everything. When I first started working remotely I feel okay about not having to talk directly to the teammates. After a couple of weeks I started to feel something is missing. I talked to my current team and they feel the same too and they said that it gets better over time. I am still figuring things out about this kind of problem.
As you can see I wrote more pros than cons. I really love remote working and I could not imagine myself not to work remotely in the future. But I think remote working is not for everyone since it requires self dicipline and self motivation too. It can be tough and some people may prefer working in an office too. A partial remote job can be really amazing too. I wish people can work remotely too because it can open up a whole new world to them. I think there will be more remote opportunities in the future.