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🔧 Maintainer: @Clement Tam
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☝ Last updated: 11/17/2019
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Since we founded, working remotely has always been a large part of Polarr's culture. As of 2019, half of our team is remote, and all team members based out of HQ work from home on Fridays. For the entire development life cycle of ‣, ‣ acted as the PM and working with ‣ and ‣ remotely as app developers. We think working remotely has a few big advantages when it comes to employee happiness:
- No commute time, meaning spending more time outside work with families, hobbies.
- Flexibility on your most comfortable way of sitting, dressing, eating - no shower? no problem. (of course we still encourage everyone to shower regularly).
- Less driving, good for environment, and lower risk from driving accidents.
- More nuanced reasons on https://blog.polarr.co/how-polarr-organize-remote-teams/
However, there might also be tradeoffs from working remotely:
- Not enough time for team bonding, and team members feel they're fighting a war alone.
- Communication doesn't happen on the fly, and require coordination from video/calls.
- You need to trust your peers to not getting distracted by cat videos while you're working with them on a hot fix of an important bug that has nothing to do with cat.
To mitigate these tradeoffs we enforce a few things in the company:
- All remote team members need to be online and available during specific agreed-upon time slot in PST timezone with the entire team in ‣. All unavailability (traveling, lunch, meetings, doctor appts. etc.) needs to be clearly communicated on your @polarr.co Google Calendar, on the ‣ and/or via Slack if not, your peers might start worrying about you and calling 911.
- All remote members on the team needs to participate company co-location plans where we will periodically meet and work together in the main Polarr offices. The company will pay for all co-location cost and help resolving immigration difficulties or visa issues. See ‣ for team outing events and details.
- Please turn on your Slack notifications during your working hours so that you can receive texts/calls/videos. Additionally, it is suggested that you have the Slack app installed on your phone for emergency off hour communication.