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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Reading this, I wonder if the problem is AI or the remote market. From what I've heard, here in Sydney the market is pretty hot, at least for experienced folks. My experience matches that. That said I know that remote jobs are uncommon.

> I know I can work remotely effectively because I did it for the last 6 years.

6 years means that Ryan started right around COVID. Looking back I don't think COVID was the remote renaissance that it appeared at the time, I think it was a temporary blip. That sucks, I'd much rather it was permanent, and some things have changed for the long run, but unfortunately I think this is likely a much bigger factor. Remote jobs have always been few and far between, and super competitive.

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Remote is absolutely making things harder. From what I've seen in Melbourne, most jobs on paper require you to come to the office 2 or so days a week. Even if in reality people still work fully remote, in the interview process if you want 100% never come to the office written in to the contract they will probably pass you up for someone else.

Lot of people moved out to the regional areas during covid and plentiful remote jobs but those jobs have mostly been reeled back to the CBDs again.

In practice if they are saying 2 days a week do they really care or track that? I know people who are not formally remote but are in the office only a couple of days a month.

And looking forward, LLMs don't need an office. The tactic of demanding RTO to maintain real estate values isn't going to hold up when 8 out of 10 people are replaced by AI.

i think a lot will fail to hold up when 8 out of 10 people are replaced with ai.

When 8 out of 10 people are replaced by AI, the offices being burned to the ground in the violent revolt is going to be a much bigger concern than the offices not being full.

The emptied office and shops and restaurants can be turned into data centers!

I live in Portland and we've recently committed to moving back to Bay Area because of this exact reason. The remote market that made it possible for me to live here is dying. There are also not many, if any, businesses in Portland that I'd work for that pay market rate.

The bosses desperately want you to use AI for Dev work but they want to watch you doing it in person for some reason

I’ve noticed a strong correlation between struggling to find a job and only looking remote.

It’s a 2020 anomaly that’s gone. You need a relationship developed from in-person work to get it.

There was an article like a year ago about how AI was making software engineers unemployable, with a single engineer as their case study. Except the guy lived in rural NY state and only wanted to work remote.

If you're only willing to work 100% remotely then you are competing with everyone in the world. Melbourne, where OP lives, has quite a few developing markets within a few hours of timezone offset. This is especially true of MNC with a strong presence in APAC.

And whether true or not you’re also signaling negative worker traits.

All low engagement employees want to work remote. But not all remote workers are low engagement. How do you properly position yourself?

'Negative worker traits'? - please explain what you mean by this

I suspect he means things that HR thinks are important but aren't.

They are signaling they aren’t a good worker. For example, “I really hate to wake up in the morning. Is it ok if I work from 11 AM - 7 PM”?

Do you manage people? When they put their butt in a seat actually says nothing about their work ethic or productivity.

I also think there is a noticeable drop in the quality of the interviews on the employers side. My friends still in the bay tell me there is a noticeable drop in the quality of the people they work with in the office. Look at the languages they are asking for, they are the languages that are cheap to develop for. But software isn't manufacturing, its more like some sort of publishing. And just making something for cheap is the best way to go out of business in publishing. I suspect that will be happening in the future. I know quite a few devs like the author who instead just started their own software business. Some are doing well, others not so much. I suspect this is the future of tech and it won't be in SV.

But the remote jobs are the canary in the coal mine.

Return to office (or tacking on an in person requirement to a posting) is just one sign that the market has shifted in favor of capital and away from labor. That's driven by AI reducing the value of developers.

You are pigeonholing one aspect of the OP.

This is an experienced person that any company should be happy to hire. If this person can't easily land something, remote or otherwise, then their frustration is valid.

Honestly, one of the largest expenses most companies carry that’s optional is occupancy. The next big downturn I suspect the RTO mandates based cultural vibes will look a lot less attractive when the director of finance looking for a promotion proposes to the board eliminating offices. They will point to the productivity gains during remote work, the overhead of facilities, how many people they can not lay off by eliminating overhead. All of this is very easy to wave a hand at mumbling about serendipitous moment when profits are rising, hard to ignore when losses are mounting.

To Ryan, I don’t think your frustration with the tech industry at the moment is lone. I don’t know of any one super happy right now, and I know too many people under / unemployed for long stretches. Even when you land something it’s just a miserable slog of political wrangling to erect enough body shields to protect yourself during layoffs. It’s not what it used to be.

Myself I bailed and started something with friends. We took no outside money and have a slow but growing client base that seems to value what we offer. It’s the first time in a long time I can actually do something worth while. I’ve considered teaching, or even finding a job at the library. I’m lucky enough to have been well employed for a long time now so it’s more about health insurance (thanks US health care work slave system!). But for the moment I’m enjoying building things and solving problems which is what I enjoyed anyways.

> The next big downturn I suspect the RTO mandates based cultural vibes will look a lot less attractive when the director of finance looking for a promotion proposes to the board eliminating offices. They will point to the productivity gains during remote work, the overhead of facilities, how many people they can not lay off by eliminating overhead.

Things could change in the future, but currently and historically commercial office leases tend to have really long terms that aren't very easy to get out of, which has a limiting effect on this sort of thing as a cost-cutting measure.

It’s true, typically 5-10 years. However that means in any year 20-10% are negotiating extensions. Recessions on average are 22 months long. That’s 40-20% turn over potential, and once a trend starts it’s hard to reverse when it comes to cost cutting.

In fact many large companies were already trying to downsize their footprint and adopting hotel seating and we work foot prints, encouraging work from home increasingly. The BYOD move saved a small amount compared to what was being discussed - BYOO - bring your own office. The pandemic led to a reflexive reversal in that trend due to irrational reasons, despite having already approved a decreased footprint pipeline.

I don’t think the hand wavy stuff will carry water post the next downturn. In 5 year planning many companies do for occupancy plans I can’t imagine “serendipitous water cooler moments” is going to be high on the cost cutting agenda.

What did you end up doing? Doing something with a bunch of like minded folks is the dream (as long as you can pay the bills!)

It does feel like there's been a big over-correction towards on-site --- or at least the places that want remote haven't felt the need to hire much. What's driving it? I don't get it: now that we have AI for everything, wouldn't real-time collaboration on code matter even less than it did before?

> wouldn't real-time collaboration on code matter even less than it did before?

being a software engineer means more than just coding.

Yeah, and the rise of AI and the huge volumes of code it can create means there is more of a need to collaborate with other areas of the business on what to actually build.

Collaboration can happen on a zoom call. We don't need to be in shoddy tuna can meeting rooms.

While it can, it is often suboptimal.

That might be the right tradeoff for some organizations (e.g. you can access to wider talent pool by having hybrid teams), but it is also within the prerogative of an org to bet otherwise.

An org has a right to do whatever stupid thing it wants; I, likewise, have the right to judge it for doing so.

I suspect it's more that few people, even at "AI" companies, understand how AI works or how to apply it. In an environment of such uncertainty, a certain class of person feels safer physically sharing a room with his colleagues: this person can "read the room" and exhibit "taste" by aligning his opinions with some emerging consensus, picking up on tiny social cues to keep himself on track.

In a remote environment, by contrast, these social signals aren't as strong. Our room-taster is forced into object-level arguments. He might be revealed as ignorant. By the same token, if a company is remote, it needs some established workflow to make progress. Workflow means words written down somewhere. Writing means accountability. Safer to just vibe.

In case it's not clear, remote work is beneficial: it forces a company to develop a level of rigor that helps it interface better with reality.

Every alleged "collaboration" efficiency the in-person model produces comes at the cost of enlarging a pile of accumulating social-technology debt incurred by substituting vibing, room-reading, and charisma for writing, debate, and accountability.

The job market has definitely picked up for us tech sales weirdos. Remote is okay, but travel obligations _feel_ like they're picking back up. I know that pre-sales FDEs are definitely on the road a lot.

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