layout: post title: “Five years of remote work” date: 2025-07-03 authors: [“Max Woolf”] description: Remote work has been transformative for my life. thumbnail: “/assets/images/gen/blog/blog-18-thumbnail.webp” #image: “/assets/images/gen/blog/blog-18.webp” comments: true published: false
It’s been more than 5 years, but it’s been 5 years of truly intentional remote work. Not just working from home, but working alongside hundreds of people asynchrously across timezones, cultural differences, project domains, and sometimes even languages.
I’m super bullish on remote work in general. The heat may have come down a bit now that COVID has receeded and companies default back to what they’re more comfortable with, but in my mind it’s a competitive disadvantage and those companies truly embracing all-remote work will ultimately have an advantage.
Let’s talk about the good, the bad and the really bad - and to offset some of my biases, we’ll start with the really bad, i.e. problems I’ve yet to see solved.
The Really Bad
New Zealand
Even async work requires the occasional in-person meeting and for everyone in the world, there’s a group of people where its just really difficult to meet people at a time that isn’t unreasonable for at least one party. For me, in the UK, it’s New Zealand.
It’s not impossible, but the only really even half-reasonable slot is 8am UK time which is 7pm NZ time. That’s not really fair on anyone. Amongst ICs, this isn’t really an issue. Although it’s more fun when you can build a rapport with colleages, it’s not a hard requirement for productive work. For manager-report relationships, I get that this could be difficult.
The only real solutions here appear to be:
- Alternate the awkward meeting times each week so that one person has to stay up late for a 1:1.
- or, within teams keep the makeup of the team within a 1 hour overlap of regular working hours.