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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

I work remotely as a freelancer and my experience has been nothing but awesome.

I'm from the CET timezone and the people I usually work with are either in PST or EST so there's a 6 to 8 hour time difference. Here are some of the benefits I've observed:

- I'm a night owl, so I can directly communicate with the people paying me

- even though I like long mornings, I still have at least 5 hours to work before employers wake up (makes for efficient-er communication because I already know what I need)

- the US is full of cool startups working with technologies I actively follow and take an interest in. (locally I've been smashed into teams still on svn ... on new projects)

- sad but true, in Slovenia nobody pays you the next day after sending an invoice, you are legally mandated to allow up to 14 days for payment and everyone takes that way too seriously (and often even overshooting) - US people have so far always paid me the day after invoicing

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> * (locally I've been smashed into teams still on svn ... on new projects)*

Completely off topic, but: is this necessarily bad? Does the world stop when there's a centralized source control server?

I'm in an environment too where people are sometimes reluctant to move to newer, better software (svn is an example, our bug tracker sucks too), simply because of the learning curve / overhead involved. I started out by being annoyed with this, until I realized that at the same time using modern SW development practices is really what matters (e.g. a lot of TDD, BDD, MDSD here). I can survive svn, but I can't survive the waterfall model.

I can't talk for TDD, BDD, MDSD. But after working with git/hg on all my projects for half a year, I'd flat out refuse to work on anything that used SVN now.

Genuine interest: why? I felt the same, until I realized that I also want continuous integration, preferably as continuous as possible. This means that if my coworker works on a feature that somehow affects what I'm working on, I want to find out now, not in a week after he merges his feature branch.

If there's a single central repository anyway (continuous integration, remember), plus you want people to share with master/trunk/whatever after being under water for at most 2 days, the workflow when using git/hg becomes awfully much like the workflow that SVN enforces on you. When I realized that, I stopped investing time in converting my colleagues to git. I use git-svn myself so that I can stash, move files without `svn move`, do local commits, etc, and everybody is happy.

But I may be missing a great argument.

CI is a good argument for centralised source control, and like you say it is possible to get 90% of the benefits just using git-svn (I have done in the past).

The real power for me is the branching, especially shared branching.

My workflow is like this, each dev has their own github repo which is up to date with whatever is in their local repo.

So even if someone is working on esoteric weird crap, I can see it (ircbot telling you about commits) and I can pull it.

For CI we have a server that is also running a git repo of it's own. Anyone can push branches to it and they'll get put through CI.

So I can now take my branch, pull 3 or 4 peoples feature branches merge them locally then push to CI repo to see if anything is broken. If it is, I can fix some of it and push it back to whoever needs to know if there is something I don't understand.

It's a joy.

I find the use of SVN to be a good predictor for a place using the waterfall model and calling it "agile", not using TDD and so on.

It's my "one wrong candy" clause if you will. (can't find the article right now, but some bands make one insane request for their backstage that can be instantly checked, when it isn't perfect, they know to check through the whole list of the stage setup and so on, otherwise people literally die when something breaks)

Wow. My "no black M&Ms" rule is a lot less discriminating than yours (btw, the band you're thinking of was van Halen). I don't care if clients use SVN, or CVS, or whatever they want. I just want the answer to the question "What do you use for source control?" to be something other than "Source control?"

I guess times change? Five years ago, that was my black M&M too.

Do you work from home or do you go to some co-working space? One of the main concerns i find for a remote employee is that people somehow need to socialize with their coworkers, feel part of something., and that part may be missing if you work from home

I work from home mostly, sometimes from coffee shops. Used to like a coworking space, but then it got too serious and office-like and drained all the fun out of itself. All the mojo was gone.

Socializing with people happens over twitter and at college, sometimes at a events, I make sure to go partying at least once every two weeks etc.

The only problem with working from home is the "But you're home anyways, you can take care of this and this and this" syndrome.

svn isn't too bad and often goes hand-in-hand with Java-based projects. My hierarchy goes something like git > jazz > svn > cvs > Clearcase.

Upvoted due to the fact "All other source control > Clearcase"

never used SourceSafe I see

How did you get started? Since you're not local, I'm curious about how you found your first clients in the US.

I started out by emailing people who post in the monthly "looking for freelancer" threads here on HN. Sometimes even job boards.

Although lately a much better model has turned out to be having a "Email me if you need a freelancer" link on my blog - produces, on average, one email per week. All from americans since that's where most of my traffic comes from.

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