There’s a night and day difference between onboarding a remote employee and onboarding an in-person employee. Since in-person new hires establish rapport with staff and coworkers face-to-face, the learning curve is shorter. When they have questions about paperwork or policies, they simply walk over and ask a coworker or manager. But remote new hires have to deal with time zone differences, communication barriers, and feeling disconnected from company culture.

Technology has broken the limitations of distance and barriers when it comes to assembling teams in the modern workplace. Thanks to technology, different people from different fields, races, disciplines, and works of life can come together to work on various parts of a project through a remote development team. Remote development teams have revolutionized the modern workspace and have changed the way people work, and teams carry out projects.

For many first-time remote workers, the ability to work from home has had some serious advantages. Remote work means no long commute, fewer workplace distractions, and more free time to spend with friends and family. For others, learning how to unplug when working from home has been a major challenge. Although working from home brings lots of positive lifestyle benefits, it can also be more difficult to disconnect from work when your office is your home.

Working as a remote software developer gives you flexibility and freedom, but it’s also full of challenges. Making the correct decisions is crucial to staying on the market. Unfortunately, however, many remote developers commit mistakes that hurt their ability to build their business. Below are five common mistakes by remote software developers that business owners or IT managers shouldn’t ignore.

While a company’s headcount might grow person-by-person, its functional complexity grows exponentially. In a team of only 10 people, there are over a thousand possible combinations of working relationships; for a team of 15, there are over thirty thousand. But let’s forget the math. After all, we’re not talking about cracking a safe, we’re talking about working with people. And when we work with people, complexity is about more than a numbers game.