Articles tagged with remote-work
A colleague who seems to be in constant 'boss mode' can be challenging. They might commandeer meetings, provide unsolicited advice, or insist on their methodology for group projects, even when you're the one steering the wheel. This kind of overbearing coworker can trigger conflicts and impede productivity.
But, before you let frustration get the better of you, consider the following strategies to deftly navigate such circumstances.
Meetings take up a lot of your workday so you want to protect the time you're investing. Those final minutes often determine how productive your session will be. Learn how to end a meeting in a way that delivers the results you're looking for.
Working at home comes with many benefits, like wearing slippers all day and being your boss, but it’s essential to have an effective organizational plan to make it profitable. These strategies for organizing your workday and environment will help you meet your goals.
Remote work isn't just about working from home — it's about building systems that let you do your best work regardless of location. After years of remote development work and managing distributed teams, I've learned that the developers who thrive remotely aren't necessarily the most disciplined ones. They're the ones who understand that focus is a skill you can optimize, just like any other part of your development workflow.
The challenge isn't avoiding all distractions. It's building an environment and routine that consistently puts you in a state where deep work happens naturally. When you're debugging a complex issue or designing system architecture, you need sustained focus. Here's how to create the conditions for that kind of work.
Remote work changed the promotion game. The old rules about being visible in the office don't apply when everyone's working from their kitchen table, but new challenges emerged around how to demonstrate value, build relationships, and position yourself for advancement when you're not physically present.
A Stanford study showing remote workers are 50% less likely to get promoted is often cited, but it's worth noting that study was conducted before remote work became mainstream. The landscape has shifted dramatically. Companies that figured out how to evaluate and promote remote talent effectively gained a competitive advantage during the pandemic and beyond.
That said, getting promoted remotely does require intentional strategy. You need to be more deliberate about visibility, more systematic about documenting impact, and more proactive about relationship building. But it's absolutely doable — and in many ways, remote work can actually accelerate your career if you approach it strategically.
Working from home isn't just about swapping your commute for coffee in pajamas. It's about designing a work environment and routine that actually makes you more productive, more focused, and more sustainable in your career. The people who excel at remote work treat it like a skill to develop, not just a perk to enjoy.
The early days of remote work were filled with advice about getting dressed and creating boundaries — basic stuff that assumes the main challenge is pretending you're still in an office. But the real opportunity is bigger than that. Remote work done well can eliminate the productivity drains of office life while giving you unprecedented control over your environment, schedule, and focus.
The key is being intentional about how you structure your days, workspace, and habits. Random approaches lead to random results.
Your next career opportunity probably won't come from your manager or HR department. It'll come from someone who knows your work, respects your expertise, and thinks of you when opportunities arise. That person might be a former colleague, someone in your professional network, or even someone who discovered your work online.
Career advancement in tech increasingly happens through reputation and relationships built outside your immediate work environment. The developers who get the best opportunities aren't necessarily the ones who work the longest hours — they're the ones who build strong professional networks, demonstrate expertise publicly, and position themselves strategically in their industry.
This isn't about shameless self-promotion or collecting LinkedIn connections. It's about building genuine professional relationships, sharing knowledge that helps others, and creating a professional reputation that opens doors you didn't even know existed.
Your resume doesn't need to tell the story of a perfectly linear career path. In fact, some of the most valuable skills and experiences come from work you weren't paid for — open source contributions, volunteer projects, side projects, and community involvement that demonstrate capabilities traditional employment might never reveal.
This is especially true in tech, where the best developers often have GitHub profiles full of passion projects, contribute to open source in their spare time, or build tools to solve problems they care about. The key isn't hiding the fact that some of your best work was unpaid — it's positioning that work strategically to demonstrate the skills and mindset employers actually want.
Smart hiring managers understand that motivation, problem-solving ability, and technical skills matter more than whether someone cut you a check while you developed them.
Your office might be making you sick — and you probably don't even know it. While you're focused on shipping features and hitting sprint goals, your workplace could be quietly undermining your health and performance.
Let's identify and tackle the most common workplace health hazards before they tank your productivity.
Job hunting doesn't have to feel like debugging legacy code at 2 AM. With the right approach, you can streamline the process and land opportunities that actually move your career forward.
Most job search advice is generic fluff. Let's fix that with strategies that work in today's market.
Workplace criticism hits different when you're used to code reviews that focus on logic, not ego. But handling feedback from humans requires a different skill set than debugging syntax errors.
Let's refactor your approach to criticism so it becomes a feature, not a bug, in your professional growth.
Your video meetings are probably leaking cognitive resources faster than a memory leak in production. What started as a temporary solution to stay connected during 2020 has become a permanent drain on mental bandwidth.
The problem isn't remote work itself — it's how we've implemented virtual collaboration. Let's optimize this system before it crashes your productivity entirely.
Your job search success depends on more than just your resume and interview skills. If your home office looks like a debugging session gone wrong, you're undermining your professional effectiveness before you even start.
Let's architect a workspace that supports your career goals instead of fighting against them.
Managing a remote boss is like working with a poorly documented API — you need to understand the interface, anticipate the inputs they need, and deliver consistent, reliable outputs even when you can't see what's happening on their end.
The old "management by walking around" playbook doesn't work when your boss is three time zones away. Let's architect a better approach to remote relationship building.
Remote work doesn't require a dedicated office — it requires intentional space design. When you're competing with family activities, kitchen chaos, and living room distractions, you need to architect your workspace like you'd design a resilient system: adaptable, efficient, and optimized for your specific constraints.
Let's solve the space allocation problem without requiring additional infrastructure.
Remote work isn't just about swapping your office chair for a kitchen table. It's a fundamental shift in how you approach productivity, focus, and career growth. After years of managing remote teams and optimizing my own home office setup, I've learned that success comes down to intentional systems and boundaries.
The transition from office to home requires the same methodical approach you'd use to refactor legacy code: assess what's working, identify pain points, and systematically improve each component.