# Working Alone, Together: What 'Solo' Teaches Remote Engineering Teams
> Rebecca Seal's 'Solo' was written for freelancers, but it reads like a manual for leading a remote engineering team. Nine quotes on remote-work isolation, why an engineer can be in every standup and still be alone, overwork, meaning, and the small things leaders can actually do about it.

*18 September 2026* · Jamie Taylor


This post is part of an ongoing series on the books that I have read as part of my continual professional development (CPD). All of my CPD posts are available at the following link: [Continual Professional Development](/tags/continual-professional-development/)


In the spring of 2020, like most of the country, I went from an occasional day at home to working remotely from my spare room every single day, indefinitely. I have called that period "the wobbliness" ever since, partly as a joke and partly because it is the most accurate word I have for it. The work itself was fine. I had a laptop, a decent chair, and a backlog. What quietly came apart was everything around the work: the walk to a desk that was not in my house, the accidental conversations, the sense that other people existed in the same physical space as me. I felt low in a way I could not immediately explain, because on paper nothing was wrong. The thing that eventually helped was small and slightly ridiculous. On dry days I would walk to a coffee shop, sit outside with a book, and be near other human beings for half an hour.

I suspect I am not describing anything you have not felt. And if you now lead a remote or distributed team, I would gently suggest that at least one person reporting to you is somewhere in that same place right now, with a green dot next to their name the entire working day.

That is why I want to talk about Rebecca Seal's [Solo: How to Work Alone (and Not Lose Your Mind)](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b). It came out in 2020, and it was written for freelancers and the self-employed: the people Seal calls soloists. On the face of it that is not us. Most software engineers have colleagues, a manager, and a payroll. But read it with a remote or hybrid team in mind and something clicks. Seal wrote a book for people who work alone. If you lead a remote team, you employ a room full of them, except there is no room. Almost everything she says about isolation, meaning, overwork and the strange elasticity of hours lands squarely on the way we build software now.

I have spent close to twenty years in this industry, across more than fifty organisations, and I have spent the last several running a deliberately remote-first consultancy and recording 197 episodes of The Modern .NET Show from a room in my house. So I am not observing remote work from the outside. Here are nine quotes from Seal's book that I keep returning to, read through the lens of leading engineers who mostly work alone.

## Loneliness Is Also a Business Problem


The easiest way to lose an argument inside a company is to make it purely about feelings. Seal does something cleverer than that. She names the human cost and then, in the same breath, points at the balance sheet.

> We all need — to a greater or lesser extent — relationships to act like scaffolding around us, holding us together, helping with repairs. If it feels like you don't have time for such things, hold this in mind: loneliness is bad for your body, your brain, and your business.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


I like that she puts business last, after body and brain, because that is the honest order of it. But the business point is real, and it is the one that tends to get a leader's attention when the wellbeing framing bounces off. A lonely engineer is not a happy engineer, and over a long enough period they are not a productive one either. Concentration frays. Small problems that a five-minute conversation would have dissolved instead calcify into a day lost to going round in circles. People who feel unsupported update their CVs. None of that shows up as a line item called "loneliness", which is precisely why it is dangerous: it is a cost that hides inside your attrition figures, your cycle time, and the pile of half-finished work that never quite gets smaller.

The scaffolding image is the one to hold on to. Nobody builds scaffolding because they enjoy scaffolding. You put it up so that the actual structure can be worked on safely. Connection at work is the same. You build it first, before there is any spare time for it, because it is what keeps the people doing the work from buckling under the load.

## Your Engineer Can Be in Every Standup and Still Be Alone


Here is the part that catches most leaders out, myself included. We assume that if someone is contactable, they are connected. Slack is green, they turn up to the standup, they react to messages with the little emoji. Surely that is fine. Seal, drawing on the research into loneliness, is clear that it is not that simple.

> Chronic perceived social isolation is as dangerous to mental and physical health as actual social isolation.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


The word doing the work there is *perceived*. Isolation is not a headcount. It is the gap between the connection a person needs and the connection they feel they are getting, and that gap can be wide open in someone who is technically surrounded by colleagues all day. The research she leans on, including the work of [Hawkley, Cacioppo and colleagues](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2769562/), frames it as a mismatch that is more often qualitative than quantitative. Too few real relationships, not too few Slack channels.

I have watched this happen to people who were, by any external measure, fully integrated into a team. Back-to-back calls, mentioned in every thread, and completely alone in the middle of it, because none of that contact was the kind that actually holds a person up. For a leader this is uncomfortable, because it means your usual signals are lying to you. Attendance is not connection. Responsiveness is not connection. If you want to know whether someone on a remote team feels isolated, the activity graph will not tell you. You have to ask them, and you have to have built the kind of relationship where the honest answer is available to you.

## A Message Is Not the Same as Presence


If perceived isolation is the problem, it is tempting to think we can fix it with more communication tooling. More channels, more video, more asynchronous check-ins. Seal closes off that escape route.

> Regular in-person social contact decreases the risk of depression, but emails and telephone calls without in-person contact do not.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


I want to be careful with this one, because it is easy to misread as an argument for dragging everyone back to an office five days a week, and that is not what I am saying at all. I have written before about how to think about [return-to-office pressure without simply capitulating to it](/blog/get-back-to-the-office-before-youre-forced-a-developers-guide-to-strategic-rto/), and I still believe remote work is one of the better things to happen to this profession. None of that means remote is broken. It means in-person contact does something specific that a video call, for all its usefulness, does not fully replace, and if your team is remote you cannot pretend that gap does not exist.

What you can do is be deliberate about it. A team that never physically meets is choosing to leave that particular medicine on the shelf. That might mean a quarterly get-together that is about being in a room together rather than about slides. It might mean supporting people to work from a shared space now and then, or to meet a nearby colleague for lunch on the company's time. The mistake is to assume the connection will assemble itself out of enough Zoom calls. It will not, and Seal is telling us why.

## The Screen That Runs Your Whole Life


There is a particular trap that soloists fall into, and remote engineers are, if anything, more exposed to it than the freelancers Seal was writing for.

> Soloists are particularly vulnerable to tech-induced loneliness. Soloists who run their businesses from their phones, using email and messaging, app-based banking and accounting software, easily get sucked in.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


Think about where a remote developer's work happens and where the rest of their life happens. Same laptop. Often the same handful of applications, the same notification patterns, the same posture in the same chair. The tool you ship software with is also the tool you talk to your friends through, order your shopping on, and manage your money in. The boundary between "at work" and "being a person" gets thin, and then it gets sucked through the screen along with everything else. I can attest to this personally; there have been stretches where I was so tethered to a device that I missed things happening in the actual room I was sitting in, and I have talked about that on other people's podcasts as one of the habits I most had to unlearn.

For a leader the signal to watch for is the person who is always there. The one who answers at 22:00, whose green dot never seems to go dark, who is first into every channel. We are trained to read that as commitment and to be privately grateful for it. Seal would have us read it as a warning light. Someone whose entire existence is routed through the same device they work on has not got more dedicated. They have lost the edges, and people without edges do not last.

## You Cannot Prescribe Connection, but You Can Signpost It


This next one is not aimed at leaders. It is aimed at the soloist, at the individual having a hard time, and I want to keep it in that register rather than pretending a manager can install it in someone.

> I can't stress this enough: don't suffer alone. Whether you've got a fractious work issue that you can't unravel, or a deeper, longer sense of anxiety or sadness, help is available, and people want to help you.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


You cannot order someone to reach out for help, and it would be a strange and slightly sinister manager who tried. What you can do is two things. You can build the conditions in which reaching out feels normal rather than risky, which is most of what I mean when I write about [psychological safety](/blog/building-psychological-safety-in-your-development-team/) and about [communities of practice](/blog/communities-of-practice-your-secret-weapon-for-breaking-silos-and-accelerating-learning/) as ways of breaking down the sense of facing everything alone. And you can, without making a great performance of it, point at what exists.

The lightest version of this is genuinely light. For a work problem someone cannot unravel, the answer is often just another human to think out loud with. Something I have started doing with my own neighbours, several of whom also work from home, is inviting them out for a coffee at lunchtime. We walk to the cafe together, chatting the whole way, have a coffee, and walk back. That is it. It is not therapy and it is not a support group. It is a walk and a conversation, and it does more for a stuck afternoon than another hour of staring at the same problem ever would. A local gaming club, a running group, a five-a-side, someone to eat lunch with once a week: for a lot of people, most of the time, that is the entire fix.

When it runs deeper than that, it is worth knowing where the more structured help sits, and pointing to it plainly. [CALM](https://www.thecalmzone.net/) runs a free, confidential support line and web chat for anyone who is struggling. The NHS offers [talking therapies](https://www.nhs.uk/tests-and-treatments/talking-therapies/) that people can refer themselves to directly, without going through their GP first. Neither of those is something you prescribe to a report. They are doors you can make sure people know exist, so that if a colleague is quietly having an awful time, the information is already in the room.

## Hours Are the Wrong Thing to Measure


When nobody can see you work, it becomes very tempting to prove that you are working, and the crudest available proof is hours. Seal has no patience for this, and neither do I.

> Two facts: hours spent at work are a terrible way to measure productivity, and working excessively long hours will harm you. Long hours should not be a badge of honour.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


She is blunter still a few pages on: "Overwork is a killer. There is no nobility, no divinity, in that." I have watched genuinely talented engineers wear their fourteen-hour days like a medal, and I have watched those same people burn down to the studs within a year or two. The harm side of this I have argued at length elsewhere, so I will not relitigate it here; if you want the full case for why the appearance of relentless busyness is costing you real output, that is the whole subject of my post on [slow productivity and Cal Newport's book of the same name](/blog/continual-professional-development/slow-productivity-why-looking-busy-is-costing-you-real-output/).

What I want to add here is the measurement half, because Seal puts her finger on the deeper error. Hours are not just a harmful thing to optimise for; they are a meaningless one.

> Making whether you were productive or not the most valued thing in your day doesn't actually tell you much. You can productively sort your paperclips, or productively order stationery, but that doesn't make you effective at your job.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


This is the distinction between speed and velocity, and it is one I find myself drawing constantly. Speed is how fast you are moving. Velocity is how fast you are moving in a useful direction, and a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step unless that step is in the wrong direction, in which case it is just a thousand miles of wasted effort. A developer can be busy all day, all week, and deliver nothing that matters. If you lead a remote team and you find yourself reaching for hours-online or messages-sent as a proxy for contribution, you are measuring paperclips. Measure outcomes instead. That is the entire argument behind using [DORA metrics to see what is actually happening](/blog/when-agile-isnt-agile-how-dora-metrics-reveal-whats-really-broken/) and behind [building dashboards that report on delivered value rather than activity](/blog/from-trust-us-to-look-at-this-building-engineering-dashboards-that-boards-actually-understand/).

## Loosen the Knot Between Who You Are and What You Do


One of the quieter dangers of working alone is that, with nothing else in the frame, the work expands to become your entire identity. Seal's advice is counterintuitive and, I think, exactly right.

> The weaker you can make the tie between you as a person and the work you do, the better you'll be able to survive the emotional or financial peaks and troughs that will inevitably come with being solo.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


If you are your work, then a rough sprint is not a rough sprint. It is evidence that you, the person, are failing. A missed estimate becomes a verdict on your character. That is a brutal way to live, and it is a fragile one, because it leaves you no stable ground to stand on when the work inevitably wobbles, as all work does. The engineers I have seen weather the bad weeks best are the ones who have a solid sense of themselves that does not depend on the state of the build.

Seal pairs this with a point about meaning that surprised me the first time I read it, and that I have come to think is one of the most useful ideas in the book.

> No job is inherently meaningful — not nursing, not medicine, not charity work. We cannot force ourselves to find meaning in work which isn't meaningful for us as individuals.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


Meaning is not a property of the job. It is something a particular person does or does not experience in a particular kind of work, which is why one developer lights up at gnarly distributed-systems problems while another finds their meaning in mentoring, or in the craft of a clean interface, or in shipping something that a real person out there actually uses. As a leader you cannot hand someone meaning, but you can pay attention to where each person seems to find it and try to point them at more of that. This is the human end of the same thread I pulled on when I wrote about [starting with why](/blog/continual-professional-development/start-with-why-the-one-thing-ai-cant-generate/). People who understand why their work matters to them are steadier, and steadier people do better work.

## Put Your Shoes On and Go for a Walk


For all its research and its hard-nosed points about business and burnout, the most practical thing in the book is almost embarrassingly simple.

> If I feel I'm struggling to focus, getting a bit fed up and bored or losing my motivation, I put my shoes on and go for a little walk, just to get some fresh air.
>
> — Rebecca Seal, [Solo](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7350c28a-0ac2-41fb-8dbc-82922dd9d94b)


The evidence backing this up is stronger than it has any right to be for something so ordinary. Seal points to research, including a large [study led by Mathew White](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44097-3), suggesting that around 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with meaningfully better health and wellbeing. That is roughly seventeen minutes a day. There is a name for part of the mechanism, attention restoration, which describes how time in natural surroundings replenishes the very capacity to concentrate that a long day at a screen wears down. You do not need a forest. A park, a canal path, a quiet street with some trees on it will do.

You will notice this is the same walk I described at the very start of this post, the one that pulled me out of the wobbliness, and it is the same walk to the cafe I now take with my neighbours. That is not a coincidence. That single, unremarkable habit does three of the things this whole book argues for at once: it gets you away from the screen, it puts a bit of nature and daylight into your day, and, when you do it with someone else, it is real in-person contact of exactly the kind Seal says a message can never replace. It is the cheapest intervention in the book and quite possibly the most effective. This is the same instinct behind why I argue that [rest is part of the work](/blog/continual-professional-development/rest-why-stepping-away-from-the-screen-is-part-of-the-work/) and that [focus is an energy problem rather than a discipline problem](/blog/continual-professional-development/make-time-why-focus-is-an-energy-problem-not-a-discipline-problem/).

Solo is a small book with a slightly self-deprecating title, and it would be easy to file it next to the freelancing how-tos and move on. I think that would be a mistake. The way we build software has turned a large part of the profession into soloists, whether or not they have that word for themselves, and Seal has written the clearest guide I know to doing that without coming apart. The through-line, if I had to reduce nine quotes to one sentence, is that working alone is a real thing that costs real people something, and that most of what helps is smaller and more human than we expect: a walk, a coffee, a boundary, a genuine conversation, and a sense of yourself that is bigger than your latest pull request. If you are thinking about how your remote or hybrid team holds together underneath the tooling and the standups, [a conversation might be a useful place to start](/schedule-consultation/).