Work by the sea

Probably every developer was thinking about remote work. After all, if you are a programmer, it's so easy! All you need to work - a laptop and mobile Internet, and your workplace will be where you want! Need to attend the meeting? It does not matter - there are video conferencing on Skype, you will be aware of all the latest cases! Just imagine: a veranda on the ocean, wicker chair, tan, white linen pants, light sandals, hat, fruit, freshly brewed coffee, the sound of the surf - the working day began.

Speaking of sandals

Have you ever heard of black desires? This is when you want what you really don't want. For example, your parents explain from childhood that a person should have a normal stable job, and you really want to be an artist. Society convinces you: to be happy, you need money, and the work of an artist is a dangerous risk, you will not be able to feed your family, you will end up badly. Then, under the influence of fear, you convince yourself that you really want a reliable job. And until the next review of your own values ​​under the influence of a life crisis or severe stress, you drag a gray and joyless existence.

Black desires will not come true.

When a person dreams of programming under the sound of the surf, fruits and coffee, he actually just dreams of living in a tropical country, swimming and eating fruit. Work in his dreams is an inevitable evil, like acclimatization or sunburn. Until he has enough courage to admit this to himself, he will continue, overcoming himself, to break away from the sea and fruit for 2 hours a day so as to fulfill his promises that he has assumed under the influence of other people's desires and his own fears. .

Although, on the other hand, why not?

Well, suddenly I'm a programmer who really wants to live by the sea. Or travel the world, see different countries. At the same time I love the development and I want to make money that way. How am I worse than an artist, writer or photographer? I, too, can work remotely. Or, in the end, I love my little town, I have a family and children here, I do not want to move.
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Oh well. I can count on three types of work.

Freelance.

All of us have ever gone through an underpinning in the spirit of “a site in 2 days and 5 thousand rubles”. As a permanent source of income, freelancing is a nervous, ungrateful business, extremely low and irregularly paid, and the resulting portfolio makes you humble as an employee. Probably, this type of work is suitable only for people who want to work as programmers on the remote, but are not programmers.

Work as a freelancer.

This is probably the best option. You work as a programmer in a serious organization, you develop a large and interesting application in a distributed team, you keep track of tasks through the tracker, participate on Skype in weekly meetings, you may even get a white salary. Dear Grigori Kochanov, in his report at the last devconfe, he spoke about his own successful experience in managing such distributed teams.

Distributed teams in industrial design set the high bar for businesses. The development process should be streamlined, the task should be prepared by analysts and architects, the task should be clearly decomposed. At the same time, it takes all the time to set tasks and control from the head of the distributed group. Therefore, almost certainly the distributed group that you will be part of will be a small team in a large team of a large company.

At such work it is very easy to solve the same type of tasks all my life and it is very difficult to grow - without spinning in a team, you don’t see what a business is doing, it’s hard for you to look at a project from a broader perspective, to get information about related problems and tasks, therefore to become an expert will be much more difficult for you than for your colleagues in the office.

In the industry, there are examples of serious and high-quality projects created by distributed groups, for example, symfony2, but this is more likely an exception underlining the rule. I am not a brilliant programmer. You are not a brilliant programmer. Most likely, in this position we will not write a symphony, but to rake the endless redmine.

Its business.

Even if I am the only product developer, according to Itzhak Adizes, I cannot build an effective business alone. Suppose I invented a brilliant service, and day and night I write code. I need another person to sell my product. He will be engaged in product marketing, speak at conferences, communicate with clients or investors. One more person is needed to control the course of affairs. He will analyze the work of the business, identify inefficient areas, ruthlessly cut all my ideas that do not make money, predict, plan and calculate. He will be my financier and analyst.

These should not be my friends, but the best specialists I can find. Their main motivator should not be our good relationship, but the growth of our product. And, most importantly, we must continually boil in one space, all the time discussing, analyzing and instantly reacting. Unfortunately, remote communication will be disastrously slow in the first stage of business development.

Conclusion

In addition to the desire to travel, to see far-off countries and live happily, a person has a need to build a house, plant a tree, raise a son and, in general, realize himself in big and small things. You and I have the ability to create complex and useful things, this ability, multiplied by the dream and work, can bring rich results. We can do something really useful to people, something that we can truly be proud of. But is it possible to build something like this not in an office in a megacity, but with a laptop on the ocean?

I dont know. It seems to me no. And it seems to me that one day I will definitely try.