Working abroad - From dreamer to doer

Cześć! My name is Taavi Rouhiainen and I’ve been working as DevOps consultant at Eficode from the beginning of 2016. This post describes how I ended up working in Poland and how working remotely works in practice.

My Girlfriend (Jenni) and I have been thinking for a quite long time if we could go work abroad. From Dreamer to Doer. As I encourage her to apply for a position she found from her intranet, I started to ask around if Eficode would be okay with me moving to Poland. Weeks went by and finally Jenni heard from the Polish branch that she was accepted with 2 year contract. Eficode has been very flexible and we came quickly to an understanding with contracts and other arrangements.

While awaiting the departure date we had to find out tax practices for the future and what kind of process the other country has for immigrants. Among with the personal stuff we started to look for new customers for me to work with in Poland. Now, remember that the faster you can start making arrangements for living abroad the easier it gets when you actually arrive there.

Finally the departure date arrived in mid-September and I started my trip towards my future home city, Lodz. It took around one week to get settled in the new apartment with Internet connection, optimized route from work spot to fridge and with all the other stuff you can imagine when moving to a new home. As I work with Finnish customers, I have to keep in mind the one hour difference between countries. Actually I haven’t even changed my time in my work laptop from Finnish to Polish. I know, it’s just one hour, and the calendar can synchronize events between time zones, but still, it makes life easier. Finding out what is the best way of communicating between you and your customer is one of the most important thing to keep things going as smooth as possible. If you have worked most of the time in customers’ or in your own company’s premises, then you might get lonely when there is no lunch company or people to tell stupid jokes to. For example I came to city center and found a cafeteria to write this post!

I cannot recommend enough to take this kind of chance. But keep this in mind: when there is no one to boss you around, all the responsibility lies with you! Communicate rather than don’t, ask rather than be silent, try rather than skip the possibility of great outcome and finally be cool.

Over and out,

Taavi