Comment by ishjoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ishjoh | Hacker News Reader

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Congrats on year 15! I'm on year 5 of working remotely.

Working in software I definitely think most companies are fine with remote individual contributors, and that it has been shown to work effectively.

If the company is setup for majority distributed communication (slack, wikis, ticket tracker, etc), then I even think tech team leads can be remote.

That seems to be the limit though unless the company is remote first or close to it. I haven't seen any remote employees in Sr. Management roles. Although Sr. Management at the company I'm working for have been working from home, I think when things are back to 'normal' the expectation is that they will be in the office again, although I'll be curious to see if they work from home one or two days a week.

YMMV

I've been a remote employee at my company for more than 7 years now, and I'm at a tech lead (principal) level and still effective there. Since I'm not interested in the management track, I'm not concerned about limitations there. It's true, though, that COVID has made upper management rethink the need to be constantly in the office.

I'm not seaside, but bayside, and my experience is similar to others in that regard in this thread. Great for family and all that, not so much if you don't like feeling a bit isolated. In the before times, I'd travel to one of the company motherships three or four times a year to get in-person time with the team. That works well to keep the team gelled.

I can send that. I've been fully remote for 4 years. Because the small village where we wanted to live has 0 tech jobs within reasonable commute distance.

I've gone from IC to team lead, to group lead. I think this is my limit at the moment. Not because I'm remote, but that's how much I can handle at the moment.

I don't get some of the hallway chats from the mothership, but the feedback routinely is that we're one of the strongest groups in the company. So I would take that as a sign that the remote aspect isn't a deal breaker.

Personally I wouldn't go back to the office routine unless I was out of options.

And yes, I do spend 80% of my time in various calls. This is not different from being in an office and working with a distributed team (also in offices in their regions).

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