It's tough, it's sad, it's true. A weaker office colleague will easily get ahead of you because he is closer and he can present himself in a convenient personal format. Nothing surprising: career growth on the remote is almost an unrealistic task. You can count on horizontal movements or a slight change in the name of your position, but it is unlikely that you will be able to become a project manager, product manager, or team leader. Simply because in these areas of activity communications decide. Answer yourself the question: do you need it?
By the way, but at a new job after remote work, you can immediately step over several steps — in the event that you spend time free from roads, smoke breaks, and coffee under gossip on training or developing a side project. Remote work is an ideal factor in order to become much cooler and additionally pump up.
At some point, you hear from an inexperienced colleague about yourself "and this is our freelancer Vasya" and the last nut of tolerance and adequacy breaks off from you. And that's going to happen, too. Alas, for new employees (especially young ones) what is a remote worker, what is a freelancer — one story about "sitting at home, laboring code, cats, TV shows, food." And it's very insulting to hear such words or a question: "What are you doing there? Really, for free?" Don't get fooled by these attacks, but don't let such an opinion form either. Just explain reasonably and calmly that you are no different from a colleague, and in some ways even superior. In general, I advise you: if you are quite far from the office and cannot get to it quickly, do not get involved in conflicts — you will lose in advance and will be known as a toxic asshole. This is very bad because a remote conflict requires incredible resources to resolve fully. It is often cheaper and calmer to keep silent, laugh off, or mention a question at a general meeting /video call and give a succinct and polite answer to it. ("They asked me here what I do, so I'm just sorting out bugs like this — and now I see what I need.../further on the working part /").
You feel that you are being underestimated. Calm down — it will always be at remote work, if only because you also invent emotions and facial expressions of interlocutors on the phone and chat. Do you have a salary, bonus, KPI, some bonuses, and a full task manager of closed tasks? There is! So you're cool, this company needs you. Remember your office life, and if you don't remember, believe me, I remember: they don't hang gold medals around anyone's neck there and rarely thank them personally. The quality of work is indicated by the fact of working in the company and receiving all material benefits. Therefore, calm down — most likely, if you are thinking about this problem, you are a really cool employee, and well done. You should know your worth.
You are afraid of evaluating your work and you yourself have a very poor assessment of your work and your development within the profession. This side effect occurs due to the fact that you have no one to compare yourself with: you do not have a full picture of the work of other employees. Yes, you can compare lines of code or the number of open advertising campaigns — but you and I know that these metrics don't mean anything. You are nervous, it seems to you that you are worse than the others — not enough on the remote, so also "only" worked 14 hours. Calm down: if you work with concentration and quality, most likely you are no worse, even more, productive and efficient than others because you are not distracted by office fuss.
If you feel that you have "sunk" in the professional part, allocate time for self-study, reading books, manuals, professional blogs, etc. Moreover, sometimes it is even useful to learn or read something basic on top of practice, such a maneuver puts your skills and knowledge on the shelves.
Well, one more little note: if you work poorly, they will tell you about it, now it is not customary to keep people out of pity or for beautiful eyes.
You are chronically overworking and processing takes two main forms: either you do your business half the day and catch up with the working day in the evenings (this is bad), or you stupidly work 8 hours + 4-6 hours, because a) there is nothing else to do; b) the work is fascinating; c) you want to do better and deeper, you leave into perfectionism. In this scenario, life is divided into two parts: work and sleep. I will not consider the first form, everything is clear with it: the work should be done during working hours, but the second point needs to be sorted out.
As a rule, people who are not burdened with any family responsibilities (not necessarily without a family!) recycle so much. or those who are used to giving their relatives only one day off (because the second one is also needed for work). And the main problem is that if something in your life changes, you will work less and switch your attention to a new event in your personal life. Formally, this is fine and joyful, but in reality, your employer will feel that you have become worse and work less, because he has already gotten used to the good, for example, to the fact that by morning the most difficult task is blood from the nose solved. You will immediately feel a change in the attitude towards you in the company and you will either have to go back into the curve of workaholism or learn to set personal boundaries and become bad.
In addition, recycling is dangerous to health: after all, you do not go outside, do not play sports, you sit at the computer for 14-16 hours, clearly forgetting about breaks, landing rules, eye distance to the screen, and so on, and so on. As a consequence: decreased muscle tone, changes in the fat layer, swelling, problems with veins, and many other minor troubles (which easily turn into major ones).
Finally, processing will sooner or later affect the quality of work: you will simply get tired of thinking so much and being in suspense. There will come a period of intellectual decline, which, under certain circumstances (there are no other interests, hobbies, habits, etc.), can become the first step of depression, and this is already a serious pathological condition from which it is difficult to get out on your own (if someone else does not know, depression is not just a bad mood).
As a result of a combination of certain "syndromes" of remote work, you begin to gradually burn out: interest in work disappears, the desire to solve problems outside the box, come up with something new, actively participate in the life of the company. It interferes with you, affects the work, and interferes with your employer.
It would be possible to arrange these theses in the order of their appearance in the life of a remote employee, but no — they do not appear one after another, they replace each other chaotically and are often repeated. It is very difficult to go through everything and not come to burnout and moral exhaustion. The remote worker stays with himself and he is both a colleague and the strictest boss for himself — the rest depends on the degree of conscience and ... love for work. If you love what you are doing, all these phenomena are much easier and do not interfere with life. But if the work is not so interesting, and the remote location is chosen more as a format of the exodus from a bored team, I have bad news: outside the office, outside of communication, outside of physical connection with the company, you will literally come to the decision to quit by leaps and bounds (however, sometimes it is better).
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