Superheroes, Lazybones or New People — Who Are Remote Developers?

I've started building a product for remote developers about 6 months ago. Recently my team & I created our first research on remote work to know our users better.

We've surveyed 250 engineers, interviewed 10 CTOs from remote startups, analyzed 400 LinkedIn and GitHub accounts to answer one questions: what makes a successful remote developer? I'd like to share with you some insights and discoveries we learned.

Benefits

Here are the three most important benefits that remote work gives for developers:

1. The opportunity to get rid of a daily commute.
2. Spend more time with their family.
3. Get access to foreign projects and a higher salary.

I was quite surprised by #2 — most of our respondents put family above salary. Isn't that sweet? 😍

Difficulties

There are many advantages in terms of working remotely, yet, at the same time, you can easily face many problems.

We've found 3 main difficulties in remote work:

1. No boundaries between work and personal life.
2. Difficulties in communication.
3. Difficulties with self-organization.

Well, no big discoveries here. But I have to mention that 27% of respondents said they have no problems in working remotely. If I was part of this survey, I'll be the one answering 'loneliness' — as 20% of developers did. I guess if you don't have a family and naturally introvert you can get lonely working remotely after all.

Portrait

The second part of our research was analyzing LinkedIn and GitHub profiles of remote engineers form fully remote companies like GitLab, Trello, Dribble, and others. We were interested in creating a portrait of a successful remote employee.

And we got some really interesting data: the average age of remote developers is between 30 and 35 years and they usually had between 5 to 7 years of work experience before they moved to remote work.

I'm 27 now and been working remotely for a couple of years, so let's say I'm the exception to the rule. But I find it exciting that remote developers are people with decent experience and age — means that they decide to go remote consciously like it's an evolution of their choices.

If you want to learn more about Remote Developers — please, read our research. I'll appreciate your thoughts or essential experience on remote work. Do you agree with the results of the research? Or are you also 'exception to the rule'?