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Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

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Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#201

Post by pawelwentpawel »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #51
pawelwentpawel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an excellent example of the difference between "working from home" and "working remotely". Those two terms unfortunately are used interchangeably as synonyms.

It’s because 99% or more of remote workers are working from home. Coworkers spaces are basically micro remote offices for 1. Much of the remote discourse has been about avoiding offices and commutes altogether, not replacing it with a different micro office that you commute to alone. It’s reasonable to assume that remote and work from home are the same thing unless someone explicitly says they’re working in a satelli…

Touching on your points:

1. "99% of remote workers are working from home" - we're in the middle of a massive pandemic so it's hard not to.

2. "(...) avoiding offices and commutes altogether, not replacing it with a different micro office (...)" - if you happen to cowork, there is a massive difference between being able to choose the location of your office (or whatever we'd like to call the place where the work happens) vs being dictated one by your employer. You're in charge of your physical location and you have the freedom to optimise your commute and context that works best for you. Cutting your commute by 1 hour a day and assuming that you do 260, 8 hour working days a year yields over a month of work freed up (~32 full-time working days).

3. "It’s reasonable to assume that remote and work from home are the same thing" - I think that this way of thinking is not only grossly inaccurate but will also hurt remote work trends in the future. WFH and remote work are two sets that sometimes intersect but are not equal. They're not the same thing. To clarify that, a couple examples:

- Most of my family are artists (painters) working from home. They're not working remotely because there is no remote entity that they are answering to. They have their art studios where they live. It's WFH, not remote.

- Let's say I have a client, employer or any entity that I answer to that's in a different location. I have a contractual agreement which states I don't need to appear in their place of work and everything happens over the internet. I choose to work from an office that I have rented. I am working remotely but not working from where I sleep. It's remote without the WFH.

- I got stuck at home working remotely for my employer because we're in a nasty lockdown or I simply chose to do so. In this case, those sets intersect. It's WFH and Remote.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#202

Post by chrsig »

bencollier49 wrote: post #196
chrsig wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t seem like it’s a matter of being WFH as much as not using chat tools effectively. It’s very possible to just shoot the juniors a DM asking how they’re doing. or having an active team channel where people can ask for help or offer direction.

Isn't the same as being sat next to them and being able to lean over or just ask though is it? You can keep your code on your own screen and just nod in. The screen context switching is a killer.

leaning over is just as much a context switch. “just being asked” something is often a rude interruption of concentration.

over chat i have the opportunity to take a minute to wrap up what i’m doing. I also walk away with a written record, so if ive asked for help, i have reference to go back to. which can then serve as a starting point for documentation. or others in the chat can read and passively absorb information. or contribute to the conversation.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#203

Post by tehjoker »

DylanBohlender wrote: post #137
sokoloff wrote: post #61

I think there will be plenty of traditional “come to the office 200+ days a year” tech jobs once COVID is endemic. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if over half of tech jobs offer an in-office experience for employees who want it. For those companies that do, I’d expect over half of employees will choose 100+ days a year in office. If you want a 5 days/week mandated in-office in Jan 2022, you’re going to have slim pick…

This depends on broader society accepting that COVID is endemic though, and the cessation of all sorts of regulations. I don't doubt it will happen eventually, but I'm not sure if another year is enough time. There has to be some sort of common knowledge catalyst that changes the general approach; as long as events are still being cancelled due to COVID cases, we're not out of the woods and "living with the disease"…

All you guys living with the virus are going to enjoy the decreased life bars of everyone in the office thanks to long COVID. Enjoy having 20% of your friends disabled and early onset dementia with sporadic large outbreaks of system overwhelming disease.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#204

Post by R0b0t1 »

tablespoonsruby wrote: post #153
severino wrote: post #71

Problem with this is that you don't want to just work in an office, but also have other people from the company work with you at the office. It's different from people who prefer WFH because they don't care if the other guys also work remote or not. Anyway, at this point of the pandemic, I'd still not feel comfortable having lunch with coworkers in a closed space. I just prefer to have lunch myself alone, or at home,…

> It's different from people who prefer WFH because they don't care if the other guys also work remote or not. But lots of remote-evangelists will say things like "If anybody is joining a meeting remotely, everybody needs to call in from their own separate computers". I might able to come in to the office but it still affects my experience.

I worked at a "campus" where we all called in anyway. It wasn't that bad. Arguably better because if the meeting starts to suck you can read HN or play solitaire.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#205

Post by spookthesunset »

For what it’s worth, you aren’t alone. Not every role in software is amenable to WFH. In fact most roles aren’t. Developers have it easy. They can do remote all day long… or at least they think they can but they still have to have high bandwidth interfaces with the rest of their team.

It’s very very hard to replace sitting with all your teammates and rapidly working through a problem. When everybody is remote everything has to be scheduled and calendared.

I dunno where I’m going with this ramble but I strongly suspect two years from now will look a lot like it did back in 2019. People will still WFH some days like they did in 2019 but all these companies trying to go hybrid or whatever will discover that it just doesn’t work.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#206

Post by dbbk »

g051051 wrote: post #123
65 wrote: post #116

Just want to say you are not alone. I too want to have a place to go. Whether it's a co-working space or an office for the company I work for, waking up and working in the same place every day is slowly driving me crazy. The WFH people are probably the most vocal online (especially on Reddit as subreddits tend to create echo-chambers), so it feels as though _everyone_ wants to work from home, but ultimately I think/h…

> ultimately I think/hope most people understand the social benefits of working in an office. As far as I'm concerned, there aren't any. But you know what? At the end of the day I don't care where someone works, as long as they extend me the same courtesy. The last place I worked at (before the lockdowns) gradually eliminated WFH, converted to an open plan office, and generally made life miserable for software devs w…

Presumably you're an introvert then? As OP said, they're extrovert, and hate being on their own.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#207

Post by jl2718 »

Even in-person jobs now have all the terrible aspects of remote work.

You go to an office full of strangers that you don’t work with, just to fight over a few private phone booths to take meetings at with your distributed team. There’s still a JIRA sprint board where you have to write bloviated stories for everything that you do. And then weekly, monthly and quarterly status updates. You still get hundreds of emails a day from automated management tools. You still have to live on Slack or Teams or whatever. Your day is still consumed by pointless 100-person meetings.

But now you’re stuck in an office. Woohoo.

There is no in-person work anymore for white-collar professionals. The good news is that blue-collar work now pays more, you get lots of people to talk to, as long as it’s about athletes or exes or politicians, and you don’t have to worry about getting fired for anything you do say.

I’ve considered the possibility of a strict office-only policy. As in, common hours, in-person only, no laptops, no phones, no remote meetings, no chat rooms, no management tools other than maybe GitHub, no social media, no non-work at work. I realize that you’d probably have to do on-site daycare, and today that implies liability.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#208

Post by caffeine »

alecbz wrote: post #182
caffeine wrote: post #32

HFT and finance are still mostly in-office. If you join as a front-office dev on a trading team, chances are you will not be remote much and people will be in the office trading.

I've never been too interested in working for HFT/traditional finance, but depending on how office trends continue I might change my mind (especially living in NYC, though I'm also considering moving).

Chicago, London and Singapore are also good places, although nowadays there are funds everywhere (Boston, SF, Miami).

This is a wild overgeneralisation but in descending order of fun levels/friendliness of HFT teams it goes Chicago, London, Singapore, NYC.

Seems to hold across most HFTs I have met/worked at. Not sure about hedge funds or other finance roles.

Edit: Crypto HFT firms also abound but they are generally more remote-friendly than TradFi (the latter have regulators that need you to have an office and stuff).

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#209

Post by spookthesunset »

tehjoker wrote: post #203
DylanBohlender wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends on broader society accepting that COVID is endemic though, and the cessation of all sorts of regulations. I don't doubt it will happen eventually, but I'm not sure if another year is enough time. There has to be some sort of common knowledge catalyst that changes the general approach; as long as events are still being cancelled due to COVID cases, we're not out of the woods and "living with the disease"…

All you guys living with the virus are going to enjoy the decreased life bars of everyone in the office thanks to long COVID. Enjoy having 20% of your friends disabled and early onset dementia with sporadic large outbreaks of system overwhelming disease.

What the heck are you even talking about? Dude. Covid is here forever. You are vaccinated and possibly boosted. You are as safe as it is ever gonna get. Move on!

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#210

Post by spookthesunset »

chrsig wrote: post #115
sdevonoes wrote: post #42

Don't get it. Even if remote is becoming more common, the vast majority of tech jobs out there are not 100% remote. Note: a lot of companies are advertising themselves as "100% remote while corona lasts" though.

> Note: a lot of companies are advertising themselves as "100% remote while corona lasts" though. This is the thing that gets me...Haven't people in tech figured out how exponential growth works? Covid isn't going away, ever.

> Haven't people in tech figured out how exponential growth works?

What are you even taking about? We have marvelous vaccines that knock Covid to the level of a cold or mild flu for most people in the “office worker” demographic.

Did you worry about “exponential growth” of the 2019 flu season?

Because part of saying “Covid isn’t going away ever” means “get on with your damn life”. If Covid is here forever it becomes just another minor risk in your life like driving, swimming, or catching the cold.

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