Bay Area Chinese Engineer: I get to do my best work when I'm at my best.

Hi everyone, my name is Wang Hongliang. I started working remotely through Brix in October 2024. I currently work for a Bay Area AI image processing company, and I'm based in Hebei.

Previously I was at a SaaS company doing mostly backend work, though the role was full-stack in nature. I did some frontend work too, but not in depth. My current role is primarily backend. Our product focuses on AI image processing, including text-to-image generation and AI portrait photos. The company is still early-stage, but it already has stable profitability.

Why did you accept this offer?

At the time I had three offers in total: this remote one, and two onsite roles in Beijing. One reason I accepted this offer was that I'd never worked fully remote before and wanted to try it.

Another reason was that after the interviews, I felt this team had more passion, was younger and more energetic, and the founders had strong backgrounds. So I chose this company.

The salary across all three offers was actually about the same. But if I were based in Beijing, I would also need to factor in rent and commute costs. Working remotely from home, those costs cancel each other out, so the compensation felt roughly equal either way.

What skills do Chinese engineers need to compete for overseas remote roles?

Some Chinese engineers, myself included, do not have great English speaking skills. When I first joined this company, I had some reservations about it. I worried there might be barriers in meetings or communication. But once I found out that our team communicates partly in Chinese, that concern went away.

That said, English is still something you need to keep learning. Even now that I've found a job, I'm still studying English. Because regardless of your future jobs or your current one, I genuinely believe that mastering English will significantly improve your logical thinking and your ability to command language.

Engineers tend to interact with English mostly through reading, so reading and writing English usually does not feel like a big problem. You might even think your English is pretty good. But the moment you need to speak, there are many limitations in your expression. And because you're a non-native speaker, when teammates who are native English speakers use abbreviations or slang, you'll get stuck. So beyond lots of reading practice, you also need to work on listening and speaking.

What did you imagine remote work would be like?

Quite a bit has changed after actually doing it. Honestly, at first I thought remote work meant no fixed hours, and in a flat company structure where no one was watching over your shoulder, maybe it would be more relaxed and more free.

I assumed that since I controlled my own time, I'd have complete freedom and it would definitely be more laid-back than going into an office. But when you actually experience it, you find that when your self-motivation is strong and your team's goals are tightly aligned, it does not feel relaxed at all. It can actually be more exhausting, and work and life can start to blur together.

Freedom doesn't mean not working. It means I get to do my best work when I'm at my best.

Overall though, I still think remote work has more advantages than disadvantages. Your schedule is relatively more flexible. That's not exactly the picture of remote work I had in my head, but I've felt real growth through this shift in mindset.

I've started to feel like I'm working for myself, for my own growth, not because my boss requires it. I'm the one demanding that I do things well. I think that's the biggest change remote work has brought to my mindset.

How do you handle anxiety and emotional ups and downs?

Yes, remote work can definitely make you more anxious at times. Most of your interaction is just with your family, and even then, when you're busy, you barely talk to them. Interactions with colleagues are even fewer. You might only meet in person two or three times a year. Most of the time you're closed off at home, and that can feel anxiety-inducing.

But when you slowly calm down, you realize that everyone has a different personality, and you might not actually need that much social interaction. Now I'm more likely to spend a weekend afternoon reading, or just sitting quietly with my thoughts, and it feels pretty good. We also add each other on WeChat or chat on work platforms, and that's nice too.

Have you experienced burnout in remote work?

Yes, genuinely. In early 2025, the product needed more output and the team was understaffed. I was exhausted, working around the clock to push the product forward. I really wanted to escape.

What helped was first going outside for a walk to decompress, and then having an honest conversation with the team, founders and colleagues alike, about how I was feeling. Together we discussed whether to slow down the product pace, whether some features really needed to be built right now, or whether it made more sense to ship an MVP first to validate things instead of trying to do everything at once.

Honest communication is the most effective solution. It opens everyone up. Because everyone wants to build a good product. Even though the project was started by the founders, if we want to keep working remotely and have stability, we all need to build the product together, to be responsible to users and to ourselves. That creates a stronger sense of ownership and belonging.

What's the biggest change remote work has brought to your life?

Probably that I spend so much more time with my family. Before, I was based in Beijing, only visiting Hebei occasionally. I barely talked to my family.

Now I'm home every day. We eat together, listen to music together, and watch movies together. My sense of wellbeing has gone up a lot. Especially on weekend evenings, watching movies together as a family, the happiness that brings is real.

What domains should remote job seekers focus on?

For remote work, on the frontend, keep an eye on React. For backend, Python or Go. In terms of industry, if you want to find AI-related work, cultivate your full-stack abilities.

AI has driven the rise of small teams. The stronger your full-stack skills, the easier it will be to find overseas remote work.

What else are you working on outside your main job?

Aside from being a remote worker, I'm also an indie developer with my own product. It is not my main project, but the idea came from my own needs. I often need to download videos for work or personal use, so I built a tool to handle that, primarily to meet my own day-to-day needs.

The project is vodmates.com. My advice for remote job seekers who want to build their own open source projects is simple: start with something you're genuinely interested in, or something that could be more automated in your daily work or life. Build a program or product around it. No matter how small it is, if it solves a real need for even a few people, it's a good product.

How do you think about long-term career security?

Honestly, not that much has changed. Whether you're working onsite or remotely, you can't avoid thinking about the future: your company's trajectory and your own development. That's true of office jobs too.

I do lean toward remote long-term. Once you go remote, you do not really want to go back to an office.