Office work? There is no way

Therefore, I do not go to the interview. Interviews contradict the very idea of ​​freelancing. If freelancers were hired through interviews, then freelancers would spend most of their time visiting interviews.

Therefore, freelancers very rarely go for interviews. For more than 10 years of my professional experience, I have been on interviews 4 (four) times, including yesterday.
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Freelancers do not go for interviews. But I received a call from an acquaintance whom I know only from the positive side and, having said that the company with which he cooperates is looking for people, he asked if I could come in to talk.

Rememberingand having estimated that the person is good and the company, most likely, is also adequate, I decided to agree.
In general, I had a positive impression from communication, and although at the moment I’m not looking for a job, the proposals that were voiced to me were quite interesting.

However, the condition was set - work only in the office. No remote.

In the end, I went out with the mandate to think until Monday. There’s nothing to think about. Office work is not an option. Having parked the car near my house, I was thinking about how to formulate a letter of refusal. The comrade with whom I spoke made a good impression on me and did not want to just write “I don’t want to work with you” in a reply letter. I decided that I would write in detail the reasons for my refusal and the importance of remote work for me. In the process, the answer became so ambitious that it turned from a letter into this article.

I will try to tell why remote work is a special status that is very difficult to refuse.

Of course, there are already a billion articles about freelancing and how remotes live, with an analysis of the pros and cons.
However, in my opinion, these articles consider freelancing a little one-sided.
For example, almost the most important advantage of freelancing is often announced "the opportunity to work on the beach / in a hammock."
Well, I have a beach 10 minutes away and a hammock right outside the door.

99.9% of work time was spent at one of their desktops.

Another 0.1% is the solution of urgent work issues on someone else's computer or via a smartphone / tablet.
Yes, to have the opportunity to work from anywhere is a pleasant feature, but in reality it is needed very, very rarely.

Let's try to formulate the main reasons why I will never agree to work in an office for full time and continue to freelance.

Ability to manage your time

It's not about working when you want. It's about not working when you need it.
Yes, I work in the evenings, on weekends, holidays and at three in the morning on the first of January.
But, if tomorrow I need to get an appointment with a certain specialist (who, suddenly, works only on weekdays from 9 to 19), then I will go to 9 and talk to him without a turn. But I do not run away like mad, at my lunch break or at six in the evening after work, when a crowd of similar office workers is breaking in to him at the reception.
You can go to the gym at a time when visiting is cheaper and less people. Just think: usually pay more to work out in less comfort ...
The interest clubs are not chosen according to the principle “I will have time for this after work”, but according to the principle “I want this one”.
In most cases, I work like ordinary people - on weekdays from 10 to 18. But, if desired, I can easily transfer part of my work on a weekend or evening and spend time on workdays for something that I need or are interested in.
At the same time I do not get tired of work. Let's be frank, as a rule, people are not tired of work, but of attendant factors: talkative Natasha at the next table, noise of computers, inadequate ventilation, a trip to / from work. I don't have all this. Therefore, I often continue to work after 6:00 PM ... And why not, if it works? If there is no mood to work, I am going to do something. Anything While office people are just getting to the house, they are so tired that they don’t want anything ...

Need to go to work

This does not apply to all. But it concerns the majority. As a rule, the more comfortable you live, the further you get to work.
And even 40 minutes one way (and this is considered to be a very good option in most cities) —this is an hour and a half wasted. And it would be okay just spent, but a trip in a minibus, in the heat, in a crowd of the same people (we are going at rush hour, along with the same comrades hurrying to work) is terribly exhausting. Not surprisingly, most of the people in the evening after work are so exhausted that they lack the strength for anything other than the episode of their favorite TV series. And if the journey takes an hour and a half in one direction only? It is quite possible in modern cities ... It is almost 20% of a person’s life, burned aimlessly at a passage.

Workplace comfort

For a long time, companies began to realize that saving in the workplace is stupid. In my very first workplace (and I already worked for three months in my life in the office on a probationary period), all the employees had chic leather chairs. Now almost all job offers contain a mention that the workplace can be arranged according to the requirements of the employee.
But ... the workplace is a little more than a chair, a table and a computer on the table. I believe that all adequate employers allocate a budget and allow an employee to build a table with a computer within the budget.

The workplace is also the temperature in the room, for example. And also, for me personally, a very important condition - sound design. It so happened that I live all my life surrounded by music. An audio system with surround sound appeared in the house earlier than a microwave. Every day some ambient, chillout plays around me ... Can you imagine a company that will allow a programmer at the workplace to put a different sound system from the headphones? But the audio channel is an important part of perception, strongly influencing mental processes.

Yes, by the way, back to the temperature in the room. Everyone loves air conditioning! Except me. Before, every trip to the street in the heat became a torment for me. I think everyone knows this feeling when the heat is pressing, it becomes hard to breathe and move. But not everyone knows (almost no one?) That you can easily get rid of it. You just need to get used to the heat and stop living in the cold. This is a huge buzz - do not die in the heat. Now I can go in +35 packed in a bulletproof vest with a heavy backpack and it will not kill me. Workplace without air conditioning - many employers are willing to give it to their employee?

We should also talk about air quality. It became a discovery for me that the humidity of the air and the amount of CO2 VERY strongly influence the state of the body.
A series of articles on Habré on this topic: "Warned - it means armed . "
After a thoughtful reading of materials on the topic of air humidity and CO2 concentration, I acquired not only humidity and CO2 sensors, but also a humidifier.
Suddenly it turned out that you can live without a headache and cracking skin.
I admit that the employer will allow to put sensors and a humidifier in the office. But in the winter, it is impossible to avoid a war among employees on the topic “it is necessary to air” and “it is impossible to air it - it is cold”. And in the summer too, if there is air conditioning: “do not open the window! air conditioner! ” Normal ventilation is a rare guest in most offices, which means all employees live in cold but saturated CO2 air. After all, air conditioners are basically cheaper and don't care that they do not know how to take air from the street ...

It turned out already a huge footwoman about comfort ... And I didn’t even describe the percentage of everything that creates this very comfort.
You can say - yes, it's all the little things. You can work in ascetic conditions.
Sorry, we live at work. We spend there five days out of seven. At work everything should be perfect, because work is our life. It makes no sense to equip the car in which you go to the country - you do not live in it, it makes no sense to put a mega-comfortable toilet - you do not live in it. But at work you just live. You never spend more time waking than at work. So all the little things are important, because this is your life. NOT a comfortable sofa, on which you sit half an hour a day, but an office chair, on which you sit 9 hours out of 16, five days out of seven.

Let's talk a little about psychology

This factor is practically not considered in articles about freelancing.
I did not immediately realize this advantage of my work. As a rule, it is not even considered an advantage, but on the contrary, it is written down in cons.
The first time I thought about it when I watched the movie “I would be in heaven”. In this picture a lot is fired. And people who are fired are shown crushed, dismissal is so terrible for them that even suicide is the way out. Even before that, I looked at the films in perplexity, showing the tragedy of dismissal. And I never understood what kind of garbage is happening on the screen. And this film caused a light shock. I have a close relative with whom we communicate closely and who talks about her work. And, having added my impressions of the films and her stories that I watched, I understood what was happening. There is an identification of himself and his work. As I wrote above: work is our life. If you have worked for several years in one place, in one circle, then you begin to identify your life with a particular firm and people, with your work, to make plans based on your work. This, of course, is wonderful ... if it were not for the risk of dismissal. And employers see this chip and use it. Employees are pressured and forced to make sacrifices, just to stay in the "family".

Freelancers do not care about dismissal. From the word "in general".
Freelancer permanently in the stage of dismissal. For "normal" people, firing is stress. For a freelancer, firing and changing jobs is a normal workflow. Today all projects will be covered up and all my clients will be lost ... Well, ok, a month or two I will be without money. Then find new customers. I am a good specialist, so even if I can’t immediately go to my current balance, it’s not scary, I’ll earn my living, and then I’ll restore everything.
It does not cause panic, tantrums, or something else like that.
Freelancers can not be blackmailed by dismissal, lowering, reducing wages. Because the freelancer will say "Goodbye" and tomorrow will work on another project with other people.

For several years I wondered how lucky I was with customers. They are all extremely adequate and intelligent people. I thought it was luck. Not so long ago, it dawned on me that this was not luck. This is filtering. Crap clients live in my world for no more than a month and disappear. Sometimes with my money. Sometimes silently and without conflict. Cool clients stay for a long time, regularly supply orders and simply support communication. In the end, it turned out that I was surrounded only by really decent people.
Working in the office, I can not filter frames. Well, if the boss copes and he selects the right people ... And if not?
When remote, it also happens that some inadequate works on the customer’s side. Of course, to abandon the project only because any prog program is inadequate is not always justified. There was a situation when a person got along well with everyone in the office, I got along well with all the staff and only we could not communicate with each other normally. This was solved very simply - we communicated exclusively on business matters and only in the general work chat, on Skype. On a remote, even in such a situation, a person can be filtered. Live, if there is a person sitting at the next table with whom it is impossible to get along - these are constant conflicts and bad mood. Why live like this ...

Myths:

"Teamless" work

I want to touch on a little myth that I was voiced at the interview:
“Teamwork is possible only in the presence of a person”
Let's start with the simplest example.
I have a partner (Eugene - an excellent designer, artist and modeler), with whom we slowly, in our spare time, we saw the game.
Last year we tried to make a finished project and made a simple arcade space Xonix. Gone Greenlight, soon expected to release on the incentive.

Since then, we are slowly finishing the second game project.
Also we saw auto simulators SRF Rally and SRF Drift (I hope, we will fully announce them in a few months).

So here. I never saw Eugenia alive. That does not prevent us from successfully sawing projects and even releasing them on such serious sites as Steam. In this case, we do not pay each other. What is this if not teamwork?
But here we can say that we have enthusiasm and not work at all.

Okay, an example from commercial development:
I had a chance to work on the Striker project. This is such a shooting complex:



I led this project from the very first day of development as a Senior Developer. By the time I left the project, there were about 6 programmers in it. Plus countless models and artists went through the project.
I led the whole project remotely. I talked live directly with the boss and with one programmer who was involved in implementing the project with one of the clients, and I drove up there to look at the project as a whole (yes, I saw the project for the first time, which I did only after 3 years of development, He was already installed at one of the clients and fully worked in a panoramic mode with seven computers combined into a cluster.
A large-scale project, several years of development are a fairly large team, the main project architect is remote and everything is ok.

Dull relatives

Rough enough headline, but when you read about this myth, it seems that it is these relatives and describe.
The opinion is often expressed that relatives do not understand that work at home requires concentration and it is impossible to ask a person to help and distract in general.
For about five years I lived in the house of my parents, at the same time my sister lived there with her husband and two children: one is two years old, the second is a newborn. It looks like a madhouse, right? Nevertheless, all this did not prevent me from working at all. Private room and no problem.
Parents were surprised at the first time that I was sitting at home and getting money, then they got used to it. Began to take more seriously. Five years ago, he moved to a neighboring house, his parents retired and literally work every day in the garden, respectively, they walk all day right under the windows, but do not interfere. My wife is a smart girl, she perfectly understands what I do and adjusted to my work style. Slowly, she enters into freelance. When there will be a child, it will probably be a little more difficult, but I am sure that the situation will not change drastically. Moreover, I already worked in a house with two small ones and did not experience any special problems.

Total:

Work on the remote is work only with adequate and honest people.
Work on the remote is the maximum comfort of life (after all, work is life).
Work on the remote is stress resistance and the ability to quickly find work if necessary.
That's why it is very hard to lure me into the office.

PS Cons

Cons, too. But they are so insignificant (for me personally) that I bring them outside the main block of the article.
1) Lack of live communication. It does not bother me, because I, on the whole, are a lone wolf. This problem is easily solved by a hobby. For example, I spent a long time engaged in airsoft and communicated with great people, fully compensating for the lack of personal communication.
2) Lower wages. I know that when I work in the office, I can claim a salary 1.5-2.0 times higher than what I get now at a distance. You have to pay for freedom. On the other hand, there is a feeling that I'm just not arrogant enough to ask for 200,000 for a remote one.
3) You need to be fairly disciplined. It seems to me that discipline comes with time. I remember very well that I was setting the deadlines for the first year of freelancing. Now there are no problems with discipline. It probably comes with experience.