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Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

I get I'm part of the privileged few, but: I've been working for a small software company for almost 11 years, and EVERYONE at my company is remote. We don't lease any real estate anywhere, unless a mailbox and a colo rack count.

It's AWESOME, but there are caveats. The biggest one is that we can't really hire newbies; everyone we've brought in has to be mid-career at a minimum because the absence of the "water cooler effect" makes it harder to ramp up quickly. Folks with some experience handle this better.

The other drawback is mostly theoretical: I'm really not sure I could go back to working in an office. I control the music, the temp, the food, the coffee, when I take a break, whether or not I take a midday snooze, and my cats are everpresent. I mean, an office sounds like a dystopian hellscape by comparison.

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This is very interesting, because your office sounds like hell to me. Any time I work from home I'm absolutely desperate for meaningless social interaction, a walk and a chat while out for coffee, a beer with my team at lunch or after work and face to face discussion. I guess it's hard to find something that works for everyone.

Interesting. I work from home most often, and I find that not having to tack on a 2 1/2 hr daily car commute leaves me time for actually socializing IRL as opposed to trying to cram that need into the office.

Yeah, but where do you find anybody to socialize with?

If you only socialize with co-workers I'd say that is the bigger problem. All my interaction with people outside office hours are with people I don't work with.

Should I consider myself privileged in this respect?

How dare you have friends, you privileged person!

Meetups, dance classes, community outreach, church, RPG message boards (speaking theoretically, not personally for every single one of those).

I have a collection of friends from different contexts. Some from past jobs, the gym and other friends. So WFH is great. If your only social group is work, then you should expand your circle, because you never know when the employer might fire you or lay you off. Which will make you very sad because suddenly you lose all your friends.

I've only had one job in my whole career where I met people I wanted to hang out with outside work. One of two of the guys I work with now might meet that bar if they weren't so far away.

Where else do we find people? Well, we're all older, so we already had friends from other activities -- political involvement, volunteering for arts orgs, our cycling group, etc.

Besides 'normal' friends, sports club, meetups, local university public lectures, out and about cycling etc. I don't see the problem.

I think your schedule (“work from home most often”) is my ideal. Did you find it difficult to find a company that permits this? Did you have to negotiate for it, or is it pretty standard for everyone?

To be fair I grew into it. Company moved several times as we grew, each time moving further away from where I lived. I had to work from home for a while when I broke my leg. It just sorta stuck from there. I mainly work with International teams, so F2F are mostly just a quarterly meeting affair. I'm well aware not being 'in the office' each day hurts my internal visibility, but it's a trade-off. Not going to waste <50% of my non-work, non-sleep, non-chore time sitting behind the wheel of a car in a traffic jam.

When on linkedin, set it to looking for a job / open looking for new work to notify recruiters and add a message to the box saying you're looking for remote only. They will come in droves.

I've just shifted all my social interactions from the day to the night, which works very well for me. And I frequently grab coffee or run errands at lunch so that I'm not cooped up all day.

It's nice to have a private office with a couch and windows in it.

I think remote work definitely favours the introverted personality. I have started a remote gig as of four weeks ago, and I was surprised that I did actually miss the water-cooler/coffee machine conversations. Based on my own personality (and the reasons I chose to pursue a remote position), I didn't expect to. It's harder to talk about sports or make wisecracks over Slack.

On the whole, I am happier working from home for a variety of reasons, but it definitely hasn't been without it's trade-offs.

I think a hybrid approach works the best: purely remote company with small offices in some big cities, where people can go if they want to. What I've seen with that is some people go almost every day, while some only come in about once a week or so, but nobody has chosen not to come in at all. It's also common among purely remote companies to host an annual or even biannual meetup.

I feel this pain, but when I return to the office the next day the existential dread of experiencing the hellscape I am now a part of just to have a handful of meaningless unfulfilling conversations with pseudo acquaintances most of whom I'd never see again if I, or they quit, is soul crushing.

coffee shops exist for this. rent a 5x5 desk in a coworking space. there are alternatives to home office for remote work.

Personally either of those options would be better for me than working out of my home. But it's a curious alternative to working in an office. You're still surrounded by people and get the downsides of you're sensitive to them (I'm not) but you don't get the social benefits.

In a dev shop social benefits are synonymous to distractions. I don't care to talk to bizops people every time they walk by me. I don't want to hear females stomping on the floor with their heels like fucking mech warriors. I also tend to work in sprints that do not conform to 9-5 work days because DevOps/SRE people are typically coding/R&D during the day, and releasing/unfucking defects at night depending on intrusive maintenance windows. I can do it all from the comfort of wherever I choose and have working internet.

Some days I work from the park, or work from a bar until I'm buzzed and need to go home.

Also the monetary value of not having to spend money on daily transportation, don't need a huge clothing allowance so you have something decent to wear every day so you don't look like a slob, don't have to waste money on food if your employer doesn't feed you and don't have to waste time preparing meals if you don't want to eat out.

If you need that much socializing time you probably don't have enough work to do, or need a hug.

I tend to fill this with Telegram voice messages, or would sometimes just go over to a coworker's house and work with them for a while just for the fun of it. But that's not something you can do unless you have remote people who are still local to you.

Oh, yeah, it's ABSOLUTELY not for everyone, and there are things you get "for free" in an office that have to be planned for us.

I have a theory that co-working spaces will be filled with remote employees. You get the benefits of remote with the social benefits of an office but with less distraction.

I'm with you on this one. I ask colleagues for a quick tea trip if I haven't talked to anyone the whole day. It drives me insane to not to talk to someone.

To each his own. I have been self employed for well over a year and cannot see myself ever going back to and office environment. Don’t care if it pays 5x more even.

This is my #1 challenge at the moment... how to sustain a remote company culture and offer mentoring/onboarding to early career Developers.

I support the "craft" of Software; which requires an equal distribution of Apprentice, Journeyman (Journeyperson) and Master level people.

But it's difficult to "pass on" the craft to an Apprentice who is remote, so our team tends to be all mid-career folks.

I've seen this strategy work: pick a senior engineer with an affinity for leadership and hire a couple junior people in their local area. The senior person would have the final say on hiring the juniors and co-work with them occasionally.

The company would pay for coffee/food if it's a coffee shop, space/food if it's a co-working space, etc.

That's an excellent suggestion. Thx.

One thing to focus on is teaching the skill to onboarding yourself into a new project. As an example, one part of that skill that I've learned from my current employer: It is actually socially acceptable to say "Hi, I've been working on $ticket recently and don't have a specific question but I feel rather lost. Could I grab 30 minutes on your calendar and you walk me through how SaltStack actually gets data values and turns them into resources and I take notes and ask questions?". For a long time, I would instead either:

A) Try to learn this by doing, which usually involved being very frustrated, taking 3x as long, and writing really quite poor-quality code. I only had the cognitive space to think about making the bare minimum change to accomplish the immediate goal, so I couldn't practice the habit of "do a small refactor to make the change easy, then make the easy change."

B) Ask for good tutorial documentation on the subject matter, which might not exist, especially if the code lives outside of a popular framework.

C) Ask differently-phrased questions that led me to get feedback from a previous employer that I was "trying to understand the universe", which led me to focus on strategy A.

Knowing that I can get walkthroughs, especially of business logic or code that lives outside a framework, is really hugely impactful. (side note: if you've wondered why people reach for frameworks while you think they are overcomplicated, this one reason why)

There's probably a whole blog post I would write with the goal of expanding a new-project-joiner's vocabulary of questions that is socially reasonable to ask.

During our interview process we attempt to quantify "Communication" as a trait; which includes "Ability to ask questions and clarify requirements."

It really is an essential must have skill for remote workers.

The ability to communicate visually and exhibit spatial intelligence through sharing screenshots and diagrams also goes a long way to being successful remotely.

An open office has the benefit of whiteboards and pen/paper to do visual knowledge transfer.

>An open office has the benefit of whiteboards and pen/paper to do visual knowledge transfer.

Any face-to-face setting really.

I'm not sure why we haven't done a better job of cracking the "like a whiteboard (or flipchart or whatever) but for people who aren't in the same room" thing. I know it's partly a surface area thing but you'd think we could do better when it's such an obvious, at least to me, missing piece in remote interactions.

Part of it is finding a good drawing tablet and good software for it. A $40 wacom tablet and whats out there for free/cheap on OSX currently doesn't work -- it takes too much frustration compared to compared to the intuitive interface of pen+paper.

You'd need something with the intuitiveness of MS Paint, which is hard. MS Paint's intuitive program model is world class.

I'm with you, I love working from home. I find I'm much more productive and am interrupted less even if that means the occasional cat on keyboard. I sometimes find myself missing being in an office for the camaraderie but I think it's mostly FOMO. It's the same thing as -- excuse the metaphor -- wanting to be in a high-end raiding guild in wow. Once you're in it you kinda wish you werent in a high-end raiding guild in wow.

>The biggest one is that we can't really hire newbies

I'd be interested in counterpoints but I'm inclined to agree. I'm mostly remote now though I have an office I can go into. However, while it's true that communication systems are much different than earlier in my career, it's hard for me to imagine the first ten years or so of my career after grad school working remotely. For all sorts of reasons, including social ones.

We do it and it seems to work out. Our system is based on assigned mentors, which we do for everyone who wants it, but explicitly do for newbie engineers for their first <insert period of time here>.

Interesting. My ability to get up to speed with the work itself and collaboration notwithstanding, I'm pretty sure that I would just have found it hugely isolating working from home, especially full-time, right after graduating from school. Even later, I'm effectively fully remote (although I have an office I can go into and did more in the past) but I travel a lot to events and I really worked by way up to fully remote over a period of at least ten years. So it wasn't like I jumped into the deep end.

Are you hiring?

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