Photo credit: Mischa van Dalen, dō-maru armour via photopin (license).
Dear Fellow Adventurer,
Awesome — you've made it to the Eight Virtues of Remote Bushidō. That already proves you're ready to uplevel.
As you can tell, we're passionate about this stuff. The core team at Clearview has already been on this path for more than three collective decades, refining and refining and refining.
Suffice it to say: We've learned a few things. Sometimes, we learned them the hard way.
The best part of this lifestyle is the way that it flexes and scales to your current priorities, goals, and preferences. You might not want to or be able to travel even a quarter as much as we do — at least, at the moment — but the tools you'll find in this guide will serve you well in any context where independent, self-directed development is the optimal way forward. (And isn't it always?) Investing in these skills and habits will ironclad your value, both to yourself and to any project you choose to engage.
Key to note: This goes way beyond a paycheck.
We strongly believe that the right kind of remote work ethic can be a force for good in the world. As Henry David Thoreau put it:
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him.
At Clearview, we're interested in living the biggest, fullest lives we can, and we recognize that doing so requires an unconventional approach to work. Since you're reading this guide, we're assuming you feel the same way. The next step is to familiarize yourself with the strategies and tactics required.
We believe in you.
…So let's get started.
The Office Is a Crutch. And You Don't Need It.
Humans are funny creatures, aren't we?
Where there is no (or just a little bit of) discipline, we have to create elaborate structures to replace it — forcing discipline from the outside, instead of allowing it to grow organically from the inside.
For this reason, humankind has invented the office.
In an office, workers remain more-or-less accountable because if they're not, they will soon receive a visit from a red-faced manager making angry faces. In an office, workers communicate information regularly because it's hard not to do so when you're standing at the same coffee machine. In an office, it's easy to walk around and see who's working and who isn't. To put it simply: The office was invented as a human-proof information trap. Unfortunately, it traps the people within it just as effectively.
Well, we don't believe that trapping our humans makes for great work.
We believe that, with strong internal discipline, we can hang up the external discipline of a physical office location like Grandpa hangs up his cane in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Everybody remembers that scene, right?) We believe that discipline is the golden ticket to the kind of office-free liberty that we crave down to the marrow of our bones.
And we believe that you're holding that ticket right now.
But you're going to have to get disciplined.
Defining Discipline
As a location-independent company, our very existence relies on each of our developers demonstrating daily that strong communication and steady productivity are possible across distances and time zones. That takes discipline — from every team member, every single day.
We use the word "discipline" because it carries with it a few important nuances. First, let's take a look at the words:
discipline ˈdisəplən
- the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior: a lack of proper parental and school discipline.
- the controlled behavior resulting from discipline: he was able to maintain discipline among his men.
- activity or experience that provides mental or physical training: the tariqa offered spiritual discipline / Kung fu is a discipline open to old and young.
- a system of rules of conduct: he doesn't have to submit to normal disciplines.
- a branch of knowledge, typically one studied in higher education: sociology is a fairly new discipline.
You can see that discipline is not simple. It's several entities wrapped up into a single word.
- It's a practice.
- It's a process.
- It's a personal experience of training towards strength.
- It's a system.
- It's a branch of knowledge unto itself.
Because it's so complex, true discipline isn't a binary error-and-punishment system. True discipline takes study and training.
Enter The Communication Dojo
Let's make a comparison.
Picture a regular, rank-and-file soldier. Now, picture a samurai. Worlds are different, right? Why is that? Technically, both have the same job: being a soldier. They just do the job of being a soldier very, very differently. And that all comes down to approach.
Defending a homeland is the activity that gets a soldier paid, but not every soldier has the samurai-level discipline that grants its wielder the kind of command and control, adaptability, and morale that decimates an enemy and raises its bearer to a level of esteem enjoyed by precious few.
There are many soldiers, but few samurai.
In the same way: Developing software is the activity that gets us paid; communication is the discipline that lets us work for great clients around the world from wherever we like. There are many great developers, but a remote professional must be the best-disciplined communicator to enjoy the kind of lifestyle people write memoirs about.
It bears mention: We are software developers, sure. But we are also consultants in — and ambassadors for — our unique style of remote work. In living like this, we are examples of the rest of a changing world.
We do the job of being a developer very, very differently.
If you've watched so much as a single samurai movie, you've heard someone reverently spit the word "Bushidō." Bushidō (武士道, "the way of warriors") is a Japanese collective term for the code of expectations that dictated the samurai way of life. The Bushidō was not a list of helpful suggestions. There was no difference between being a samurai and living the Bushidō. You were in, or you were out.
The same holds true for us.
As the samurai lived by the eight virtues of Bushidō to keep their ennobled position, remote developers can't rely on "talent" to stay in the game. We need to, at the very least, live by our own code — just as specific and just as challenging as the samurai's — in order to stay relevant, gainfully employed, and sane.
Mastery of that code requires consistent practice and refinement over time, but with mastery comes, well…world domination, for all intents and purposes.
With mastery comes freedom, whole and entire.
The Eight Virtues of Remote Bushidō
1. Be relentlessly proactive.
When the client has an in-house team, there will be many conversations that happen in person that a remote worker will not be present to hear. So it becomes essential to be relentlessly proactive in contacting in-house team members and informing yourself of discussions that you may not have been involved in.
If there is no standing call scheduled for a project, get a weekly video call on everyone's calendar and attend it like church, well-prepared with any talking points you'd like addressed.
2. Update daily.
Non-communication from remote developers reliably leads to the assumption that no work is being done, whether or not it is. Your responsibility is to kill this assumption every day, and you will do this by keeping clients and colleagues updated about your work on a daily basis.
Do not let a day pass without at least one short comment on any task you're currently addressing. No matter what the status of your task, the final thing you do as you sign out for the day should be to write a short comment describing your progress.
3. Update clearly.
Be detailed. Ideally, use templates to make sure that every communication contains a reliable set of information. You can use this bullet list as a template for those daily check-ins:
- What you're working on
- The progress you've made since the previous check-in
- Any challenges you're currently dealing with (or elements you're waiting to receive from clients and teammates in order to move forward)
- How you plan to tackle those challenges today
Bad Example: "I'm still working on my task from yesterday."
Good Example: "I'm working on task X and progress is going well. Yesterday, while debugging some unexpected behavior I found poorly written code in function Y that my feature was calling and I spent some time cleaning it up. I'm still waiting on an API key from Z. Today, I'll continue where I left off and begin implementing unit tests."
4. Engage, meaningfully and visibly.
Make yourself a part of the conversation, especially if anyone is discussing something you've worked on or are currently tackling. So you can get an idea of how they fit into the bigger picture, ask questions that can help you understand more of the context surrounding your tasks. On occasion, share some funny or useful image/link/comment.
The more visible you are, the more your team will respect and respond to you as a human individual, not an automaton that spits out code.
Automatons are easy to replace. Human individuals are not.
5. Commit code often.
You're working hard! Make it the worst-kept secret in the world. Do not wait to finish a task and commit everything all at once. Commit often — daily! — and regularly ask for code feedback.
6. Ask for help.
Along those lines: Don't hesitate to ask colleagues for help, explanations or the support you need to do great work. Take the time to learn about how the code you're working on fits into the broader scope of the application.
7. Revere your commitments.
This one's about integrity, pure and simple. If deadlines are defined, respect them. If deadlines are not defined, set a realistic deadline for yourself and ask for your team lead's feedback on the working timeline you envision. If you've been invited to a meeting, either be there on time and prepared or ask to reschedule for a time when you will be.
Miss no meetings. Miss no deadlines. None.
As soon as you suspect that you may miss an upcoming deadline — whether it's one you set for yourself — communicate with the team and explain the situation.
If you're challenged by a deadline set for you, the team will be far more understanding than if you act like everything's okay and then surprise them with a flub.
If you're challenged by a deadline you've set for yourself, you'll be a hero for averting potential issues down the line.
8. Always be the first to speak up.
If issues arise with your project, your client, or your team members, it falls to you to address them when the bud of the problem is just pushing out of the soil. Don't wait, hoping it'll wither, while it steadily becomes a tree.
If you wait, dear remote reader, there's a good chance that the in-housers will frame the problem with the implication that you — comfortably out of the blast radius of angry stares across a copy machine — caused it.
Remember: Even serious problems are soluble if you catch them early enough and address them with respect, honor, and integrity.
And, at the end of the day, it's respect, honor, and integrity that earn you your place smack-dab in the middle of freedom.
So take it.