The Geography of Being Findable

I work from home. I've worked from home for years now, through different contracts, different time zones, different company cultures stitched together via Slack threads and async standups. I work in my pajamas some mornings and dress up for no one on others. I take Irma, my four-legged furry roommate, for long walks at 11am on a Tuesday when the neighbourhood is quiet. I cook lunch. I don't commute. I live in Athens and I earn in euros that stretch here in a way they wouldn't in London, where my colleagues' rent is someone else's entire salary.

If you'd described this to me a decade ago, I would have assumed I was either very lucky or very lying.

Both, actually. But let's start with the real part.

The freedom part is real.

Remote work, when it works, is one of the better reorganisations of professional life available to a knowledge worker in 2026. The geographic arbitrage alone is quietly life-changing — not in the Instagram-nomad sense, but in the more ordinary and more meaningful sense that you can live somewhere you actually want to live while doing work that belongs to a larger market. You stop subsidising the cost of someone else's city. You get the time back that commuting ate. You work inside a life rather than around one.

The other thing nobody warns you about is how much clearer your thinking gets when you stop performing productivity in an open-plan office for eight hours and start just... doing the work. The collaboration you lose is real. But so is the concentration you gain.

I've shipped more in the last few years — projects, ideas, things I'm genuinely proud of — than in any previous period of my career. Some of that is thanks to AI, which I've written about elsewhere. But some of it is just quiet environment, and a desk that's mine, and the ability to not lose three hours a day to logistics.

The wall part is also real.

There is something the remote work conversation tends to skip: getting there, if you're from a country without a recognisable tech brand, is not a matter of being good enough. It is a matter of being findable, which is a different and considerably more annoying problem.

Greece doesn't have an engineering reputation the way India does, or Romania and Poland in our relatively closer neighbourhood. There's no pipeline. There's no network effect that makes a hiring manager in Amsterdam think to look here first. I'm using Greece because it's where I live, but the same logic applies to any country that hasn't built a national narrative around its tech output. The talent exists. It just doesn't come pre-packaged with a signal that travels.

I got my first fully remote role through a referral. Someone vouched for me to someone who vouched for me to someone who eventually hired me. The work that came after built the network — European contacts, recommendations that now travel on their own — but the first step required a door that was already open, held by someone who knew my name. I'm not embarrassed to say that includes luck. It does. The luck of being in the right Slack at the right moment. Of having a colleague who thought of me when a role opened up. Of timing.

The honest structural problem isn't unique to Greece. It's the absence of collective visibility for any country that hasn't, by accident or design, built a brand around its engineers. Talent that assimilates and performs quietly doesn't build a reputation that feeds the next person through the door. The pipeline never forms, and the wall stays up.

What this is actually about.

Remote work is one of the few genuine equalisers available to engineers from periphery markets. Not because it erases the wall — it doesn't — but because once you're in, geography stops mattering in the way that used to trap people. You don't need your country to have a brand. You just need to be known by the right ten people, and those people to be willing to pass your name forward.

That's a smaller ask than "fix the structural invisibility of an entire country's tech ecosystem." It's still not nothing. It requires a first break, and first breaks are not distributed equally, and pretending otherwise would be a form of advice I don't want to give.

But the wall is crossable in a way it wasn't fifteen years ago. Open source helps. Writing helps. Side projects with GitHub stars help. The tools for making yourself findable have never been cheaper or more accessible. The network, once seeded, grows on its own.

None of that changes the fact that the honest version of this story isn't "work hard and you'll get there." It's "work hard, stay findable, and hope someone opens a door before you run out of patience."

I take my dog for a walk at 11am on Tuesdays. I am not taking this for granted.