Working with the Finns

One Finnish stint in my career rewired how I think about remote work entirely.

It was the first place that expected a remote employee to be online nine to six. Not flexible. Not "whenever." Factory bell. Time card. Show up at ten in the evening because an idea hit you? Congratulations, you're a bad employee. The good ones weren't working at ten. Work-life balance, apparently.

Same story on weekends. Technically you could push on Saturday. In practice, Monday brought a polite note saying you shouldn't. I didn't get it at first. I shipped the thing. What's the problem? The problem, it turned out, was real.

Then the classic happened. They gave me a task with a one-month deadline. I finished it in two days. No heroics, no all-nighters. The ticket just made it look bigger than it was. I expected them to hand me something new. The opposite happened.

The team started reviewing my commits like I'd planted a backdoor in them. Every line picked apart for a week. Three follow-up questions on every variable name. It eventually reached the CEO: "the team is spending too much time reviewing his PRs." The conclusion was obvious. I was the problem. Writing too much.

When process matters more than outcome, don't try to speed it up. They won't thank you.

Two things stayed with me. First: remote work isn't about tools, it's about culture. With the Finns I had the same Slack and the same git as everywhere else. Different planet. Second: if a team values process over outcome, don't try to make the process faster. You're not a hero. You're a threat.

I can laugh at it now. Back then I was pissed.