Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

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This post has some great points about remote work that make sense based on what I've learned from speaking with remote workers . I would love to find a remote engineering job but I have run into 2 obstacles:

First, I believe some remote companies like to see some remote experience to know that you can be successful on a distributed team. This is a tough catch-22! I have asked my manager at my normal office job for opportunities to work remotely 1/5 days but I am not sure if this is adequate experience.

Second, it is much harder to find remote work for embedded/hardware engineering (my background). Obviously it is different when actual hardware is involved as it is more convenient to be in the same physical location, but the advantages of a remote hardware team should be the same as a remote software team!

If anyone knows of remote friendly hardware companies I would love to know!

Hardware is tricky. I work in medical devices and just went remote due to my partner's new job and move. There are a lot of things I can't do anymore. I used to be able to walk over to another desk and borrow $20000 test equipment for a day. Not anymore. I am sure you can do hardware dev remotely to some degree but there is a limit if you need expensive equipment. You can't just build a $500000 lab for every dev.

Software is much easier that way. I am lucky that most of my work always has been pure software so I will probably try to minimize tasks that need special hardware.

Thanks for sharing your experience! Obviously with specialized hardware remote work isn't feasible, but I think with a lot of things (like smart home, iot, etc) the focus is on the firmware and not so much the hardware.

I do think it may be necessary to switch over to software development but that would be a tough transition!

It's not hardware, but if operating systems-level programming is an interesting compromise, we're hiring remote workers for the Wine project :-) It occasionally dives down to stuff like HID, USB, Linux kernel, and X11/Wayland programming.

This sounds like an interesting area to work ok. I think I would enjoy it more than the medical stuff.

Luckily that's been the case for me. I work primarily on-site, but can work from home pretty easily since the hardware I test on is easily reachable from VMs I can remote into.

We may be looking to hire some remote embedded/hardware engineers soon. Shoot me an email.

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