First bit of background, it was the month of March 2015 I decided to sign out from the company i worked for 4 yrs due to personal commitments. Prior to that, i came across a blog post by one of the leading Indian blogger about Themeco and the flagship product X Theme. I decided to take a look and as I was going through the blog it was becoming clear that X Theme can act as a perfect framework to develop real complex applications that will have a sleek user interface. However, it raised a couple of questions and to get a possible answer I started navigating Themeco website and had a thorough look at the demo pages.

The next obvious questions that struck my mind was regarding Themeco founding team and developers behind X Theme. After searching on the internet I came to know about one of the co-founders and a YouTube video featuring him in which he shared his online marketing story. Not sure but there was an instant connection as in what he was trying to convey through that video and I decided to take a look whether or not Themeco is hiring. They had an opening for customer support analyst and I decided to take a chance and quite frankly I wasn’t expecting a reply from them :P. Fast forward they replied back and after 3-4 rounds of interview, I was selected for one month of trial. Completed trial period successfully and here I am working for Themeco 🙂

So, after working for over 1 year what are my key learnings while working remotely? Let’s start with the goodies.

1. First and foremost, you get to make new connections. Make no mistake these are 100% distributed companies and the opportunity to work with diverse set of colleagues is a class experience altogether.
2. That I can work from anywhere and get a chance to see new places while working.
3. No need to wear those semi/full formal dress, Yippee. I get the opportunity to work in my pyjamas.
4. I get to interact directly with the community and act as a face of the company and get first-hand information about the problem they are facing. Remember, support was, is and will always play a crucial role in the success of a product.
5. No need to physically commute. Hahaha
6. That working remotely made me more proactive and better communicator.
7. Working remotely made me more productive. Why? Because as I am a night owl and there is no disturbance, no phone calls (you know what I mean) etc.
8. I get to spend more time with my bike and family.

Now comes the flip side of the coin:

1. Usually, i have quite an interesting time explaining my parents, relatives regarding the work I do that too from home.
2. Since I relocated to my hometown, sometimes I feel damn isolated. Why? Because I don’t have friends over here.
3. There is no or rare face to face communication between your colleagues, bosses and customers.
4. It can be quite tricky to stay in sync with the team. As a distributed company, we use Slack and Skype for communicating. So the best option is to before log in check chat history, daily.
5. Balancing work and personal life can be tricky at times. Most of the time you will find me sitting on a chair, staring at the laptop screen and hitting those keystrokes.
6. Depending on how you look at this, but I really hate maintaining and constantly upgrading softwares. Yes, how can you forget to periodically maintain and upgrade the desktop softwares.

So there you have, some of my key takeaways while working remotely.