Working remote from Rosario while studying: the price and what I bought
A team across three time zones, exams that crash into sprints, and the same chair for everything. What it costs and what you gain from an arrangement no digital-nomad post writes about.
The chair at the desk in my house in Rosario. The same one where I study at 8 in the morning, from which I join the team's weekly call at 11, where I eat lunch with the laptop open, and still occupied at 10 at night when I'm fixing a bug. That chair has been the entire stage of my recent years — university and work, all in the same square meter.
I've worked 100% remote since day one of my career. Always from home. Almost never a café or a coworking space. Today I'm at Brault, a team distributed across New York, Argentina, and Madrid. This isn't the Bali beach fantasy — it's Rosario, a desk, and a team across three time zones that never closes at the same hour.
My days are impossible to typify. Some start at 6 because I have class at 7:15. Others at 8 with a quiet coffee because I have afternoon classes that day. Others get cut at 4 because I have an exam at 7. The university is the boss of my calendar. Work fits in the cracks. That was the actual shape of my days — not a routine I chose, one that settled.
Three things really cost me. First: work and study overlap. An exam deadline and a sprint deadline compete for the same head, and you don't always know which to handle first. Second: coordinating with a team across three time zones is a permanent sudoku — if the meeting is at 9 in Argentina, it's 1 p.m. in Madrid and 7 a.m. in New York. Every hour has someone eating, waking up, or having dinner. Third: the chair never changes. There's no "I'm finally home" because you're already home. No physical cut that tells you the day is over.
In return, three things this arrangement gave me. I could study Systems Engineering full time — if I had to travel two hours a day to an office, I never finish the degree. I jumped from junior to architect in 18 months, with responsibilities I didn't picture when I started. And I learned distributed work from day one: how to write a Slack message clear enough to skip three question cycles, how to leave context in a PR so someone in Madrid can pick it up tomorrow, how to avoid meetings for everything.
One day I'll have an office, a separate room, a routine with edges. But the degree, the junior-to-architect leap, and the distributed team — those I can't save for later.
This is transitional. What you earn here, isn't.
Living something similar? Write me at hello@sebastianfermanelli.com — I'm curious how others handle it.