Campus to Cloud - How Remote Work Can Shape Students' Lives
Break from remote work is nice

Campus to Cloud - How Remote Work Can Shape Students' Lives

Work has forever changed with the rise of remote opportunities, especially in IT. Stationary, remote, and various flavors of hybrid work models come with their advantages and problems. Companies forcing employees back to the office are making headlines.

While those who went through the change argue for or against it, knowing both lives, we may overlook the people who started afterward. People who may have started now because remote options got rid of the overhead holding them back.

I want to present you a view through the lens of an AI/IT student for whom remote work made wonders. Its flexibility enabled me to put what I learned into practice, polish and pick up skills and knowledge, good work practices, and presented me with view-changing perspectives - without much gymnastics adjusting to my changing study schedule and having to make it to the office.

I hope for this article to achieve two main goals:

  • To?help students decide to look for such working opportunities?- they are out there, and they can boost your career life
  • To?help employers understand the?(potential student)?employee side of remote work opportunities?- it can earn them a loyal employee, rather hard to come by in the age of job-switching

Full-time remote CAN work well, even when just starting

Back in February, when I joined?TomTom? as a Software Engineer, I started full-time (given I was in the middle of 1-year student leave, as described in?this article ). Besides two visits to the office at the very beginning,?the job is practically completely remote, since the majority of the team is based in the ?ód? office and there was no push to work from the Poznań office.

This is my first time working in a non-academic environment, so remote is all I ever knew. Initially, I was a bit afraid it would be hard to get things right, given all the talking about how "remote work cripples team bonding and knowledge sharing". Fortunately, it turned out, that?it IS possible to efficiently introduce someone new on a remote basis - here are two tips on how to do it right.


  • Introduce the complexity progressively

The tasks I worked on were progressively increasing in complexity.?Each next task was a relatively natural progression from the previous ones. This way, instead of getting overwhelmed, I learned in a bite-sized manner, delivering more and more impactful tasks.

For example, part of my progression looked as follows:

  • initially, I worked on improving the documentation - this way I was exposed to the general idea of how things work
  • after docs, I followed up by working on feedback reporting - after working on the docs, I had a few ideas on improving reporting feedback on faulty data, so I joined these team efforts
  • after feedback, I progressed to data validation logic - while working on feedback, I gained an understanding of possible faults in the data, so it was safe to assign validation logic tasks to me

With this natural progression, I was more or less at the sweet spot between knowing how to do things and having to learn something new. Moreover, at each step, I contributed a greater impact. This made it easy to get started, learn, and become a valuable team member - a win-win for everyone involved.


  • Work and talk with various people from the team?(also, have exposure to other teams)

Changing up the team members I worked with proved very beneficial since?I got to see and understand different views and perspectives. Enclosing me to a box of colleagues with particular skills and approaches could have led to improper development in just a few directions. Given the mix-up, I was exposed to plenty of lessons to learn and challenged to face diverse problems.?It also helped prevent me from becoming a copy of colleagues, rather develop my own stance and integrity - being an actual addition to the team.

Some colleagues do state it may have been easier to learn and pick up skills and knowledge in the office. That I missed out on that. While there must be some truth to it,?I feel what is often not mentioned is that working remotely solves some of the office problems, e.g. much easier to focus on things without distractions.

These two tips are not unique to remote work, however, it's essential to get them right for the remote model to work. The advantages of remote over office are still worth going for, as mentioned in the next paragraphs - though it is crucial to create the proper environment for remote work.?Otherwise, it may backfire - not necessarily introducing problems but magnifying the ones existing in the stationary model.

Remote and flexible go well with studies (as well as work-life balance)

As of October, my student leave ended and I went back to studying, switching to part-time work. It provided even more reasons why remote work and flexibility are game changers.

The most obvious one is that?I don't waste time commuting to the office. This helps manage a rather substantial combined workload.

It's much easier to manage my university schedule, which changes from semester to semester. The room for adjustments when and where I work enables me to, for example, squeeze in some work hours in case I have a free period, or distribute them over different days to accommodate the need to finish earlier and attend an exam.

On top of that, it makes it?possible to maintain a work-life balance. Thanks to it, I manage to squeeze in a few hours at the gym and have some rest. I don't feel burnout, and I make the most out of the working hours.

All in all,?the remote model and flexibility allowed me to take up a long-term regular job while feeling confident it's not going to clash with my studies. Those are huge advantages that would make me have second thoughts before thinking of changing jobs.

A healthy dose of non-forced in-person meetings is great (both work and after work)

Despite all the arguments in favor of remote work,?there is a place for in-person meetings. They can be an amazing opportunity to get matters done. Also, getting to know people you work with better, outside of the work environment helps bond and trust each other more.

My first such opportunity was the Madrid workshop in October. Seeing familiar faces turn out to be more dimensional human beings felt just right. It was fun working out problems together, sharing conversations, and a lot of laughs. The effects last, and since then I have an even bigger appreciation for my colleagues.

The meetings don't need direct contributions to have a positive impact on our work. Even a small Christmas lunch we had a few days ago opened up my view of how we do our best to make gears turn. I feel that people working in other teams don't seem as alienated as before.

The key is that those meetings are optional?- it is my choice I attend them, and so they don't feel forced or artificial. So is the case for the others. When we all know that, and we choose to meet, it has a special weight to it than mandatory office.

Main takeaways

Remote work, when done right, opens up a bunch of possibilities. It can be a student's career booster. It can be an opening to a pool of employees that would otherwise be out of reach. I hope that this article convinces you to try it.

Thanks to all my colleagues and TomTom for making it all possible. You rock, looking forward to more time spent together! Be it virtual, the office, or billiards, you name the place ;).

Feel free to share your view on the remote working model in the comments below.

I'm here for you

Jaroslaw Jarmolowicz

JVM Software Developer

11 个月

Great photo;)!

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