Comment by balloot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by balloot | Hacker News Reader

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I don't get what it is about software engineers that make so many of them think they're entitled to work remotely.

It seems to start with the fact that many engineers think 100% of their job is coding, and therefore they can get "more" work done when working remotely. This is absolutely dead wrong. Engineers also should be accomplishing the following in order to maximize overall productivity:

- teaching other engineers

- learning from other engineers

- coordinating engineering tasks to minimize duplication

- doing what is necessary to ensure the software is what is needed

- communicating with others any insights that may be had while developing

- working with other departments to make sure everything is in place to build whatever it is you're building.

This is just what I can come up with off the top of my head in 2 minutes, and each of these things takes a significant hit when the engineer is working remotely. Any engineer I would want to hire has quite a bit more to offer than coding skills, and as soon as you require more than a basic automaton blindly building a product exactly to spec, you need human interaction with that person to maximize potential. We already learned this lesson a few years ago with the total failure of "all software can be outsourced to India!" I don't see why we need to learn this again.

good sw engineers are rare and in demand plus, we have many tools and telecommunication technologies which let us communicate and work remotely. Some people have learned that traditional corporate offices are full of things that make them less happy or less productive. Distracting sights, noises, interruptions, makework, politics, inability to say what you really think, having to act and dress artificially, inability to say take a nap when you feel you need it, arbitrary arrival times, hampered ability to switch over to non-employed tasks when needed (family things, a FOSS project, another contract gig, etc). Some find it patronizing as well. There's also the notion of maximizing for happiness rather than purely money. Also a smart actor in any economy will use whatever leverage he has to maximize his own interests. If the demand/supply balance happens to favor sw engineers right now they would be wise to take advantage of it. Businesses and governments do it too. Also, some individuals are broadly talented, beyond just being a programmer, and it's much easier for those folks to exercise and monetize a broader range and depth of their skills if they aren't kept in the narrow straigtjacket of a specific employer's job role, and place and time of business. Being a remote worker makes it much easier to lead a hybrid life where you spend some time on entrepreneurial side projects since less time wasted on commutes and you can handle interrupts from those side projects without political shit from your "day job". You can make $100k/year as a FT programmer, a good life to be sure, but the most likely path to making millions is by starting a business. And that path is easier to try if you're a remote worker or contractor.

And yes, I know there are positives and advantages to office life as well, please no need to chime in and enlighten me there. been there, have the t-shirt, but there are lots of other t-shirts. :)

I disagree with a fundamental assertion you make here. I think a software engineer has a very low ceiling when working remotely. Engineers that I consider "good" or better not only must be on site most of the time, but they WANT to be on site most of the time. It's the only way to maximally impact whatever it is you're working on, and any good engineer wants that.

Also, many of the things you are talking about are red flags that would cause me not to hire an engineer (FWIW I'm a lead engineer). If I'm paying you a good salary to be on my team, I don't want to structure our work arrangement around letting you work on various side projects. We pay well, we expect a lot, and you should deliver as such. And I have consistently found the only way to make that happen is to enforce physically spending the majority of your time with the rest of the team.

why would I want to be on site most of the time if it is not necessary? So I can be more involved in company politics ? If I deliver all you wanted what is a problem where I was when things were done ?

Your last sentence actually might indicate that your team is maybe not so high quality like you think ? High quality developers are sufficiently self motivated that they don't really need to be forced to produce results.

concise: remote/untethered people can deliver great work and as long as you're happy with it thats what matters. also, alot of people find they are happier not being tethered to a Dilbert-like existance. some of those folks are highly and broadly talented who have lots and lots of paying alternative opportunities, so you as an employer will be competing against them whether you like it or not.

> Engineers that I consider "good" or better not only must be on site most of the time, but they WANT to be on site most of the time. It's the only way to maximally impact whatever it is you're working on, and any good engineer wants that.

I know a lot of excellent programmers and have never heard anything expressed other than the precise opposite of this sentiment. None of them want to be on site if it can be helped, and they pretty much universally believe that physically transporting one's self to a real office on a daily basis is an outmoded practice.

I don't doubt that there are good people out there who like coming in to work in an office, but in my experience there are a lot who do not.

You say that you've been unable to get consistent high output without forcing people to be on site. I've seen lots of people produce consistently over a period of years without ever once setting foot in any office (frequently when there is no office to set foot in at all). Perhaps the problem there is not with remote work in general....

You seem to know a totally different set of engineers than I do. I work in Silicon Valley, and the vast majority of jobs here require on site presence. This is the case for a very specific reason - the most productive engineers work best when they can quickly and easily share ideas with others. You would be wasting a significant amount of their ability by not having them around in person.

The proof is in the pudding - every highly successful, well admired web company you can think of employs the vast majority of its engineers onsite, and those that are offsite are not core contributors. To claim that working in an office is "outmoded" is ludicrous when there has yet to be a successful case that succeeded with a team that is mostly remote. And no, 37signals and its dozen employees don't count as a successful case of remote teams. I'm talking about a venture funded company with dozens/hundreds of engineers.

While I agree that good engineers should be able to do all of the things on your list, I don't agree that a distributed team is necessarily a huge barrier to all those things.

I work with such a team, and we're in constant contact. I teach, learn, coordinate, discuss design, and communicate insights via IRC and Skype. We're signed in and talking at pretty much all hours. We talk about the piece of code we're working on at the moment, we talk about what we're about to do, we ask for design feedback, we bitch about terrible dependencies, everything.

If you're talking about the kind of remote workers who fire off a couple e-mails and maybe jump on skype for 20 minutes a day, then I agree. That just isn't conducive to good, cohesive work. It also wouldn't fly on our team.

I think it needs to be recognized that (especially with the right team) distributed work and throwing development over the wall to a random offshore company are _nowhere_ near the same thing. If they are, then the team clearly isn't good at remoting and, as you say, probably need to be physically present.

Good engineers should be able to do either well, not just one or the other; and a good team should be able to do everything on your list with either work arrangement.

I've met an equal number of non-engineers who feel they should work remotely. I watch as my wife works remotely. She gets at least 10 times more done for her employer when she works remotely. 1 reason being is that her work is so much more efficient. No one jumps in her cubicle to bug her about whatever. And there are plenty more. Another thing that happens is that she tends to spend the time she would have spent commuting (at least 2 hours each day) working. And she's not alone. I've seen all her colleagues and bosses do the same thing. What sucks though is she works in a culture that isn't anywhere ready to let go of the control. They are too scared.

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