Posted by Due to the ravages of the new crown virus, many companies have begun to work remotely.
As a young mobile Internet advertising company, Xinyi Internet has adopted the form of remote work since its establishment, so this working method is not unfamiliar to us.
Here I would like to share with you some of our telecommuting experience, and hope that at such a special moment, it can be helpful to all colleagues.
The following is the complete telecommuting experience of Xiao Ma in the technical department from entry to the present.
onboarding
I joined the job in April last year, and the entire interview process before joining the job was conducted remotely. It is very flexible to interview by phone, WeChat video, QQ video, etc. at the time agreed in advance by email or phone.
When I joined the company, the company was relatively small and passed only four rounds of interviews. The first three rounds were technical interviews, and the fourth round was an interview with the boss in person.
After passing the interview, you need to go to the Beijing headquarters to sign the entry contract and pre-job training.
Those who work at the Beijing headquarters are colleagues from the business department, and the technical developers are distributed all over the country, and now there are some abroad.
everyday
We have three children in our family. The eldest is usually in school, and the second is not yet old enough to go to school. We did not send him to kindergarten. He plays at home by himself, which is quite worry-free. The third child was still in his infancy last year. Fortunately, my wife is also at home, and she usually takes care of her.
Every morning at around 7:00, I would get up and cook, and when it was ready, I would wake up the eldest to eat together. My wife continued to sleep with the two young ones. After breakfast, I will send the children to school before 8 o'clock, and when I get home, I will plunge into the study and start working.
When I am working, I am rarely interrupted. However, even during working hours, if I need help, I will leave the chair for a while for wiping the third child's buttocks, changing diapers, and bathing, so I don't have to worry about hemorrhoids from sitting for a long time.
Normally, lunch time is after 12 o'clock, but sometimes inspiration comes, and I can't stop writing code. By the time I remember having lunch, it may be 2-3 o'clock in the afternoon.
At 5:00 p.m., I will pick up my boss from school, cook with my wife when I get home, and continue working for a while after dinner.
Sometimes children go to bed early at night, and the dead of night can just concentrate on writing code, and if they are not careful, they will write after 12 o'clock in the middle of the night. But recently, I have tried to reduce the behavior of staying up late, and try to wash and go to bed after 9 o'clock every night. After all, good health is the most important thing.
When it comes to physical health, one has to mention exercise.
Other colleagues do various sports every day, and also check in in the company's WeChat group. I’m lazy. I usually take my kids to and from school, and walking to and from school is considered the biggest exercise. However, seeing my colleagues are so active, I think I should work harder in this area. I don’t know if buying a Switch version of “Ring Fit Adventure” will help. It will allow you to persist in your exercise better.
weekly daily
Every Monday morning and Friday afternoon, we hold a video conference for all staff, and each meeting is usually controlled for about half an hour. The meeting of the technical group is held every two weeks, also on Monday morning and Friday afternoon. The meeting of the technical group is relatively short, usually about ten minutes.
Weekends are normal, and I have never encountered overtime work on weekends since I joined the company, and weekends can be freely arranged. Sometimes I will take the children out with my wife, but recently it is impossible to go out.
But to be honest, I prefer to stay at home on weekends. The children will play games online and rarely need my company. I can quietly work on my own open source projects.
OKR and team building
The company formulates OKRs every quarter and summarizes the completion of OKRs in the previous quarter. At the end of the year, it will formulate and summarize OKRs for the whole year.
The company will also hold a team building event every quarter for about a week. Generally, they will be chosen in some more interesting places. The last two team building locations are Huangshan and Phuket.
Usually everyone works remotely at home, and there are few opportunities to meet each other. Team building has become a good opportunity for everyone to communicate face-to-face and promote relationships. Sometimes OKR formulation and summary will also be carried out during team building.
Tools for working remotely
In our remote work, we mainly use the following tools: Github, Slack, Confluence, WeChat, DingTalk, Teambition and corporate email.
Github is where our code is hosted. All of our code is on Github, both private and open source.
In order to facilitate access by domestic users, we have mirrored some open source projects on Gitee. Our Code Reviews are all done on Github, and part of the development documentation is also placed in the Wiki of the Github project.
Slack is a tool for daily communication, project deployment, and system monitoring of the technical group. Slack provides a lot of integration tools. For example, if a colleague submits code on Github, he can receive a message on Slack that needs to be reviewed. Jenkins will also report the construction status of the submitted code to Slack. When the project is deployed, directly enter the deployment command in Slack, and the robot will deploy and feedback the deployment status to Slack.
What everyone is currently doing and what they have done can be clearly seen in Slack, and all records are kept. In addition, if there is an abnormal situation in the system, the alarm information will also be sent to Slack. With it, our remote work becomes very convenient.
Use Confluence to record meeting minutes, internal documents, and personal knowledge sharing.
Confluence provides a good category management function, and multiple people can edit documents together, which makes remote multi-person cooperation very convenient. But the disadvantage is that it does not support document editing in md format. Therefore, we put some development documents written in md format on Github, and then only made a link to the document in Github in Confluence.
Teambition is used for SPRINT task management.
WeChat is a communication tool between company colleagues and partners; DingTalk is used for company daily management and video conferencing; corporate email is used for internal notification and integration of some system monitoring. These tools must be used by everyone, so I won’t expand them in detail.
In addition, we have also used Zoom and Telegram. Although they are very good, due to environmental reasons, these tools are not popular in China, so we have to give up.
Working remotely
I've been working remotely since 2008. But compared with now, there were not so many convenient tools at that time. From a feeling point of view, the current remote working experience is much better than before.
I have a powerful desktop at home with two monitors, the main monitor is a 43-inch 4K monitor, which is very cool for writing code, and the secondary monitor is a 23-inch 1080p monitor, which is used to display Slack and WeChat chat windows , you can see the news sent by colleagues in time. With such equipment, the work efficiency is quite high.
In terms of time management, I don't use tools like Pomodoro. Although I tried it, it doesn't feel right for me. On the one hand, because it will block information, so that I can’t see the messages sent by my colleagues in time; on the other hand, it will affect my concentration in writing code. The train of thought is interrupted.
Now when working remotely, tasks are written in Teambition. Before working every day, open Teambition to find the task you have to do today, mark it as in progress, and when it is completed, change the mark to completed and mark how long it took to complete.
In this way, completing each task is like defeating the boss in the game to pass a level, which makes me feel very challenging and very fulfilling.
I really enjoy the current way of working from home. It can balance the relationship between work and family very well. It does not delay work, but also takes good care of home, and does not waste time on the way to and from get off work. It feels really good Excellent.
It is a very lucky thing to be able to join the big family of Xinyi Internet. Work at home, no 996, have weekends, there is a domestic group building trip every quarter, and a foreign group building trip every year, and the colleagues are very good, it is really fun to work together.
If you are interested in our work and want to try remote work, welcome to consult and communicate. Of course, if you can negotiate, you are welcome to join the Xinyi Internet team.
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