In the beginning of this year I was convinced I was going to do a PhD. Last month there was a particular negative moment that drove me to send out resumés and reach out to people, the details of which will remain private. During this period I scouted Erlang’s slack channel and the #employment channel, and was fortunate enough to come across an offering for Kobil Systems in Worms, Germany.
Well, you’ll have probably guessed by now that I got the job. I recently returned from a 2 week on-boarding period, and I will be resuming my work remotely from now on. It was an ambition of mine to grab a remote job, but after my stay in Worms I wish that Kobil’s offices were in Lisbon. I felt welcomed into a team of very talented and funny people plus I get to work on a cool project!
Now that I’m finally back home and done stuffing my face with delicious Portuguese food, I’ve found that working from home is a bigger challenge than I had originally anticipated. I work from my own room where I have my setup with an extra monitor, keyboard and mouse – and herein lies the issue. It is hard to maintain discipline during working hours. I found I needed to completely shut off communication channels (Discord, Slack, etc) in order not to be distracted for long periods of time. Working alone makes me more prone to replying to chats to keep in touch with people, and if chats are not strictly work related it is easy to go into tangents. I have, in the last few days, learned to disable notifications and talk to other people at specific times (e.g. while waiting for built/test results) so as to not get carried away.
Postscript 28th March 2019
To avoid becoming a caveman, I also have to interact with other humans. To do this, I want to start attending several tech related Meetups, which will force myself to get out of the house. Yesterday I attended the Elixir Lisbon Meetup and got to hang out with friends and former colleagues. This was great on its own, but the talks there were also pretty good and I learned something, so there is little reason to stay home… 🙂