Remote

Any time you’re physically out of the office or working with someone who isn’t next to you, you’re working remotely. At Toptal, working remotely is a productive and efficient reality that we evangelize to our clients, while practicing what we preach.

In this article, Toptal COO Breanden Beneschott shares great tactics in operating highly collaborative remote teams.

Toptal has taken its place as one of the strategic partners in Facebook’s effort to connect the world. Our vision of a distributed and office-less company with developers spread all over the globe has proven to be an amazing match to Facebook’s attempts to connect people worldwide.

When entering the remote developers’ world, the biggest obstacle that managers must overcome is to change their mindset by accepting that the developer will not be in plain sight, and where they can manage and follow the work being done.

This new paradigm requires businesses to implement a number of mechanisms to track progress and avoid a redundant workload. Such mechanisms will help both manager and developer be more productive, which is in everyone’s best interest.

As Co-Founder and COO, Breanden Beneschott has been effectively running Toptal, a venture-funded company growing hundreds of percent year over year, while traveling across the globe. Breanden shares his tips and experiences as a successful traveling engineer and entrepreneur, including his perspective on the benefits of this new lifestyle.

With an 80% increase in the remote workforce from 2005 to 2012, there must be more to the picture than meets the eye. This post pulls the rug out from under 5 of the most prevalent myths about remote workers, with a specific focus on the software development industry.

As a veteran telecommuter through multiple jobs in my career, I have witnessed and experienced the many joys of being a remote worker. As for the horror stories, I have more than a few I could tell. With a bit of artistic inclination and a talent for mathematics, I also have a fascination with patterns: design patterns, architectural patterns, behavioral patterns, social patterns, weather patterns—all sorts of patterns!

When I first encountered anti-patterns, I discovered a trove of wisdom I wish I had known before I had learned the hard way. Anti-patterns are recognizable repeated patterns that contribute significantly to failure. For example, the manager that keeps interrupting the employee in order to see if the employee is getting any work done is engaging in an anti-pattern that serves to prevent the employee from getting any work done!

Based on my own experiences and experiences of friends and co-workers, I am assembling descriptions of anti-patterns related to telecommuting.

If you’re an experienced developer, you’ve probably progressed from being a humble tester to a senior developer, and if you’re a freelancer, you’ve made another leap, perhaps the biggest of them all, when you started working with clients directly.

Some clients aren’t in the software business; they’re in an entirely different industry that needs a piece of software, and they don’t have a clear and precise vision of what they want from you. This is a far greater challenge than it appears, and here’s what you can do to improve client communication and project documentation.

Starting a new remote gig, be it a contract project or a full-time job, can be a little intimidating if you’re used to going into an office day after day.

But this style of employment is growing in popularity, with some very notable companies lending it their endorsements.

I’ve worked remotely for years now on projects of various scales and durations. With this post, I hope to enumerate some of the best practices that I’ve picked up for working in a variety of situations. The advice here ranges from specific recommendations for software and hardware to tips for hitting your team’s deadlines.