NOEL:  Hello and welcome to the Tech Done Right podcast, Table XI's podcast about building better software, careers, companies, and communities. I'm Noel Rappin.

Each episode of Tech Done Right focuses on people in tech talking about interesting problems. Today, we're talking about remote work.

On our panel today, we have Allison McMillan. Allison is a software developer at Collective Idea, living in the Washington D.C. area. Before becoming a developer, she was the Managing Director at a national non-profit, a startup founder, and a community builder at the University of Michigan. Allison started programming at a Rails Girls workshop and is now a chapter organizer. She speaks on a variety of topics including mentorship, working remotely, and being a parent and a developer.

Hi, Allison.

ALLISON:  Hello.

NOEL:  We also have Bradley Schaefer. Bradley is a senior developer at Table XI who works remotely from the Cleveland, Ohio area. Despite his involvement with the Ruby community, Bradley wants you to know that he is a dog-person and not a cat-person. So, you can send your letters to Bradley.

BRADLEY:  That's right.

NOEL:  Bradley is also a member of the RSpec core team and also speaks at community meet-ups and conferences on development topics.

So, we're having both of you talking because both of you work remotely. And Allison, you just did a presentation at RubyConf in November about working remote and specifically supporting junior developers remotely. Maybe you could both just say how you started to come to work remote and how often you work remote now or what kind of setups you use. You want to start, Allison?

ALLISON:  Sure. I've been working remotely for six or seven years now. I actually started when I was the Managing Director of the non-profit. We quadrupled our staff size and part of that was becoming a partially remote team. So, I was actually responsible for that transition and I was in office but part of being responsible for that transition meant that I really encouraged myself and other folks on the team to work from home so that everybody could sort of understand what that experience was like.

And then when I left that job, I worked on a startup. I launched a startup, so I was working from home while doing that. And then when I became a developer, I just continued working from home because I loved it and I sort of had my setup and everything. I just loved it. 

NOEL:  Bradley?

BRADLEY:  Sure. I dabbled a little bit in remote work when I co-founded a company called AnythingSocial with two other developers and we consulted for other businesses. Most of the time, those businesses were not co-located with us. But the other two times I've worked remote were predicated basically on big geographical moves. 

So, I was living in the Bay Area and decided I wanted to move to the Midwest and I was fortunately able to do that with the job that I had at eBay. I think they have fairly significant remote workbase, and that worked out for a while. And then I moved on to Table XI and worked out of the Chicago office there for a while and found out that I was having twins with my wife. And that kind of put me into a panic mode because I don't know how to deal with the sudden appearance of two children. I wanted to be closer to family, so that started another geographical move from Chicago to Cleveland. And I was able to stay on at Table XI where I'd been working in the Chicago office but now, I work remotely. 

NOEL:  Bradley, you work in a co-working space, though, some of the time, right?

BRADLEY:  I would say probably 80% of the time, I do work out of a co-working space here in Cleveland. It's called StartMart, it's great. 

ALLISON:  I don't work out of a co-working space. I've toyed with the idea here and there but I co-work at least once a week, usually twice a week. 

One of the co-working places that I go to is just like a group of people in the area that worked from home and the other one is a group of developers that are just in sort of the Metro D.C. area. We usually co-work like the day that meet-ups happen. So, there's at least I think one Ruby meetup every week in the area just based on different sub-groups and so often, groups of folks will meet up that day and just co-work together from a coffee shop during the day and then go to the meet-up that evening. So, that's why I sort of decided not to join a co-working space. 

NOEL:  Table XI, we have a small number of remote workers. Most of them started in the Chicago office and moved for various family reasons. We also tend to have people come in and co-work in our space. And we have had people do it for a very, very long amount of time actually and eventually get hired by us. 

So, there's a lot of different things I want to talk about here and I'm not sure which one of them to do first. Let's start with what makes somebody successful. Are there things that you need to do as a remote worker to be successful? Let's start on the worker side and then move to the company side. The things you need to do as a remote worker to be successful that are different from what you need to do if you're on-site with your team to be successful. 

ALLISON:  Yeah, definitely. I would say probably the two biggest things for me are having a schedule. So, I wake up -- and this is even before I had a child -- I wake up at the same time every day and have my morning routine, make sure that I organize myself. I have my office space that is my space and when I'm there, I'm working. And that was something that my husband and I very early on had to work out because when I started working from home, I also became the person that would handle things that needed to get fixed or deliveries or whatever. And so, we sort of had to work through like just because I'm home, doesn't mean I'm available. I have my space, have my setup. So, that one is very important. It's also really important for being able to stop at the end of the day and say like, "Okay, now I'm leaving my space. I'm not going to continue working on the couch downstairs," or wherever. I'm leaving my office space and therefore, my job is done for the day.

And the second one that I think is really big is communication. You really need to sort of over-communicate. Especially as a non-senior, I think also as a senior developer, but as a non-senior developer, you really have to communicate. When you're stuck, when you need help, when you have a question, if you're confused about a ticket or a story that you're supposed to pick up, you really have to communicate all of those things because nobody can see you to see when you're stuck, when you're frustrated, when you're happy, when you're sad, any of that. You have to make sure to communicate all of that to them. 

BRADLEY:  I would definitely agree on both of those points. I think having a routine has been huge for me. I've worked out of my home a lot as well as working at a co-working space and I've also kind of ran into the similar issues of having boundaries that are very clear about when I'm at work and when I'm not. So if those get blurry, you can kind of find yourself either over-working or under-working depending on the amount of distractions. So, I think getting into the right mindset of a routine is important. 

NOEL:  I work from home maybe once or twice a week. And the amazing thing about it for me is -- and this is something that is really only possible because I don't do it every day, but I feel like I have so much extra time because I'm not commuting for an hour that I start way earlier and generally tend to finish my day pretty early when I work from home. But I think that's a little bit of a function of -- I donŐt know that that's the schedule I would be on if I was working from home all the time. But sometimes it feels like a real treat to actually wake up and start working and not wake up and get on train for an hour. 

We have this idea that junior developers are harder to work remotely. It's hard on both sides but it's harder on the junior and it's harder on the team. What do you feel like you gained in that respect from working remotely? What do you feel like is a challenge for you when you work remotely? 

ALLISON:  What I gained -- it's sort of typical for anyone who works remotely, I think just really values the flexibility and the freedom. I joke about offices that say, "We have such good snacks at the office." And I'm like, "I have such good snacks in my kitchen." Those were the benefits. 

I have a small child. I have a kid who's almost two and I was pumping for the first until he turned a year. And so, being able to take breaks and pump breast milk without having to make sure the company has a space and make sure there's a door that locks and make sure there's space in the fridge and all of those other things that was so, so much easier for me as a working mom who was able to work from home. 

NOEL:  I think we underrate remote work as a mechanism for making the office more accessible to all kinds of different people like new parents, obviously geographic distance. But I think it really does extend the reach to the number of people that you can work with in a lot of different ways that are not quite what we immediately seem. 

ALLISON:  In terms of what you miss, there's definitely a social aspect that you miss and I don't just mean social as in like chit-chatting with someone at the water cooler per se. I mean overhearing conversations about technical implementation, overhearing different people solving different bugs or different technical problems and being able to say like, "Oh, that's a new word for me. What does that mean? What does that do?" 

When I switched jobs in tech or looked at new jobs, I have always thought about what if I would want to go into an office, what would those pros and cons be? But I found that as long as you fill that gap somehow, that it's okay. So for example I mention that I co-work, by co-working with a group of Rubyists once a week, I still overhear that sort of stuff. I still get exposed to problems other than the specific problem that I'm working on, and I still have those sort of random conversations about what's going on in tech. I think that, coupled with being a part of having an active company Slack team and being a part of a couple of other Slack teams, sort of fills that gap. But that's definitely a downside to working remotely. I think as you're learning and when you're still sort of like a sponge soaking up all of the knowledge about all of these different parts of tech and definitions and words and methodologies and whatnot, you really have to fill that in order to not miss out on that exposure to lots of different things. 

NOEL:  Bradley, you transitioned directly in the same job from being on-site to being remote. You have a direct before and after experience. What is that like especially the ways in which like being in a 5-hour drive away is different from just working at home occasionally? 

BRADLEY:  I think the answer to that question is probably different within different companies. I'll speak to my experience, of course. If there's kind of a culture already in the company of people collaborating using kind of online tools and things of that nature, I think it's a lot less of a shock to the system to go 100% remote. I think it's a lot harder if you don't have a company culture that kind of buys into collaborating in that way which is why I kind of feel like one of the worst situations to be in is if you have a whole geographically co-located team and you're the one odd man out, I think that can be the worst situation to be in as a remote worker because you're just not really thought of as a part of the team as much as you would be if there was other remote people. 

NOEL:  It's sort of having like a big TV screen that just has your picture on it the whole time and nobody really wants that. That's creepy. 

BRADLEY:  Sure. And I think you can fight against that in various ways. 

NOEL:  I know some people have fought against that by just saying, "We have a whole team with one remote person. You know what? Everybody, work at home and we're just going to be an all-remote team for the duration." That's potentially easier than dealing with everybody on site with one or two remote. 

Allison, do you work on teams where you're the only remote person?

ALLISON:  I have, before. The companies that I've been at, there's always sort of been a little bit of team shuffling. And I have been the only person that has worked remote on a team even if sort of the entire engineering team, there are a good number of folks that work remotely. And yeah, it can be really challenging. I think that a lot of places with an office and folks that are co-located don't always realize how many sort of informal decisions get made without saying -- they're often really good at saying, "Okay, we're going to make a decision about this. We're going to have a meeting. And therefore, we need to make sure that there is a video conferencing link and that person is involved," et cetera, et cetera. But the conversations where it's like, "Oh, did you check out X's style guide? It's really interesting. I think we should adopt that." Those conversations often just happen sitting next to each other or when you see a tab open on someone's screen and that sort of stuff.  Then somebody will say, "Oh, and we're looking at this company's style guide and you might think of adopting it." And I'm like, "Really? When did that happen?" And they don't realize that the chatter just sort of informally happened in person that never got translated into Slack, into a format that I can sort of be a part of. 

So, I think it's easy at the end of the day to be like when we weren't on Slack, we just chit-chatted. But when you get down to it like there are actual decisions that are made and that can be challenging. 

NOEL:  I think that that gets worse particularly when you have a company like Table XI, I think it's fair to say prides itself on its culture. Whatever exactly that means, we don't necessarily need to dig into. But it certainly prides itself on being a group of people who enjoy working together. And I think that that makes it in some ways harder to be the one person remote because it means we have even more informal talking over lunch or who knows what. 

What can we do on the company's side -- I'm going to say 'we' even though I'm also at home right now, designated like representative of people in offices, I suppose. What is effective in that respect?  

BRADLEY:  I think some amount of actually flying to come to be together, to be co-located briefly from time to time. 

NOEL:  Just so they remember what you look like?

BRADLEY:  Yeah, exactly. So you can see how long my hair has grown or whatnot.
 
NOEL:  Or remember how tall you are, which is the piece of information...

ALLISON:  I was going to say like how tall or short someone is, is usually like the biggest. When you see them for the first time, I was like, "Oh, you're that tall!" Or, "Oh, you're sort of short." 

BRADLEY:  I think doing that periodically can actually kind of keep teams cohesive, even when they're not located in the same spot all the time. 

NOEL:  Allison, have you ever been on a team that's like explicitly setup just hangout video conference time? I heard of this as something done at the end of the week and it's a remote team at the end of the week in a half-hour video chat that's not team related, it's just an attempt to try and get a hangout.
 
ALLISON:  Yeah, I have. Not at the end of the week but we used to have one like every week for a half hour where it was exactly what you said - just sort of everybody who's remote hanging out in the Hangout. I think it works when it's focused and a part of the team culture to sort of hop in and do it. I think it doesn't work when everyone's like, "Oh, but I really have to get this PR pushed up," or, "Get this code finished." 

What I found is that it sort of ebbed and flowed. There were some days where we all really encourage each other to all jump on the Hangout and it would be a lot of fun and really fantastic. And there were other times where it was just sort of like one person would be sitting there and be like, "Oh I guess nobody else is joining today." I think that it does sort of have to be made a priority in the team culture in order for that sort of thing to be effective. But I totally agree with flying people in face-to-face. I think periodic face-to-face gatherings really make a huge difference. 

I also am a big believer in retrospectives to surface that stuff. When you're doing your retrospective on a sprint or on the last couple of weeks of work or whatever to not just think about just the stories and the code and the PRs, but also about team dynamic and how did we communicate with one another and was there a time that was missed. 

Right now, the team that I'm on, we're working with a client who is also local. And so oftentimes, I am the only person on the meeting who's remote and I talk to my team about just making sure that there's space for me. Sometimes when you're the only person who's remote, it's sort of awkward to jump into a conversation or you sort of feel like you're just the person shouting from the screen while everybody is chatting in the office.

NOEL:  It's hard to get a visual cue of the flow of the conversation when you're the one remote person, especially if you're not on video chat. 

ALLISON:  Yeah. And so, just making sure that before we move on to another section, say, "Hey Allison, just want to make sure, did you have anything to add?" We talked about that in a retrospective and it's happened in every meeting since and it's been fantastic. Again, communication and making sure that you're surfacing things also is really important.
 
BRADLEY:  One thing that Table XI does that I really like is the Know Your Company, like weekly questions that we get in our email.
 
NOEL:  Are you familiar with this, Allison?

ALLISON:  No. What is it?

NOEL:  So, Know Your Company. It actually used to be Basecamp but they spun it off. It's a service that is designed for relatively small-ish companies and you seed it with questions and it automatically sends everybody on your team the question. I think you can set it on whatever schedule you want. So, we do one tech-related one, and one socially-related one a week. And then it gathers everybody's answers and shows everybody everybody else's answers. And it also stores them. It's useful as a management tool because you can go back and see people's answers. But it's also pretty useful -- one that we just did like 'do you have any New Year's resolutions'. So you see everybody on the team. And that is kind of, to a very limited extent, a substitute for the kind of random meeting or hanging out and just talking about what movies or something like that.
  
BRADLEY:  It's a good conversation starter when you're removed from other people. 

NOEL:  Yeah. I think it's mostly -- sometimes we struggle to decide whether it's actually useful or not. It's interesting though because I don't really think of it and I think when they think about its value, they donŐt really think of it as a social input for the remote team as well and I think that's an interesting way of looking at it. I don't think that thatŐs something that Table XI management thinks of when they think of that tool. 

BRADLEY:  Oh! Well, pass that along. 

NOEL:  One thing about face-to-face is we have a person, one of our remote team -- actually, at various times, different members of our remote team have had the habit of bringing in special food when they come in. So, we have somebody who makes it a point of bringing in popcorn to the office when she's in town. We used to have somebody who worked in Austin and he would come in, he would drive in with huge things of brisket that would become lunch. One of the things about that is it makes having a remote person coming in special or it gives you just a hook for like, "Oh, there's popcorn in the break room. Alicia's in town." It's just a nice way to mark it, a little bit of ritual to have a little bit of that, to be a part of the office culture. 

BRADLEY:  I agree. I guess I'm on the hook for bringing some Pierogies from Cleveland next time. 

NOEL:  You got to find whatever it is they do well in Cleveland and bring that.
 
BRADLEY:  I'll just bring LeBron James then.

NOEL:  Yeah, that's cool. Just fit him in the overhead compartment and that'd be great. 

ALLISON:  That's an interesting point because I know one thing that a lot of partially remote teams struggle with is what to do when the company has lunch.
 
NOEL:  Yeah, we struggle with that too. 

ALLISON:  When there's a celebration, I think this is one of the more tricky things to figure out when you have a partially remote team. Like when you're celebrating the launch of something or how do you make sure that the folks that are remote also get some sort of benefit, some sort of fun? You see it sometimes with welcome packages. Welcome packages are sort of very focused on the in-office experience and you get something. As a remote person, you're like, "Oh, this is sort of useless for me as a remote person on the team." I think that that's one of the trickiest parts. 

I would love to hear what various companies do. But I think that's one of the tricky parts. How do you translate those sorts of benefits and how do you celebrate together making it feel like a celebration for the remote person who's there on their computer with their headphones?

NOEL:  Table XI as a consulting shop doesn't often have a team-wide shipping celebrations. So, most of our celebrations are just like annual all-hands and we do fly people in for that kind of thing. But if you look at our web page, lunch is a big perk. It's a big part of the company culture and it's not something that we can email you. So, Bradley and other remote people, we don't really have a good substitute for that. 

BRADLEY:  Yeah.  

NOEL:  There does wind up being this kind of tension between having an office culture and a remote culture. 

BRADLEY:  I see it as a trade-off. I mean, I would love to have a private chef cook me lunch every week but in lieu of that, I get to work remotely. I feel I get a lot of other benefits from that arrangement. I try to see it as a trade-off even though at times, it can be hard when the chef makes really good food. 

NOEL:  What about when we post pictures? 

BRADLEY:  Yeah, I just try and stay out of it. 

NOEL:  How do you deal with the idea of -- I guess the other way of presence is we have all of these tools that deal with communication and instant message and texting and Slack and all of these things that, even though you're remote, can give you the same kind of instant -- like I can scream at Bradley through four or five different channels and get an immediate response, just like I did when I sat in the same row with him. Is that stuff helpful? Does it kind of diminish the benefit of being remote if everybody can contact with you? Or is that part of what makes it possible?

ALLISON:  I think it's part of what makes it possible. A lot of companies that are sort of unsure about going remote or have just started, I find that a lot of those companies talk a lot about trust. And this is where that comes into play because if I'm heads down on something, like, I'm heads down on it, so you could shout at me in five different channels but I may not have any of those channels open. If that's the case, then I don't want you thinking, "Is Allison even working? Is she at her computer? What's going on?" My hope is that your assumption is, "Oh, I'm shouting at her in five different channels, she's not responding. She must be really focused and heads down on something." 

NOEL:  Is that one of the things that makes it harder for people to be comfortable supporting junior workers as though you don't necessarily have that level of trust? 

ALLISON:  Yeah. 

NOEL:  Almost everybody who has gone remote from Table XI worked in the Table XI office before they went remote which is a way of building up trust that you wouldn't necessarily have if you came on to a team as a remote person. So, how do you build that trust as the remote person? 

ALLISON:  I think that it comes directly from the company. I think that the company really has to have a president they trust remote folks. If you're making a hire and you're not sure if you trust them to work remotely, then you shouldn't be making that hire. 

This was actually what a majority of my Ruby Conf talk was about was for people that are looking to hire junior or mid-level remote developers, like what are the questions you need to ask them. And a lot of them aren't specifically around tech but a lot of them are sort of behavioral based interview questions that ask them about situations they've been in the past and how they've dealt with those situations related to communication, related to working remotely. And you're sort of looking for cues that show you yes, I can trust this person. This person is thoughtful about what it means to work remotely. This person is thoughtful about difficult situations and how to communicate working remotely. This person is thoughtful about expressing a need for help and coming up with solutions, things like that. 

And so, I think that if you have a good interview process, then it hopefully builds that trust. But I think that has to come from the company and the person doing the hiring. And if you don't trust them when you hire them, it's going to be real difficult to overcome that issue. 

BRADLEY:  I also think to a large degree, you have to judge remote workers especially, but all workers really based off of the actual work that they produce. And if there's something kind of off with that, I think that's an indicator that a conversation should be had. And that's kind of the end of it like it doesn't matter if somebody checks their Facebook if they're getting their work done, for example. So, I don't think kind of like micro-managing people's time is an effective management strategy particularly for remote workers. 

NOEL:  Especially for kinds of technical creative work, that kind of micro-managing is counter-productive. Allison, was it beneficial that you had a record of working remotely in other fields before you came into tech and said I want to be a junior remote developer? 

ALLISON:  Yeah, definitely. I think not only for the company but also for myself. I actually don't know if I would have been successful sort of in an industry that can -- working remotely as a developer can be sort of lonely and isolating. You really are heads down. There are some days that I don't talk to anyone for solid five or six hours because I'm really focused on what I'm trying to get done. And you could look up and be like, "I haven't talked to anyone all day," especially if you don't live with anyone. It was also beneficial for me because I knew coming in, I knew my personality as a remote worker or somebody who works from home. I knew that I had to co-work once or twice a week for that social aspect. I knew a lot about myself working remotely. And so, I was able to communicate that to companies that I interviewed with which made them I think also more comfortable because they're like this isn't somebody who's just trying it out. She's actually thought through pros and cons and resources and setup, et cetera. 

NOEL:  What about if you're coming in and you're like a genuine boot camp. This is your first job, your first couple of jobs, you don't really have a sense of how you work yet, but yet, you want to be remote for whatever reason - you have a small child, you live in a remote area, you want to work for a company that you don't want to move. What kinds of things -- I see your beginning job in tech is overwhelming. What kinds of things can help somebody deal with that on top of not having people near you, the remote work aspect?

ALLISON:  I think that people do really need to know themselves well. I mean, a lot of folks that are coming out of boot camps like a lot of them aren't new professionals, a lot of them have done work in different industries in the past. But if they are new professionals and they don't really know how they work in sort of a professional setting and they're new to tech, I think it's just really important that you sit down with yourself and say, "Do I feel comfortable in person like asking a question in front of the room?" If I was in a boot camp class and -- I'm just sort of making up a scenario but if I was in a class and I never felt comfortable raising my hand and asking a question, I don't think that working remotely would be super beneficial because I'd probably have that same fear throwing that question out, just like in a Slack chat room. Like can I be self-directed? What do I do on the days where I want to get -- in boot camps, you do need to be self-directed or you teach yourself. You need to set goals and accomplish them and work through things. How does that work for you? Are you successful at that? Are you not so successful? If you're not so successful, then -- even if you think it's really cool and you really want to work from home, you really want to be a remote worker, it might not be the best situation. 

I think it's really easy to say, "Of course, I want to work remotely. It sounds awesome." But it's really important to think through all of those different aspects including things like do I have good internet? Because if you don't have access to good internet, then that's also going to be a really difficult challenge for both you and your company. So, I think just being really honest and realistic with yourself is important. 

NOEL:  Do I have good lighting in my desk so that when I'm on a video chat, people can see me? My desk is in front of a window so that I'm being backlit and washed out all the time.

BRADLEY:  Like an anonymous informant? 

NOEL:  Yeah. Actually, there are some rooms in our office that if people work remote from some of our conference rooms, if people dial in to a conference call from some of our rooms, they really do look like they're on a witness protection program. 

BRADLEY:  I think anybody just kind of spring boarding off that topic, like anybody starting with remote work, they should try and be really self-aware about it but I think they can also be really helped out by the company they work for. If for example they have kind of more frequent check-ins especially to start with and they kind of encourage good habits, the only word I can think of to describe it is hygiene. But make sure that they're actually going outside and experiencing other things, not just sitting at the computer all day because that will totally burn somebody out or get them into a depressed place where they're not going to be happy. 

I think if you're just starting out, it might not be as apparent for you how important it is to --

NOEL:  It's worth, I think, exploring -- I want to work remote because I live an hour and a half from the city and I donŐt want to commute is different from I want to work remote so that I can watch TV at lunch. You need to know yourself a little bit to know what you're trying to get out of it. 

ALLISON:  That's a great point. Sometimes, you're heads down and you won't respond but that doesn't mean that you should just sort of like, as a company, you just sort of say like, "Okay, this person is remote. They'll reach out when they need to." There should definitely be a system for check-ins in place and maybe that is more frequent until everybody figures out each other's styles. But also not just like a manager or somebody checking in, but also peers.
 
I think all of the companies that I've worked at have had like a remote chat in Slack or in whatever the chat platform is. And so that as a fellow remote worker, you can say like, "Hey, has everybody left their house this week?" There is a couple of weeks ago, I actually had a week where I didn't leave the house and I posted on Friday -- I forgot if it was Friday afternoon or Monday. But I posted in the remote channel, "Hey guys, didn't leave my house this week. Not a good thing. Don't be me. Leave your house." And it's important that we're checking in with each other and encouraging healthy habits in each other as well. 

One thing that I think is really important is thinking about the team that the remote person is going on to. So, we talked a little bit about if you're the only remote person on a team of people who are all in the office. But more than that in general, I think it's really important to cultivate kind, caring teams where there's a culture of positive feedback and constructive code review. 

One of the most difficult things for me is when my code gets reviewed, figuring out is this an opinion, is this a fact, what the review is and what needs to be changed versus what I should be reading more about and thinking more about because I should be establishing what my opinion is on a subject matter. And I think that if you work remotely and all of your code reviews, your PR reviews are always just sort of like picking apart your code and lots of comments about lots of stuff that you've done wrong or incorrectly or whatever, and you're not in person to give any of that feedback any context. Oftentimes in the office, they'll say, "Hey, I'm just reviewing your code. Do you want to sit here and I can go through some of the things that I'm taking notes on or writing?" And it just makes it a little nicer. When you don't have that in the office, you're just reading it and there's no context or tone when you're just reading feedback. And so, I think it's also really important to make sure that you're sort of cultivating a mentality of positive constructive code reviews and that there's a kind, caring team where you know that all of that stuff is coming from a good place and not just like blah. 

NOEL:  A left-field suggestion with that is if you have your team that uses rubocop or some kind of linter, Bradley's going to roll his eyes in a second. If you use some kind of common linter, the advantage of that in a pull request is it gets rid of all those nit-picky things that just like, "Yeah, you got the spacing wrong, you got the spacing wrong, you got the spacing wrong" Imagine that that would be even more irritating out of context for a remote person. So, that's one little thing that you can do that will make those things a little bit more humane.
 
BRADLEY:  It's better that I hate rubocop than I hate my co-workers, you mean?

NOEL:  Yes. 

BRADLEY:  I would say even on a personal level, though, something that I've found that I need to focus on is actually expressing positivity remotely like to my team because I've found that -- maybe this is a personal problem of mine. But when I'm frustrated with something, I'm very quick to be like, "Oh! What's going on here? This sucks!" And express that to my team members but if things are going great and I'm getting along with my work, then I am very quiet actually. And so, I think that that can be interpreted as, "Oh, this remote person is always very cranky." But in reality, it's something you have to focus on is letting people know when things are going good too. 

NOEL:  It's sort of weird. I have that sort of when I tell people about my job, the people that I tell, I tell the stuff that's annoying because that's the newsworthy stuff. So people come away with this impression like, "Oh, this must really be driving you crazy." No, I really like it. Because I really like doing these things that's why I come up and bring it to you. If you're remote and you got to remember that people are only seeing the part of the iceberg that's above the water and not the stuff that's submerged. 

I like to try and close out with resources or tips that people can take away and really immediately start looking at or start applying to their teams. Do you guys have something that's a resource or a tip or both that you might want to pass along?

ALLISON:  I have two tips and two resources. 

NOEL:  Great.

ALLISON:  My two tips first. My first tip is that if you are in a remote situation and you are having trouble finding people to pair with you or to help you get unstuck on stuff, schedule weekly pairing sessions with different folks on your team, so that it's in the calendar and that the time is made and you can sort of save questions, issues, et cetera, and knock those out all in one timeframe.

My second tip is if you feel nervous about asking questions, and this could be either when you start a job or at any point when you're at the job, make it a goal for the week or for the month or whatever to every week ask X number of questions. And the important thing is that it doesn't really matter if you actually measure how many questions you're asking but the important thing is that if you make it a goal, you're much more likely to do it in order to accomplish your goal. Those are my tips. 

My two suggestions is Zach Holman has a great blog post on 'Remote-First vs. Remote-Friendly' that's often recommended and cited when discussing remote work. So, it's a really good one to skim through or to read. My second resource is the SheNomads organization. It's also a Slack team. It's for underrepresented people or allies in tech and it's just a great resource for the Slack group, it's great for travel tips and working either remotely or nomadically and chatting with other folks. And they also provide a bunch of resources' through their website.  
 
NOEL:  Bradley, do you have any suggestions or resources?

BRADLEY:  Sure. If you're trying to convince a company that doing remote work is okay, I think the book 'Remote: Office Not Required' by 37 Signals is pretty good at that. It's a super easy read. I think I read it like in an hour. That might be an obvious pick because it's very on target for what we're talking about. But I thought it had some good stuff in there about describing that remote work can also kind of be like a spectrum. It's not like everybody's off in the boonies. It can be like maybe one day a week or two days a week, people work remotely or even just for half a day. And I think that perspective is valuable that it's not really an all or nothing thing. 

As far as tips, I think I would probably say if you're working on a team, you should try to find kind of pairing tools that work well for you. I like Screenhero. I don't know what's going to happen with Screenhero because Slack bought it but it still works for now for me. But if you're kind of like a command line Vim jockey, then you might like TMate which is a way to share team work sessions really easily. 

NOEL:  What do you use, Allison?

ALLISON:  I use Screenhero, although the ability to use TMate has sort of pushed me into the learning Vim as a goal for this year for me. So, that's what I can use as another remote pairing option. 

BRADLEY:  I've been working on my Vim for the same reason.

NOEL:  Great! Thanks to Bradley and Allison for being on the panel today. The Tech Done Right podcast can be found at TechDoneRight.io or download via iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. You can send us feedback or ideas on Twitter at @tech_done_right. Or you can email us at TechDoneRight@TableXI.com. 

The Tech Done Right podcast is brought to you by Table XI, a UX design and software development company in Chicago. We are 35 meticulous and curious minds with a 15 year history of building websites and mobile applications and custom digital experiences. Let's work together. Find us at TableXI.com where you can learn more about working with us or working for us. 

I'll be back in a couple of weeks with the next episode of the Tech Done Right podcast. Thanks Bradley and Allison and I hope to see you guys soon.