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Comment by kkfx | Hacker News Reader

The limited reliability is not only their part:

- living on wireless connections means being less reliable than being on FTTH, of course having a mobile backup/StarLink etc is a good thing, but A BACKUP not the main connection;

- living on laptops in public spaces or in a van it's a bad setup, you get tired, you could get ambient noises, you could get infosec issues much easier than a desktop at home, in a dedicated closed room, maybe with a spare one.

Of course a digital nomad who do not need to work because he/she have enough sources of income to live as an entrepreneur, a retiree etc nothing against, but a digital nomad who is an employee, well, it's a liability. I'm not against them as people, I believe in free will, I'm against digital nomad employees if I need to work with them as a colleague or a customer. That's is.

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Very few DNs live in vans, or rely solely on public wifi.

The places DNs tend to go usually have excellent and cheap 5G service, particularly in Asia.

Executives and sales people have worked “on the road” for decades and I don’t recall anyone calling them a liability to their employer. DNs can and do use the same hotels and co-working places as those more temporary travelers. I can get a good fiber connection at a temp office down the street here in Bangkok for a few dollars a day, with fast 5G as backup. I can’t find that in most US cities.

Starlink, ironically, is more reliable than either of the FTTH providers where I live - in a first world country with a massive tech industry.

Ambient noises/infosec issues - noise cancelling headphones and FDE with offsite (encrypted) backups resolves this.

If someone was to steal my laptop right now, I’d be back online within “how long does it take me to buy a replacement laptop and restore from backup?”.

It has happened before - I had a bag with laptop stolen on a business trip and was able to recover within a day and complete my work with fuck all disruption.

Well, reliability does not just means "there is no neighbor who cut my aerial lines", means also normal performances with congestion, high RTT etc. While many jobs does not need special performance we still have many VoIP annoyances here and there, dropped frames from a video call, bad audio sometimes, the impromptu need to transfer a big amount of data as a normal thing like "ok, look, just download this 1Tb archive" etc.

Noise cancellation is remarkable these days but you can't work for a whole day with some headphones on you NORMALLY, it might happen, I think almost anyone here have experienced that but a day it's a thing, every day it's another. I've felt the pain of some colleagues with their laptop while they have rejected the idea of a proper desktop setup stating how nice it is being with a tiny laptop in the garden etc, yes it might be some days, but not every day. Every day we need comfy chairs, standing desk, a good keyboard a good monitor etc.

Many push against remote working are for real estate business and a certain economic model reasons, many others are for mere reactionary ideas, but some of them have good points about "way too many remote workers are not engaged, have little attention, are hard to find" etc and those in most cases are people with such "mobile setups" as their normal way of work.

Maybe every day you need a standing desk, chair, desktop computer, big monitor, etc.

I don’t. I work on an iPad Pro from all over the world. I freelance for different kinds of customers. No one cares where or when I get the work done. I have worked like this this for over ten years. And I know many DNs who get their work done with their own portable setups.

You need to learn more about how DNs actually work, because it seems you base your criticisms on a caricature. Co-working spaces have a lot more DNs than gardens or beaches.

Maybe that's one of the reason for the current sorry state of IT. I'm serious, it's not a critic to you, but the current model produce really bad IT, as we see everywhere and we are heading to a not-that-different dot-com bubble because of that.

I doubt digital nomads have anything to do with that. Just like I doubt standing desks affect quality or productivity in a measurable way.

I have worked in IT for almost 45 years. At no time have I thought enough programmers knew what they are doing. We just have more now, and more dumb ideas funded by VCs and greed. If we’re headed to another bubble bursting it will come from stupid money invested in AI, not from nomads working on laptops.

Teams, zoom, meet, etc all work fine on dogshit connections IME.

If I have to transfer 1TB of data through my own laptop, I’ve catastrophically fucked up somewhere.

As for noise and headphones: You get used to working with noise.

> Every day we need comfy chairs, standing desk, a good keyboard a good monitor etc.

I literally have not had these for my entire career, bar a short stint where I had a couple of monitors.

Desk is “whatever fucking desk”, at office or at home. Same for chair.

Keyboard? Nice to have but I do fine with whatever laptop keyboard so long as it works.

It is entirely possible to work effectively without all the nice to haves, it just requires some motivation. For me, that’s earning a fat cheque.

> Teams, zoom, meet, etc all work fine on dogshit connections IME.

In the sense we can talk, yes, they do a remarkably great job, but the real quality is very low, sufficient to work, but definitively not good, and that's one of the reason why so many dislike remote.

> As for noise and headphones: You get used to working with noise.

Again yes, of course your output will suffer as you... In the history humanity have passed through an incredible amount of sufferance and we are still here, but those who have had certain experiences have certainly not lived well.

> I literally have not had these for my entire career [...] It is entirely possible to work effectively without all the nice to haves, it just requires some motivation. For me, that’s earning a fat cheque.

Witch might perfectly meet your desire, but what you produce will be of a different quality, because your target is just earning as much as possible, not produce advancement for the τέχνη, not to evolve, and that's exactly why current capitalism couldn't be sustained and produce mostly garbage. We witness no more real revolutions, no more tangible advancement except in the human pasture techniques and business for business to the point that even the WEF advocate a great reset.

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