Crawling: My First Steps into Remote Work
Before Dell, remote was just a buzzword to me. In every job I had before that, the idea of someone not being physically present was almost treated as a blocker. Collaboration happened shoulder-to-shoulder, literally. Desks were shared. Meetings happened on whiteboards, with everyone in the room. Remote work wasn’t just rare—it was invisible.
When I joined Dell in Porto Alegre, Brazil, everything changed. Not immediately. It started as a slow crawl.
The headquarters were in Austin, Texas. We had teammates in India. That distribution made remote work not optional—it was the default. My first experience with remote collaboration was awkward. Calls with poor audio. Shared Google Docs with conflicting edits. Back then, I didn’t even have a good chair at home—remote meant plugging in from a kitchen table or a makeshift setup in the living room.
But I was lucky. Some of my teammates had been working this way for years. They were patient. They explained the importance of writing things down, overcommunicating without overwhelming, and making time for asynchronous work. I wasn’t fast, but I was learning. That’s where I took my first steps toward a remote-first mindset.
Walking: Distributed by Design at ThoughtWorks
ThoughtWorks was different. Remote wasn’t an exception—it was baked in from day one.
Still based in Porto Alegre, I joined teams that had people working from San Francisco, California (the client’s HQ), and from multiple cities in India. Unlike at Dell, the tools and expectations were already in place. Teams were used to timezone gaps. We used those constraints to our advantage.
What made it work?
- We documented obsessively (not bureaucratically).
- We used time zone overlaps strategically.
- We had rituals that worked equally well in Porto Alegre or San Francisco.
One small but powerful practice was the “end-of-day handoff”. Before logging off, you’d post a quick message: what you did, what’s next, and anything blocking. It wasn’t formal. It wasn’t mandated. But it created continuity across the team without depending on everyone being online at the same time.
Another powerful idea: bias toward asynchronous. Meetings were used sparingly, and when we did have them, someone always captured the outcomes. Discussions happened in threads. Decisions were documented in markdown. Git history wasn’t just code—it was a record of design thinking.
One practice I really valued—especially during those rare synchronous moments—was having the camera on. It wasn’t a rule, but a shared habit we encouraged and celebrated as a team.
When working across so many time zones and contexts, seeing people’s faces made a huge difference. It helped build trust, made conversations more natural, and gave us a small window into each other’s environments. That small visual connection helped bridge the distance.
I still carry that habit with me today. It became a meaningful part of how I relate to remote teammates.
That said, I also understand now—something I didn’t back then—that for some people, especially from underrepresented or marginalized groups, keeping the camera on isn’t always comfortable or even fair to expect. At the time, I wasn’t aware of these nuances. I just knew it helped me feel connected. Looking back, I’m grateful for how that practice helped shape our team culture—and I’m more mindful today of making space for everyone’s comfort level.
These weren’t rules. They were habits. And they made a huge difference.
Learning: A Mindset, Not Just a Setup
Remote-first is not about working from home. It’s not about Zoom fatigue, or Slack etiquette, or “cameras on.”
It’s about designing your team operating system around distributed trust, not physical presence.
I didn’t invent any of this. I was just lucky to work with teams who had been doing it for years—who showed, by example, that:
- Good communication is not about availability, it’s about clarity.
- Autonomy grows when expectations are explicit.
- Documentation is empathy, not overhead.
Over time, these ideas stuck. They became part of how I worked and how I helped teams work better.
What’s Next
In the next post, I’ll share how we took these lessons and went all-in on an officeless model—not just by necessity, but by intention. With the support of Iryna Kulakova and our fully remote team in 2021, we decided not to wait and see if we’d return to the office. We decided to design for what we wanted to become.
Stay tuned.