Remote working from Thailand

During the month of July I worked from Thailand. It was a great experiment for Skyscrapers and I learned some valuable lessons. You can already find a lot of tips for remote working online.

Internet connection

As a remote worker you rely on a stable internet connection if you want to collaborate with people. Video conferencing went well and collaborating using this channel was ok.

Working was sometimes more challenging as the connection to the European data-centers had latencies in the +100ms. Luckily we didn't have American clients because that connection was even worse.

I think this was mostly due to the internet provider not having a good peering contract. As I connected to a DO instance in Singapore with VPN everything was a lot better.

Timezone difference

As I described in my previous post there is half a day of overlap in working with my European colleagues.

I could start the day with un-interrupted time to work. Which helped as I needed to finish an important milestone in a project. Working without this interruption meant great productivity. To be quite honest I have never been so productive!

Working too much

Yes this was a problem! It should have been an experiment for working remote AND a part time holiday. I worked weekends and long days to cover for the few occasions that I took a trip somewhere. In the end I worked 40 hour weeks.

My lesson here is that next time I will plan a full week of 'un-interrupted' holiday. Because I didn't plan when I would work and when not I just kept working. Planning free time is also important.

Type of work

Technical

This work is perfectly possible doing remote. Especially in our field. Most important part is that your organization is already good in communication using different channels. Over communicate on slack or other communication tools you use, setup video calls with colleagues. Sometimes a quick chat using video helps feeling more connected.

Sales

Our strategy is to embed ourselves in the community. We use old fashioned networking to gain new leads and clients. For the moment we're focussing on the European market. So my presence is needed in Europe as I go to conferences and meeting people in real life. When we're more established I will do the same in Asia but we're not on that point yet.

Goal is to build a strong online presence to gain leads. But building this takes time. But this is 1 of my main focus points in the next months/years.

Conclusion

My girlfriend is from Thailand and our goal is to re-locate back to Thailand in the near future I'm glad I'm part of a company where we build an environment where working remote from different locations is possible. Even if it's not possible for me to re-locate full time to Thailand yet.

If you want to work for a Belgian based company that supports 'real' remote working: we're still looking!