| I've worked for nearly 8 years remotely in Belgium. Further to that I moved here from the UK and started working remotely at the same time. The only people I knew were my parter and her mother who we were living with. The other in-laws lived close by but that was it. Effectively I've made zero friends here, certainly no-one who I'd be going for a beer with. Two years ago we moved to live on our own with the child we've had since moving here. I have the daily standups with work but apart from that there's relatively little communication with my work. I do work with good people so it makes working remotely as easy as it can be. There's been various ups and downs in productivity, a crash is down to 90 billable hours in a month with an upper value of 190 billable hours. One of the hard aspects is that the flexibility of the hours makes it unclear for your partner when you're working. When an 3rd party decides what hours your working, i.e. a company then you both know when you'll be home and when not, so there's no room for argument. This is similar to when I finally decided to put a TomTom in the car. Before then car journeys could be a source for arguments because you have to plan ahead and that puts extra burden on both. Having that 3rd party to blame takes the stress out. I go to a cafe pretty much every morning now, I living in a town of about 30,000 people but there's not a single remote tech worker here that I've ever seen in a cafe. I've tried the odd co-working space and got semi-settled in one, but the commuting time plus the cost of it wasn't worth it. It's just as lonely being surrounded by people you don't know as it is working from home. I'm finally going to stop working remotely and work at a company in Belgium in October. I'm very intrigued as to how it will work out. |