Agreed asynchronous communications can have a ton of benefit as mentioned in the article (fewer meetings, schedule flexibility). But on the other hand, taken to the extreme, this also can lead to just the isolation the article mentions.

I spent ~5 years remote at a larger company where the vast majority of employees were on site. Needless to say, the culture didn't adopt any "remote best practices". I worked from home during this time, and am probably somewhere similar on the social spectrum as the author: some aspects of introversion and extroversion. I think the frequent meetings and synchronous communication with colleagues is exactly what kept the job from feeling too isolating during that time. (However, meetings were TOO frequent for productivity).

I feel like your experience is germane. You're relating your experience with remote work directly. If anything, what's really coming across the loudest is your drive to be productive to the point of being conscious of problems arising from work conditions.

Out of curiosity, do you have kids ? I bet the answer is no.

I envy you that you can do it. Having young kids makes things like that more complicated. Still possible, but not optimal.

I traveled like this with my family with 1 kid and a pregnant wife as well as with two young kids. I really enjoyed how having young kids acted as an ice breaker with people in other countries.

We tried to stay in each place for at least a week at a time.

We're wanting to settle down a little more now so we can have a stable social life and do more things like gardening, but I also know someone who has 3 kids and lives out of an rv with his family.

I'm curious: what did your kids do in a foreign country while you were working?

When one was only 1.5 years old, she mostly just stayed in a carrier on my wife's back while she explored the area, going on day trips and running errands like buying groceries (which in a foreign country can be fun on its own). When we had a 1 year old and a 3 year old, we were nomadic for about 2 months and we mostly found an airbnb for a week-month and drove on the weekends. During the day, the kids and wife would go to local playgrounds, public libraries, state parks, national parks, beaches and kids museums (a membership at one gets you a membership at most in the US).

Now that our oldest is about start kindergarten, we're more interested in staying in one place so she can make longer lasting friends, but when they were younger it was a lot of fun. The sweet spot for us was when they were too young to walk and could ride in the carrier for hours on end, or old enough to walk well and be interested in more activities and places. In between was harder: not wanting to be carried, but not really capable of walking for more than a few hundred feet at a time.

Nice, thanks for the info! Sounds like this would be hard if both parents want to work. (Of course, that's hard in general.)

Yeah for sure, though one of the places we stayed at in Guatemala would have taken our daughter for an English-speaking preschool had we wanted, though it was an area with a lot of people who had immigrated from Europe and the us.

>Out of curiosity, do you have kids ? I bet the answer is no.

I live a somewhat similar lifestyle( although not as extreme as gp ), I have 2 cats which that I leave with my girlfriend when I fly out.

>I envy you that you can do it.

I sometimes regret not having a structured lifestyle and warmth of family. I am envious of my friends with kids who are going with the flow of life and are not living in existential dread. It's a classic human dilemma of freedom vs security.

> I sometimes regret not having a structured lifestyle and warmth of family. I am envious of my friends with kids who are going with the flow of life and are not living in existential dread. It's a classic human dilemma of freedom vs security.

I've been working remotely in a semi-nomadic manner for a few years now, and while on average I have no desire to give it up, this sentiment definitely pops up from time to time.

I find I oscillate between a desire to be in a place where nobody knows my name, and places where I'm (relatively) well known.

Working remotely grants me the opportunity to adjust my location and lifestyle accordingly.

What qualifications does DO look for in an employee? I applied there but was rejected outright.

It really depends on the time and what projects we had running, and the needs we had in term of experience and background at the time! It doesn't mean anything about your adequacy. Try again, things change every month!

In general for remote positions, we look for people who've done it successfully before (or some shape of something like that - for instance I had experience as a research assistant for a prof from afar), or that have a lot of experience in their field of expertise.

(note: I'm an engineer, I'm not really involved in hiring stuff, so take what I say with a grain of "needs to be confirmed by competent authorities")

Is DO actually only hiring people with 7+ years experience? I ask because if not, I'd be interested in knowing how the decision to not put any entry/3-5 years experience positions affects the pipeline of candidates.

Is this REAL remote (I can apply from any country) or "just within the US" remote? I checked the link you provided but this was not detailed.

I'm from Canada but in Argentina right now. We have lots of folks in Europe and some in Asia! We have folks doing the round the world dance too. We had folks in Australia.

Is that a YES to "REAL remote" or no?

It's a yes!

Thanks! What can you tell me about the interview process?

Why all the downvotes?

It's REAL remote. I'm working a Software Engineer working for DigitalOcean from Turkey :)

Important question: do they differentiate salaries according to your region? In other words, are you paid similarly as your North American peers or you get a Turkish salary?

Yea this is an interesting question.

How did you conduct the interviews? Did you have to travel or over Skype?

This is but that does drive me crazy. Even in the US it will be "remote" but only from certain states.

I'm working on getting some support from the marine engineering department of my local uni to assess the idea of a ferrocement boat with basalt rebar reinforcement instead of steal.

I think this has a bunch of advantages over other techniques for this kind of lifestyle.

I would love to receive some emails (myusername@gmail.com) or comments talking about oneweb, and the freedom it could provide for people who like this kind of lifestyle. Some testimonials that there are actually people considering this.

I'm not exactly sure I understand what you're saying but my plan is 100% to, when I become an adult that needs to settle down, buy a catamaran instead of a condo and live and work from there!

You forgot shark week. It's nice putting faces to handles. I can't be mad at you if I've drank beers with you.

You'd be surprised. The worse office politics and hostility still happen to people who meet every day.

> then getting super depressive from loneliness

I read this so often and can't understand it. It's like most people never get friends outside of work. Like they never grew up and are still in the 'I can only get friends at my school/class'-mindset from when they were young.

The best people I know I met at places of my choosing, not at work, not at school.

I work remote because my private life is so demanding and I couldn't get it work with 40h in an office.

The regular social circles of most adults do come from their occupations, simply because they spend such a large part of their waking hours there. There's nothing strange about that. If that's not the case for you, cheers, but empirically speaking, most people aren't lucky enough to have a vibrant and dynamic private and outside social life beyond work—least of all in the highly isolated, individualistic automobile landscape of America.

And so, of course, it comes as no surprise that people look to work to fill a lot of their social needs, and that coworkers play a big role in not only their job, but their life satisfaction.

> like most people never get friends outside of work.

60 hour weeks and a young family will do that. I literally don't have a single friend outside of family members. I'm also suffering from bipolar depression but it's either support my family or be happy. I'd rather they be happy. I guess.

> 60 hour weeks

There's your first problem. Stop overworking.

Maybe. But then it's not that simple for everyone to break out of such a vicious cycle and find friends when you don't have friends to help already.

Required.

I can only speak for myself, but it can be hard or impossible to talk to others without having a good reason to do so - i.e, that person being necessary to your current mission ( work ).

Create a good reason to talk to other people then. Maybe learn a new language. Now you have a reason to talk to people that speak the language you are learning.

> It's like most people never get friends outside of work.

I don't think it's friends. It's the large number of causal acquaintances that most jobs deliver.

What's your setup like that enables you to work from those crazy settings ?

As long as you have internet and a laptop, what's crazy about ANY setting?

Fair point. However not every setting has very good internet. It might be slow or not reliable, strategies to mitigate that would be very interesting to me.

Fair point as well.

Some basic tips: mosh shell, international 4G data plans, dvcs and local dev/testing vm (with vagrant etc) for working autonomously in chunks, etc.

My mac and tethering. It's more about being used to not work with external screens and SSHing on workstations to do data heavy operations.