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Comment by jeffreyrogers | Hacker News Reader

People like to downplay this by saying you can be entirely remote with no problems. Probably true if what you're doing is CRUD app stuff that most people on the team have a good idea of how to do, but I'm skeptical that it works for other types of project/product.

I work with hardware and being able to have someone physically look at a schematic with me or explain something to me in person greatly shortens the amount of time it takes me to understand them.

Edit: I also think we don't know the long term effects being remote has on innovation. It seems like people congregate in cities because the rewards to being near people are greater than the costs. Is technology really so good now that it can offset all the years of evolution we've gone through to make us into the social animals we are?

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Hardware is tricky. Anything hands on really.

For anything abstract I would argue that the people who are able to onboard and form teams and ideas remotely are inherently the best for the job and likely produce a disproportionate percentage of any teams output. In my experience when you remove middle management (as it happens when you go remote), you want to only hire those people adapted to remote and self-directed work.

I would argue that location based and remote teams are fundamentally different companies. Similar to how tech first and tech-second companies are fundamentally different. I can't think of a single tech-second company that was able to move into the tech-first world. Some local companies might be able to morph themselves into remote companies, but as we see today, they will both lose a lot of staff, and even change their product eventually.

I work with hardware that either I do it at our facility. Or I risk making a few hundred people homeless if the hardware goes up at flames at home because it'll take a good day to put out the...volatile fuel source :D The ultimate WFH experience.

I'm a software engineer on a hardware project. Yes, there are definitely a few people who absolutely have to be in the lab for hardware dev, but there's a shockingly long tail of people who would have been in the lab some of the time but didn't really need to be.

I generally preferred working in the office pre-pandemic, but it wasn't strictly necessary. I also hated living in the bay area. I finally got all the i's dotted and t's crossed and I'm now living somewhere I vastly prefer (far fewer people and a whole lot cheaper). I've only been here 3 weeks and it's already hard to imagine going back.

I also deeply miss access to the occasional second set of hands to hold the probes while I drive the scope.

I'm lucky in that I have an office that's open so I can still have access to the fancy microscopes etc (as well as to more able sets of soldering hands/equipment), but being largely remote has definitely made distributing prototypes across the team for development and QA much more difficult (not to mention if mods to those prototypes are necessary).

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