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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

Remote work is great for so many reasons. Off the top of my head:

For the company:

   * less office space expense
   * bigger talent pool
   * low cost benefit
   * increased documentation
   * encourages the trend towards outcome based management (as opposed to butts in seats)

For the programmer:

   * more control over their work environment
   * more control over their time
   * no "commuting" subsidy for their employers
   * arbitrage payscales and standard of living
   * working vacations become possible

There are some downsides in terms of increased coordination costs and I have some friends that will never get to work remote because of security concerns, but for most developers this trend is fantastic.

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One of the downsides is managers think we don't do anything all day as they can't stand over us monitoring for efficiency, so insist we are available at a whim on Slack, which makes Slack the new open office where you have to stop reasoning about what you're building and answer somebody's meme post on Slack or a manager's musings that would've been an email in the past you could reply to later. To me this is just as great as disturbance as the door opening to the foozball and video game room with a crowd of people yelling.

When management don't understand how to gauge productivity they resort to this "ass-in-seat" metric. It's the circumstance I've dealt with in most of my software positions and also the source of most friction to WFH or remote employees.

Agreed slack can be a disturbance, but seems like the issue might be management expectations, not what the preferred method for interrupting you is :)

Perhaps you could write a chat bot that periodically makes arbitrary comments or adds reactions to others' posts?

I've been looking into https://twistapp.com/ for the reasons you said about slack.

I'd list working vacations as a downside. Proper time off, and the expectation that when you are on vacation you are on vacation is really important.

I work 1-2 days a week from home and it's a great balance. It gives me time to really get stuck into things with minimal distraction, and be more flexible with time. That said, the days in the office are really useful too - nothing beats sitting with other people physically when you need to communicate.

I don't think you should take all your vacations as working, but if you have a limited amount of vacation time and want to take a trip to see family or whatnot, a working vacation can be helpful.

But I agree, time off the grid is important and at least some of your vacation days should be non working.

This is exactly what I do. If it's a family trip, when I know there will "down-time," I'd rather work a half day and save my vacation time for a proper trip.

I've done some longer trips with my family (4-6 weeks), and working remotely has allowed us to take those longer trips when I didn't have six weeks of vacation. I would typically take two weeks off, work three or four days, take another two weeks off, work a few days, etc, etc.

I take proper vacations, too, but it's when I actually need a vacation only. For certain events I have to travel somewhere, but don't or can't necessarily participate in something the whole time. I can still be there, still be productive, and I miss neither work nor the event. More time to spend on actual vacations when I do want to disconnect for a week or more at a time.

The problem with remote work is that you need very competent managers who understand the work deeply and can keep things together. From my experience there are not too many managers who can lead a remote team competently.

Sorry, I don't understand why competent management is required for remote work but not for non-remote work. Is there some advantage for onsite work in terms of management?

In my experience, incompetent management won't do a good job of leading a team in any circumstances (remote or non remote).

Incompetent management is always a problem but in remote teams it's even worse. With onsite teams the manager can at least track attendance and can generally see if people are doing some work. With remote teams your only measure is the output of people and that's very hard to judge if you are not competent.

I think you also need to hire differently for remote. People need to be self-motivated and self-sufficient.

> I think you also need to hire differently for remote. People need to be self-motivated and self-sufficient.

I think this is true, but I think that most hiring managers would prefer to hire for self-motivated and self-sufficient regardless of the role location. But maybe I'm too optimistic.

It's nice when you can hire someone self-motivated and self-sufficient but it's certainly not the only criteria. I've worked with people who struggle quite a bit to be productive when working from home, but that wasn't a problem because we just didn't let them work from home and they were very productive when at the open-plan office interacting with people who were being productive.

If the biggest issue I have with a direct report is that they require a bit of attention to keep them focused and productive, then that's a high-quality employee I'll be very happy with.

"But maybe I'm too optimistic."

Unfortunately I think so.

It's not a 100% difference, but there are different dynamics to almost constant face to face communication. Some management styles would have a problem. Similarly, a remote manager might have their work cut out for them moving into a more traditional in-the-office company. But there are different workflows, different subtle problems to notice, etc.

I'm pretty sure that larger talent pool is a myth. Not everybody has the discipline to work remotely. Perhaps are able to cast a wider net, but there are a lot more rotten fish.

I would expect that a larger talent pool maybe the case for smaller cities

Actually, I think the larger talent pool is pretty inescapable. Here's some wild guesses:

There are 3.87M software devs in the USA in a population of 325 million: https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...

Call it a density of 1% across the USA.

San Francisco has a population of 870k, round up to 1M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

If you assume that SF has a software engineer density 20X what the US does, then they have approx 200,000 engineers available for hire.

Assume that only 25% of software engineers are good for a remote job. That means that you'd have 960k engineers available for hire remotely, almost 5x the pool of SF.

Yes a lot of assumptions above (and there's also a skills matching and discovery issue), but I think that illustrates the size of the talent pool for remote hiring. And that doesn't include software engineers who aren't residents of the USA.

not everyone has the discipline to work in an office either. not sure the proportion is any different.

The downside for me is communication has more overhead and friction. Communicating in person is less effort. YMMV.

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