I have a lot to say about remote work and how it has changed my life. Rather than park all of my writings here, I decided to start a new blog: RemoteNook. A few posts on there will look familiar as I will be reposting from here, but most content will be new! Thanks for reading and supporting!
Category: Remote Work
Working remotely
Stripe announced their new engineering hub on Thursday- remote! They have “hubs” in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin and Singapore already, and remote will be their fifth. They said they were hoping to hire 100 remote employees this year. Stripe went out of their way to praise their remote workers, saying “Stripe has had hundreds of extremely high-impact remote employees since inception” and “…remote employees have outperformed all expectations”. It is exciting to see a silicon valley unicorn (for lack of a better word) pushing forth the remote work trend. Although remote work continues to be on the rise, large companies haven’t fully embraced it. No huge tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix have fully embraced remote work as Stripe[…]
Earlier this year I finished the book Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. I could say a lot about this book (and Tim) in general, but I’m going to focus on one of the sections that was valuable to me: The Canvas Strategy (AKA Canvassing). I don’t recall the name’s meaning but the strategy goes like this: Do stuff that nobody else wants to do to make yourself valuable. My favorite example that Tim gives is that of Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick. Belichick volunteered to watch film for hours on end to prepare for upcoming games. He did this extraordinarily well and shared his learnings during team meetings. His expertise eventually made him useful in increasingly important decisions which[…]
After getting accustomed to the remote work lifestyle it becomes easy to take for granted the freedoms and benefits we are allowed. I want to take some time to reflect on a few freedoms I appreciate. Family Time I have two small children aged 3.5 and 1 whom I get to see a lot every day. Before working from home I was commuting 1 hour each way and I would hardly get to see my newborn baby during the week. I was out the door about 30 minutes after he woke, and got home after he was in bed. It wore on me more and more and I had tremendous guilt for not spending more time together. The days we[…]
Finding remote work is difficult. The best way to get remote work is to have remote experience, which leaves us with a nice chicken and egg problem. The easiest way to get your first remote job is to convert your current job into a remote job. Working from home is a great joy and convincing your manager to have some time to work from home (WFH) can be rewarding. If your company already has a flexible WFH policy, then great! Take as much time working from home as your company allows. When I was working for a major hospital, they allowed employees to WFH one day every two weeks. Almost nobody utilized this benefit but I was sure to take[…]