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Comment by yarg | Hacker News Reader

Do we always need non anecdotal data to support every assertion that we make?

I've had many face to face conversations in a room with a whiteboard that couldn't have happened nearly as efficiently if everyone was remote.

Now I do think that the push against work from home in general has very little to do with operating efficiency (if companies cared that much about operating efficiency they wouldn't have developers working in loud open plan offices, drowning out the world around them with headphones), but the argument that there's no utility in face to face meetings is just as meritless.

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> Do we always need non anecdotal data to support every assertion that we make?

When the claim is that remote work is a mistake and that its era came to an end... Yes. It's an exceptional claim, and exceptional claims demand exceptional data. Otherwise we should call it bullshit.

> but the argument that there's no utility in face to face meetings is just as meritless.

Probably. I do prefer remote work, and I favor working for companies that allow me to stay remote.

But I think there's place to companies that prefer to work in office, and people that prefer to work in the same physical space as their colleagues.

This balanced take doesn't seem to be very popular, however. I wonder why.

People like to see things in black and white (they're not always wrong, sometimes a compromise is the worst of all worlds).

Well de-facto the balanced approach is here already. If you don't like OpenAI, you can go work for Gitlab. The actual interview is not as extreme as the title, and since Altman mentioned they have remote workers too, he seems to be trying to say that 100% remote for everyone is over.

> he seems to be trying to say that 100% remote for everyone is over.

That is not a balanced take. In fact, it's pretty extreme.

Plenty of companies are 0% remote, plenty of companies are 100%, and plenty others are somewhere in between.

His take that 100% remote is over is bizarre and somewhat confrontational, without any data to back it up. It's plain bullshit.

fwiw my personal take is if 100% remote actually worked for the mainstream companies, all of us would have been outsourced to Kenya or Pakistan at 1/10th the cost instead of taking leisurely dog walks between the zoom meetings in Austin, but this simple thought seems to not have crossed the advocates' minds.

That would assume timezone, language, legal, cultural, governmental, and infrastructural differences don't exist between countries. Outsourcing outside your country of incorporation is a completely different challenge compared to remote work within your country of incorporation.

as someone who has personally hired and worked with for several years teams overseas (e.g. an individual in Spain or a team in Eastern Europe), I'm not really seeing that challenge. If our small startup managed to pull it off, then those logistical problems are not quite as bad as they may seem.

You direct hired or hired as contractors? Your HR platform handled global benefits and payroll with little to no added effort or expense? There were no additional legal regulations or compliance issues you had to consider?

I could see a nimble startup pivoting in a way that can make it work. I can also a see large businesses investing in overseas at scale. I don't see smaller or mid-size companies able to reap the same kind of benefits as easily, unless they were setup with it in mind from the start.

In this case, yes. Because otherwise I will just go with my anecdotal observation that this is just about management feeling lonely and with less control.

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