Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast everybody. Hope you're going well with the pandemic that is happening now, with the coronavirus and all the lockdowns. It's, of course, a tragedy but it's something that is just happening. That's the reality of things and we need to come to terms with it and just wait until it all goes away and do our best to slow down the spread of this pandemics so that we don't overwhelm our health systems. 

And today actually, I wanted to talk about something and that is a direct consequence of this pandemic. Right now, over 35 countries are in lockdown and approximately a billion people are either in self-isolation or self-quarantine. How crazy is that? Those numbers are just staggering and it's hard to imagine one billion people are in lockdown. And what do we do? What is the nature of work? 

This is going to likely continue. Some experts predict that it will continue for a few weeks to a few months. Imagine this continues all the way into June, July. This could take quite a bit of time. So what do we do? Well, this is the time when a lot of people are starting to consider working remotely. And in fact, it's not just because of the virus and pandemic. It definitely has expedited this trend. But in reality, working remotely has been increasing for the past couple of years. 

For example, just in the U.S. alone as of February this year, so just before the virus really took its toll and started developing very fast, there were about 4.7 million people working remotely or that is about 3.4% of the population of the United States. And that is a growth of about 91%. It's almost doubled in the past 10 years. So remote work has been catching on and with this pandemic it's definitely going to become a new way of doing things. A lot of companies are, a lot of people are working remotely now and even when the virus goes away, when the pandemic is over, that culture will still being embedded. It'll be a new world. So something to prepare for. 

So what are we going to do in this podcast is we're going to talk about working remotely. Personally, I've been working remotely for 4 years, and I love it. And currently at SuperDataScience, we have 15 people working a 100% online full time. They span across 12 different countries, eight time zones and five different continents. So we have quite bit of experience with this phenomenon of working remotely. And what I want to do in this podcast is I want to first of all I'll give you three advantages of working remotely for you to consider. So if you haven't yet thought about working remotely, you are still thinking about it, there'll be three advantages of working remotely, three disadvantages of working remotely or three things to look out for and how to mitigate those risks. 

And finally, I just posted 10 jobs at SuperDataScience. We are hiring, not that these are predominantly not data science related jobs, these are jobs in marketing and sales and operations and management, but we are hiring at SuperDataScience. And so at the end of this podcast, I'll go over a few of those opportunities in case you are interested or you know anybody else who is interested in new opportunities. So here we go. 

First part is the three advantages of remote work. Something that I've seen for myself, for the people in my life and also for the people that work at SuperDataScience. What have we noticed? Well, the three advantage are, first of all, no more commute. You save a lot of time. On average, people spend about one to one and a half hours and that's on average. I've met people who spent over two hours, one way per day commute. This is one to one and a half hours commute in total. That's on average how much we spend. 

Imagine getting one and a half hours of your life back for every single day, 200 working days a year. That's 300 hours you can get back if you don't commute. That's a lot of time you can save and spend with your family, with your friends, improving yourself, working on your health, doing the things that you love. So no more commute, amazing advantage. 

Number two, is flexibility. You are your own boss. As long as you get the job done, you can save time by being more efficient. Probably not all companies are like that, but with remote work, more companies are like that, that you don't have to be working 9:00 to 5:00 fixed hours. For instance, at SuperDataScience, you can work any amount of hours you like. Nobody is holding you accountable to the hours you work. We hold each other accountable to the results we produce. So as long as you produce the results, if you do them in three or four hours, why do you need to sit the remaining four hours? 

When you go to a real office, it's kind of weird and awkward to stand up and leave when everybody else is still there. And we've all been in those situations where you're sitting twiddling your thumbs just waiting for the clock to get to 5:00. So that's a great advantage, is flexibility. And also, that means you can start work later. For instance, maybe you prefer working at night. Our team spans 12 times or eight different time zones and some people prefer working at night. Some people prefer working in the morning. You can go have a nap in the middle of the day. I know in our team there are people who have one and a half hour naps every single day. 

Next is advantage number three, there is definitely more advantages, but this is one of the top ones that I've identified. You can combine travel and work. Now, this is not for everybody. Not everybody wants or likes to travel all the time, but if you do like to travel, if you do want to explore the world or even your own country or see friends and family, you can work from absolutely anywhere. As long as you have internet, you can work. I've personally worked from a variety of different places from amazing co-working places where you can meet a lot of people, to very deserted locations, almost in the middle of the jungle. And as long as you have internet, you can work and you can get things done. It allows you the freedom of travel. One of our values at SuperDataScience is freedom; freedom of location, of schedule, of timing, and all of that comes with remote work. 

So those are the three main advantages. Of course, there are more but let's limit it to three. Now let's look at the disadvantages or things to look out for when you're considering remote work. Number one is, sometimes it gets lonely. You are working from either home, which I don't really recommend. I recommend going to a cafe or a co-working place. But wherever you're working from, you don't have your colleagues around. There's nobody to go and stand at the water cooler and discuss what you're working on, things like that. And to be fair, most of the people working in our company, most people working remotely, are introverts because this type of work is by default, better suitable if you are comfortable, if you get your energy by being by yourself.

On the other hand, at the same time, we do have extroverts on the team and their feedback is that you need to maintain your own energy levels yourself and pay special attention to social interactions outside of work. So you need to compensate for that. It's a bit of extra things to think about, but it's totally doable and can be totally fun. For instance, you could go to a co-working space and work from there and then have lunch with other people who are working from there. Very often they have things in the evening, like toastmasters or presentations. You can attend those. You could spend more time in your social groups. 

I know right now we are all under this lockdown, and it's even harder to do that, but once the lockdown goes away, it's totally doable if you meet up. Because you have more time, you don't have the commute, you can go do a yoga session with some friends or you can go for some drinks in the evening, or even now during the pandemic, you can catch up. For instance, my girlfriend was catching up with some friends on her phone and they were having this two or three-hour chat about random things and playing games and things like that. So there's ways to compensate for that lack of social interaction at work. 

Disadvantage number two, is distractions. Your productivity is in your own hands. We don't really notice it, but when we go to an office, one of the big advantages of going to the office, you change the environment. You change the location. And that makes you feel that you need to work, that you are in a place of work and when you come back home, you are no longer in that place of work so you can relax. But here you don't have that, especially if you're working from home. That's why I don't really recommend it. I would recommend going somewhere or even just a different room, not your bedroom or at least maybe outside somewhere if, of course, you can. At the moment, it's much harder. But in any case, when you're working, when you're in charge of your own productivity, it can be sometimes difficult because of all the distractions. Your kids might run side or your dog might want to go for a walk or there might be something interesting going on and because you're not in that atmosphere of work, you might get pulled away and distracted. 

Well, the solution to this is discipline and working on yourself. It's actually very fun, very interesting if you are conscious of it and aware of it. And you can become a much better professional, much more organized and you can discover a lot of new interests, interesting things about yourself. Again, it's a challenge but it's totally possible to overcome it. You just need to put in effort to make it happen. 

And disadvantage number three, is work/life balance. Surprisingly, work/life balance is of course an advantage of working remotely. But it also can be a disadvantage. And what we're seeing and what I was just reading in one of the surveys about the remote work is that people tend to overwork. People tend to get carried away. When you don't have that boundary, what we were talking about just now, when you don't leave work and come home and it's two separate locations, it's all blurry. Whereas work, whereas home, whereas productivity, whereas fun time, whereas play time, whereas relaxing time, when it's all blurry, you can get carried away. 

And I've been there. I've been in situations where months on end I would work 12 hours a day because I love what I do, and also, because I can work from absolutely anywhere. I don't have to be in a location where I get kicked out at 5:00 PM. So something to keep in mind because you can burn out, you can overwork and you can start hating this remote work because it will become your life. You don't want that to happen. You don't want your work to become your life. You want those things to be separate. You want work to be a part of your life, but at the same time you want other things. You want hobbies, friends, rest, sports and things like that. So, very important. Again, another disadvantage, but with the right self-discipline and the right mindset, you can definitely overcome this disadvantage as well. 

So as we can see, we've got three amazing advantages, no commute, flexibility and combining travel and work. And we have three disadvantages. Sometimes it's lonely, distractions, and work/life balance or overworking. But all of the disadvantages can be totally overcome with the right mindset. 

And now, let's quickly talk about SuperDataScience. We are 100% online, and I'm very excited to announce new positions. Why? We just released this. I've been meaning to create this careers page for a while, but now with so many people losing their jobs at no fault of their own, just because of this virus, there's so many talented people out there. We want to help. We want to create opportunities for people to use their skills, use their talents, and continue growing, continue professionally developing. 

We have a fantastic team and we would love for you to join us if you have the right skill sets that we're looking for. Now note that right now, these are mostly non-data science positions but have a look out on that on the page. We might have data science positions coming up. The ones that I just posted include a marketing strategist, a B2B sales representative, an event marketer, an event sales representative, also B2B, a junior media creator, a VP of sales, a general manager, a product designer, a VP of marketing or vice president of marketing. So quite a few interesting career opportunities. 

If you love what we are doing, if you love data science and helping people learn and you love this space and you have one of those skills, we highly recommend check out the page. It's superdatascience.com/careers. And there you can find all of these opportunities and some descriptions about our team, what we do and actually hear a few things from there. What makes SuperDataScience stand out. 

We have flexible hours and work schedules, something we discussed just before in the advantages of remote work. We're 100% online. We are location independent. We have unlimited PTO or personal time off. You're not limited to two weeks off a year. You can have as many weeks off as you like as long as you get the work done. Compensation, we have competitive pay with unlimited room for growth. We believe in rewarding people based on the value they bring. Annual company conference, because it's important to get together in this remote work environment and have the team bonding and get to know each other better, at least once a year we get together in a random location in the world. 

We've been to Vietnam, we've been to the U.S., we've been to most recently Cancun in Mexico. At least once a year, we get to a location in the world where we all connect and network and spend a whole week together. And the company pays for everything for your flights, accommodation. And you just are there to meet your co-workers, do some workshops, have a lot of fun. So that happens at least once a year. And individual teams within the company have their own. Also, we're aiming for them to have at least one more a year this year. 

Also, we do learning, of course, once the virus has gone. That's put a bit of a spanner in the works, but hopefully, that will resolve soon. And learning and development, if you're not growing, you're dying. We have a team coach, a buddy program, and we make learning a part of everyone's role. For instance, we have a team coach where everybody gets to meet with them at least once a month. If you want more, you can meet more often and discuss any kind of matters, whether it's professional, personal to help you continue growing. We attend conferences and we do lots of cool, fun stuff. 

So if that sounds exciting to you, I'd love to have you on the team and work with you. Check out our careers page superdatascience.com/careers. If none of those jobs are relevant to you at this moment in time, please forward that to somebody you know, somebody who may have lost their job in this crazy pandemic, this crazy situation. We are continuing to offer positions and we would love to work with talented people who are passionate about what they do. 

Once again, it's superdatascience.com/careers. Check it out and I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.