37 signals was not lying, you win by being remote

There is such moment in developer’s life when you start looking for a new job, sooner or later. You can observe that even in Poland, there are plenty of Ruby on Rails job offers, often in very perspective companies. I probably could find interesting job in Poznań, where I live, but there were some presumptions which pushed me to apply to Arkency.

Due to my life situation becoming a bit complicated and me feeling totally whacked out, I needed to find workplace where I can feel really comfortable. I wanted it to be a place where I could develop my skills and face new challenges.

Few months ago I have found “webworktravel” facebook page and started thinking that it would be great to have a possibility to work this way. I developed my first commercial project as a remote team member, so I was close to this nominally. Unfortunatelly I was studying simultaenously and it was really hard for me to achieve this. Then I run for three and a half year of “classic” office work. During this, I had some bad experiences in cooperating with some remote workers and I tried to figure why some things gone wrong and whether it is possible to make things right in the future. I started reading articles about remote work and trying to figure out how to handle it properly. Then Arkency released preview of their Async Remote book. I bought it without a falter and read within single breath. Suddenly, 37signals released “Remote”. I was joking that maybe it would be as good as the Arkency one. I started to believe again that remote work could be possible if company has well organised processes to handle this way of working.

When I was looking for a job I received some propositions, mainly with relocation to some other cities in Poland or to Berlin, Germany. Some of the companies looked promising to me, some of them even offered remote work. I was able to relocate, but working remotely was an interesting alternative for me. Even so I felt that I could become some kind of a dropout because of not being in the office and having less contact with the rest of the team. Working remote, but still from 9am till 5pm makes not really big sense for me. In this case, the only value is no need of relocation. Then I realised that there’s a team that works remotely and asynchronously. Asynchrony is the key factor which makes remote working really attractive. It’s really great feature when you can work in your comfort zone, you can go to the doc or plan your working hours to spend more time with your family, especially when your spouse doesn’t have such flexible work.

I have known some of Arkency guys and I have known their skills, care about proper design and engagement in Ruby community. Their articles are often published in Ruby Weekly. That really impressed me, but thing which tipped the scale was their approach to remote work, described in the Async Remote book.

During first day of my new job I was coworking, pair programming and when I was travelling back home from Wrocław, I started writing this blog post. Cool, huh? At last my new company is developer oriented.