Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

>I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem."

This is incredibly dismissive. Almost all the "advantages for employees" are personal. How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit? The advantages for remote work are almost entirely being sold that they are better for people. If someone has a personal problem with an aspect of it, then it should be taken seriously.

Imagine if you told an employer that the commute to work was rough so you would like to work remote and he told you "that sounds like a personal problem, why don't you move closer to work?"

View on HN

> How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit?

My commute is a 20 minute walk through a very nice park, and my partner walks the same route in the morning. It’s one of my favourite parts of the day, and it would be a hard push to get me to give that up right now.

How would working remotely affect your routine? You could even work all day in that park.

We're all very jealous.

You 're suggesting that you have to be forced by your employer to take a walk in the park. I think you 're justifying the parent's dismissive comment.

If you two didn't have that commute you'd be free to do it whenever you felt like, not forced to twice a day at mostly-fixed times.

Where do we draw the line though? Do we draw the line? At what point do my personal preferences/issues (and trust me I have plenty of my own) become my team's/workplace's problem? I certainly fall closer to the side of "it's my job as a professional to find a situation that doesn't drive me nuts", which is probably where our disagreement might arise. (Candidly, and unfortunately, it's probably born out of the pragmatic "a job don't owe you nothing" upbringing)

You aptly point out that "no commuting or stress" is a personal benefit; to play devils advocate with that, wouldn't having a "typical job" then be "dismissive" in not catering to someone who might be incredibly sensitive to the commute? I bring up this contrast since I think a lot of the friction with remote is that it's a change from the status quo, not necessarily that the status quo doesn't incur its own comparable (if inverted) costs.

Let me try and rephrase my point better, regardless. I don't think there's a one size fits all, period. Some people simply want/like/work better in some environments than others, and to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.

You asked the question at the end re: a boss telling me that about my commute. Honestly, yes, this has happened to me. And I switched teams, to the one I'm currently on, which is extremely remote friendly. I don't mean to whitewash remote work for any given person or say that everyone has such a lucky opportunity, I see it as two sides to the same coin, in which we shouldn't assume highly-granular personal choices to be a global downside to remote work, and we should enable as many opportunities for that choice to be present as possible.

Edit: After rereading my posts, I'll concede that "personal problem" may not have been the best way to put it, and comes off as far too accusatory. I want to delineate between problems I expect a professional adult to be able to understand their own exposure to and handle via their own autonomy, vs problems that are only in the purview of the workplace to solve/that we can't expect individuals to navigate feasibly.

> At what point do my personal preferences/issues (and trust me I have plenty of my own) become my team's/workplace's problem?

At the point when the company is losing value and opportunities that you could be providing. It's a business.

To be clear: whether or not it's economical to deal with this problem also matters.

> to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.

I'm not sure that listing pros/cons paints them as anything (or vice-versa), though maybe I haven't quite gotten your point (and I've read all your edits).

I've never had an opportunity to work anywhere all-remote, remote-first, or even truly remote-friendly, and I harbor an interest in the discussions, including anecdata, primarily because so many of these things are personal. I, as a reader, am pretty capable of figuring out which personal preferences don't actually match up to my own and which pros/cons may not actually apply to my situation or profession. The water isn't muddied for me by more information.

As such, I very much would prefer to hear a more complete [1] and expansive list of both advantages and disadvantages to a remote-only culture. I find it's even important to include what you describe as "isomorphisms of in-office problems" if only to point how they're easier/harder to deal with when working remote.

[1] I think a grandparent comment used the adjective "honest", but I think that's only relevant as maybe a jab at the article itself, which is clearly promoting an agenda.

The advantages are not all personal. The environmental benefits that come from reduced travel and reduced need for office space (which sits empty much of the time) is no joke. Neither is the economic / environmental benefit of freeing people up to live anywhere, not just where the corporate offices / factories happen to have located. That means people can go where the housing is available and affordable. We can repopulate areas -- like many midwestern small towns and medium towns -- that have emptied out as jobs have moved away.

These are very significant societal benefits, not personal ones.

That said, remote working isn't going to work for everyone. Extroverts, especially, I think tend to struggle with it a little bit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com