Comment by sandover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandover | Hacker News Reader

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Very much agree. There's a herd mentality in the programmer community on this issue. Having worked remotely for a year myself, I think remote work should be considered harmful for the career of most engineers.

For engineers who are in the habit of thinking of their job and their career (and maybe a lot of other things?) exclusively in mechanistic terms of inputs and outputs, it's a tempting abstraction.

But when you work remotely, you're basically advertising your work as commodity work. You're basically consistently reminding the company -- and the job market -- that you are substitutable. In economic terms, that is simply not a smart signal to be sending.

It's also short sighted in terms of the arc of your career. Right now you might be making economic value in the marketplace strictly by extruding a software widget from your keyboard. Great! But at some point, the odds are good (not 100%, but good) that the way you'll make value is by enabling others to build software; reading body language, detecting issues in a team; or negotiating; or motivating; or selling; etc. The proportion of people reading this who will hack til their retirement day is quite small.

Sitting in your home office being "productive" isn't preparing you to do much that's important in the second half of your career. It's a case of over-fitting. You're optimizing around your current skill set and not thinking about the larger portfolio of useful -- human -- skills.

> But when you work remotely, you're basically advertising your work as commodity work. You're basically consistently reminding the company -- and the job market -- that you are substitutable.

You don't provide an argument for why working in an office provides what you are claiming remote workers to lack, nor do you provide evidence to backup your claim that remote workers are more replaceable.

> But at some point... the way you'll make value is by enabling others to build software; reading body language, detecting issues in a team; or negotiating; or motivating; or selling; etc.

If you can't do this through verbal communication and hangouts, maybe you should work on your communication skills as a manager - sometimes listening to the words people say is more reliable than making assumptions based on body positioning. On the flip side, maybe you should focus your hiring efforts on developers with strong communication skills, and enforce an evaluation period w/ new developers to see if they can meet the mustard in terms of remote communicating. Good developers don't communicate passively; they use their words and this can be assessed by good managers.

> You don't provide an argument for why working in an office provides what you are claiming remote workers to lack, nor do you provide evidence to backup your claim that remote workers are more replaceable.

Maybe the reason you don't see that this is obviously the case is that you haven't been in enough direct contact with the people making these replacement decisions. :P

> If you can't do this through verbal communication and hangouts, maybe you should work on your communication skills as a manager - sometimes listening to the words people say is more reliable than making assumptions based on body positioning.

...and sometimes it's not. Also, you're making it sound like people are more likely to make assumptions based on body positioning--every form of communication involves assumptions. Communication without body language inherently communicates less--you're making more assumptions because you have less information to go on.

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