The rise of remote working will continue | Hacker News Reader

The rise of remote working will continue

fastcompany.com

342 pointskeiferski206 comments

>REMOTE EMPLOYEES ARE SIMPLY MORE PRODUCTIVE
>remote employees simply produce better results than their traditional counterparts.

>employees who spend a bulk of their working hours outside of the office are vastly happier and more productive.

As a remote worker, articles like these only preach to the choir (people like me) instead of actually convincing business people and decision makers.

Having a journalist repeatedly say "remote is more productive" isn't going to radically change the industry.

What the business world needs is a high-profile example of a company beating all the competition specifically _because_ of their remote workforce. E.g. a Google/Facebook/Apple type of multi-billion dollar success that shows the remote workers at Company X beating the onsite office workers at Company Y.

If that happened, there would be endless writeups and case studies in Harvard Business Review and WSJ with CEOs and middle managers copying the "remote work is our killer competitive advantage". The evidence of "more productivity" would be so compelling that incubators like YC and VCs would refuse to fund you if you didn't have a 100% remote work force because it would be business suicide to stuff everybody on site in a office.

Which company is closest to providing that compelling evidence? I don't see the remote work culture at Automattic & Basecamp really changing that narrative yet.

It's odd they're pushing "more" productive. Wouldn't a similarly compelling argument that'd be easier to prove be "as" productive, but you'd save $XXXk on overheads per year?

Productivity is the measure of economic output per unit of economic input.

But it's not an especially compelling framing of the point though. To influence decision makers then tapping into a loss aversion mindset with a tangible dollar figure attached seems much more likely to work than the more nebulous (and much harder to prove on an employee by employee basis) "productivity" metric.

I’d question how much cost savings there is. Maybe in the highest cost areas. But, leaving aside the implications of hiring people in lower cost areas and paying them less, it wouldn’t surprise me if additional travel costs for team meetings etc. balanced out the cost of a desk. A fair number of remote workers also get their companies to pay for coworking spaces.

Personal anecdata, but I've expensed only £120 in train travel in the last 2 years, and my employer doesn't pay for/subsidise coworking. Obviously it'll depend on company policy, but my benefits expectations with my current employer are minuscule to start with, so don't need any additional sweeteners over and above agile working to balance out.

It’s fairly common and probably a good practice for distributed teams to get together F2F a couple of times a year. The broader team I’m on does this. We’re spread around NA and Europe mostly with a combination of WFH, offices, and hybrids.

If someone has figured out how to measure developer productivity, they're positioned to win a Nobel prize or something. I have yet to see it done. That's why butts in seats is the de facto measurement.

I guess you're looking for Gitlab then. They even documented their work culture and publicly share it:

https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/resource...

>I guess you're looking for Gitlab then.

Gitlab would be the opposite example of an influential company the business decision makers are looking for. Gitlab has gotten $350M in VC money but they haven't yet demonstrated high profitability. And so far, they haven't "won" over Github.

The business world hasn't yet seen a trendsetting and influential company that has shown obvious evidence of competitive advantages because of remote work. The evidence includes beating the competition.

Examples of influential companies where their business practices spread would be Ford Motors and the assembly line improving manufacturing efficiency and therefore being copied by other manufacturers. Or Toyota's lean manufacturing and JIT inventory management reducing defects and saving money and also widely copied. Or Google's single-repository and Facebook's trunk-based-instead-of-branch-based development with continuous deployment to production being widely copied.

The Gitlab/Automattic/Basecamp companies are not influential enough (not big enough, not succesful enough, etc) ... so their remote work culture isn't copied like the previous practices of Ford/Toyota/Google/Facebook.

How about Stripe? They recently announced that their 5th engineering hub would be fully remote: https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub

Though I would probably argue with this article to some extent, the strength of remote isn't as big a sell for this large influential companies. I think the real selling point is that you can get high level talent form anywhere, the Googles and Facebooks of the work already have access to that talent, and have hubs all over the world. I would argue remote work is a bit of a bottom up movement, and we won't really see it shift to top down unless there is another wide market adoption that it becomes a requirement by potential employees. And as long as you're offering at least 50% more than competitors, I don't see that happening.

>How about Stripe? They recently announced that their 5th engineering hub would be fully remote: https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub

Stripe is doing what many other older companies already do: have a core of on-site office workers but also open a satellite office that has remote workers.

Google and Microsoft also have pockets of remote workers.

Again, I don't think Stripe's 5th hub being "remote" is going to radically convince a lot of business managers. But that blog announcement is recently dated May 2 2019 so it's too early to predict its potential influence.

Do you think it will really turn the heads of business leaders?

[EDIT correction to Gitlab amount above; funding was $168 million not $350 million: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-o...]

> engineering hub

> fully remote

Is it just me or does this make no sense? Does Stripe Inc. not know what the word hub means?

>And so far, they haven't "won" over Github.

Zero-sum is the only measure?

Just a consideration: I don't believe that remote is so much more productive. The central advantage that I see is that in other regions than the Bay Area, the costs of living are much cheaper. Since for the employee, the central metric of revenue is "salary - costs of living" you get:

- "better programmers/employees for the same money",

- "cheaper programmers with the same quality",

- you have it easier to find good employers (less skill shortage) since you can also include potential employees who live somewhere else and are not willing to relocate.

As a remote worker, it feels like spin to me too. Or, at least it's only being compared to cubicle farms or cargo-cult open plan spaces.

I know that personally the most productive I've ever been was attending an office each day which had people co-located in rooms of 4-7 people by team / project.

I absolutely love my remote situation, it's 1000% better for my general happiness (I feel like my work is a part of my life rather than something which puts my life on hold) and stress levels, and there are days where I can be very productive, but due to the simple factor of motivation and the symbiosis which can occur in co-located teams it simply doesn't compare to the productivity I experienced as a part of a good team in a well-planned office.

As an employee I definitely prefer remote, but as a (heartless) employer optimising only for medium term productivity (and ignoring the trade-offs of overheads etc) it wouldn't be so straightforward and would probably depend on the people and projects.

Edit to add: here I'm talking about productivity as quality output per unit time

Yeah, remote work seems to be a double-edged sword for productivity. As you say, the quality of life/work improvements are great, but the motivation and accountability and shared situation of a co-located team can provide the morale and accountability that push you to actually be productive.

I think remote work can theoretically be a lot more productive for solo-ish tasks like coding. On some days this is definitely the case for me, after I pull marathon coding sessions that likely couldn't have really happened so smoothly in an office setting. For some days or weeks where I'm consistently in the "zone", I really feel like I've gotten more done than I could've if I spent those days in an office.

But in practice, unless you have very high self-discipline, you're probably going to be battling motivation and boredom to some degree on a daily basis. You often might in an office, too, but it's not the same. In an office, you see everyone else working around you, probably talking about work, some of whom can see your screen (maybe not ever actually looking, but still in line of sight), and that's a potent cocktail for human psychology. At home, you're in or right near the same place you watch TV and movies and relax and sleep, alone or with your SO/family, and there's probably nothing really going on around you, so the environment is basically the same as your non-work environment. There's nothing around to light a fire under your ass.

I also prefer remote work, but I'm definitely trying to find ways to feel more motivated and symbiotic, and am interested in ways a manager or employer could help foster that for remote employees. I've been trying to work from coffee shops more, and that sometimes seems to help.

I think the team needs to be set up quite well for remote work. You need good tools and workflow in place. Otherwise, people will get bored, carried away and won't feel like getting their stuff done. Skilled management is really a must.

My place is trying remote, and sometimes I'm more productive in the office. However, if I get in the zone at home I will accomplish significantly more. I would definitely rather go outside for 10 minutes to take a break instead of chatting in the office. Unfortunately, it seems like there is no attention on how to make people more comfortable and engaged.

It’s definitely a team effort, and management has to be remote first for (imho) any remote success.

Too many places dip their toes in the water, but as a remote employee, I can sniff out immediately if a team is ‘backchanneling’ in the office, starting or ending meetings before/after the remote call is over, etc.

If the team is not remote-first, living and breathing with the sense that nothing should be isolated in a single physical location, it’s not going to be fun, especially for the remote workers.

It can sort of work in a sense where everyone gets together for some time, then everyone breaks off and does something, then they get back together.

But more often I see a team where 3 people are in the office, and 2 or 3 are remote—I’ve never seen this model be successful in the long run.

I’ve seen it work great. At Autodesk our team was half remote. People would come in at varying frequencies. Mostly for release planning.

Having a separate room dedicated to only work really helps. When I’m done I go downstairs and “leave the office”.

cheaper...same quality

This is the offshoring holy grail. Let’s be honest here please, exactly the same structures and cultures that allow effective remote work also enables continued and increased offshoring. With the accompanying negative effect on US developer salaries. Indeed companies should be focusing on this significantly!

> This is the offshoring holy grail. Let’s be honest here please, exactly the same structures and cultures that allow effective remote work also enables continued and increased offshoring.

The (microeconomic) problem with offshoring is that other countries (think of India, to use a stereotype) have a quite different level of education, work morale, sense of quality etc. That is why it worked so badly. On the other hand, inside a common cultural area, this should be much less of an issue.

I have development teams in a variety of locations around the globe (including Boston and Mumbai areas). The Indian primary education system is quite good, as is IIT.

We get excellent work out of India, with the primary downsides being the related factors of 10.5 hour time zone difference to either US coast and higher demands for coordination/communication.

If India was in a time zone with more overlap with the US, the situation would be far more dire for the average US software developer I think.

Well, you also get what you pay for; many companies are not willing to put in serious HR groundwork and hiring efforts in India, and it shows. There are plenty of great devs and employees I’ve met and am friends with in India... but many companies I’ve worked for/with are not willing to spend the money or time investment in consistently getting this level of employee.

Quite right! We took several years to get to this point and two different local HR/leadership "regimes", so it's not all peaches and cream to be sure.

If you go in and just want "lots of bodies, cheap", you're going to light money on fire, waste your time, and pull your hair out.

Cost of living is cheaper, so you'll just accept less money and let the company keep it?

You shouldn't determine how much you charge by how much you need to survive, but charge instead by how much the company can afford to pay, or how much they're going to make (harder to determine the latter).

After all, the company doesn't price its products by how much it needs to stay solvent, it prices them by how much they can get people to pay.

> Cost of living is cheaper, so you'll just accept less money and let the company keep it?

Let's rather put it this way: the company saves money; if they give some amount of the savings back to the employee (via salary), both sides should be satisfied.

Cost of living is cheaper, so you'll just accept less money and let the company keep it?

Yes. I work remotely from Uruguay. It´s basically the only option to compete with U.S. talent, the whole point of remote work for the company is to get the best talent at a price they wouldn´t get in the U.S.

I know that if I get an H1B visa or whatever my salary would immediately go up. Location and salary are unfortunately correlated (it´s not even cost of living, Uruguay is more expensive than 2/3rds of the U.S.).

Every single co-worker I know that has worked remotely was less productive.

Not my experience.

That being said, if your team was mainly non-remote with some remote employees, then I'm not surprised: it is the worst possible organization and a motivation killer for the remote person. Every article about experience of remote work I've read says: "don't put remote people on non-remote team" and I wholeheartedly agree.

I work remote and have some colleagues who do as well. Working remote does not make you more productive. Having the discipline to work and stay on top of communication is what makes you productive. A couple of those remote colleagues are not as productive as people who are in the office. A good part of the reason is they just aren't good communicators. Being remote, even when the company is geared towards being remote, means you have to be proactive in getting the information you need to do your job.

GitHub was acquired for $7.5B. That's pretty unicorny.

There seems to be limits to remote first though- GitHub is a remote first culture, but even then they had a non-insignificant in-office population, ~30% if I remember correctly. There are many job functions that require geographic presence- dealing with physical things obviously, but also some types of sales and I’m sure other functions I’m not thinking of. It is also harder to onboard entry level workers in a fully remote team.

>GitHub was acquired for $7.5B. That's pretty unicorny.

According to analysts, Github in 2018 was still losing money when Microsoft acquired them. This is another example of remote work enthusiasts inadvertently undermining their case. If the strategy is "use remote workforce for happier employees and it doesn't matter if you're bleeding money because one of the FAANG companies might swoop in to acquire you" -- you can see why that narrative is not convincing at all to business leaders!

This is the same issue as citing Gitlab's remote work culture while the CEO (Sid Sijbrandij) mentions they're not yet profitable. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014)

Another example is highlighting Elastic's IPO with 700-employee distributed workforce: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18168423

Elastic has also been losing increasing amounts of money for the last 3 years (see their SEC 10-K filings) and has never had a profit since their IPO. They lost $109 million in 2019.

To be fair, it doesn't mean that financial losses should be blamed on remote work -- but you also can't use them as positive case studies either.

tldr: do not cite Gitlab/Github/Elastic as evidence of remote work "being a success" to convince skeptical business managers.

To re-iterate the issue: the Remote Work Movement still needs a slam-dunk-world-beating story of its success. They haven't gotten one yet that convinces skeptical business leaders to fully adopt it.

What if Github was specifically optimizing for that end-goal though? It is hard to definite what productivity means unless you had inside knowledge of the goals of the business. Amazon took 14 years after their IPO to turn a profit, but that isn't to say that their employees were not productive. In the same vein, Github may have never turned a profit, but if that was not the goal, it's hard to say if their remote employees were not productive.

>, it's hard to say if their remote employees were not productive.

Yes, Github remote employees were productive in an absolute sense. The employees obviously created a usable website with enterprise customers before MS acquired them.

Instead of absolute productivity, the issue is if remote worker is more productive relative to office workers. (See the 3 repeated claims from the author I quoted in my first post.)

What we want is for Github's remote workforce to demonstrate such obvious superiority that it causes Bloomberg/WSJ/HBR to write articles explaining how business managers are incompetent idiots for not fully adopting remote work. But that didn't happen because Github wasn't successful enough to influence the business landscape like that.

In contrast, the business media has already written plenty of stories about Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity of workers. So far, influential business publications have not highlighted Github's remote culture as a competitive advantage.

> Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity

Out of curiosity, are there any actual documented improvements, or is it the same "this makes us more productive" that we're talking about the remote promoters spouting?

I wish I was more productive working from home. I mean, I am, in the sense that I get more chores done than I do when I work from the office, since I seem to procrastinate by doing anything but actual work related tasks.

This is me. I really wish I was, but home is where I sit around and watch TV, or whatever else. When I am home, I might get a half day of work at best. I am sure I could eventually, but I would have to re-arrange and set aside a place that is only work, and probably block things like amazon and netflix from that room even. Besides, I want the in person interaction with everyone at work. Couple days home and I am stir crazy. I need to get out and interact with people in person. And not just a random person at a coffee shop.

It’s not for everyone.

> set aside a place that is only work

Crucial.

> repeatedly say "remote is more productive"

Even if the CEO and the board are truly, honestly, sincerely pursuing actual productivity (which is far from granted), there are lines and lines of middle managers below them who have realized that achieving the illusion of productivity by cramming people elbow to elbow in a cacophonous open office and demanding daily or even hourly status reports is far easier than achieving actual productivity.

Elastic. Public since last year. 5.5B mktcap

I work remotely, and I will never go back to an office again if I have any say in it. It is simply so much more enjoyable and is great for my life and soul.

I go for a longer walk with my dogs after lunch, listening to a podcast or audiobook and just enjoy. I don't really enjoy the concrete that cities provide to you and working remotely allows me to live in a cheaper, bigger and I believe more healthy place.

If you have the possibility, work remotely at least a couple of days a week. I think you will enjoy it. One big downside is obviously the lack of social interaction which can be frustrating at times but it's basically the only big downside for me at least.

A minor downside is it feels like the days goes by faster, I believe this is due to each day being so similar so the brain does not simply register the day in the same way it does when you travel away from your home.

Just as being on vacation in a different country makes the vacation feel much longer than it would if you spend that at home. It sounds like something that is nice, but in reality, you don't really want to feel like your life is just flashing by. But it also gives you perspective to work on stuff you feel is important and provide value.

I also work remotely and being able to work remote will definitely be a major factor in taking any other jobs in the future. For me it comes do to avoiding a terrible commute and the open office trend has made it more and more difficult actually get work done in the office.

I'm lucky enough to have a hobby where I can interact with people and get that social outlet. So for me there's not really been a downside. In fact it's more of an upside where my social interactions are with people I choose to be around doing something I want to do rather that with people I'm around by default doing something I have to do.

Social life: if you want a busy one just start calling. The more you call the busier it will be.

Time passes too fast: it seems that we register the events in our life and not the actual time. A busy schedule will make your life "slow down". At least that's what I read somewhere.

For me, a 100% remote job was great at first but quickly became torture and lead to some really unhealthy habits (more snacking, increased alcohol intake, staying up late and sleeping until 7:55 etc.) - but everyone is different and perhaps someone who is more of an introvert would do better than I did with this.

> sleeping until 7:55

That's an unhealthy habit? I usually wake up at 8:30

It is when you start work at 8:00.

Oh, I see. Yeah I could definitely see myself waking up 5 minutes before a meeting if I worked remotely, which would be a bit unhealthy.

> more snacking

There are free snacks at the office while remote I'd have to buy my own, so less snacking for me. Same goes for the alcohol, I can't participate in office parties, if I'm not at the office.

I currently work remotely and enjoy it for a lot of the reasons you say. However I've had a pretty tough time with loneliness. I moved to a new city (relationship reasons) which is always challenging, but I think remote work has made those challenges particularly acute.

I think of myself as a fairly social person (at least relative to software engineers) but I've struggled a bit with this one.

Coming up on 6 years of remote work and I’ve found that if it weren’t for my wife (who works locally), I’d have zero friends within a 2,000 mile radius. She has basically built our entire social fabric from the various jobs she’s had locally. I could see how being single and being remote could run a toll.

Suggestion: Go to meetups (tech or otherwise) and other social activities. I've found this to be the best way to meet people who have a shared interest and are looking to be social. I've been remote for most of my career and this has been so important to my ability to stay remote. Yes it will be awkward at first, but it won't take long to meet enough people to make friends and it really only builds on itself from there.

I struggle with this sometimes myself. I also consider myself to be very social, unfortunately I live in a country where people don't speak to eachother unless there is a reason for it.

But if you want, hit me up on hn@ecmascript.tv and we can talk further.

I think the lack of social interaction from the office is a good thing because it's healthier for our friends to be outside of our work

I've been working 100% remote as a contractor/gigger the last four years, with the exception of half a day/whole day stints at the clients office from time to time. It has been working great for me, I have been super productive and have come up with some really creative ideas that have turned into several side businesses.

I also sometimes miss the social part of working in an office. When I get lonely I just rent a flexible desk by the hour at a co-working space where some friends or industry acquaintances work and work there for a week to get my social fix. There is also almost daily breakfast/lunch/dinner tech meetups/network events in my city so it's easy to hang out with other cool and smart people.

> There is also almost daily breakfast/lunch/dinner tech meetups/network events in my city so it's easy to hang out with other cool and smart people.

Wow,that sounds really interesting, I never thought something similar could be a thing. Out of curiosity, where do you live?

I live in Stockholm, Sweden.

> There is also almost daily breakfast/lunch/dinner tech meetups/network events in my city

Could you perhaps share some of the events you are going to? I happen to live outside the city you live in, so it is relevant to me :)

I use a combination of Meetup and LinkedIn, sometimes Telegram, Facebook or Twitter, and usually scout a couple of weeks to a month or so in advance. At these events I've met with people and connected after, got invited to some private event, meet more people etc.

Right now in mid July there is not many events, just a few, but check out Stockholm Startup Founder, Let's do business STHLM, STHLM Tech Meetup and SUP46 on Meetup to get started for after summer. Add own flavours to fit your interests and focus. I also use LinkedIn quite a bit to find events for specific areas I am interested in. Many times a post with just "Any tech aw going on today/this week/soon?" have been an easy way to get to know what's going on. It's usually at least a few companies hosting something to attend.

I work remotely 2-3 days per week, and in the future I only want to increase that number. Recently, I turned down an opportunity because it would have required me to commute to an office every day, without exception. For me, that is now a deal-breaker.

Some personal benefits to working remotely:

- I save an hour a day by not commuting

- I can work in whatever position I want

- I can wear whatever is most comfortable

- I can work outside, in the park or in my garden (I suppose I could do this near the office, but the park is not as nice)

- I can tend to my household duties or exercise during my short breaks instead of just milling about the office

- I can take a nap

- I can prepare a fresh meal

- Privacy / personal space

- No undesired socialising

My biggest reason to work from home has been my son's school schedule. He gets out at 3:00. There's no way I can reliably come from work, pick him up, bring him home, and then get back to work without wasting a lot of time. Now, I moved my lunch hour to that time, I spend the entire hour driving, pickup/drop off, and a little bit of play before I head into my office for the rest of the day.

On a side note - I feel like taking a nap is a bit too extreme for a work at home setup. Maybe you don't need to be available all the time during your work hours, but unplanned naps means your team will be unable to reach you at a time they assumed you'd be available.

My work schedule is shifted early, so I leave the office by 3pm. I think all offices should permit this to accommodate school pickups. A side benefit is that I never have to commute during peak times.

I do not need to be available at all times. There is an insignificant time-away-from-desk difference between going out for a coffee and having a short nap. A nap helps me stay unstressed, energetic, focused. I feel a headache coming on, a short nap nips that in the bud. Working continuously with no breaks is only a fine strategy for robots.

I'm with you. Plenty of people (across all job industries, tech included) go out for long lunches and/or coffee and often aren't checking their notifications for most or all of that time. A nap is no different, and is just as, or more, important to productivity and health as food or coffee.

For certain kinds of "emergency response" jobs in tech, that may not be an option, but for everything else odds are your teammates can survive if you aren't available right that minute. And even emergency responders need shifts and breaks during shifts. If you're a developer, unless you're very actively training a new team member or something, I can't think of many scenarios where an immediate response is truly needed. This is HN and everyone has a counterexample for everything, so I'd be curious about other takes on this, but that's been my experience.

Remote-first companies seem to be very asynchronous (or at least try to be), out of necessity to accommodate people across all timezones, but also to encourage this kind of flexibility.

I agree with "undesired socializing". Sometimes the peer pressure gets you. Especially the small talks in the kitchen area.

Yep. If the companies support remote working for entire teams (Stripe, GitLab etc.,) - it will be a boon. Else we'll get into a mode where you feel highly insecure.

And if you did go to the office, there's a good chance you'd get to the office only to find you need to work with people who are remote.

It is interesting to ponder if more remote working in the United States will lead to a rebirth of community institutions, the clubs and volunteer organizations whose decline over past decades Robert Putnam charted in his book Bowling Alone. Americans have increasingly made their interaction with their coworkers the core of their social lives. If people switch to working remotely and there are no coworkers to interact with IRL anymore, then maybe they will more active in their local communities? On the other hand, it could simply lead to spending even more time on social media to fill the gap.

"On the other hand, it could simply lead to spending even more time on social media to fill the gap."

Or both?

I work remote and this is kind of happening. I worked locally for five years and most of my relationships were my colleagues. But now my colleagues are just people I work with. I'd consider them acquaintances and I like them. But I'm not seeking a friendship. For that I'm looking elsewhere and it has its own pros and cons.

As a parent with not much me time, coworkers make for very convenient friendships.

As a remote worker I really want this to happen. As a parent of two tiny humans it’s hard to even fathom where the time goes most days.

After my new remote job settles down in a few months, attempting to start a low key coworking group in my small but quickly growing community is going to be my new project.

> attempting to start a low key coworking group in my small but quickly growing community is going to be my new project.

But if you are liberated from an office environment, why try to create a new office environment all over again? Why not seek out special-interest groups or volunteering/philantrophic organizations to provide social interaction?

It’s not a bad point. I personally need some separation between my home and work environments and I’ve found working completely on my own to be somewhat isolating. Right now I have a small portion of a guest bedroom dedicated to office and it’s not great. In my ideal world I would have a small space shared with a few people within a short walk from home.

I'm guessing strangers in a co-working space would feel less entitled to walk up and interrupt you throughout the day. That's largely my issue with the open office where I work.

I don't think Americans have made coworkers increasingly their core, more that the cores outside of work have eroded slowly. Those outside-work social cores are less relevant and ever-present in 21st century than in 20th and earlier.

It's definitely romanticized in American culture though. Ally McBeal, The Office... It's expected that your work culture will be fun and socially interesting.

I'd be worried about selection bias there. Plenty of TV doesn't show people at work, instead showing circles of friends or family. The fact that there exists some popular shows premised on work relationships is not itself evidence of much.

It's not just the existence of the shows. It's a very real culture that exists in the workplace for people < 40.

great point, tech meetups provide some of this

Why would anyone employ a remote worker who demands a US salary when the same remote work can be done in any country with cheaper cost of living and consequently lower salaries?

If you have to be on-site, you're only competing with locals. If you're remote, you're competing with the world.

A strikingly large amount of remote-work offers require the person to be in a particular time zone. Managers want you to be able to communicate with the team at times that are normal working hours for everyone. Even if there are Eastern Europeans or whatever who are comfortable working nights, they still wouldn’t get hired in spite of the opportunity to pay them less.

Taxation and other regulatory, bureaucratic nuances

Communication.

It's already hard to communicate with others with slack, video,etc. Now throw in various languages and the lag of third world internet and it is pure hell.

Having worked entirely remote for a decade, I side with remote with a bit of regular in office. In office can be helpful and there is some serendipity which cannot be accounted for remotely. People will also just ask someone else rather than send you an email/IM.

However, meetings are terrible onsite. Most meetings do not require strict attention or presence of mind (for my role at least) for the entirety of the meeting. You can gauge when to lean in and when you can work on something else. It can be a great time to handle installs, catch up on small tasks, or follow up on other conversations. I'd attribute a lot of my productivity boost to being able to leverage meeting times as productive minutes. Folks in the room tend to zone out as well, they just can't be as obvious with their lack of focus.

I think you’re describing the type of meetings that should be e-mails :)

For creative activities like design sessions where engagement is high, being co-located in the same room is essential. Virtual product design often ends up as design-by-committee after the team grows beyond the size of close personal relationships.

I half-agree, I love online meetings for visualizations (not strict color design) because everyone is seeing the same thing on their screen and not a whiteboard or presentation. There's more engagement and most tools allow for easy sharing and markup as well as video recording and transcribing.

Some sessions are easier in person absolutely but there are not plentiful enough to consider requiring butts in seats everyday.

I spend a lot of time in meetings, as both host/facilitator and guest, and work remotely 99% of the time. I highly recommend the book "The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance" [1] ("One of the top business books everybody will be reading in 2019" — Business Insider) or, for a quick summary, the author's webinar "The Surprising Science of Meetings: Evidence-Based Insights Leaders Need to Gain a Competitive Advantage" [2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190689218

[2] https://youtu.be/8rDuumUtfAM

I run a fully remote team of devs.

If you need to travel into a major city, that can easily be 45 mins each way. 5 days a week, it pretty much adds up to an extra day each week.

Then there's the benefits to hiring. You now have a global pool of talent to tap, and you can offer for them to live wherever they want. Plus a lot of people appreciate being able to see the kids to/from school.

And just general flexibility is useful. Why shouldn't you run to the shops for a few minutes while things are quiet? Or pay bills, do your taxes, etc?

How do you recruit? Where do u advertize?

I think the real problem is cutting down the initial 1000 CVs no ?

HN is the best place to find devs, without exception.

> I think the real problem is cutting down the initial 1000 CVs no ?

Yeah that's a time sink. Most applicants are unqualified. Good ones tend to stand out immediately though. Whatever you're after, you can find someone with the exact requirements you asked for.

> You now have a global pool of talent to tap

I wish more places adopted that. Lots of "remote" positions are actually "same city / state / timezone". Which makes sense in many cases and makes things easy for HR... But finding a global remote job is pretty hard if you're not in Europe/US.

I actually wish there was a better naming convention. WFH vs remote? Remote vs global? Majority of the time looking for remote job ads seems to be filtering out things like "remote (but you need to be within 20min of our Boston HQ)" and "remote (US only)"

I've seen variations of this. I think this is to get around the problem of lack of core hours.

If you are in the UK and you have somebody in your team from NZ, then there is never going to be any overlap in working hours, which might work, e.g. somebody likes to work late/early or might not (people like to stick to business hours)

edit:

The ones saying (US only) probably don't want the headache of dealing with people in a different tax jurisdiction

I completely understand why companies may prefer some country/location restriction. I just wish that we had better names for those categories, so we don't waste each other's time in mismatched recruitment. And so it's easier to say "I'm looking for unrestricted global-remote jobs".

Anecdata: I'm in the UK and have worked with someone from NZ, it worked really well. He was a designer and tester so when we came in the morning, he'd tested everything and left new designs to be built up, then handed over to him overnight.

It's more of a problem if half the team is UK and the other half is NZ.

I think a project on my company was run along the same lines as you mentioned but reversed: Testers in UK, Devs in NZ

Worked well but occasionally Test manager would stay late for a call, I presume that it was early for NZ guys.

I’ve had some of these discussions recently. Between butt in seat all day every day and globally distributed/work from anywhere there is a lot of potential variation which may be preferable to either extreme. For example, regular calls start to get hard beyond 6 hour time offsets unless one person is willing to regularly take very early morning or evening calls.

Likewise there’s a big difference between living across the country and dropping into the office once a week or so with other team members.

I work in an office but have to deal with multiple time zones 5 hours ahead in UK and 3 hours behind in Cali. Basically, I work in the morning for UK and night for west coast and take a long afternoon lunch, nap and workout.

> Lots of "remote" positions are actually "same city / state / timezone".

One thing to remember is that every state a company has employees in is another state that imposes regulations, taxes and other requirements. So, depending on the size of the company it may be far easier to have 10 remote employees in one state than 3 in 3 different states.

Not that that addresses your core issue (about "remote" not being truly remote), but just wanted to add some company side perspective.

The US really would benefit from adopting an EU "single market".

(This is partly trolling but partly entirely true - the EU is aware of the difficulties of interstate business and factors in reducing them, while the US has lots of market-fragmenting rules, especially in banking and healthcare)

I'm not so sure about that. Having local power to enforce employee protections is a huge thing. My state mandates things like paid jury duty and extra healthcare coverage, would I really want to wait until the federal government decides we need that? It may never happen!

I'm going to pile on this point.

Each state requires different health insurance plans, so the employer would need to supply 50 different health insurance plans.

It would roll back local minimum wage hikes.

Forming unions would require national coordination inside of local.

Many states have extra protections for the workers, like California protecting IP generated outside of office workers.

National politics are very unstable and the rules and regulations for everyone would be under threat of change after every election that changes the balance of the president, the house and the senate.

> If you need to travel into a major city, that can easily be 45 mins each way. 5 days a week, it pretty much adds up to an extra day each week.

Doing the math on my commute time and realizing how much time I was giving up was a big push to look in to remote work. Not only the time it wasted(~9 hours for me a week, +/- for traffic), but that time wasted was probably the worst 9 hours of my week and I felt like it just dragged down the quality of my life in general.

Interesting to see all the pro-100%-remote comments here. I worked for a company for about two years. One year in, they decided to go fully remote. The goal was to save money (the business was bootstrapped at the time) and to allow one of the founders to move to where his wife was attending graduate school. I don't feel like our productivity changed much. I enjoyed the flexibility but found myself feeling horribly lonely without the normal day to day interaction. So, they offered to get me a dedicated spot in a co-working space. That helped some, but not as much as being part of an in-person team.

So I ultimately left, although for other reasons. Now I work at a place with a generous WFH policy but a central office. I WFH maybe one or two days a week and this is way better.

I think it depends on the job itself sometimes as well. I work on a data science team, and I've never found a good replacement for doing math on the whiteboard with someone. The communication barrier introduced with a network connection is just painful in that case.

However, I also live in Boston, one of the few American cities with (mostly) functional public transit. My commute is a 10 minute train ride where I can read email/slack and think about what I'm doing that day. Or if the weather is nice, it's a 30-45 minute walk. It's no pain at all to make it into the office.

Seriously, I've been doing remote for the past three years and I despise it. Maybe I'm just a weird for working together as a team instead of lone wolfing everything but it gets incredibly lonely.

Being unable to easily bounce ideas or ask Joe why something works a particular way is incredibly frustrating.

The problem I have with this kind of happy rainbows and unicorns kind of reporting is that focuses on the companies and people where remote work is a success and completely ignores those who tried and failed. There is very little investigation into which situations can support remote work/teams and which ones don't.

Agreed. Feels like it's giving a lot of power to employees, employer less being able to know what's going on. I have a developer friend who's working two jobs at the same time for example. The distinction between independent freelancer and employee becomes very thin

If the work is being done, why does the employer need to know more than what is absolutely necessary?

What if both companies have a production outage at the same time? The employee would have an obligation to give 100% focus to both of his employers.

On top of that the employee is probably providing microfriction in day to day life: asking to reschedule meetings when double booked, having a longer than necessary delay in email/Slack responses.

If the person is a contractor it's a valid thing to do, but going to work for a w2 implies that job will be your primary commitment outside of family.

A lot of the issues people see with remote work or in this case multiple jobs, I've already seen solved at IBM. IBM is something like 70% remote work for its 350,000 employees. Every problem anyone has seen with remote work, IBM has probably already seen it and solved it.

In this case, my group at IBM is a consulting group and we work with multiple clients at the same time. I've had two (sometimes three) clients with production down issues at the same time. It's a solved problem, and we solved it by eliminating single points of failure. Every project we have a lead and a backup, and some bigger projects we have multiple backups. We also keep good documentation for projects in a standard template, so even if the person knows nothing about the project, they can step in, spend five minutes reading the docs, and then jump straight in.

Same thing with scheduling. We have to do a scheduling dance when we're putting out meetings because clients can't see our calendars and we can't see theirs, but it works. Is it perfect? No. But it's not a show-stopper either. Business still gets done. Work gets done. The only friction is the mindset of "that job will be your primary commitment". That is the only thing that's holding it back.

But like you said, it can be easily overcome by just saying you're a contract employee instead of a full time employee.

many people hold down two jobs. You don't owe the employer any more then what's in your contract.

I'm wondering the same. I like the whole remote thing because it removes a lot of B.S. in the relation you have with your employer : you are in an exchange and the boss needs to give you the work. If he doesn't manage you well, then it's his fault.

On the other hand, there are a lot of psychological / social mechanism which makes it so that more trust is built between coworkers / managers when they all gather everyday in the same place (what if an employee has life issues, how to handle that with the work they need to perform ? a good talk with a manager you trust could lead to solutions based on trust and face to face talks). By reading stuff about remote companies online, it seems like they are handling that by having annual or bi annual company-wide meetings / conferences / gathering. Which is great ! I just keep thinking about the differences between remote freelancers and remote employees, especially for computer science where there is a great lack of good developers around (so good ones have a lot of lever)

If she is paid based on deliverables it’s perfect. If he is paid by the hour, and the employers don’t know about the double job, value can be eroded and it’s hard to keep it fair. If someone hires you on a per hour basis they expect best effort, and if you have 2 jobs it’s clearly not best effort.

Your friend might be forced to work for two companies by the tax office; in many EU countries freelancers have to show at least two sources of income or they are forced to become employees/register themselves as a full business with all the necessary bureaucracy.

Really? What countries for example? How would that work out with companies that don't have an established subsidiary in the country of the freelancer?

Doesn't matter if a company is outside a country of tax residence of a freelancer. Within EU there is "reverse charge", with US there is W8 form, allowing freelancer to work for anyone in EU/US. But EU tax offices don't like freelancers in general, so they try to impose more difficult conditions to minimize their number.

For freelancers yes, but for employees... ? (which is the point of the discussion, force the change of status from freelancer to employee)

Employees are often prevented by the same tax office to have two comparable jobs at the same time; the only way that it could work is to become a freelancer.

It's actually good intentions. If you only have one customer, they push you in the direction of full employment to make sure you're not being exploited. Employment (in Germany) has health insurance included and your employer pays into your retirement fund. And of course minimum wage! Although that shouldn't be an issue in anything IT related.

It doesn't change much. You can make more money being a freelancer and pay separately for your healthcare and retirement fund; There's no free lunch

I get the argument this was done for low-paid jobs to prevent worker's exploitation. However, it complicates life of highly paid consultants that e.g. work remotely as they are traveling around the world or get quick short-term highly paid gigs from all over the world (imagine Deep Learning freelancers). Legislation doesn't like that as regular payment to retirement funds has a priority (i.e. paying off current retired persons instead of saving money for one's advanced age).

> employer less being able to know what's going on

My question is always how is this any different than when someone is sitting in the office? Unless the employer is literally standing over the persons shoulder all day, work and play look exactly alike. If the person is actually working another job, then it looks even more same.

It's very likely that if a company can't support remote work that they have other major structural problems. It's really not hard to have remote developers. Any competent management structure should have no issue with it.

You need to switch all of your IT and meetings fully online. Doesn't sound easy if you didn't start from zero with that in mind

Eh. Even if the company is a single office, I’m pretty sure people need to travel and need to be able to get online and have meetings when they’re not in the office.

It's not so trivial. If you have only one remote worker, you need to adjust the mindset of all their colleagues.

A frequent example of this is having remote attendees in a voice/video meeting not being recognized, forgotten or just spoken over. Learning how to integrate remote employees and behaviors takes time to learn for any organization, even competent ones.

I have to admit that I consider that a fairly trivial problem. I will say that the bar for quality has to be higher for fully remote employees. They must be somewhat self driven and mature enough to speak up and be heard when the time comes. Mediocre people can "hide in plain sight" when they're in the office every day. The lack of output or formal collaboration comes out more when they're remote and can't pretend to work/chat with colleagues all day long.

I think that is a good point. For those reasons many have come to the conclusion that fully remote workforces using appropriate communication paradigms (usually written) are more feasible than partially remote.

I work in a fully remote enabled team, and one thing we do to even the playing field is always join calls in separate rooms even if we're in the same building.

Works well!

> There is very little investigation into which situations can support remote work/teams and which ones don't.

One possibility for the lack of visibility is that the companies don't want to be known for failing at their support for remote work. This comes off poorly for the employer in multiple ways.

In my personal experience, most companies that try and fail at remote work didn't set themselves up for success and the motivations were lacking. They weren't prepared to make the right trade-offs and commitments, so it was obvious it wasn't going to work.

I think that is covered in the last section, although they didn't tie the points together. If you give your remote workforce clear instructions, it works. If you do not give clear instructions, it fails.

You could expand upon that by getting into all the different communication tools and channels that are needed, as well as the product management maturity that is needed, and the individual communication skills. But at the end of the day, remote working lives or dies based on good communications and instructions.

Remote work can be an interesting forcing function though- the things you need to make remote work succeed will make you a better company anyways, so why not try to work towards a remote friendly culture?

Im curious whether the "evidence" takes into consideration that the people who switch to remote working have naturaly high level of self-organization and often value their own time a lot more simply because they are "better" than an "Average Joe" from the Corp Co.

Evidence that sound like "A group of experts that are alot better than an Average Corp Joe, produce a lot better results even when working remotely" is not as impactful, dont you think ?

Tho if the best candidates value remote working so much, mby corporations have not much of a choice but to change hiring policies.

Also, higher-performing workers may have a stronger hand to negotiate remote working into their contracts than average ones.

I've been working remotely for 3 years now. This year with a new daughter we took off to Europe for 3 months to visit family (live in NZ). It's so amazing to be able to continue to work but spend time with the grandparents. Incredibly lucky and privileged position to be in.

I too don't want to go back to office life full time if I can avoid it. Unfortunately getting this position was sheer luck, and, I'm not expecting to find it easy to find another full time remote position when this ends. Still, that's a problem for another day ;)

Over the years I developed my own spin on this topic. For me it’s not about working remotely but the ability to choose day by day whether i want to work remotely or on-site. My current balance, evolved organically, is 4 days remote 1 day on-site. The constraint of course is that you have to live close enough to an office of your company to commute. The upside is that you can have it all :)

Taking it a step further, even being able to make such calls as going in for the AM and coming back home for the PM can be incredibly powerful for both productivity and maintaining a presence as someone in upper management. I’ve found myself increasingly in this situation organically, balancing my family obligations, meetings in different time zones, and having the time for my team and to get everything else in the middle done.

Close enough to commute, but as close as when you commute every day.

I would tolerate a 1 hour commute each way if I only had to do it once a week but never if I had to do it every day - the short time I did made me miserable.

This is actually what I do now. I have just about an hour of commute time by car when I go into the office, which I do about 1 day per week.

It isn't bad then and I actually enjoy the commute most of the time.

I am in the red on this one. I travel one hour both ways for a sysadmin job. But, hoping to relocate or start doing remote 2-3x a week.

Back when I was actually going into an office occasionally, the 4 remote / 1 in office schedule is what I wound up with (through my own choice). Spending 1 day (sometimes 2) in the office, the rest remote is really nice. At least for me, it's optimal.

Going to echo the main point I do on all remote threads - it needs to be inherent to the culture. Things can't be decided by the water-cooler if you have people who are working remotely - you need, ideally, to be "remote first" even if you have a physical space.

We have offices, but every employee can work remotely (realistically, 2/3 days a week at least), and with the spread of offices and team members, working collaboratively is a native thing.

If it was only a few people though, you start forgetting to put a Skype link in a meeting here, not having resources to share ahead of calls there, and making decisions in the corridors all over the place.

Have an office, sure, but behaviours need to be the same whether you're sitting next to someone, or hundreds of miles away.

The discussion so far is about work/life balance, productivity, etc. And those are very important and should be discussed.

However, I think the climate change impact is underappreciated. An example with some numbers I picked to keep the math simple:

Assume a 40 mile round trip daily commute. And also a 40mpg car. Here's the effective mpg of that car with days per week WFH (when WFH, the car trip that didn't happen can be considered virtual miles traveled with no gas used):

0 days WFH for the week: 40mpg

1 days WFH for the week: 200 miles / 4 gallons = 50mpg

2 days WFH for the week: 200 miles / 3 gallons = 66mpg

3 days WFH for the week: 200 miles / 2 gallons = 100mpg

4 days WFH for the week: 200 miles / 1 gallons = 200mpg

The debate is too much about extremes (full remote vs full in office). A partial solution of just letting everyone have 2-3 days of WFH could allow employees, employers, and society to get a lot of the benefits of both remote and in office.

The climate cost isnt inherent in commuting though, only for commutes in a personal vehicle. Commutes by public transportation may have much lower per capita emissions (for a well utilized system), and marginally the carbon difference of adding one more commuter to an existing transit system is effectively 0

Right but in the US the vast majority of areas require cars. Things are just very spread out and so everything was designed for cars. It's not feasible to do public transportation like in Europe in most places because of the very low density and vast areas.

Yes, when you drive a carbon-dioxide emitting vehicle less, the impact on the climate is lessened.

When working from home, you don't drive anywhere. That's a distance of zero miles traveled, whether they are virtual or real. I think the calculation you've shown doesn't really add to the point you're trying to make.

It's clear if you're aware of environmental policy in the US. There's a big fight right now between the federal government and CA just to keep a modest target of 50 mpg average for cars by 2025. Climate change discussion here involving cars is often expressed with mpg as the main metric, they even created mpge for EV to try to link the two.

There's just some kind of cognitive dissonance with a lot of middle management and remote work. Event with a lot of remote employees, they never seem to fully take the time to learn it, and take advantage of it.

Anecdotally, my company, which has about ~50% remote employees, has stopped advertising remote positions as it tries to fill up large office sites it's invested in.

It kills me, because I've witnessed several, very experienced remote employees leave, which then are not really replaced. We tend to get little teams or clusters of people from companies nearby the new office sites. Those new "in office" teams often come in with a built-in culture, which of course rarely wants to learn or extend what's there: instead, they seek to make their fingerprint with something new. Almost every senior remote employee that's been hired solo has _never_ tried to rebuild the universe around them; but these new teams seem to start with that kind of mandate.

I actually think we'll end up somewhere in the middle, where people work remote most of the time but companies may have more smaller offices for people to go into.

My wife works remote a lot of the time (But has the option to go to an office) and when she goes weeks w/o going to the office, the lack of interaction can get to her.

I agree - small satellite offices instead of huge massive HQs and have employees work remote most of the time with option to hit a local office

Exactly, would allow companies to hire from pretty much any major city and would allow people to relocate back to where they are from and maintain a great lifestyle and still have some level of camaraderie at work.

As someone who hires software developers, opening positions up to remote employees allows us to get the best bang for our buck.

We can hire top talent for our given price range without geographic restriction, save on costs (no desk, office, etc), and retain the employee longer.

There are downsides, but they're 95% managerial issues.

+1 on retention. Once we had a second office, the benefits of retention started out weighting any down sides of having one more person on the other side of the video screen.

Does anyone here have some perspective from the employer side? While the benefits for the employee are pretty clear, I am skeptical about the higher productivity claims.

As already somebody wrote earlier, you cannot make decisions with remote workers at water cooler anymore. You must tweak your processes and write everything down. This requires more work from lazy management. Basically, home office from employer side is a bad thing since it requires more work and better processes. This transition is barely doable for crappy shops (I work in such). First issue is to force people write everything down and it’s already impossible for some companies. I would say, home office option strongly correlates to company’s culture. Stay away from employers, where it is forbidden. Such place probably has already very toxic culture.

Top benefit is access to a global talent pool. Also, in a fully distributed team, everyone logs all time against defined tasks (eg GHI or trello card) so you get useful data. Having no single time zone means no “management by walking around” so you need to embrace disciplined delegation and accountability. Managers are valued for knowledge rather than baby sitting.

Edit: typo

Employee retention, continuity, and fewer disruptions. I'm not management but I am on the interview team, and I can tell you that hiring senior and architect level positions isn't easy in this job market. Loose one of those folks and an entire scrum team is crippled for maybe 3 to 9 months. Say 10 people for 6 months at 2/3 productivity, and you're looking at 20 developer months wasted, and user facing projects delayed or tabled. Even if you happen to find someone quick, you're loosing years worth of company specific history/experience.

As a remote engineer at a good but little known medium sized company, I could get an offer from a FAANG company(no interview, automatic hire, big raise) and realistically I'd probably tell them no. They don't have offices where I want to live, so if they won't do remote, then they just don't have a compelling offer. My quality of life would suffer too much. The most important and overlooked part of the hiring pipeline is employee retention, and my employer has already retained the $%^&* out of me by letting me work remote.

Right, I understand your point completely, my wife is fully remote, and we are both pretty burrowed in where we live, so it would take some doing to get us to move. It seems to me though that all this talk about greater productivity is self-serving nonsense. Remote work is a loss for the employer, all else being equal, though it might very well be worth it at least in this market.

Yea, I'm not sold on the productivity thing either, at least not on an individual contributor level when everything is going perfectly. But high turnover and/or low headcount in the senior engineering ranks can really send your team/company productivity right down the drain. And with a little investment in tooling and process, having a third of the team on video rather than in the room is a fairly modest inconvenience. And I'm sure better than half of slack messages at my company are between people sitting in the same room.

I disagree about the self-serving nonsense part. Sure, it requires a certain degree of discipline and self organization, but whenever I work at home on side projects, even if they aren't particularly enjoyable, I'm freuqently surprised by how much faster I seem to work if I'm not interrupted by chatty co-workers, ringing telephones and other minor annoyances that are quite significant in their sum. Don't get me wrong, all these things have their time and place, but asynchronious communication allows me to deal with them when I feel like it, which is a major advantage for me.

I think this depends a lot on the company and your personal ability to tune out noise. Also whether your company uses slack heavily. Office or remote I find 99% of my interruptions are from slack, but they're semi-async and mostly ignorable if I'm heads down on something.

The difference is that I can ignore or mute Slack for a while, which doesn't work as well with people physically visiting your desk.

Sure, but do you just do more work or do you do the same work in less time (and use the extra the time for work balance) ? In my experience most people will just do the later.

Isn't either case a win?

You can hire people with lower salaries in countries with cheaper cost of living.

Instead of Americans in Silicon Valley who need huge salaries to pay their Bay Area mortgage.

I imagine a big benefit to employers is that if a valued employee doesn't live in a tech hub, then there are limited opportunities to get another job.

It's the counterpart to the Silicon Valley saying "My job security is I can get another job"

Hiring remote gave my startups access to amazingly talented people where they were, not where we were. It allowed the team to work in a space they felt was productive and comfy and our employee turnover was non-existent.

I'm a big proponent of distributed teams.

Fully remote for 4+ years now. I consider it worth £5-10k on top of my salary due to cost of commuting (cash + time). I think it can definitely negatively impact career if the company is not properly set up for it, and can also act as a discouragement to seek out better opportunities - before I'd consider even applying I'd need to know I'd get that £5-10k commuting cost plus a decent increment on top. Most companies are going to baulk at that as a pay rise unfortunately.

Hey ho. Golden handcuffs of a sort.

I go in to the office to get away from my family. It is hard to focus with them around. The commute sucks. Once my kids are older, I'll probably switch to a remote gig if I find a good opportunity.

I've worked remotely for almost all the last 18 years. My last true office job ended when the company failed in October of 2001.

I started out working independently doing web development work and project management, then joined a startup. The startup had office space in an incubator near my house, so we did use an office there for about 6 months. Then one of the founders bailed, and it was just me locally, so we gave up the office and I went back to working at home.

I joined my current company in 2007. For the first 3-4 years, I traveled a LOT, but then telepresence took root and now I almost NEVER go to customer sites. I haven't been to one in a nearly 3 years.

We have a small, very solid team. We communicate by chat, email, or phone constantly. The only downside is that we can't really hire baby devs, because there's no watercooler. A fresh graduate would be pretty adrift, especially since our market is kind of esoteric.

But that's a small thing.

Decentralizing the office lets us decentralize where we live. You can live outside a city or in the middle of nowhere as long as you have a good internet connection. Makes cost of living go down, and puts less pressure on the real estate industry for high density areas.

Imo a huge win in the long run.

what isn't discussed though is companies offloading many of the operating costs onto employees, and whether that is covered. It's a great tradeoff, but worth being aware of it and asking for coverage:

- increased electricity costs

- increased wear-and-tear of your home

- increased housing expenses (requirement for a 'office' space in your house)

- infosec vulnerabilities: home networked and physical environments now become vectors into a company, are you being compensated and covered for the risk

- business DR planning: a DR plan becomes much more complex, although perhaps better-hedged, with remote work.

etc.

This already became a bit of a thing when personal phones became a requirement for work, and companies to be fair did adjust fire w/ provide work smart phones.

> many of the operating costs onto employees, and whether that is covered.

Asking your company to pay your electricity cost and house wear and tear would be like a commuter asking them to pay for your shoes and clothes due to "wear and tear".

The last 2 points are valid though.

Disagree, shoes/clothes costs are not at all compatible with the costs associated with physical location of work costs.

Accounting departments spend a great deal of focus on fixed asset depreciation for tax purposes, and general office planning. Eventually, work places move to new buildings- office buildings get old and in disrepair from use.

These costs that a company accepts as part of doing business get offloaded to the remote employee. It's most certainly a planning factor doing business- check out a SEC form for instance.

With remote work, that cost gets offloaded to an employee. You won't see the impact on your house for a long time, but unless companies are subsidizing you to afford a bigger home to account for additional office space needed, that wear and tear from use, that asset deprecation as a result of work use, comes into your actual home.

So the question should be along the lines of:

- where is your fixed asset depreciation as a part of doing business for your taxes? Are you filing it? Your company certainly is.

- are the remote work benefits enough for having to accept this cost without financial augmentation

-are you getting paid enough extra to cover this.

Odds are most workers who work remote won't/don't consider this, but your company certainly is for its own workplace, why not you? You've leased out part of your home for your company's workspace essentially, but done so free of charge.

I work remotely and like it but this is a pretty low content article. It’s mostly about how remote working is nice together with some very basic advice like have the right software installed. Certainly nothing objective about why it will continue.

I've been working remote for 9 years now, after having worked on-site for 20 years prior to that.

Remote work is great, perhaps the greatest perk of all. No driving, no time wasted, less office politics. It's the way to go.

ricky J my man. I just started on this life style after a solid 10 years of office action. Some cubical and some open. I'm not sure it can work for everyone but for myself (software / data analyst) it rules. I can focus intensely, peace and quiet. No co-workers talking you to when you have your giant headphones on.

However some folks thrive in more social situations. Not sure it works for them. For myself it has been great. That is just the work side of it. On top of that I am home with wife and kid an infinite amount more than when both parents worked and kid was in daycare.

Myself, 6 months remote after 8 years in an office. I like it a lot. But I figure it depends on the person. My friend who thought he was fine as a loner hates it. He has no nearby friends or family.

I love it. I never liked water cooler talk or the people at the office but I saw value in it since being antisocial wasn't good for my career.

Now that I'm remote, there's much less politics/drama. I imagine in other companies it could be a problem that there was politics you don't get to keep abreast of, but I suppose I am lucky. I am measured more by my output than by my smile and/or on-the-spot responses.

I have more time for my family, I get all the household chores done during the work week and free up my nights and weekends. I don't think I'll go back to an office if I can help it.

Sourcegraph CEO here. One data point: we’ve always been remote-friendly at Sourcegraph, and we’ve become remote-first. The vast majority of our recent hires on engineering and sales have been remote, and we even had 2 SF teammates decide to move away (and become remote Sourcegraphers).

I personally understand the value of remote work for productivity and happiness. I have a dog who I love to walk in the middle of the day, and I know that for certain types of work, being at home can get me in the zone better than being in any office.

I worked remotely for twenty years and then decided I wanted to work in an office so I worked as a contractor at Google in 2013 and managed a deep learning team at Capital One 2018-2019. I am back home now living in the mountains of Central Arizona and now I volunteer at the local food bank for social interactions. I would like to find a part time remote job, but between volunteering and outdoor activities with friends during the day, I would have to find a job that let me work early in the morning and in the evening.

Get a remote job in EU or Australia ;-)

I really don't get the article's point about IoT. I'm all for remote work (I've been 100% remote the last 4 years), but this is a pretty poor article, honestly.

The biggest obstacle to reducing greenhouse gases isn't a political party. It's commuting.

My feeling is that most jobs can't be done remotely and the vast majority are done more efficiently in person. We're in our small tech bubble in which people sit down all day in front of a screen and mostly interact through text, the vast majority of jobs aren't like that.

Look at the top US employers worlwide (or the largest sectors of employment [0]), there is no way UPS, walmart, fedex, starbucks, &c. can work with remote employees. [1]

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/200143/employment-in-sel...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_United_States-...

There is some truth to what you're saying -- medical professionals need to examine in person, retail employees need to be at the store, package delivery can't yet be completely automated.

If you had said there was no way those employers can work with all their employees being remote, that would be true.

However, all office work could potentially be remote with little or no technical advancement from where we are now. When I look around the city I'm in (Boston) I see a lot of office buildings. I think the potential reduction in commuting is huge.

You mention your feeling that the vast majority of jobs are done more efficiently in person. Do you still feel the same way when you factor in the unproductive hours spent behind a steering wheel daily?

I strongly disagree. Reducing warming to <=2C will take drastic government regulations. It's never going to happen. This isn't something that can be done by recycling campaigns or "work remote!" slogans.

The ineffectiveness of slogans is irrelevant. If you want to prove my statement wrong, point to a viable political party with a plan that drastically reduces commuting. Then I'll agree that all other political parties are obstacles.

Our company is remote first (no physical office, co-founders spread across the world), and one frequent point of feedback we get from new hires is that working for a company with a 100% remote culture is quite different than working remotely for a company with existing physical offices. When you are working from a distance with an otherwise co-located team, it is easy to miss out on important information, and interacting socially with coworkers (a challenge for any remote position) becomes even harder.

Btw, we are hiring. Stack is Elixir, Rust, Typescript, React, GraphQL, and we have many challenging/interesting problems! https://jobs.lever.co/nash.io

You’re describing a distributed organization, not remote. Distributed assumes no home base, no HQ, nothing. Everyone works from home or a co-working space.

SV is staunchly apposed to remote, I can’t even imagine their opinion on distributed.

I live in SV, and while I wouldn't say hiring remote employees is common, it is becoming much more so. Staunchly opposed doesn't sound correct given the other founders I interact with.

And "remote first" is a common term so far as I know: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/02/08/means-remote-first-com... Though I do also like "distributed" as a description.

Seattle job search in 2018 revealed almost zero companies who did remote work. Butts in seats appeared mandatory. Kinda weird.

I personally think it reveals a generally weak management culture, along with issues with employee development and training inculcating self-starting thought.

Outside of the HN echo chamber you’ll find that distributed and remote work is deeply frowned upon. The worst perpetrators are often big tech cos and startups funded by SV VCs. It’s incredible how resistant tech is to remote work.

There are a few Microsoft/Amazon teams that are remote-friendly, but you’ll have to look for them.

Remote for over ten years and like other commenters, not going back to an office anytime soon if I can avoid it. Obviously there are professions this sort of arrangement doesn't work as well for, but I think over time there is reason to be optimistic that the increase of remote work will have a lot of positive impacts: less commuters on the road and spreading the economic benefits of highly skilled jobs out to areas that haven't traditionally enjoyed them.

I know at least three startups personally who have a working product with a remote team. The key, though is that if you're the CEO driving the product, you don't need to use expensive Bay Area engineers. There are lots of good Pakistanis living in Pakistan who'll do as good a job.

Once you go remote as a founder, there's no reason to search only in America. It's going to be a revolution in product development, I think.

Our venture studio is built on this premise.

As more and more people need to work together but a part, that creates the need for some underlying infrastructure that works behind the scenes to glue things together as if people were sitting next to each other.

It also interesting enough touches on the field of non-desktop work which is 80% of all jobs but only have 1% of Silicon Valleys investments.

If this is a space you are into I would love to hear from you.

Remote working is the real game changer: less commute means less pollution which means greener and better environment and less usage of fossil fuels.

I still don't understand why companies work against this (including mine), moving as argument the fact that workers might work less or do something else than working for the company

As usual, paranoid managers fearing they're losing control over their "minions".

Because the goal was never to be productive but to be seen as powerful

I am happy I have the option to work from home if I need to, but I will never ever want to do so for extended periods of time. I might not consider my coworkers friends, but I really enjoy their company. My work days are fun because of the great people I get to hang out with.

Articles about remote work often focus too much on life and not enough about work.

I’d like to read more about HOW these companies solve remote problems such as: communication, responsiveness, measuring productivity or architectural discussions.

I am especially curious about managing abuse done by remote people.

I'm curious to know how Gallop measured their results noting that remote workers are "substantially more engaged in their jobs than traditional counterparts who are stuck behind desks all day." Though I understand the logic, how did they measure this

They may have observed remoters deliver the same unit of work faster and more correct.

I wonder if there is bias in that companies offering remote working tend to fall into a category of companies that tend to have more highly engaged employees on average. ie, there is much more soul sucking onsite companies mixed with soul enhancing onsite companies and the remote/onsite isn't the critical factor?

Unfortunately I have an awful home situation so if I were to work home the only way to be at all productive would be for me to go somewhere else and work; the local library is ok but the bandwidth is disappointing and certain ports are blocked.

I like the "option".

I work from home 2 to 3 days a week, but man for some meetings and such I really want to be there.

Eliminate the “there” and you’ll find that it works. The only two reliable work models are “everyone is in the same room” or “no one is in the same room”. Trouble arises when there’s a mix.

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