I've worked remote ranging from 100% to 30% most of my career. I've also built a business with 100% remote workers, and currently work for a "some people remote" business.
My advice to anyone considering this is if you are currently in a company that is designed and built around face to face office communication - run, don't walk. You will almost always be a second class citizen that is slowly forgotten about. It's simply how humans work, and while I'm sure there are outliers I don't find them very interesting.
If you do decide working remote is important to you, I would suggest looking for a job where the entire team, (especially) including high level management, works remotely at least the vast majority of the time. These situations tend to work out rather well if you have the CEO/CTO at the top of the company holding remote work as a core company principle.
The communication structure of a remote worker vs. office worker company is vastly different, and companies ran remotely must establish very clear communication policies that look wildly different than normal. I've never seen a combination office/remote organization actually do much to change these policies when the first team goes remote - with completely predictable results.
One of my rules when I ran my company remotely was that practically everything was talked about in public chat channels so anyone could search/scroll up and read 30 minutes of backscroll to see what the emergency/whatever of the day was. I found some folks flourished in such an environment, but some folks absolutely detested it since they couldn't deal with being "called out" for a mistake in public. When those "mistakes" start being hidden in private chats is where fundamental cohesion problems start within remote teams, in my experience. Those sorts of things sort of simply permeate naturally through on-site teams, where there is no such action for remote teams if information remains segregated into a zillion private interactions.
I love remote work, and hope to one day build another remote-based company since I miss it and have some further ideas I'd like to try implementing to make it even better.
If I had to make one point it would be that remote companies need to be fundamentally designed and organized differently than non-remote companies and this fact is rarely recognized by most.
Successfully sold it for a myriad of reasons, both personal and market based. Basically we were too small for our market and had to consolidate with another similar company.
The acquiring company was also 100% remote so it was a great fit, and the resulting combined company has been doing quite well since which is a point of selfish pride :)
My advice to anyone considering this is if you are currently in a company that is designed and built around face to face office communication - run, don't walk. You will almost always be a second class citizen that is slowly forgotten about. It's simply how humans work, and while I'm sure there are outliers I don't find them very interesting.
If you do decide working remote is important to you, I would suggest looking for a job where the entire team, (especially) including high level management, works remotely at least the vast majority of the time. These situations tend to work out rather well if you have the CEO/CTO at the top of the company holding remote work as a core company principle.
The communication structure of a remote worker vs. office worker company is vastly different, and companies ran remotely must establish very clear communication policies that look wildly different than normal. I've never seen a combination office/remote organization actually do much to change these policies when the first team goes remote - with completely predictable results.
One of my rules when I ran my company remotely was that practically everything was talked about in public chat channels so anyone could search/scroll up and read 30 minutes of backscroll to see what the emergency/whatever of the day was. I found some folks flourished in such an environment, but some folks absolutely detested it since they couldn't deal with being "called out" for a mistake in public. When those "mistakes" start being hidden in private chats is where fundamental cohesion problems start within remote teams, in my experience. Those sorts of things sort of simply permeate naturally through on-site teams, where there is no such action for remote teams if information remains segregated into a zillion private interactions.
I love remote work, and hope to one day build another remote-based company since I miss it and have some further ideas I'd like to try implementing to make it even better.
If I had to make one point it would be that remote companies need to be fundamentally designed and organized differently than non-remote companies and this fact is rarely recognized by most.