Our Remote Work ?? Jobs Economy ???????????????? ? An Evolution of Automation Empowering Employee Performance ??

Image Credits: Cartoon: Janne Livonen. Source: New Yorker: Improving Workplace Culture One Review at a Time. Header Image and Article from Buffer: Remote Working Scale.

6 April 2023 update: I originally wrote this article before COVID-19 after having a huge admiration for remote roles I was seeing online and being fed up with the 5 day (yes, that was a common routine), 1-1.5 hr one-way commutes. A lot has changed in our work world yet all of the remote culture largely remains the same with an introduction to the Hybrid approach and a vastly increased global adoption of remote work whether forced or chosen. I eventually plan to write a follow up. There has been an explosion in remote work articles as you can imagine. I found this one just today (6 April 2023) from my Google Discover feed:

Thank you and enjoy the read and linked sources.

**2019 article begins:**

Makes total sense that Remote Work (working from home) delivers in droves. There's no energy expended on mostly unnecessary lengthy commutes, significantly less body language energy required for the work - (one of the most taxing forms of our energy, especially in a creative or any office job) or unnecessary office white noise; all of which that energy be reinvested back into powering more work and personal errands when not in work hours.

I find co-working spaces, quiet cafes, libraries or a secluded office space whether at home or somewhere else to be most beneficial. I think the variation of environment is key to fuelling productivity and creativity levels to new heights!

Having said all of that, I still feel that in-person interaction every so often is a refreshing breath of fresh air (but too much of it is not when not absolutely required) and can't be beaten by a video link, although video streaming does come quite close, having someone or a group of people near you who you can trust to always be right next to you when you need help is tops, having said that, there's always Slack and Trello for remote teams. Kinsta, Flywheel, Buffer, WP Buffs, Automattic + more offer physically decoupled & distributed working environments, the way it should have been ages ago! ??

Who Am I?

Some (almost) 26 year old tech and marketing geek from Sydney, Australia with about 4-5 years work experience all up, read more about my history in the "My Work History" section. I graduated from a Bachelor of Information Technology Co-op Scholarship at the University of Technology, Sydney in 2016. I travelled to San Francisco ??as a WordPress Web Volunteer (free ticket) to TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 (a 3 day startup conference) and was amazed at how many tech companies there are in one place, it is the SaaS tech hub of the world after all! ??

Google's Mountain View HQ Campus, where's Gavin Belson from HBO Silicon Valley?

Currently remotely freelancing in Sydney with WordPress & static HTML (bootstrap) web design with on-page SEO and Social Media Marketing at Siteroo. (I've done Social Media Marketing for Google during the 2013 Google Student Ambassador program in Australia and NZ).

Looking at automating everyday annoyances with end-user tasks with Chrome extensions and Android/iOS apps such as minimising the amount of RAM and CPU Chrome consumes and more efficient photo galleries for auto-transferring to a NAS/HDD (I have a Synology NAS). Are you skilled in these areas? I'd love to connect. Reach out! ??

Twitter: @stefssite (Yes, as of 5 April 2023, Twitter now has a Dogecoin logo) | W: Stefs.site | E: [email protected]

My San Francisco trip was only for 12 days, I spent my last hours rushing to the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto and checking out the Google HQ campus for a second time before hitching a free ride back to SF on the Google bus. ?? (Thanks Google). It's like a 40 min ride with light traffic, heavy traffic during peak can drive that closer to 2 hours I've heard. It's also a similar drive from Melbourne, Australia's airport, but not as long I think.

Introduction

We live in an age where more job applicants more than ever before are spear hunting for remote jobs. Some even going to extent of turning down in-office jobs for their remote versions elsewhere. What does this mean for the job market? It's changing, REAL FAST, and automation is not far behind the remote revolution trail either, in fact it's here too.

All those self-check outs at supermarkets and the airport check-in machines, all those Boing 737 MAX crashes and Airbus A330 near crash, yep, automation done poorly. Often IT or even digital marketing jobs are the first to be automated for good reason, they're highly structural and procedural. I've worked in the DevOps/CD/CI/Cloud/IT Support and Social Media & SEO Marketing spaces and can definitely tell first hand this is where automation has been happening first.

QF72's A330 flight from Singapore to Perth nose dived twice due to an automation software glitch in 2008. Thankfully the Pilot, Captain Kevin Sullivan, was a Former Airforce Pilot and managed to land the plane safely with a lot of software luck and bad luck happening in a few hours.

The glitch apparently happened due to false data being fed through a single external sensor. Today's planes are equipped with multiple sensors to data check. But automation glitches can come from many directions as seen from the 737 MAX cases.

I'm sure any business would love to automate EVERY job if they could, it's just that's still a work in progress today (thankfully for us humans - there's a section on UBI below). I saw first hand in IT Support jobs, automated machine learning knowledge bases offering Support Engineers related best case solution documents for each customer issue base on keywords in a technical customer support case (One startup which won TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 in San Francisco, Forethought, does exactly this, think Slack but for all of your company's documentation auto-routing).

No doubt while these IT or Cloud Support roles have a great deal of complexity to them (every big tech company like Google, Facebook, Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft) still hires for IT or Cloud Support because it's still an area with a lot of edge cases and Cloud is relatively new, but once knowledge bases become more sufficiently populated by humans and machine learning algorithms become vastly much better at digesting, understanding and manipulating human interaction, it's safe to say those jobs will be out the door as well, (hopefully transferring to managing these automated support systems instead, but likewise with all automation taking place, instead of needing 10 people, you now only need 1 or 2 to manage that abstracted system which reduced an enormous amount of business complexity and expense on constant salaries).

Take this automation video I saw a few years ago which has staggering 11.3+ million views. (There's another really good automation video at the bottom of this article or here or there directly after this video below).

The later half of the 2010th decade: Enter Remote Work & the Gig Economy

WP Buffs is another WordPress maintenance (not hosting) company which hires all of their staff remotely, it was born out of Washington, USA. Their Instagram looks really bright with remote worker pics!

I originally wrote this as a microblog post yesterday (5 June 2019). But have been thinking about this remote movement for years and have rapidly seen a sweeping pro-remote work change in the tech & marketing industries (for great reasons!).

I also just read Paul Hewett's (awesome marketing leader! He runs the Google Marketing Platform Sydney meetup every month) article on The Reality of Running a Remote Company (the company he works for is entirely remote) and hence I was motivated to push this article officially out as my (finally) first LinkedIn article even though I've posted 100s of LinkedIn posts and a few candid blog posts on Medium and my own site over the years. Pro tip: CMD/Ctrl-K is a godsend hotkey for hyperlinking text, I was hoping it was supported on LinkedIn Articles, since it works in Google Docs, and it was. :) Nice going LinkedIn, I just wish the edit/update button was available on the mobile article page itself. And it wasn't appearing when I first published my article on the desktop site. (I had to go to Profile -> Articles -> Edit.

Sorry about the lack of spacing inside paragraphs, doesn't look like LinkedIn has any options to add spacing in bullet point paragraphs without creating another bullet point. :( I did my best. I also wish it had the ability to tag people and companies within articles, that would be slick. @LinkedIn (I reached out to LinkedIn Support on Twitter DM). I'll repost this onto my personal blog once it's up.

Automation Taking Place (I.e. SaaS companies; the only scalable companies on the internet)

Here we'll take a look at few different tech verticals that have been automated with market saturation. These are companies that have generally raised money from investment firms, angel investors or a rare few are entirely bootstrapped from their own funding and customer revenue (i.e. Kinsta.com).

Hosting Automation

• Public cloud providers: Google Cloud Platform (GCP) & Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure.
• Software startups dealing with infrastructure: Harness.io, Docker, Kinsta, Flywheel, WPEngine, Pagely + more, I'll update this list periodically.

Web Design & Web Admin Automation

• LeadPages, Unbounce, InstaPage, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, Strikingly, Cloudflare, Automattic.

SEO / PPC Automation

• Marketo, Digital MaaS & Autopilot (Australian startups), MailShake, ActiveCampaign, Drip, Google Ads, Facebook Ads etc.

Chat Bots

• Intercom, Drift, Chat fuel, Pure chat.

Social Media Automation

• HootSuite, Buffer

Workplace Collaboration Automation

• Atlassian/Trello, Slack with slack bots.

Food Delivery Automation

• Uber Eats, Menulog, Deliveroo, Foodera
• Groceries: Woolworths, Coles, Amazon Fresh

Ride Share Automation

• Uber, Bolt (Taxify), Ola, Lyft etc

General Automation

• Zapier, IFTTT can be used with IoT applications like Dyson Purifiers, Lifx (smart lights) and Voice Assistances such as Google Assistant and Amazon Echo.

These software services are all solving manual task problems with code. They turn 2 or more steps into 1 for the end user, this is where value is generated. All of these ideas can be started anywhere in the world with any person or group of people. Kinsta (a managed WordPress hosting provider) for example, built a hosting dashboard that basically automated a lot of the WordPress hosting tasks involved with hosting a website, any issues that arise, there's an Intercom chat with a live experienced remote Support Engineer available 24/7. This company started with 4 people literally working away in one room, the company is mainly distributed with a small office in Hungary where it began.

Kinsta's CFO, Tom actually wrote an article how they went from $0 to 7 figures reoccurring revenue without any external funding. He also wrote another article on scaling a SaaS company. Kinsta also has one of the best far reaching SEO blogs in the WordPress space. It's pretty impressive considering they only had 2 Writers until recently, I bet automation and great content played a great part. No doubt remote environments made these severely limited number workers about 10x more efficient. Kinsta has around 60 staff today with most being Support Engineers situated around the globe working from home or anywhere they see fit. Flywheel is another case in point.

So, What is Remote Work? (I.e. The dream about 10 years ago, now reality for a lot of jobs on the market)

Basically, in the context of white collar industries, a digital job that allows you to work from anywhere you see fit. As long as you have a stable and fast enough internet connection (either through hotspotting/tethering on your phone's LTE or using public Wi-Fi access points in co-working spaces or cafes etc).

This video below is probably the best one I've seen on remote working, a little more on the extreme side of remote working where Freelancers or Startup Founders will call themselves Digital Nomads and travel the globe whenever you want. You can if you have enough time and energy for that travel in-between work hours, e.g. In a weekend (or long weekend) you could be setup and ready to work from another country all by yourself. Bali, Thailand and Singapore are renowned for being Digital Nomand hotspots.

Courtesy Chris R Dodd, aka, Chris The Freelancer (who has been freelancing far longer than I have and reigns from the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia).

I watched a few YouTube videos on people who had remote worked, some good, some explaining the cons when I got offered to work remotely for the third time in less than 6 months.

Here's a good list:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=A+day+in+the+life+of+a+remote+worker

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cons+of+remote+work

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Remote+work+good

This guy above also coincidentally looks a lot like Paul Hewett mentioned above.

Just some of the visible perks of a remote job if you're happy with your career trajectory / growth.

As you can see from the video above, it's also highly dependent on the job and how much learning curve is required. Are you confident enough you can keep learning on your own or are you still at the stage where you would benefit from constant face to face feedback while you work? Developer jobs are the most challenging jobs in the IT industry.

I believe remote jobs are great once you have nailed a particular skill set under your belt that you feel confident enough doing that skill yourself. That's what that guy above basically says. You will learn at a faster rate being surrounded by others with likeminded but further developed skillsets than yours. You can also self study online through courses like Udacity, Coursera, YouTube if you can't find or get a job easily. Build pet projects to build up your skill and confidence to help you get any type of job.

Ok, Sweet, Where Can I Find Myself a Remote Job?

Remote jobs can be found increasing on places like WeWorkRemotely.com, Remote.co, Buffer (legit, the first company I heard preaching about remote work AND transparent salaries, how good is that? AAA rating. Kinsta, Flywheel, Automattic (the company behind WordPress, Jetpac and WooCommerce [acquired]), and even now Atlassian (Australia's biggest startup to corporate success story to date) has finally succumbed to remote work for some roles (as stubborn as Australian companies are when being resistant to change, heck we just voted in the Libs for another term vastly due to 'cheaper tax cuts', no carbon emissions scheme and a whole lot of surplus/property/corporate jargon).

I'm even seeing a few remote jobs mentioned on Seek.com which is great to see. Selz is another remote e-commerce company, a competitor to Shopify.

While Google seems to not be totally set for remote work, despite the Google Co-founders wanting to end the 40-hour work week with more part-time jobs (but so far I've only seen one part-time role for Sydney and it was for Software Engineering), I have confirmed with sources saying they do allow like 1-2 days working from home, depending on your Manager/team, however this is obviously not a trait of a remote first company, so I would tread carefully if you're after remote roles.

I'm not aware of Facebook's, Twitter's, Apple's, Amazon's or Microsoft's remote work policies (I'd imagine them to be much like Google's, being fairly tech corporate, maybe employees from there can comment as this article does the search engine and LinkedIn rounds, Facebook, Twitter, Atlassian & Google also offer their staff free meals and other in-office perks every day), but having said that, I saw a job listing from AWS on WeWorkRemotely.com just yesterday! So just goes to show how the sand is shifting every day.

GitHub has been supporting remote tech support and software engineering roles for some time now.

Here are some other companies offering remote work.

Just a list of countless remote jobs on WeWorkRemotely.com.

My Work History (Who is this guy, and why is he writing this long piece?!)

Usually SEO Marketers will write long pieces like this for 'long tail' content for their blogs to get more visitor traction to their websites. Good news is, this isn't a blog, I'm not selling a product or service here. I'm merely trying to spread more word about how pervasive remote work as become in certain parts of the world.

I have literally worked in 15 different companies (I counted twice - LinkedIn) in my time so far on this still blue planet of ours, even though I'm just 26 this June. They span from when I first entered the workforce in 2009, ranging from, small and medium businesses and startups to full-blown multinational corporates, my career has been structured like this so far:

• 2009-2010: 3x 1 week work experiences during high school. (SITA - Airport IT servers, Coca-Cola Amatil - IT systems for packaging of Coca-Cola products, Mega Digital Technologies - Satellite TV AV local shop).
• 2012 - 2015: 3x 6 month full-time internships during university. (Optus SingTel, WiseTech Global [Formerly CargoWise], Cisco Systems)
• 2012 - 2018: 7x Part-time & Full-time contract work - I find contract work to either be hit and miss, on one hand it outright says the company is still testing your abilities even though you're already hired so you feel deposable [lack of trust] - one company that turns this upside down is Google, they put complete trust in their hires at least for actual internal Google staff which can also be contract based (I'm aware Google also contracts out to third party companies for employment too, depending on the role/team/location).
• Sub-point: On the other hand contract work adds a great deal of career & lifestyle flexibility to find other jobs/companies/field/career changes when your 3-6+ month contract terminates - I've even seen some fixed contracts go up to 2-3 years, I'm not sure how I feel about those though, they seem more like full-time permanent jobs without the long-term stability - nothing is really 'permanent' in life any way, not even housing ownership; there will come a day when we either suffer severely poor health to live on our own or die).
• I worked contract roles at Subway, Google, pre-launch dating app startup (not mine) at Fishburners, Channel 9's Stan, Cammy - IP surveillance monitoring app, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Prosperity Media - SEO Agency).
• 2017: 1x Startup as a Co-founder working remotely with WordPress, AWS and Social Media Marketing while hot-desking across multiple locations in Sydney including home, cafes, libraries and co-working spaces. Owneroom.com

Starting Owneroom took about a full day and night (WordPress, AWS, Cloudflare, G Suite, logos, pitch deck, the team pitch itself). Keeping it going, about 8 months surveying for user feedback and software development.

Taught me a lot about WordPress, SEO and how actually difficult and expensive startups are to market; competition will basically wipe you on the floor if you're bootstrapped (not funded).

Make sure your financial runway is long enough to sustain multiple blowouts to project timeline and budgets.

Was a completely remote functioning company, but we did meet up as a team a few times a week to resync and do video interviews for Accelerators.

• 2018 - Present: 1x Now freelancing (consulting) web design & digital marketing remotely at Siteroo from co-working spaces such as Sydney's Startup Hub on level 1 (free), cafes, universities or libraries if you can find a spare seat anywhere (usually there are a tonne of seats everywhere if it's not exam time), or simply work from home if it's not too distracting depending on your circumstances, e.g. Children or not.
• 2018 - 2019: Been offered 2 remote jobs in Technical WordPress Hosting Support from US companies, but working in Australia.

The Baby Boomer generation (born around 1960s onwards), while less techy, just stuck to their same jobs and companies for 25-30+ years - this was the expectation that society set down for them at the time, quite the contrary for today's tech jobs.

Great article I just found as a Medium notification (it found me). Save 20 hours per week.

The traditional 9–5 workday is poorly structured for high productivity. Perhaps when most work was physical labor, but not in the knowledge working world we now live in. - Benjamin Hardy - Organisational Psychologist

Important Findings on Remote Work in the Work World

While many (including myself) strongly believe remote work is the current and future way forward for digital work, it requires the right culture and implementation strategies both by the employer's company and the employees who choose to take on remote work.

Buffer goes through the 5 different types of remote work environments, ranging from the in-office worker who occasionally gets permission to work from home during bad weather/family events all the way to fully distributed global remote working teams like at Kinsta, Buffer, Flywheel and Automattic to name a few fully remote heavyweights.

I'd admit, I think most have this preconceived perception that remote work involves outsourcing your work as a Freelancer to other countries, e.g. For Software Development. That's one form of it I cover below, but it doesn't mean you need to work internationally or with international clients or companies (although that can be a benefit too - larger customer base with flexibility to travel to new countries).

You could be working remote within your own city as a Freelancer. By no means does it mean you have to outsource anything. This was probably my first misunderstanding of when I first heard the term remote work way back when, it has thankfully evolved so much from those days whereby actual companies rely on it for running their everyday core business functions such as web hosting user support, designing, programming, marketing and no doubt other professions too like Accounting and Law I must think, heck, even Surgeons are performing remote surgery with robots now!

Flux, a popular YouTube Web Freelancer from Israel shares his experience of working with international clients. (One from Australia!)

The occasional in-office remote worker (kind of bad due to lack of remote focused culture and constant daily burden to be in-office):

Having experienced being an in-office worker who occasionally requested to work from home (under the assumption it had to be better than the productivity I was getting in the office which I'd say was only about 20-40% of my actual energy output into the work's day working from a corporate office, and about 60% working from a smaller office with constant work colleague chatter all day), I can say while I appreciated the more distraction free quieter commute-free environment at home, these companies didn't have much remote structure or collaboration in terms of the actual work.

I assume at no fault on their part, but merely that their culture just didn't have the experience to train their employees to be effective remote workers (it was never within their scope to). I found it was hard to bridge the communication gap back with my in-office colleagues who would otherwise just roam to my desk for watercooler type work-related chats, whereas if I pinged them online through our corporate internal instant chat tools or emailed, I wouldn't get a response back in hours if any. This left me feeling pretty secluded and ultimately unmotivated to do the work when I got stuck on issues. The fact that I could keep just saying I'll get around to solving that issue later due to lack of collaboration, created this loop of procrastinating even more on issues.

I think this type of remote work environment generates a bad rap for remote work in general and hence employers shy away from the topic all together (self-fulfilling prophecy - which is why it's so hard to change in-office culture to work more remote - and also, these companies have already spent big bucks leasing out city office spaces and decking out their office with decor and perks), which kind of makes it out to be a taboo topic most of the time when going for interviews or simply just asking if a company does remote work. I think a good indication is, if they're not already advertising remote work either on their blogs or job posts, it's safe to safe they're not a remote company and expect to work from a dedicated company office setup.

The Better Remote Work Environment for Companies (The best):

I believe for a remote environment to work effectively, a remote-first or pro-remote (remote adopting) company would have to already invest in training and education into how remote work can effectively be used for their employees within their organisation. Ensuring that their employees can get human help as needed wherever they are in the world.

Companies that do this well are, Kinsta, Buffer, Flywheel, Automattic. They constantly blog about remote work and how it benefits them. They understand what it's like to remote work and hence cater to all the nuances involved in being a remote worker. Just sent a message to a colleague of Slack? Expect an actual instant reply in seconds not hours.

Jon Poland, Kinsta's COO sheds some light on working from home for a company to WordCamp Asheville, USA as well as why he believes WordPress is so great for the global community. Fun fact: At least 30% of the world's websites run on WordPress.

Freelancing as a Digital Nomad (Highly flexible, but income can be very intermittent).

Since it's just you or a really small self managed team, you can to control how your business works, where from, what the hours are and how it scales. Your remote work effectiveness should be akin to a remote company since all communication should be instant through remote channels which can include video chat. You're not reliant on any commuting or other communication happening with in-office buddies, so you should be able to get more tasks per day per person done. Hello an extra 4 hours to do work or be split across personal time as well.

I saw Stephanie Campanella present at WordCamp Sydney 2018 and was highly inspired by her remote experience at managing a team of overseas employees for her WordPress Marketing Agency. PS: She uses Slack.

Now actually onto the remote work vs in-office work environments bit (what this article was initially written for).

?? Entrapments of Office Work - Where's All My Productivity Going? Hint: Not as far as it could go.

Image: Some open office probably in the US. Looks like an office I worked at at WiseTech Global. (A medium sized organisation at the time in 2014 which has expanded from 3 to 14 countries). Distraction central? Looks like it.

Pitfalls of in-office work:?

• Commuting is an added daily stressor and human energy consumer that is guaranteed to not operate correctly on most given days. This creates a tenfold higher chance of employees being late and arriving with evaporated energy levels (trains/buses break down, delayed and cancelled often, I even missed an interview recently because my train broke in perfect weather, it was just 40 years old in Australia - it was the only time it had broke, but they will break when you least expect it as technology so often does (the trick here is to minimise points of failure and delays), my bus' tyre popped once after going over a roundabout. Just yesterday I saw another old train break in the city, which would send further delays down multiple train lines. That was home time, fun.

Just another day on Sydney's public transport. A pretty fallible system.

• Peak hours traffic is utterly terrible in a lot of cities of the world (think Sydney, San Francisco, Tokyo) [due to the fundamentally poor design choice of centralising a central business district to a city, imagine if all of our urban suburb's internet connections had to connect up at only one point in the city, this would be a HUGE resource contention leading to massive connection dropouts (It's why P2P connections like Cable DOCSIS dropout and suffer huge lagspikes) and severely degraded speed throughout, people are much the same, just way bigger than data packets :)]

Gilfoyle from the hit startup tech series,?HBO Silicon Valley. I highly recommend watching the series. It's basically deadset the startup industry in a nutshell.

• ?? ?? Employees (including Managers, CXOs) have a higher chance of becoming more sleep deprived ?? and mentally fatigued/burned out at work ???? due to preparation (which burns more precious energy and time even though they haven't even left home yet) for the day out ahead & travel taking 2-4 hours and precious energy out of their day.
• Sub-point: When you work from home, you can order Uber Eats, you minimise interactions and hence distractions with the outside world, you can get to work in 10 seconds flat to your desk and do 10x more, you can go for a lunch time jog around your suburb, how great does that feel compared to cramped up city life, pretty good so far, right?).
• Sub-point 2: Context switching is one of the most energy draining tasks we do everyday. Whether it's opening a new window/tab or commuting or going for lunch, every new environment our brains have to render is more energy expended. Minimising these context switches will save you energy to reinvest back into doing single tasked work items.

What in-office work can often feel like. The zone is a state of flow where you can achieve 10x or even 20x than you normally would if you had just started on a task.

Having worked in both corporate and remotely, I can definitely say it is much easier to fall into the zone as a remote worker and for longer periods at a time.

In an office, you're definitely 50x more bound to get interrupted by someone or something, whether it's office white noise or a shorter sleep due to commuting.

• More physically exhausted (wasted energy and time spent commuting and upholding body language or watercooler chat than actually working).
• Office distractions such as background or foreground chatter (depending how close you are to others), or constant energy sapping white noise like phone calls of others which further disorients your concentration.

What affects our focus levels and how can we focus better compared to AI?

• Can feel less innovative and inspiring as a company overall just purely by the fact that you're wasting 2 - 4 hours of your energy and time getting ready and commuting each day where it could be vastly better reinvested going for a 10 min jog and then back behind an actual screen developing that app/website/marketing campaign or self studying for better skills.
• Sub-point: The 40-hour work week goes back to Henry Ford and his Ford car manufacturing plant in the 1840s. He reduced it from something like an 80-60 hour work week to 40 hours so people had time to buy his cars and shop for other items aka commercialism as we know it, that's how outdated this model is and relatively only a few have aimed to change it.

What I view most corporates as, minus tech ones.

Pros of in-office work:

• You get to meet (existing and new) people everyday, including prospective clients, sales leads or just fun colleagues to bounce ideas off from at any given moment. (Can be a con if these people aren't directly related to helping you achieve your work goals, e.g. work colleagues that have their own goals but you're still expected to interact with them for the entire 8 hour duration of that day, this is great when your work goals relate, but not so much when they don't).
• Great for starting out and learning new skills/field, you will be hopefully trained up by the right work colleagues in a much faster way than learning it on your own or remotely (where you're usually expected to know most of your stuff before being hired). A pitfall though is many people starting out in the industry tend to not know what they 100% want to focus on yet OR they just never receive the right amount of quality of training or constant team mentorship to succeed in their role (exisiting team members become busy ALL THE TIME and think it's not their job to train someone else full-time, this creates a lack of cohesion in office environments and higher employee turnover). It tends to happen more often than not.
• Your day is more structured by default (not much say in how you work if options throw you about). Whether you've got eyes constantly over your shoulder Communism style or just the mere fact that you commuted to work got your blood flowing in a particular way, the structure is all there, just how well you handle different extents of structure will also determine your work's output.
• Some particular roles or organisations such as Government, Hospitals, Schools or Banking often require a central place of work due to their unique office environments, clientele/user base or fear of data privacy and Intellectual Property (IP) Right breaches. A good catch all is to just ensure employees only work from a central office or set of centralised offices throughout several states/countries. I'm also sure this is partly why companies like Google and Facebook prefer to keep their employees onsite for the majority of their time; it can also help boost collaboration and innovation since you have more face time with your colleagues. (That's why Google, Facebook, Twitter and Atlassian all offer free food with their own cafeterias inside their offices, it minimises travel time to go get lunch + fuels team or cross team collaboration).

Sydney's new $309 million Rail Operation Center in Alexandria. It looks similar to a Network Operations or NASA's Flight Control Center

• You can hopefully find new food places or cuisines to eat out at with your team, not to say your local area while remote working wouldn't have a wide choice range either, especially with Uber Eats, Menulog delivering across multiple suburbs, but it's usually nicer to have food with a team or people you can easily bounce ideas off from that doesn't involve communicating over a screen. Having said that, I can't think of a time where a major breakthrough in my work was drastically improved from watercooler type chat, but I'm sure there were smaller moments here and there where tips would fly in all directions. Slack or blogging is pretty cool for that too.
• Office decor/space can be inspiring but so can hot desking remotely or co-working spaces. Some offices usually have perks such as, foosball, arcade machines, team social or sporting activities and table tennis tables (although the noise from this can become irritating if it's not appropriately placed away from desks or in a sound proof room like at H2 Ventures at Stone & Chalk, Sydney, level 4, 11-31 York St, Sydney).

Qualtrics' Sydney office feels cosy, decked out with carpet, low-height ceilings, private booking rooms alongside open space desks with table tennis and putt putt golf, a golfer's dream, am I right?

One of my former Cisco Managers used to bring in his own mini-golf kit into the office!

• As of 2019, since remote work is still a relatively new way of working, at least in Australia, in-office jobs usually contain a wider range of roles/career growth opportunities/promotions.
• You can always just move closer to the city (but it's no where near as a flexible option as getting a remote job would be, unless you've been at a company for many years and you see longevity there) if you can afford the rent with a hopefully decent salary (not implying remote roles pay less by any means, in fact, usually it's more, cause you're not spending $2.6k+ a year on transport fees, but some countries have mandatory superannuation schemes which some overseas companies can choose not to legally support either as Independent Contractors). Good luck buying closer to the city (within an 1-2 hours commute one way), unless you're uber rich or have been working full-time since you were 11 and saved every penny, I'm assuming that would be a high minority of the workforce.

?? Enter: Remote Work - The Godsend We All Need? Yes, Please.

Source: Happiest guy on the planet.

Pitfalls of remote work:?

• You will feel more mentally burned out / drained much faster being in the same environment most of the time if you choose to primarily work from home unless you change up your environment to work from different places (Cafes, Co-working spaces etc) and discipline yourself to take regular short 5-15 min breaks every 1.5-2 hours or so (there's no office kitchen or watercoolers here - I usually use bathroom or hunger breaks as a good indicator to get up every 2 hours or so) - this refreshes your mind and keeps you highly focused for longer periods at a time (i.e. A sitting session), something you can't really achieve in an open office (unless you book a private room and made to feel isolated from your team) with so much constant energy sapping white noise and distractions such as colleagues or in-office email events).
• Sub-point: Part-time work may be a temporary or medium-term way around avoiding feeling burned out in any way. Speak to your Manager about it if you're already employed. Another note on part-time or casual work, I found if I worked like 2 or 3 days in succession, it was much easier to maintain a regular sleep pattern that way rather than having 1 day work, 1 day off, 1 day work and then waiting for the next week again to repeat that cycle.

Dinesh from HBO Silicon Valley realises he's a home drone.

• Supplementarily, and one of the biggest draw backs I see, is it can be hard to distinguish/set particular buffers of time between personal and work life (Before, commuting to/from an office was effectively your buffer between the two) since you're now effectively sharing the same location for both if you choose to work from home (I've heard it drastically helps to have your office space in another room if space allows, it could even be as simple as working from your dining table, I've found that has worked wonders during my high school university entrance exam (2010-11) years, it was also way warmer since our heater air-con was in that room too, efficient, I know!). The good news is you can always choose to work from any location, so go test out that cafe, library or co-working space you've always seen but never actually been to, see what works best for you! ??
• I found this link that relates to how you can split you day up as a Freelancer. https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2019/06/how-to-figure-out-when-your-freelance-workday-is-over/
• Sub-point: I recommend keeping on top of your regularly weekly or daily sports, exercise or meditation, whatever you do to bring peace to your inner mind's sanctum that doesn't involve a screen for at least 30-60 minutes a day. Reading a book is great too, Kindles are good because they're front-lit e-ink displays like reading off paper (tenfold less straight on your eyes and you can't be distracted by notifications or tempted to check - it just simply wasn't designed for that for good reason), not the same as what you get from every other LCD or OLED screen.

Flux (a constant Web Freelancer YouTuber) explains his experience with Remote Work

• Higher chance of feeling more alone. (Although this can be easily circumvented by attending relevant meetups at night or day after/before work in your field [depending on your shifts], for example, Sydney always has around 3-4 great content sharing meetups a week around WordPress, Digital Marketing, Software Development, Startup pitching and more!). It's definitely a great way to meet like-minded people, who knows, you might find your Co-founder there! ??

• Due to lack of face to face interaction, work can feel slightly less impactful or under appreciated if you're used to doing work in front of others to receive feedback. Often the case with office IT support jobs as well. It's highly strenuous work that often is a very behind the scenes job so doesn't receive the full recognition it deserves. Yes, we get paid to do it, but humans run on emotions too, and if they aren't receiving the right ones in right amounts of a daily basis, things can start to go south pretty quickly.
• Sub-point: I recommend reading Glassdoor company reviews and reaching out to current employees of the company on LinkedIn, Twitter or even Email to find out more about their culture and more aspects about the role you will be doing. Some good questions to ask are; do you guys remote work, what day to day tasks do you do for x role?

Dinesh and Gilfoyle (senior Engineers) from Pied Piper from HBO Silicon Valley explain the harshness of the startup landscape.

• It's tenfold harder for remote employers to trust and vet remote employees based on them not being able to interview you in-person (but they can test your skills much faster due to everything being over instant communication channels). Skype or other video platform interviews are a great replacement for this, however employers only see how that person visually reacts for 1-2 hours.
• Sub-point: Arguably the same can be said for in-person interviews too, but there will definitely be visual cues lost with remote workers that would otherwise be present inside an office. This is why remote offers are usually contract based to start off with at least and then most continue on a contract based (for easy termination in case a remote worker underperforms or decides to stop working for a remote company entirely).
• High chance your career will feel highly specialised/narrow direction to the point of feeling pigeon holed into just doing one role for the next 5-10+ years, harder to build out other connections (across different departments that may have influence to refer you, Remote companies are usually quite small in nature, so Slack generally suffices for that, but it can feel less personal, since you're just another bit of pixels on someone else's screen).
• Tougher to get upskilled in another role unless your employer gives you online courses like Coursera, Udacity and sees a business need to train you up or provides mentorship/video screen flow face time training. Having said this, you will have plenty of self-study time saved from commuting outside of business hours if you want to pursue another skill set. (It might just be quicker and cheaper for that remote company to just hire a Specialist in their desired field.
• Sub-point: Google hires specialists with years of experience doing one field, every big company does because of their powerful brand name attraction and perks, but now remote companies also have that same power of hiring from a global talent pool, minus the brand attraction unless they've mastered their blog in their own niche market like Kinsta.com have in the WordPress space, these smaller agile types of remote companies can become very well known brands within their fields in a relatively short space of time. Kinsta literally have the best blog on WordPress right now (so much so that I managed to find them in multiple Google searches doing my day-to-day freelance WordPress work) next to WPBeginner and WPLift blogs.
• Highly more competitive to get hired and hire due to a global talent pool with globally hiring companies.
• Pay can sometimes not take into affect Superannuation or Holiday benefits, depending on your locale/country (some companies actually do, because they know they want the talent in a certain locale, Flywheel for example, a managed WordPress hosting company in Nebraska with an Australian remote customer support team to handle the follow the sun hours support, smart!). Usually you're hired as an Independent Contractor, it's just easier this way for smaller overseas companies to employ foreigners. Here's the Australian Government's document on Independent Contractors vs standard employees.
• You may feel more disposable due to the contractor nature of roles and the company having access to a global talent pool, but this is highly dependent on company culture. From what I've seen, remote-first/pro companies tend to lead the way in terms of culture and employee retention. I can't say the same for in-office work where employee retention seems to be low (especially at larger company brands). Whenever I see a job ad for an office job, I'm like did they fire someone? But I never think the same way with a remote company. Weird, ay.
• While also a pro, it can also be a con; timezone differences. Keeping everyone in sync can be a challenge and get out of hand if not managed correctly with experienced distributed teams. I know when I was interviewing for remote roles, I'd often have to interview between 12-2am, which is quite normal for me to be up at any way if I'm not on a 9-5 schedule. ??

Really cool interview I saw on a Web Freelancer, Michael La Plante from the US explaining the benefits of remote work in the most coherent way.

Pros of remote work:

• Get tenfold more done without transport, lunch or office distractions, especially great for people who get distracted easily if they're not focusing on work tasks. (Quite the contrary to what most employers think remote work is bad at, hence the whole 'in-office supervision' mantra most of the world has got installed, which is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy for disaster for a lot of people).

Avoid the 9-5 rat race with over congested transport which either convinces people to stay back later in the office to miss the peak traffic or face the brunt of it. Wouldn't you rather be cooking dinner at 5:05pm? Now you can.

• It's cheaper for employers to hire (no need to lease an office, co-working stipends often way cheaper); access to a global talent pool. (There should never be a shortage of talent to hire in this case, the bottleneck will become how fast your company's hiring and onboarding/training processes are, some companies fly new hires to their HQ for a month of training, Google does a similar thing over 2-3 weeks, other companies offer entirely remote training which is more time and energy efficient but less sociable).
• Most remote companies do at least yearly company meetup retreats, one company, Flywheel, does 4 a year! - Flights and accomodation fully paid for! To make up for the loss in daily face to face social interaction.
• People with accommodatable disabilities can feel much more equal, especially people with physical impairments such as being wheelchair bound, a broken leg or chronic fatigue when they have to maximise every ounce of energy they put into their body. They may also have social anxiety, autism or another mental illness where physical interaction with other people drastically impedes on their performance or energy levels.
• Sub-point: I once saw a guy with a broken leg (literally limping to walk) and a blind guy with a guide dog commuting and working to corporate offices (different multinational companies), and I thought the work they do is virtual, surely they could just remote in and be 100 times more efficient with their entire lives. But corporate mandates get in the way and make everything counter intuitive for all. Basically what I imagine working in politics must feel like daily.

The idiocracies behind in-office work when clearly remote work would overtake the performance of in-office work in leaps and bounds, especially for people suffering manageable disabilities and even normally healthy people.

• Remote work could help so many digitally focused people, but so far most employers in Australia are stepping on that brake so hard it's not funny. I'm seeing a lot of talent being poached to US based companies right now (probably why Atlassian started offering remote jobs), either remotely or onshore in the US just because Australian companies are lagging so far behind remote work policies it's not even funny. Instead, our Liberal Government invests 7 billion on automating buggy self-driving train lines that were perfectly working before with new trains. If it wasn't for Labor being in power in 2007 (Kevin '07), we would have never got an NBN internet infrastructure upgrade, LTE has pretty much surpassed most of NBN's speed plans but there's no unlimited, unthrottled LTE plans here yet. Carriers are greedy, some remote areas use LTE or Satellite for NBN.
• It feels more empowering/rejuvenating since it's a relatively modern way of working while knowing everyone else has to commute the daily 9-5 grind losing 2-4 hours of their time and energy a day while you simply hum away at your designated tasks before they even reach their desk and then you can do whatever you want with your additional non-commute hours (heck, you can even choose to commute to the city for a meetup 1-2 times a week, that solves the lack of social interaction bit, at least it has for me, working remotely over 2 years, usually I'm working from different spots in the city due to liking the freedom of where I work and the hum of a moving city, I also attend quite a few meetups around Sydney) once you're off the clock.
• (Oh, oops, it was this point) No commutes again! You can live anywhere you want and buy cheaper housing as a result. (Can also be a negative if you value being close to the city for meetups etc, but you can rentvest).

Say goodbye to those dreaded commutes. Heck, you wont even need a car, save money on petrol, registration and car insurance. Choose where you want to live and when.

• Communication is often clearer due to everything being sent as digital trails. You can easily reference back to something if you forgot what someone said without having to re-ask them.

Slack team chat. Combine it with Trello, Asana or similar for full project management dashboards.

• Office politics can be nearly or entirely eliminated. Employees working remotely tend to remain working in much more relaxed states without the stress and time of having to commute every day, deal with people face to face and as a result form stronger bonds with the company itself due to it being such a privilege perk of relatively a few companies in the industry. (Scarcity or FOMO - Fear of missing out of another remote job quite like it).
• Greater flexibility with shift hours, offset weeks (working 1 weekend day in place of a weekday, quite common with US timezone overlaps) and 4 day weeks worked. Remote companies free up more of your personal time by not having a commute and often they might only have four 10 hour day weeks, which frees up one of your week days to tackle business hours errands, that Dentist appointment you've been putting off for 5 months, no worries. You will have more energy to do what you want as well after or before work. ???? ♂? Shifts can start earlier or later than the traditional 9-5 hours which gives you extra time to do business hours errands.

Stef the Freelancer at (the super pin-drop quiet) Sydney Startup Hub (again it's a free space on level 1, 8am-6pm Mon-Fri, although the rooms aren't technically for free members, but sometimes in the afternoons they're super empty, just give priority to whoever booked it if they did), Fishburners (startup co-working space) also has a weekly pitching and networking meetup every Friday (lvl 2, 11-31 York St, Sydney with a Virtual Membership if you live anywhere else and want videos and community member accesss) with pizza, it's a really great startup vibe I recommend you check out at least once in your life).

You can read more about me at stefs.site. (Being redesigned by myself).

Hybrid Remote Work and the Future of A Predominately Autonomous Work Environment (Machine Learning and Universal Basic Income)

I think a hybrid approach for the introduction of remote work may work best, especially as an interim solution while a lot of companies face pressures from their staff or potential talent to work remotely. Something like 2 days in office, 3 days remote (or vice versa) would be a cool middle ground. In the end, most of our jobs will probably be automated to some extent or entirely. Machine Learning (ML) is already here for the world to use, companies like Google and Amazon have had a 20 year head start on it all and now are profiteering off that infrastructure.

We will soon need a Universal Basic Income - UBI (different to welfare). Unemployment is on the rise and automation is getting hungrier, software is eating more of the world alive and traditional jobs (a lot of data center jobs have been centralised to the software giants of Amazon, Google and Microsoft now) and I'm sure traditional print media Graphic Designers know full well of what technology can do to an entire industry's jobs. More people are being born, and more jobs are being evaporated as we speak.

This is a great channel I highly recommend: Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

In Summary

What are your thoughts on remote work? I'd love to hear them. Only a few years ago, I used to think remote work was only a thing reserved for a special highly skilled few or 'higher ups' (especially when I saw only Managers being able to take work from home days, usually due to family commitments, so immediately this implies remote work is a highly regarded privilege rather than just a simple efficient means to an end in most companies, especially in corporations), but mainly because I wasn't exposed to the whole remote or even freelance culture when I started out in mostly corporate tech internships.

Even though I clearly saw there was not much value in having to commute to another desk at work to do a virtual task I could do 15x faster from home or elsewhere and for longer hours at a time because of that reinvested energy I would have otherwise spent commuting. So I was made to think that it wasn't really a possible thing most employees could actually achieve, but that is changing now with many remote job boards like WeWorkRemotely.com, Remote.co and Virtual Freelancer where you can get daily email digests of new remote jobs.

Also, my entire immediately and extended family goes to work in offices or places of work, and just thinking about my circle of friends or even Facebook friends, I can't think of anyone who remotes, but some have in the past and said they love it, I know a handful of connections on LinkedIn that remote full-time, I met them through remote companies or meetups. (I'm the only one that does an IT/digital marketing job in my extended family in Australia).

Remote work can sound like an oddity, but I think it's workplace_v2.0 revamped and it certainly has its place in excelling productivity tenfold with a wider range of people, I just wish more employers (especially Australian employers / companies) adopted remote work at a much quicker rate, at least Australia is now getting FTTC NBN (apparently FTTN deployments can't get FTTC unless they pay for it through the Technology Choice program) rolled out to most homes at an ever slow pace, but it should be much more reliable with much faster upload and download speeds than what most would be experiencing on ADSL2+ or DOCSIS 3.0.

• I've been using a 200GB 4G Optus Mobile Broadband plan (the 200GB deal doesn't seem to exist anymore, they used to have a 500GB 24 month plan too) with my LTE Router and so far uploads and downloads are much faster, I definitely wanted more than the 0.8Mbps uploads I was getting from ADSL2+ especially after see how San Francisco had 79Mbps up everywhere. It drops out sometimes, but my router doesn't support all the frequencies since it's an overseas router but I needed ethernet ports for my NAS.
• Any how, I'm meant to get the NBN FTTC switched on TODAY in my suburb! (7 June, EDIT: It got delayed until 21 June), but our 200GB 4G plan ends in October (AUD $40 a month). We've (3 people) never run out except when Google Photos ran in the background one month. I'm pretty conservative with data too, the most I use are occasional YouTube videos and music streaming off YouTube Premium / SoundCloud (Pretty sure music videos use less data if it's a still image or a video with not many moving pixels - less data to transfer).

Other Goodies:

From a Designer, which is arguably one of the MOST collaborative roles in the IT space. Check out how Jesse handles his remote work flow.

Flux is also a great YouTuber Web Freelancer, I've been occasionally watching his videos for months.

I found the following link earlier this year in February, while I can't validate the 'rest n vest' culture myself, it seems to be an actual thing, and HBO Silicon Valley made sure they captured that. (They spoke with real tech executives and Engineers to write the script, Dick Costolo, a Twitter Co-founder works on the script with them).

Rest and vesting is when employees go to an in-office job and aren't assigned any tasks so they just sit around waiting for their shares to vest (so they can claim the cash out) and then leave the company. I think this only happens in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, but I'm sure many workers there are the hardest and most stressed workers, it's a highly competitive market after all. You don't just get a job at Google in San Francisco.

Inside the world of Silicon Valley's 'coasters' -- millionaire engineers who get paid gobs of money and barely work

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Proudly written from home, at night owl hours for you to enjoy and comment on your commute to work. You're welcome. Don't forget that coffee.

Ok, my Mac literally froze right at the end of typing this, luckily LinkedIn auto-saves every character + I was taking periodic copy and pastes to notepad. Better hit publish on v1.8. And I'm really hungry.

Thank you for reading, feel free to say hi in chat or the comments. ?? Don't forget to share everywhere. :)

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Kind Regards,

Stefan Caliaro

Web Designer & Digital Marketer at Siteroo

Sydney, Australia

[email protected] or just DM me.