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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

I would be in favor of a number of working arrangements, ranging from working in a Bay Area office full-time(least favorite) to working from home most-time in an area that provides me with the chance to buy a home and have a reasonable commute to a satellite office.

I am absolutely, 100% against full-time WFH in an expensive, low-quality(no sound/thermal insulation) Bay Area apartment without a dedicated workspace.

> if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world

I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.

One final point is that anyone looking to judge my WFH productivity better take into account the endless procession of major disasters taking place outside my window. WFH in a pandemic with looting and massive wildfires is not the same as WFH in a 'normal' year.

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>> if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world

> I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.

Welp, I'm the CEO of a smart wearable device company (https://pavlok.com). We were based in Boston because everyone told me, and I believed you HAD to be in one place to build a startup, and DEFINITELY for a hardware startup.

Then when I finally closed the Boston office and moved to Medellin, Colombia. Then budapest. Then Berlin. Then Bali. Then Mexico.

All while doing the same for the team -- remote first, work anywhere.

Only then did we begin to explode in productivity and success.

I don't think it's true for EVERY job (tough to do janitorial cleanup from another country). But it is possible for a lot lot lot lot more than you think.

I can’t even with this comment.

Not everyone has the resources to make a working place anywhere viable. You seem to have the resources to make a hotel in Budapest or whatever work. Talking so causally about international travel already puts you beyond most Americans’ income.

So yeah it is very, very easy for folks with a job like yours, and with the resources you’re afforded, to work anywhere. The issue isn’t proximity to resources, but the ability to complete work.

It seems to be implied with the closing of their Boston office that the whole staff is remote, not just this person.

also that they had already built a strong team

Staying at AirBnBs in the listed cities and working from there is quite likely cheaper than renting office space in Boston (probably even including airfare). So it’s not about “resources” as in money, it’s about being able to be productive working from all these places, especially when taking into account the time zone difference to other members of the team.

Yes, and... I’d be curious to see which digital nomads follow the local taxes regulations. It’s easy to get in trouble with working abroad.

Fully agreed, taxes and work permit/visa are topics that are likely being neglected by most. Often, there simply isn’t a visa category that allows individuals to work for foreign entities while residing in another country, as regular work visas are for employment with an entity based in the country.

>regular work visas are for employment with an entity based in the country

Usually true. Although some countries (like China) do have a business visa that you're supposed to get if you're e.g. attending a business event.

With a US passport traveling to countries for example, there's nothing keeping you from visiting for a month or two and working from a short-term rental. I don't know all the theoretical rules that may exist but I know traveling partly/fully on business, people obviously do work for their US company all the time without filing any special paperwork.

I met these guys a long time ago in Boston. It's literally a company based on a physical device that shocks you to make you more productive. It's a fucking joke

We’ve sold over 100,000 devices and helped people quit smoking, wake up on time, and lose weight. You can see articles about our users in the NyTimes, Bloomberg, and more. Why such hate, for a product that helps people?

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/a-shocking-way-rea...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...

Don't be daft, an average US salary will get you an above average life almost anywhere else in the world.

Why does working remote-first require more resources from the worker? You don't have a commute and you have the flexibility to choose where to work. In this scenario, nobody is forcing you to travel anywhere—a sharp contrast to non-remote jobs where you have to relocate if you don't already live in the right, usually expensive, place!

Snacking, food, cleaning, equipment etc.

I moved out of Boston because we were spending money too quickly. I dropped non-personnel expenses by 80% by doing so....

How do you know the success explosion wasn't about to happen regardless?

Because I would have run out of money and died pretty soon after if I hadn’t left

Does that imply the key factor wax runway (captilal) rather than the remote work itself?

Sorry I was unclear. What I was trying to say is that if you haven't offshored your team already(i.e. moved part of your engineering operations to E. Europe, Asia, etc.), then you have a good reason for doing so. Offshoring engineering has been going on for decades at this point. Anyone threatening that working from home means your job is a target for offshoring(to someone else, not you in that location) is full of beans. It's an empty threat.

I have no doubt that I could personally move to another country and do my job. I seriously considered it as a way to escape unfair alimony payments, and still might.

> What I was trying to say is that if you haven't offshored your team already, then you have a good reason for doing so.

What if, pre-covid, the reason was "we believe having everyone in one office, regularly meeting face-to-face, is more productive than anything involving videoconferencing" ?

These companies certainly can try and great for them if they can make it work. If it was easy though it would have already happened to a greater extent.

Many companies have a history of failed outsourcing efforts. Or ones that didn't fail, but which failed to realize any costs savings.

And, of course, there are often other similar failures, like failures related to contractors, or failed attempts to switch from internally built software tools to third party vendors.

If a company has been around for 30 years and isn't using an option that seems much cheaper, there is going to be a history behind that.

We have never had the case where _everyone_ has to work remotely.

One of the reasons why offshoring failed is that you needed to be in the office to have a 30 second chat about something that saved you a few minutes of digging to find it yourself, which added up quickly.

This is no longer the case.

There are still reasons to not offshore, but we do not know if they are enough to keep it from happening. These conversations tell you more about the mentality of the people having them than about the viability of offshoring.

> I have no doubt that I could personally move to another country and do my job

Yes, but your compensation will be reduced. You can't take you SF salary into Eastern Europe.

I don't think the point being made was that you can't have a remote workplace, it's that you can't just find the place in the world that has the cheapest labor and assume you'll be successful.

Yeah, I don't know about working from "anywhere in the world"... I'm sure there's places without good internet, etc... that would make that difficult or impossible.

I can say one thing about it after being 100% WFH for 2+ years now, I can set my alarm clock, to wake me up exactly 1 hour before my morning video conference "standup" meeting, and still have time to wash-up, make coffee, watch the markets open, be properly awake and caffinated to participate in the meeting, etc...

Previously, depending on the total commute time, I would need to set that same alarm perhaps 2 hours or more in advance... the stress of the commute aside, I was getting less sleep on average, and in my line of work ( programming ) sleep is valuable to me, it helps me think better than when tired.

I feel more rested, healthier, happier, less stressed, and I know my productivity has INCREASED over the alternative in-office scenarios...

I'm an MD of a very small firm in the UK and I have had my mindset changed by events. A huge social experiment on homeworking has been done (and ongoing) and results are in.

I will make my commuters into remote workers by default unless they either want to come in or have to. One of my guys is Polish in Poland and can do whatever the hell he wants! Most of my staff are a bit stressed over SARS-COV-2, as am I but we will crack on.

I'm glad to hear you are thriving. You are one of the folks keeping your economy going (wherever that is) - take some pride in that.

> A huge social experiment on homeworking has been done (and ongoing) and results are in.

No they really aren't. It will be several years until we really understand the effect of remote work on areas like talent management, retention, idea generation, trust building, etc.

> A huge social experiment on homeworking has been done (and ongoing) and results are in.

Sort of? Unfortunately this experiment also has included forced isolation and social distancing, and for parents where schools and day care have closed, a further experiment in what happens when parents have to simultaneously do child care and get work done.

I expect it's hard to look at what's going on now and really see what prevalent home-working looks like in normal times, when there isn't a global pandemic going on, people can still meet co-workers when necessary, and friends for normal social activities, and parents can still send their kids to school and get in a productive day of work without constant interruptions from their kids.

My company (IT consultancy) is based in the SW of England. One of my employees is Polish and now lives in Poland. Mid 2019 he decided to return to Poland from here (got married, child born, look after ailing parents etc!) and we came to an agreement.

He gets paid UK rates for a UK job and lives in Poland as a sub-contractor. He may do other stuff there as well but I don't care - I get my pound of flesh 8) Poland is an hour ahead of the UK so he generally gets to run the 0800 start which works nicely.

Now this is not the new normal bollocks. It works for us and him. I can't ask him to go to Cardiff and roll out a few dozen new laptops but in general it doesn't matter that he is in a town in Poland that I can't possibly pronounce the name of, instead of Yeovil, when fixing a snag in Sherborne or Hull.

I and my company are very lucky that we can still function effectively, regardless of location. I as MD am now much more disposed towards home working. We were already pretty flexible but now I am far keener on even more flexibility. There are loads of silly and not so silly things to work out eg "I did x but n doesn't seem to be pulling their weight" etc. We need to invent mechanisms to deal with this. We already do a weekly get together on Teams but that is not good enough.

> I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.

I tend to agree. At least as it relates to offshoring. My company has been doing a 50/50 split between the US and Hyderabad/Pune for years, and there is no real danger of us moving everything to India. Good developers there aren't really that much cheaper than good developers in the US. The 10-12 hour offset is a huge impediment to success. Some folks there will work really late to make up for it, but there's still a pretty big gap. Not a lot we can do to make it better other than move entire groups over there and minimize communication requirements.

What I can see happening is more competition within the US. Having developers offset a couple hours is no big deal. Same culture, same language, and three hours ahead is just fine. We do that every day. So it may be that remote developers who used to work in expensive locations like SF will find that they can't command that salary when they are indistinguishable from any other remote developer in the continental US.

> > if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world

> I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.

I can give an example here: Back in March/April, we were told that if we wanted to "WFH" in another state, we had to get approval first due to laws around payments and taxes. Some states were pre-approved because of remote workers we already employed, but most had to be looked into and it wasn't a guarantee they'd be approved.

if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world

Anyone who says this has never tried to work closely with someone in a timezone ~12 hours away.

>> if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world

> I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.

I'm a dev and I say confidently that I can code from anywhere and produce the exact same output as in an office. In fact, not having to deal with the stress of office conditions will almost surely get you better code out of me. Maybe you do something non-technical, but for most any tech job, I can't understand why you say this.

It’s an interesting question.

First it’s wrong to assume there cannot exist multiple sets of laws in the same physical place, which reduces to effectively the economics of offshoring. Amazon delivery contractors deploy undocumented workers or people with unlicensed driving skills, paying them $7/hr and charging Amazon $15/hr. It’s economically positive for sure. The drivers live here. Is it really the same country or the same laws?

It’s also wrong to assume people have tried or will document the consequences of their try. Apple already earns more than $1m per retail employee. The gulf between Apple and BestBuy’s revenue per employee is much bigger than the savings due to offshoring anywhere in the world. I personally don’t think it’s obvious why Apple Retail stores are so successful, it is multifactorial and very difficult to reproduce, so even basic service jobs may never be worth trying to offshore (whatever that means) if there’s absolutely no way it could really matter. Another way of looking at it is that retail store bankruptcies occurring today were inevitable, the economics of what they were doing never made sense, so even if offshoring could save them money they were still doomed. This is a much harder conversation to have about IBM or Accenture, who have made offshoring a consistent economic positive for someone, we just can’t be sure it is for their clients or for them. However, it seems pretty obvious that a robot (or an abstraction thereof, like an automated warehouse) can do a lot of what retail workers do.

So I still think it’s all about the mechanics of the job, and it’s definitely a signal if you can WFH.

> working from home most time in an area that provides me with the chance to buy a home and have a reasonable commute to a satellite office

Companies will lower our salaries as we move to more affordable places to live. It already is dependent on location, people in the same team living in US and EU have different compensations.

This final point is so important. I have been full-time WFH for the last ~6 years, and 2020 is by far and above 10x worse than any prior year. My immediate environment has not changed much, but the disruptions elsewhere have added up to quite the psychological burden.

> I will call anyone's bluff who says this. Do it. Good luck. If you haven't successfully done this already, there is a reason and you know it.

It's fine. They can force the expensive employee to teach the new cheap person everything they need to know in the few weeks before departure!

LOL, yeah, sure.

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