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good afternoon everybody and welcome to the final torque slot of Linux convey you for this year oh but we're going out with a bang here is a John Dalton who will be talking to us about the joys of remote work please make him feel welcome thanks everyone so around the middle of last year I hit my ten-year anniversary from the first time that I started working from home when I first made the decision to do that it was a huge jump for me I didn't know anybody else who was doing it and I didn't know if it was going to work out I just want to get a quick show of hands if I can now who here is already working remotely excellent and who's working in an office but wishes they could work remotely that's most of the rest of you is there anyone who's working remotely but wishes they could go back to working in an office yes yes interesting good and have you ever felt that the place that you wanted to live and the work that you wanted to do were in conflict with each other yes so that's the situation I found myself in and I was worried that I was going to have to choose between one or the other instead I found that there is a third choice remote work has given me the opportunity to have fulfilling sort of technical career while at the same time being able to raise my family in Tasmania which I feel is one of the most beautiful corners of the world and research shows us that working from home is becoming much more common all over the world but for example in 2016 the ABS the Australian Bureau of Statistics released results from their characteristics of employment survey which showed that you know an extra 10 percent of the workforce has started working from home over the past 15 years now almost half of that is made up of people who are taking work home right so that includes any kind of you know telework that's that's people having the ability to catch up on work which is becoming increasingly more common and it also includes a small percentage of people whose work is based at home anyway like they've actually count farmers in that but the rapid change over a short period of time in the number of people who are working at least some amount at home shows that for a growing number of people it's now possible to do their job without being in the office and if you don't need to be in the office to do your job then maybe it doesn't matter how far away the office is or even if there is an office at all I'm going to talk about my own experiences and observations and while I might throw one or two sort of statistics out there and a few holiday snaps no these are all pictures of where I live I'm not trying to claim that I'm some kind of expert on this or that I have the one true solution to remote working success but if you've been wondering if you'd be able to do it or sitting on the fence as to whether it's worth giving it a go then hopefully I can give you a bit of a nudge over the edge to go out there and give it a try I hope that doesn't come as a surprise if you were looking for the talk where it's you know this one man has spent ten years working on a remote island paradise and he is done you know then this is the wrong place for that sometimes there's a temptation in discussions about remote work to give people the Instagram sort of version of what it's like you know laptop in the foreground the sandals and the beach in the background it's like the picture of the perfect plate where the mess that you made in the kitchen is just out of frame and the kids refusing to eat the dinner you spent three hours preparing is it's not including that picture either and you know this talk I mean this Beach right is two minutes walk from my house I might go there at lunch sometimes but for the most part my work looks the same as it did when I was in an office you know very occasionally it's from a cafe but I work a normal kind of life so there's nothing particularly glamorous about it and this is an opinionated unvarnished and personal tale of remote work designed hopefully to convince you that it's actually worth giving it a go I want to take you back in time for a moment in the early 2000s my wife and I were trying to start a family and we've been trying for a couple of years and without any success we had a string of miscarriages we had doctors say to us you know you really need to maybe start thinking about whether this isn't going to work out you know you need to contemplate a future in which you don't have any kids and you know so we did we started to think well what does that look like for us and so we came up with all the usual ideas as well we can travel anywhere we can do anything we want and we actually started going through the process of getting the paperwork to move to Dublin which at the time was sort of heating up as a tech center and you know had got our heads around the idea of these opportunities and this move and you know this change in what our life was going to look like then we got pregnant again and of course everything was put completely on hold and this time it actually worked out you know we our first son was born in 2005 and we knew instantly that we weren't going anywhere because we talked about this you know previously we knew that wherever our life might have led us ultimately if we got the chance to raise a family we were going to do that at home in Tazi with friends and family around us and what we felt was the ideal place to bring up our kids so I refocused on work opportunities at home and life moved on you know we had our second son 17 months later this is them at about about that time and by the time 2007 came around I was feeling a bit Restless and I couldn't quite put my finger on the problem you know we had our family I had a good job I was looking after the high-performance computing facilities at University of Tasmania so I had interesting work to do incidentally you can hire a machine quite a bit more powerful than that now from AWS for about 17 bucks an hour Australian you know so do you ever find yourself looking at your life and thinking that the way that you're supposed to feel about it and the way you do feel don't actually match up right you know my brain was telling me that life was perfect and my gut was telling me that something was missing and also in 2007 I'd read this book called the world as flat by Thomas L Friedman it's a super optimistic take on globalization you know it tells you how by outsourcing everything non-essential you can now make anything from anywhere in the world and in the previous 15 years the internet had gone from academic curiosity to completely mainstream 2007 is the year that the iPhone came out and so he was describing this list of forces that had caused the world to become flat and he talks about you know offshoring and outsourcing supply chain automation all that kind of thing but he also talked a lot about the importance of open standards like SMTP which is actually from 83 or so I think originally HTTP HTML the web was you know really this big thing and in particular he talked about the importance of the disruptive effect that new practices like open source software and global collaboration building projects like Wikipedia were having on the way that people worked and coming on the world Friedman's taken all this was pretty gung-ho on the whole capitalism as a force for world peace aspect he previously had come up in a previous book came up with this concept called the golden arches theory of conflict pre-conflict prevention which argued that no two countries which have a mcdonald's have ever gone to war after they both got their mcdonald's all right so yay capitalism by the time this book came out he'd actually renamed it to the Dell theory conflict prevention and can you guess yeah that's because there was some McDonald's bombing that had happened in the intervening period but even if there's a small chance just a small chance that we might be on the Bladerunner timeline of the future that he was predicting open source and mass collaborative projects have changed the world you know Kickstarter has put a public face on the notion that you can actually collaborate design fund and outsource the production of just about anything from just about anywhere but in 2007 what I took from this was that if everything's going to be outsourced I would much rather be the person they outsource it to than the person they outsource it from and if the world is flat then the fact that I'm kind of dangling right off the bottom of it shouldn't be too much of a problem and I realized that while I was in a good job doing interesting things what I was passionate about was the future of you know web technology I was worried about the potential for a technical career for me in Hobart and some of my friends were already starting to move into management positions you know as a as a means of career progression I was definitely not ready for that I love getting my hands dirty I wanted to play with big toys you know there are technical roles in Hobart there is complex infrastructure but because I was passionate about the web and nobody was doing anything at the sort of scale that I wanted to play with I realized that you know that was the problem for me was that I couldn't do what I wanted to do where I was of course thinking about it and doing something about two different things and sometimes we need a bit of a nudge to get us moving I might not have done anything at all except for a stroke of luck I'd had joined the site called library thing which lets you catalog your collection of books shortly after they launch and one day the founder Tim Spalding posted this job advertisement looking for a sysadmin the site had gotten bigger it was more complicated to run it's growing fast and they're looking for the first Seuss admin to help them sort of get through they're growing means search wasn't going very well though they were looking for someone in Portland in Maine and that's where Tim is based without any success and while they searched they continued to grow I mean you know I've read this job Proust I was already preemptively jealous of whoever got the job and then Tim posted again and he said they'll pay a thousand dollars in credit at Amazon or the bookstore of your choice so whoever introduced them to the person they hired write and check the fine print you can recommend yourself so here I am sitting in my office in Tasmania thinking this job would be perfect and you know what I am the perfect candidate for this job pity that it's on the other side of the world right I mean literally on the other side of the world they had said in that job ad that they wanted someone within driving distance of Portland Maine which is up there and you know that's me the the actual exact opposite point is just in the water off the east of Portland there there's a tiny little island quite close to it and one day I feel like I'd like to visit but you know so I knew it was possible for me to do this job from where I was because my office was directly above the data center and I hadn't been in there in six months and I knew that it was possible to collaborate with people because I was working as part of a team with other research institutions around the country and we were having online meetings every week you know so I said to Tim something along the lines of look you know I'm the right person in the wrong place but it doesn't matter because I can do this job from Tasmania and he didn't immediately dismiss the idea after several conversations which took a period of a couple of months you know we realized we actually were serious about this and decided to give it a go if you've never worked remotely before and you're used to working in an office I'll give you a heads up it can be a pretty shocking transition you know the nervous tension you get when you start a new job right you really desperately want to impress people but you're worried about it just seems feels like it takes forever and I come up to speed you feel like you should be working at a better place than you are and everyone's a stranger at first you know and you need to learn who it is that you have to ask about different things so who knows this part of the codebase who knows why we do this thing the certain way that we do you know maybe there's a good reason for it looking like that and so I had all that usual sort of stuff to learn but there are other challenges that I was dealing with as well I knew I could figure out new systems and new codebase and you could do the work but I actually wasn't sure yet whether this was going to work out and it's one thing to take a risk for yourself but by this point I was also risking my two kids my my wife who was now stay-at-home mum and so these challenges that I had to overcome where things like discipline and when people find out for the first time that I work remotely almost always this is the first the first question and in fact I got an uber this morning and the drivers chatting and he's like you know what are you doing and so I tell him and yes sure enough it was like oh you must be so disciplined and it's usually followed up by something like I'm not sure that I would be disciplined enough to do this job and over time I've actually found it harder rather than easier to answer this question because you know one reason and I'm completely upfront about this is I am NOT a very disciplined person in my mind you know I mean there are people who are organized right organized people have organizers don't they have Diaries they make lists and then they cross things off those lists and they start new lists they have color-coded calendars these these people are real some of my best friends are organized people and these aren't random photos off the internet this is my friend Tanya who also is a remote worker but in the creative industry she's an illustrator and actually the illustrator who created all the artwork for this conference the branding and that's not me right I wish it was I consider it a personal failing I'm still working on it I have a planner for this year back in November I decided all right I'm gonna start in December I'm gonna print out everything for this image like do a dry run so I'm ready to go my most recent resolution was alright as soon as I've finished writing my talk alright then I sit down and I plan everything and I go back and I finish all of the January stuff and so the current plan is you know and for the record so you can shame me into it I'm gonna go home I'm gonna pull out all of the colored pins that I bought with my still empty planner I'm gonna start my year off right with some new year planning just in time for February you know there are other types of discipline though and as I've spent most of the past 20 years as some variant of sysadmin I eventually realized that I had a level of commitment to keeping things running that you know my wife might once have even described as pathological um know if you've seen this xkcd comic before number 705 about C sad means the alt text reads the weird sense of duty really good sis admins have can border on the sociopathic but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your catalog servers and there are some jobs like she said men or customer support which involve a large reactive component where your plans are always tentative because you know that there's a possibility you're gonna have to drop things to deal with something else as it comes in as long as you've got projects and new issues coming in you're never going to struggle with having work to do but for that kind of work having a ticketing system ensures that you can always see what needs to be done and that you can see the progress that you're making in terms of some court some sort of discrete unit rather than just time spent sitting in a chair which is important for people who aren't quite as as organized you know my organized friends use all kinds of different approaches there's GTD getting things done Paul Madero Pomodoro Technique Paul Fenwick gave a talk on using tasks warrior in a mini confit of the day which is a great thing to check out if you might be interesting like a command line sort of approach to task management there's an endless list of possible approaches you can actually spend an awful lot of time reading about time management without doing any of it the Wikipedia article on time management is a good starting point my friends tell me that it's not just not just making better use of their time that has been the benefit for them but the reduction in stress that they get as a result of that which I'm keen to get on board with so well I say that you don't need to be a hyper-organized color-coded list making sort of person to be successful at working remotely you do need to have something that will get you out of bed in the morning right that will get you actually started on doing the work do you need that sort of self driven motivation even if right even if it's just the fear of getting caught out if you don't so another challenge with the remote work is isolation and when I first started working from home I didn't know anybody else who is doing it my work colleagues were all on the other side of the planet I live in a beautiful little beachside suburb just 20 minutes out of Hobart to give some perspective on that for people who live in cities here a 20 minute drive out of Hobart means that I can drive past wide open spaces and paddocks with horses in them before I get to my house there's an archery range like just around the corner so you know my suburb used to be shacks and and holiday homes and while I'm close to the city in real terms suddenly I found myself in this position where I'm in a semi-rural area four days at a time it was not at all uncommon for me to not go further than the letterbox on our property for an entire week you know at the weekend as a family there would probably be things to do so it'd be hoppin the car and then it's very people around to various family and kid related engagements but that was my my time away from the house and there's two issues with this like we all need a certain amount of adult human contact and I've never really considered myself an extrovert but I do enjoy talking to people at least weekly and you know it's not just about socializing it's about mental health a loneliness an isolation well recognized as risk factors for depression the amount and type of contact that people need is going to vary from person to person but I was definitely falling below my threshold there's another problem and it's that I inadvertently cut myself off from the local tech community these sorts of professional connections in your local community are really important right because it's not just about the people you have lunch with you know it's about being able to bounce ideas off people it's about the fact that so many jobs are filled because person a knows somebody a company B who needs a person you know with a certain set of skills and they introduce them if nobody knows who you are you will never hear about those jobs and once I realize that this is becoming an issue I made an effort to find ways to counteract it I still do this it still takes conscious effort because I'm always trying to balance work family social professional time at the time a few of us started doing regular long lunch with people in the local tech community and after a few years I got too busy to keep those up but these days there are a couple of local tech meetups that I make sure that I get to once a month and I do other social things I mean in person but as well I actually play Dungeons & Dragons with friends remotely you can do that now too and so remote also doesn't have to mean working from home some people choose to work from a co-working space there is one in Hobart that I keep thinking about getting a desk at and then I think well I have this office I don't pay any rent on you know but I do have a regular co-working arrangement with a couple of friends who actually don't work in the tech industry at all but our remote workers one of them sort of freelance and you know just getting out of the house on a regular basis whether that's working from a cafe or from a library we found that the members lounge at the local museum is actually a really great place anything you need to do to get a regular dose of people the right dosage for you setting boundaries is crucial when you're working remotely the most obvious example if you work from home is that it can be really hard to leave work because you live at work and what starts out as an advantage which is the ability to do your work from anywhere can turn into a disadvantage because you find you are doing your work from anywhere all of the time now I've got into the habit of sticking my laptop on the kitchen bench of a morning you know walk out all right laptop there grab a coffee quickly read through some email oh look there's a little thing that needs doing or there's a little message it needs a reply and it's three hours later and I've been looking like this and my neck is killing me my coffee's gone cold you know I'm still standing at the kitchen bench probably still my boxers you know so it's a really good idea to have a dedicated work space if you can and it doesn't need to be an office I mean obviously it's going to depend on the space that you have available the kind of work that you do right but it's a physical area that you can say this is the place where I do my work and when I leave it I have left my work behind in that first remote role I was pretty typical startup sysadmin so I was on call 24/7 365 I wasn't really too fussed about where I was working from if it was 3 o'clock in the morning you know if you're busy it can very hard to step away when you know that there's plenty more work waiting for you internet access is obviously a thing that you need to spend actual conscious time thinking about right about a year after I first started working from home we decided to take holiday for a week around New Year's we traveled up the east coast of tazzie which is a beautiful place I didn't get to quite often enough bits a bit a pretty remote so I'd actually warned my workplace I said look I'm gonna periodically be completely out of touch I don't name names but my mobile provider at the time was a company that rhymes with Kodachrome and it honestly didn't occur to me that it was possible for a major network carrier to have absolutely zero mobile coverage over the entire East Coast of my state you know which even even 10 years ago included towns that you know we're like tourist towns and this is before an eccentric millionaire built a private museum and put Hobart on the map so a few days of holidays and the lack of coverage combined with my sis admin spidey-senses meant that I was starting to feel a bit nervous I was having trouble relaxing and I said to my wife look I'm just gonna duck into the online access center you know it's a little publicly funded computer lab attached to libraries and sort of government offices in these little towns and you know I just want to make sure things are ok and they weren't things were not okay did you know you can run putty from the folder that you've extracted it into with with without installing anything like I'm a bit out of date as far as Windows and the desktops concerned I hope that's that's still true and at the time I also allowed SSH access with password authentication so I didn't even need to have certificates with me and that's how I ended up spending an afternoon of my holidays at a public machine in an online access center putting out fires these days I prioritize coverage over cost in my mobile provider contract I have a data plan that I can actually use to do work if I need to which is I mean things will fail right your fixed line connection will go down at some point and sometimes you don't have the option of deferring workers sometimes you something has to be done you need that internet access so multiple independent providers I'm lucky that I can do real work with a web browser and terminal client our friends in creative industries who are much more reliant on a high bandwidth connection and enough quota to actually use it in order to do their jobs this is the slide where I talk about the NBN no I'm not gonna talk about the NBN you know we had an opportunity we squandered it communication skills are crucially important in every field all about human to human protocols whether speech writing signing painting sculpture you know they all involve taking your thoughts and running through a sort of a lossy compression protocol communicating comes more naturally for some people than for others but all of us can benefit from working on those skills and occasionally taking some time to examine you know how we can improve the way that we communicate with other people it's especially important in remote work because in this scenario almost all communication is like it happens on purpose right it's intentional you don't bump into somebody in the hallway at work you don't happen to sitting with someone at lunch and end up discussing a problem you don't see the subtle physical cues you know body language between people when you're speaking to them or when somebody else is speaking and see how the third person reacts you miss all of that you need to take care to be explicit to say what you mean directly but tactfully without expecting people to read between the lines you need to be precise especially if you're communicating things about process or technical concepts because even when you think you've been precise enough there's still room for things to go wrong in that first role library thing I organized a remote data center move from Portland in Maine to Boston in Massachusetts and you know it was fun it was educational I was the only sysadmin so you know there was potential for things to go wrong I planned it out and what I thought was excruciating detail I thought there's no way that we can make mistakes here and for the most part it was good you know we kept the site up there were two minor hiccups one was that I'd used remote hands in the new data center and I had given detailed instructions on how to actually you know rack the machines where they needed to go what needed to be plugged in where and then because I couldn't get in there physically myself I gave instructions on setting up remote access hardware with an initial password so that I could get in do the rest and I got the message back saying all right the works been done I try to get on I can't get on and in the end I end up ringing them up and walking through the process and going through all of the docks and eventually managed to figure out that they had misinterpreted somewhere along the line he just walked up and let's ignore all the details you know here's a screen that's asking for a password all right so so what he did was configured the system itself with the carefully specified account details and password and then plugged the remote access hardware with the default and very easily Google herbal credentials directly into the public Internet and you know luckily I found that before any damage had been done you know giving random people console access you hardware but it it taught me that I need to be very careful about assuming any particular knowledge when communicating with people and and that is a it's something that requires tact because it's easy to condescend and it's easy to bamboozle you know finding that line is a process that takes time to learn and often takes you know it's actually surprisingly high bandwidth you need to go backwards and forwards with people the other thing that went wrong as my co-workers arrived at the new data center and they drove the old equipment down their truck and it never occurred to me that I needed to explain that you don't use a power driver to screw things into Iraq and I was Skyped in from a laptop on a crash cart when I can still remember how I felt when I heard the noise of that screwdriver spinning up in the data center like aside from needing to be explicit and precise remote work requires you to be more aware of potential cultural differences mostly it's wonderful right it's and it goes both ways for example after a decade of working with people in the USA I now accept that maybe we don't need so many use in all of our words and if a word ends in eyes maybe we can just spell it that way you know and and I've been able to provide useful information as well like a words like arvo which add color to their vocabulary and critical how do you live without them words like fortnight super quick explainer on that one for any of our overseas visitors a fortnight is like two weeks literally 14 nights bi-weekly means every two weeks twice a week right there's no way that it could mean every two weeks because of fortnight is every two weeks there's no need for confusion on that one you're welcome and I know now that I'm gonna get grammar nazis yelling at me on the internet just don't look at the dictionary right this challenge is related to you know I mean they're not unique to remote work they're universal so you still need to be careful with that you write clearly and unambiguous I'm ambiguously when you're sending an email to a colleague who's sitting two desks over you're going to encounter people with diverse political religious and cultural views inside an office you know but remote work takes the chance of a miscommunication and multiplies it and requires you to spend more conscious effort on communicating clearly with people from different cultures and being more understanding about potential miscommunications that can occur and sort of like as a special case of communication is coordination because a particular problem is coordinating with people in other time zones there are certain time zones that are just always going to be hard for you and the time zones are going to differ from person to person because people have different preferences people have different availability around their own days I've worked with people in terrible time zones for me normally where it was no problem at all because it happened that their preferences and mine you know meant that we actually had quite a lot of overlap but at times it's going to mean early or late meetings and it's going to mean long lags between emails so asynchronous communication can end up really slowing down and it's something that you usually you're just going to have to you're going to have to have inconvenient meetings to fix it Tasmania is a wonderful place the scale of most IT infrastructure there is necessarily limited by the size of the population and there are organisations with a global customer base but there's not too many of them and so the job market is pretty small and opportunities to work on infrastructure at any sort of significant scale you know tend to be rare and that's what I was interested in doing and I'm not even talking about Google's scale here I'm just mean like it you know maybe an application that needs a dozen servers to run and over the past decade I've had the opportunity to work with customers who's active user base was the size of the population of Australia you know I've had access to jobs that aren't available in the local market and it doesn't have to be jobs that are overseas either people who work remotely can have the opportunity to stay close to family and if one partner needs to move maybe it means that the other partner gets to keep their job and go with them remote work gives people access to peers with like a wider range of experience and backgrounds and that's really important because even if you work in the same field you're not necessarily going to have arrived at that from the same starting place in a small town it's pretty easy to end up in a situation where everybody you work with has worked for the same three or four companies you know and like the shared background can result in unexamined biases because you've all seen things done the same ways and the advantage of having access to people with such a wide range of backgrounds is that people bring new perspectives new ideas about and how to do things there's a better chance of coming up with new ways of doing things it's not just technical backgrounds that matter like diversity of social and cultural experience is increasingly important as the users of the technology that we build come from a wider range of backgrounds as well and of course these benefits aren't just for remote workers companies benefit from this as well if you're struggling to find someone nearby with the right skills then why not look further afield you know why take an acceptable candidate in the right place when you can maybe have the perfect candidate in an unexpected place if you're building a product that you want to sell to the world what better way to know your audience then have people in your team from around the world if you're supporting a customer base around the world have people who share culture with the customers that they're supporting or at least a time zone you know if you I mean I found it accurate like I found it difficult to get accurate figures on how remote work effects retention rates but anecdotally it's good news you know like I've been in this job for six years which is well over six years it's a longer substrate in one it's unusual in some tech fields and I've worked with people who were there for 10 and colleagues who've worked in other remote positions often have surprisingly long 10 years as well there are benefits for me personally in working remotely and benefits for employers but there's an economic benefit to the local economy too and for a decade almost my entire income has come from overseas and that means that every cent I spend you know the tax that pay everything it goes into the local c'mon local community and the skills experience that I gained stay stay at home you know in Tasmania we have a lot of concern about brain drain young people leave for opportunities overseas and then or you know even just interstate often they don't come back sometimes because they don't want to but a lot of the time it's because they can't move back and work in the field that they've developed their career in and so when we can encourage remote work we can allow rural and remote communities to provide opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have access to to allow their young people to stay or its return and to allow people to choose to live in the community that they want to rather than just where they need to find work so when people ask me how do I get a remote job I think back to how I got my first job and I say have you tried just being really lucky and maybe a little bit overconfident you know and I offer some slightly better advice than that but there's one useful takeaway from that story and it's that a lot of a lot of jobs could be remote if you don't take the location as being set in stone now obviously you need to play this by ear you know there's no point suggesting a remote position at a company where they just absolutely don't do it or where you would be the person in a different time zone and you're expected to be constant close collaboration my second job though happened the way so many jobs happen you know and it was as I mentioned before it's person a know somebody at Company B who needs these skills and they they introduce you it was actually somebody that I meant through the lunches that we set up as a way of avoiding isolation and you know he introduced me had another conversation with some people that ended up taking several months and I've been with Engine Yard for a little over six years so you know networking was key to that position and other jobs that I've had professional networking you know includes stuff like going to your local meetups just being here in this room you know coming to this conference is a critical part of professional networking if you haven't had well is there anyone in the room who's hiring for remote positions yes that was worth a try there you go look so if you're in this room and you're interested in working remotely look around a couple of hands went up and so it doesn't have to be all asking everybody can you please add me on LinkedIn and going to you know business branches so aside from like you know talking talking your way into it or just having it handed to you on a plate the market for advertised roles has drastically improved in the past ten years and I haven't generally been looking so I spent a bit of time looking and it's amazing the jobs Boff was on the other day and it was really great to see how many people are offering remote roles there are a couple of places just starting points to look there the jobs page on the wiki for this conference now has most the information from the jobs both stackoverflow will let you filter by location and explicitly filter for jobs that are available remotely we work remotely lists remote positions in a bunch of categories it's not just tech jobs there's marketing design customer support and more and this github repo has a big list of companies including profiles of them where they go into detail about the kind of work they do and the kind of people they're looking for so it's worth having a look at those and when I started doing this ten years ago everyone wanted to know what kind of software we use to collaborate remotely and so since then you know so many more tools have become available there's so many the risk isn't whether you can find the right tool that works the risk is using too many of them all right here's a handful so this is just chat and instant messaging you know slack is the the clear winner I use it I am actually a fan but it's not open-source IRC works fine frayed riots riot da diem and matrix and probably if you've been using conference chat then you might have either used that or seeing people bridge into IRC who are using matrix it's a much more modern approach and matter most I haven't used but it looks really interesting they're basically trying to build and open-source slack alternative and they provide you know enterprise hosting as well I'm collaborative editing you will have to do and of course that's not just remote workers but etherpad is I've used it it was it's really sort of like waiting fast Google Docs is the opposite of those things but you know it's not open source but people can use it without installing anything in documentation I mean again this is not about remote workers everybody has to do this but it's you're gonna rely on it even more use a wiki everybody knows that now hopefully I've become a fan lately of just using plain markdown in a git repository if you stick that on github they render it really nicely you have a beautiful web UI and you can even edit it inside the interface but you also have the ability to keep that offline have access to it when you've got no access to edit it remotely and sync it up later you need to use a shared calendar reminder BOTS a nice slack has them and of course you know there's dozens now already for matrix I use this website called every time zone several times a day because one thing I've learned is that no matter how well I think my brain understands the Khan except of time zones which is like you know it's just never going to get these calculations right okay and daylight savings doesn't happen once it happens like six times a year for me because it doesn't happen at the same time and you're moving in different directions I don't even try anymore to do this in my head that's a great tool keep it simple though right it doesn't matter that you find the perfect tools like if you're joining an established company then it's probably going to be dictated to you but if you have the opportunity to do it then my advice is to pick a small number of great tools that aren't actively use a hostile so to pull all this together then after a decade of working remotely it's pretty clear to me now that the technical challenges are basically solved right this is people problem we have the ability to do it it doesn't work perfectly videoconferencing still sucks on a pretty regular basis but when I think about what it really takes to make it work top of the list are ideas about how we work together as people right so my might sort of top four points be visible and it goes both ways if you're a manager you need to make sure that people know you're there right and if you're working you need to do more than just hand in work go home at the end of the day all right leave your work make time for networking it's crucially important and remember remote people are real people they're not just names at the end of an email conversation one day you might meet those people that's Sonia who I worked with for four years without meeting any of my co-workers until we were both in different jobs and happened to be in San Francisco at the same time this is my coworker Diego who I started working with several months ago and met on Wednesday for coffee and he has moved from Brazil to Sydney this is the first time in 10 years that I've had a co-worker in the same country so you know this is why I do it right this is my family you know Thomas Friedman was all about globalization as a force for peace but I think there's more to it than that I think that rather than the fear of loss try we can look at the things that we do without using profit as a primary incentive and the open source approach has allowed people to build amazing things together and remote working has naturally been a part of that community is now coming out into the world I think that also can be more than just convenience for workers but a force for peace you know a way for us to get to know each other I hope that if you've been thinking about taking the plunge that this is the nudge that will push you over the edge luck and coincidence played a really big part in me getting my role but if I can do anything to help even just one other person make that jump then I would consider that a win thank you very much for having me thank you again John we do not have time for questions unfortunately if you do want to bend John's ear about anything in particular please try and find him out in the hallway there is