Remote working from Spain for a London based company
Spain is really great for remote working: good weather, good food, amazing public transport, a lot of good coworking spaces, and we even have a Google Campus right in the city center of Madrid.
I’ve been working at Audiense for 2 years; 100% remote work within a team, at present, of 15 Devs and 3 SysAdmins. The company employs about 50 people working from Barcelona, Madrid, Córdoba, Granada, Seville, Uppsala in Sweden and London. We have two offices, one located in Córdoba (Spain) and the other in London (UK).
What’s my work routine
First of all, keep in mind that in Spain we don’t follow the northern European timetable, so we usually start work a bit later than the average in Europe. I wake up at 6.30am and make breakfast for myself and my girlfriend and then we go together to the bus stop where she catches the bus to work. We’re both developers so we understand our common problems at work which we sometimes discuss at home although we try to avoid too much work-related stuff so I don’t feel trapped in a work environment the entire week.
I usually go for a walk around my neighbourhood until 8 o’clock and as I live near the Retiro Park I see a lot of people jogging and others making their way to work. There’s even an area of the park with blue peacocks which I like watching as they stroll around the park displaying their extravagant tail feathers. I haven’t seen any squirrels but people say there are some.
Sometimes I don’t go for a walk and instead I do some reverse engineering which is another of my hobbies. I usually reverse engineer old games to see how they work (I’m now reversing Tzar: The Burden of the Crown) and I’ve been doing all this reverse engineering entirely with JavaScript for the last 4 years.
Daily meetings
I start work at 9am and first of all I update my Productivity Planner to help me keep track of the work I have to do for the day and which also helps me focus on the really important tasks. I like the motto of the Productivity Planner: “Beat procrastination. Get more done.” and that’s exactly what I do.
At 9:30 we have the daily meeting which helps us to keep focussed. It usually takes less than 15 minutes and we share what we did the previous day and if we had any problems or bottlenecks and what we are going to work on during the day ahead.
My girlfriends setup, very similar to mine. When I go to work at Google Campus I take my Roost Stand to reduce back pain.
Time to eat
At 2pm I stop to have lunch. My girlfriend and I usually prepare our meals on Sundays so we have food ready for the entire week. It’s quite hard work to prepare all the meals in just one evening, but if you plan carefully this is a healthy way to eat. I can recommend this post if you’re interested in this way of preparing meals.
Connect and Insights teams
We are divided into two teams; one called “Connect” (responsible for Ads campaigns, DM campaigns and different ways to connect with the user) and the other, “Insights” (responsible for targeting audiences, metrics and insights). My product owner calls me once a week to keep in touch and to discuss the current status of what I’m doing.
Meetups
We are a remote team, but we see each other every 3 or 4 months. We all head down to Córdoba in southern Spain, not the mobile framework Cordova ;) and we mostly focus on these things:
- Our definition of awesome
- We all share our thoughts on what we want to change or achieve, we make proposals to all the dev team about the way we work, what needs to be addressed, etc.
- Short talks
- Mostly 15 minutes long talking about what we’ve been doing or something that we want to share. The last time I gave a short presentation about Twitter Ads.
- Pair and mob programming
- Screenhero is our remote collaboration tool for pair programming. However, it’s always good to do some pair programming together in person.
- Gastronomic days, no joke!
- We eat a lot. Córdoba is a great place to eat so we all go out to incredible restaurants together. It’s not forbidden to talk about work during the meals, and we usually discuss our technical environment, personal projects, etc.
Wanna see what our last meetup was like?
Our tools for remote working
- Screenhero for pair programming (we also do pair programming when we meet at the Google Campus)
- Google Hangouts for daily meetings
- Github as a code repository
- gtmhub.com to manage our objectives and key results
- Waffle.io integrated with Github for Kanban management
- Slack
A screenshot of a meeting of the connect team about Twitter Ads
How do I report my issues to my team?
We are an Objective and Key Results (OKRs) based company, so the goals I set for myself are based on a negotiation with my manager, Ivan. He usually calls me a couple of times a week for a one-to-one meeting and to discuss how we can improve my productivity and fix any problems I might have.
We use gtmhub.com to set and manage our goals. Every week I update my key results so what I do is aligned with the company objectives.
Benefits of remote working from Spain
- Good weather most of the time. The summers in Madrid can get very hot. During July and August, the hottest months, the daytime temperature will rarely get below 30 °C (86 °F).
- Great food. Really! The absolute best you can find!
- Excellent meetups about programming, online marketing, etc. Our React-tive guy @javivelasco is giving a talk at http://frontfest.es/ in february 2017.
- Good internet connection. I have a 50/mbps symmetrical connection at home which is enough for everything I do. You can easily contract 100mbps or even more if required.
And finally
This is the second time I’ve worked remotely for a company. The first time I didn’t enjoy the experience at all but now, after 2 years working at Audiense, I really think this is the way to go. I love my job and we’re always hiring so if you want to join us, see the latest positions which are available here!
