Ask HN: How Would You or Did Convince Your Boss That You Can Work Remote?

I'm a bit (maybe more than a bit..) of a limit pusher too, and over the course of a half dozen years or so I've helped push our small company from saying they're ok with remote work - but yet I'd occasionally get talked to by the boss about coming into the office more - to personally coming in often less than half a day in a week (I work remote the most by a good margin), our sales lead considering moving across the country with full leadership support, and our boss recently working remotely for a month from across the globe.

Our boss is great, and does support remote work, it just seemed like there was this mental hurdle - inertia from social norms - that took a while to get past. He said he was ok with working remotely, but would still be bothered by simply not seeing a person for days at a time. There wasn't an issue staying in communication, and no issue with work getting done, so eventually he had to reconcile his position.

not in any real practical sense

I'm going to probably be unwisely candid in this answer.

It's a game, and a game that often in large corps involves deception, but I don't think has to. (Or perhaps I'm just making myself feel better by calling it "Crafting perceptions.")

There was a post a while back about a topic, "status fungibility." In a perfect world, you'd be in a team where everyone knows how hard that task is and you wouldn't have to say a thing. I've been on teams like that. They're fantastic. But in most worlds, you have a team where, if you're lucky, a handful of the people know _deeply_ what you're doing and the rest have a general idea. They probably aren't _trying_ too look down on you for being silent, but next to the guy who gives status updates translating what might be a simple task into something they perceive as a journey and time consuming, the human mind tends to use flawed heuristics that benefit certain types of overcommunication.

I've wrapped this in a lot of flowery and clinical language to try and not get incendiary about of it, but the crux is that you sometimes have to help your team see the value you bring, (The positive side) while recognizing (the negative side) that this enables an ecosystem where this opaqueness can allow others to use this intangibility to try and boost their standing vs. yours, so there's a degree of "protect yourself."

Sorry if this is a ramble. It's a topic I took a while to build mental models for (similarly introverted) and something that I've had frustrations with which is why I now try to look at it very impassively. I hope these thoughts offer at least a useful point of view.

As a manager of software engineering teams I can tell you that: there are two options to be as productive remotely as within office hours.

1) Either the whole team communicates in a remote manner, e.g. holding meetings via videoconferencing only and writing down follow-ups, meticulously logging progress via special tools, putting a lot of effort into documenting everything, so any member of the team can quickly find literally any piece of information and manage most of the tasks without asking peers for help.

2) Or you should ask for a position as mechanical and routine and async and redundant as possible, like I don't know, fully scripted first line of customer support, or data markup, or monkey testing, or something like that.

This is because most of the teamwork is actually about information flow, and the bigger the team - the larger the stream. In case of partial remote working, when some team members are indulged with home office days or even full remote, other members, and especially leads and managers, are just paying these outstanding info bills, just to keep remoters in the loop with the team and company as a whole.

So in my opinion the only way to work remote in a close-quarters team is to either be extremely special and indispensable just to strong-arm your privilege, or be largerly underpaid to justify communication tax you will lay on your teammates and direct supervisor.

Now you should consider those effects.

1) most mechanical and routine jobs will be automated first. So in XXI it is not a wise choice.

2) Any team manager's duty is to reduce bus factor [1], so strong-arming remote job from competent supervisor should entail dissolving or breaking apart a unique employee's position.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor