 catch a pretty nasty cold right in time for the conference. So we'll see how long my voice holds out and I'll try to reduce the sniveling to a minimum while I talk, so bear with me please. All right, remote work. Working remotely is kind of this legendary opportunity that you have as a developer or really anyone working in the digital trade. Like the freedom to work from wherever you want to is pretty great, right? And it really is, I mean, there are a couple of trade-offs, there are a few things that you have to work around when you do so, but all in all is really a great chance to like go places and still earn money while you do so. There is this assumption however, that working remotely is something that you do when you're kind of like a more experienced programmer. Senior is someone who has a couple of years of experience, doesn't really need co-workers to support them that much and it's not really something you see a lot of juniors doing and most companies are also kind of worried about, you know, if they have a junior that wants to go remotely, they're more like, maybe that's not such a good idea. So my name's Laura, I work as a junior developer, I also work remotely and today I would like to share my story with you, how that happened, how we made it work and I'd like to share a couple of points with you, how you as a junior developer that might want to go remote or as a company, a manager of a junior developer that might want to do the same thing, how you can make it work too. So in 2013, after graduating from university, I moved to Berlin and started working there as a junior developer for a local startup. So this is Berlin, if you photoshop it a little bit and this is, if you don't photoshop it. So let's pretend this is Berlin. And yeah, so I started working in Berlin, I moved there, I really liked my work, I enjoyed what I did there, my co-workers were great and so yeah, I worked there for a while but after about a year or so going to the office every day, I kind of started to get bored of my surroundings of being in Berlin, being in Germany, which is a great place, don't get me wrong, but I'd been back for about four or five years after living in Bangkok for a while and I was just kind of starting to feel that I wanted to be somewhere else again. So I kind of pondered this for a while and it really boiled down to the fact that I loved my job and I didn't really want to quit but I didn't really want to be in Berlin anymore either. So after I thought about it for a while, this thought popped into my head and that was, well, working remotely would be the perfect solution for that, right? I wouldn't have to quit my job, I could still say I'm with the same company but I can also go somewhere else, in that case it would be Tokyo which is where I wanted to move and right after that there was a second thought, there was like, well, can I actually do that? I mean, I'm a junior developer, I don't have that much of experience, like is that possible, can I do that? Will that work at all and how the hell do I get my company to agree to that? So after thinking about it for a little bit, I finally decided to talk to my boss about it because I mean the worst thing he could say was no, right? And if you decide to do the same thing, I have two points that I did before talking to my boss and I really recommend that you do those too because I think that were really something that's things that helped me to get to a yes after all or at least on the right way to a yes. Number one, find benefits for the company. If you just walk up to your boss and go like, well, you know, I wanna go remote because I really want to, that might be true but it's not a very good argument, like, you know, you might say like, well, but what's in that for us? Like why should we allow that? So actually think about something that like in you being remote would actually benefit the company as well, there could be anything from, for example, like I'm more productive when I'm not in the office with a lot of people around me that bother me all the time or you won't have to actually find hire and train a new developer. If you decide that you're actually gonna leave the company if they don't allow you to work remotely but don't just make something up, like make it something that is actually true. And in my case, one of the things that I used was if I actually go to live in Tokyo due to the time difference, we will have a longer timeframe where people are actually awakened online so that we can immediately fix stuff as it comes up. And that way you show right away that you A, thought about it and you're B, not only interested in your own benefits but actually also think about what's good for the company as well. Second, prepare to address their concerns. Before you show up and talk to your boss about it, actually there's a really high probability that they will have some concerns or they will come up with some objections that will worry about something about you going remote. So before you actually talk to them, go and research common objections, common concerns about that come up in remote work negotiations and find answers to that. So when they come up, like in the negotiation itself or when you talk to them and this question comes up, you can actually answer in a way that's A, reassuring and B, shows them you thought about it and you have a solution to that issue if it comes up or you have a way to avoid that issue actually showing up. And a couple of the points that I'm gonna make in a bit might help you to answer those questions as well so stay tuned for those. So after preparing that way, I finally walked up to my boss, I was a bit nervous so I walked up and I kinda tried to catch him in a moment when he was not super stressed and not super busy. That's actually important to you, wouldn't believe how many people actually come up to you and when you're like in work until here and you look super stressed and they go like, hey, can I talk to you like I want something and I was like, yeah, that's not a good idea. Catch him when they're like relaxing in a good mood. So I asked him for half an hour of his time and they was like, okay, so I really enjoy working in this company and I would like to continue doing so but I also would really like to move to Tokyo. And he was a bit surprised, like he wasn't super thrilled in the beginning, probably also due to the fact that I would have been the first person and whole startup that went remote, like we didn't have any other person working remotely at that time. Let me, a junior, on top of that. But he listened to what I had to say and because I had answers to most of his questions, he was willing to think about it and he just asked me for like a week or two of time to consider and he would come back to me after that. So after a while he did come back to me and it was like, Laura, let's talk about this remote thing again, I want to talk about that and I was a bit like, okay, what's he gonna say now? Is he gonna say yes? Is he gonna say no? Is he gonna fire me? I had no idea. But it turns out that he wasn't generally opposed to the idea of me going remote but he was worried about the risk that we would only find out afterwards, like after I had moved to Tokyo that this whole remote thing wouldn't work out after all. That would have been a problem. So we sat down together and tried to figure out a way how to minimize that risk which is my next point, do a trial run. This is something that makes sense for you as a junior who wants to go remote if you haven't done it before and for the company because it will lower your risk. So what you do is a trial run where you try out the whole remote working thing without the person actually moving to another country. So in my case, we did it in two steps. In the first step, I worked from home, from home office for one week and regular German office hours so we were working at the same time so we could focus exclusively on the issues that would come up because I wouldn't be physically there. And then in the second step, we faked me being in the Japanese time zone. That means for two weeks I worked from home as well but every day from 4 a.m. in the morning until 12 o'clock noon. That took a bit to get used to but it was actually very good because that way we could figure out how to get around the issues that would come up due to this time difference. So the important thing about this trial run is this. This is the time when you want problems to appear. You expect them to show up and you iterate. Like you find a problem, you try to solve it, you try to make it better. Then you iterate so in the end you can actually make your work flow smoother and not just blow the whole thing off because it's like oh there's a problem, obviously the whole remote thing doesn't work. So after doing this trial run for three weeks we had a meeting like we all met up and it turns out that it all went a lot smoother than we really had expected. And my coworkers didn't have a problem with me going remote at that point because they had seen that we could make it work. My boss didn't have any objections anymore either. And there I have my yes. So a couple of months later actually last year in October I moved to Tokyo and after taking some time to orient myself and finding a place and everything I started working from there remotely. I sometimes from home, sometimes at coffee shops or in co-working spaces and I really enjoyed being in Tokyo. I liked to free them that working remotely gave me even though like sometimes I missed my coworkers but it was still really nice. And we did have a couple of small issues coming up but the two major things that we figured out during the trial run really helped immensely to make stuff go fairly smoothly right from the beginning and that's why I'd like to share those two things with you as well. Communicate proactively. This pretty much sounds like a no-brainer but if you think about it, I mean it's not only that you're not especially when you're in a different time zone it's not only that you're not always part of all the work related conversations or meetings. It's also that you're not like a part of all the casual conversations. Like you know when people work together in an office they meet in front of the coffee machine, they go for lunch together, you're not there. So you really have to make sure, proactively have to make sure that you don't disappear from your team's horizon that you fall over the edge and people don't think about you anymore. So if you have daily stand-ups like my team does that kind of covers it. So you have, actually you have contact with them every day anyway, if you don't really do make sure that you have a way to touch base on a regular basis and not only professional stuff, it doesn't hurt if you just chat with people once in a while or like Skype call and just like figure out how's it going and stuff. Just the same way you would do if you were to meet them in the office. And this is like, you're the person that's remote so don't wait for them to reach out to you. You want to be really proactive about that and try to touch base as often as possible. Documentation, writing things down. This kind of goes hand in hand with what I said before but it's especially important if you're not in the same time zone. So Japan is currently seven hours ahead of Germany. That means it's pretty okay for my team in Berlin because their morning is my late afternoon thereabouts. That means when we do a stand-up in their morning the first thing they get is an update from what I did during the day and they can just hand off stuff to them. But after I sign off, if they decide something and they don't write it down, I don't see the next morning I will only hear about when I talk to them again in my evening. And we actually had that happening once where they, in the beginning they kind of decided to change and approach how to build a feature and that they forgot to write it down. I didn't know about it and I kind of ended up working on something for a whole day that we had to throw away afterwards just because I didn't, you know, there was no way how I could have known in advance. And that's something you can really avoid doing and in fact it actually ended up improving my company's development workflows because like that we suddenly had to be a lot stricter about stuff, right? Like we had to actually properly assign tickets or like, you know, GitHub issues, like write proper commit messages because you can't just show up and ask like what the hell's that, right? And actually like if you make decisions write them down so people can, everybody's informed, people can revisit them. So that was actually a very nice side effect. And there's one more thing that as a junior who works remotely you probably ask yourself or at least I did and that is like how do you actually keep learning and improving when you're not around your coworkers all the time? Who might, you know, this is a very real issue as a junior developer because you're at a part in your career where you're maybe not a complete beginner anymore but you still need, you know, guidance or like, you know, support from your coworkers on a fairly regular basis and you still need to learn a lot about the technologies that you're working with. And you really wanna do that because like this is not only you who has a stake in that and it's not only you who has a stake in becoming better as fast as possible or at least you should have but your company does too. So do take a very, very active approach to make sure your improvement gets at least as much attention as it would if you were physically in the office. Like do ask your coworkers for pair programming. I mean like online pair programming is not quite as convenient as, you know, physical pair programming where you actually sit next to each other but there are a lot of tools out there for that so it's definitely possible. It's very important you can learn a lot so try it out and see if you can make it work. Ask for code reviews and really, really make sure you get them because that's also a very good way to learn when people actually tell you okay, this is a part of your code that you could write better in this and that way. And you can really do it in whatever way you want but like something I've made good experiences with or like me and my team have is like the pretty regular thing like the reviewer actually commenting on your pull requests on GitHub and then at some time or after that doing a Skype call where they actually explain, okay, this is what I meant and then you go through it together and they will, you know, tell you, okay, this is how you can do it better. And yeah, pretty much like you would if you were in the office but with the internet in between. Also ask for general feedback. General feedback in the sense of like your work performance since you kind of changed to remote or stuff that you could do better and do the same for them. Like let them know if there's something they can do, excuse me, if there's something they can do to make things more smoothly for you and for them. So let's recap those points that will actually help you to successfully negotiate a remote working agreement and then after you're remote to make it run more smoothly. Benefits come up with benefits for the company that are like connected to you being remote before you actually talk to your boss and prepare to address the concerns that they might have. So just a trial run and actually do it before going remote. This is a very good way to find out about problems or possible issues and fix them in a very cheap and low risk way. It's also a good thing if your boss is a bit reluctant like with this really work, I don't think it works. And they can say, okay, let's do this for two weeks or three weeks and see if it works because there's nothing lost if I work from my home for three weeks. Communicate, I don't think I need to get deeper into that, it's pretty self-explanatory. Document things, write things down so everybody knows what's going on and can check back at all times and definitely ask for feedback, feedback in form of code reviews, learning code reviews, pair programming is also kind of like very direct feedback but get as much of it as you can. So after all of this, let me say one thing. I do still think it's harder for a junior to work remotely simply because of the difference in experience that you would have as a more senior programmer as a junior you're just simply more inexperienced and that is a thing that is more difficult but it's definitely possible and it can even be a very good personal and professional experience. So I learned a lot while doing it. We even improved my company's workflow and a development workflow while doing it and don't just jump into it, like take your time to prepare for it and if you do that I'm convinced that you can absolutely make it work for you and your company too in a very successful way. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have an hour later, thank you. What kind of tool, communication tools do you use for making sure you're in touch with your team and stuff? Pretty much regular, I mean obviously GitHub, like comments and stuff. We do Skype calls for the stand-ups. We have Slack to write stuff down. Like we have a different channel, we have a channel for decisions that were made and whatever comes up. This is pretty much it. We do some emailing but mostly it's Skype, Slack and GitHub. Does that answer the question? Yeah, yeah, thank you. Hi, how long have we been doing it now? I'm sorry? How long have we been doing remote? I've been remote since October last year so it's been about six months. Has anyone else in your company started doing, have asked to do the same thing? Since I started going remote, a couple of the other developers started going remote not completely but occasionally. So for example, one of my coworkers has family in Poland so once in a while he'll just go over and work there for two weeks or something like that because now we already have to process this established. So it became a lot easier and in fact, we hired a contractor for a while who was sitting in the States which we never did before because we just didn't know how to deal with people who were remote. So it's actually made it easy if you're coming to employ people? Yes. Great, thank you so much Laura. If you guys have any more questions for her you can catch her during the break.