Skip to main content

Disadvantages of working remote

Just ranting it out loud, I am working remote for the past two years for a startup and there are many advantages of working remote but there are many disadvantages also.

  • Its hard to chase people over phone. As people wont pick up the call or they wont reply to Instant Messages. So you are stuck in your chain of thoughts cursing the monitor.
  • You miss the coffee talk.
  • You miss what's going on in the office and really dont know whats going in the company.
  • In meetings you could be writing code and its easy to get distracted over phone.
  • Some people prefer to chat over talk and thats a pain because you already miss the social connection and typing is always a pain.
  • You miss all company dinners and lunches.
  • Because you save time on travel you tend to overwork.
  • Worse if you are working in a different timezone then people would disturb you off hours.
  • Lots of time is spent in trying to screen share or do go to meeting.
  • People will prefer to talk to person in house and unless you are a rockstar and only you can deliver the feature mostly people will prefer in house person.
  • Lots of things will get discussed in adhoc passageway meeting and you would miss all of that.
  • Dealing with HR is a pain. As you are remote you dont have the luxary of walking into their cube and getting your work done. I am literally screwed on every work that needs to flow through HR. Communicating with them on email leads to frustration and all you can do is curse your monitor.
Also check my post on Advantages of working remote

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 19, 2011 at 10:46 PM

    Kalpesh, I understand that VERY good, I've been working in such mode for 3.5 years with timezone offset 9-10 hours.

    Last half of year of my working remotely I ended up almost completely shifted to the timezone most of the people work, which meant for me - working from 1-2pm till over-midnight pretty much all the time.

    I think I worked remotely more than enough in my life so far :) Now I'm enjoying coming to the office and talking to people.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Haproxy and tomcat JSESSIONID

One of the biggest problems I have been trying to solve at our startup is to put our tomcat nodes in HA mode. Right now if a customer comes, he lands on to a node and remains there forever. This has two major issues: 1) We have to overprovision each node with ability to handle worse case capacity. 2) If two or three high profile customers lands on to same node then we need to move them manually. 3) We need to cut over new nodes and we already have over 100+ nodes.  Its a pain managing these nodes and I waste lot of my time in chasing node specific issues. I loath when I know I have to chase this env issue. I really hate human intervention as if it were up to me I would just automate thing and just enjoy the fruits of automation and spend quality time on major issues rather than mundane task,call me lazy but thats a good quality. So Finally now I am at a stage where I can put nodes behing HAProxy in QA env. today we were testing the HA config and first problem I immediately
Post a Comment
Read more

Adding Jitter to cache layer

Thundering herd is an issue common to webapp that rely on heavy caching where if lots of items expire at the same time due to a server restart or temporal event, then suddenly lots of calls will go to database at same time. This can even bring down the database in extreme cases. I wont go into much detail but the app need to do two things solve this issue. 1) Add consistent hashing to cache layer : This way when a memcache server is added/removed from the pool, entire cache is not invalidated.  We use memcahe from both python and Java layer and I still have to find a consistent caching solution that is portable across both languages. hash_ring and spymemcached both use different points for server so need to read/test more. 2) Add a jitter to cache or randomise the expiry time: We expire long term cache  records every 8 hours after that key was added and short term cache expiry is 2 hours. As our customers usually comes to work in morning and access the cloud file server it can happe
Post a Comment
Read more

Spring 3.2 quartz 2.1 Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.

I am trying to enable HA on nodes and in that process I found that in a two test node setup a job that has a frequency of 10 sec was running into deadlock. So I tried upgrading from Quartz 1.8 to 2.1 by following the migration guide but I ran into an exception that says "Jobs added with no trigger must be durable.". After looking into spring and Quartz code I figured out that now Quartz is more strict and earlier the scheduler.addJob had a replace parameter which if passed to true would skip the durable check, in latest quartz this is fixed but spring hasnt caught up to this. So what do you do, well I jsut inherited the factory and set durability to true and use that public class DurableJobDetailFactoryBean extends JobDetailFactoryBean {     public DurableJobDetailFactoryBean() {         setDurability(true);     } } and used this instead of JobDetailFactoryBean in the spring bean definition     <bean id="restoreJob" class="com.xxx.infrastructure.quar
7 comments
Read more