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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?

#211

Post by spookthesunset »

chrsig wrote: post #172
rsynnott wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re taking that a bit too literally. “While COVID is a massive office-closing problem” might be closer to the mark. Before Omicron showed up, a lot of places were moving to re-open everything mode. Omicron will slow that, but probably not by much.

Conversely, I think others are taking it too loosely. There’s going to be a continual stream of new variants, and vaccines will always lag behind them. Reopening everything will always accelerate this. Gathering is always going to be a mortal risk for the rest of our lives. I just wish the world would accept that and adapt rather than resign to it and downplay it.

I dunno how to put this but consider seeking therapy. 2 years of constant fear being cranked out by public health “experts” and the media have done a number on people. Fretting over Covid forever and trying to usher in some “new normal” is not rational thinking at all. I know plenty of smart people whose brains have been seriously messed up by all this Covid crap.

Learning to live with Covid doesn’t mean accepting some crazy dystopian “new normal”. It means accepting the small risk of Covid and going back to 2019 living. The one where you didn’t spend all your brainpower on “slowing the spread” of other viral diseases like the flu or the common cold.

We have vaccines for Covid now. It’s time to move on.

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

#212

Post by caffeine »

alecbz wrote: post #167

> Are there places out there for weirdos like me? I think the discourse is heavily biased towards pro-remote. We've been working from offices for years, so the pro-remote crowd has been vocal for a while, whereas most pro-office people are only just beginning to realize that they even prefer an office, let alone how much. But so basically I think it's a completely false notion that preferring remote work is the norm.…

It’s fun to sit in the same room/office and brainstorm and actually build something together.

Gives that sense of camaraderie, we’re-in-this-together feeling, if it’s with the right people.

I also think it’s about 20x more productive if in a high-stakes, high-uncertainty regime.

But the median remote work is probably better than the median in person work, even if the very best work is in person.

Try to imagine starting SpaceX or Apple as a remote company… I think that kind of magic just wouldn’t happen.

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

#213

Post by spookthesunset »

chrsig wrote: post #184
bencollier49 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this. Certain phases of work and types of teams do alright remotely - typically a team with a lot of senior engineers in mid-project flow with few external dependencies. But a team with a significant number of juniors, faced with multiple blockers or external dependencies will underperform badly compared to in-person working. Whole days will go missing because of a lack of effective communicat…

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.

Not everybody’s brain is wired to monitor chat tools, streams of jira tickets, and piles of email. Many are much more effective when they can just roll their chair over to their colleagues desk and work something out.

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

#214

Post by spookthesunset »

bfung wrote: post #146
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whole days will go missing because of a lack of effective communication A friend in the construction industry has been dealing with this since COVID WFH started. He works with a lot of different architects, designers, suppliers, and so on that have to coordinate work. He also has to track the costs of mistakes and extra time lost due to drawing issues, errors, missed change orders and so on. As soon as COVID WFH st…

Sounds ripe for disruption for a coordination app of some sort to track different progress of things…

Not all problems can be solved by technology. Not all “problems” are actually problems either.

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

#215

Post by rsynnott »

chrsig wrote: post #172
rsynnott wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re taking that a bit too literally. “While COVID is a massive office-closing problem” might be closer to the mark. Before Omicron showed up, a lot of places were moving to re-open everything mode. Omicron will slow that, but probably not by much.

Conversely, I think others are taking it too loosely. There’s going to be a continual stream of new variants, and vaccines will always lag behind them. Reopening everything will always accelerate this. Gathering is always going to be a mortal risk for the rest of our lives. I just wish the world would accept that and adapt rather than resign to it and downplay it.

… Eh? No, that seems highly unlikely. Decent therapeutic drugs will be available from next year (in quantity; homeopathic quantities are already available but not to the point where they’re particularly useful). Increasingly few people are totally naive to the virus. Over the next period of time there’ll be precautions to keep the hospitals operating and the death rate down, but that will tend to get easier and easier.

If you look at hospitalisation and death figures from heavily vaccinated countries, each wave has generally been less severe even as variants get nastier and restrictions are eased (you’re not seeing March 2020 restrictions pretty much anywhere today). It remains early for omicron, but initial signs show the same pattern.

I do think that places with this kind of politico-cultural objection to vaccines (parts of the US and Eastern Europe, for instance) may struggle.

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

#216

Post by g051051 »

dbbk wrote: post #206
g051051 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And as I said, if OP wants to hang out and work with other people, I'm fine with it. Medical reasons aside, I wouldn't force someone to WFH any more than I'd want someone to force me into an office. However, work culture (until recently) has catered exclusively to "extroverts".

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

#217

Post by whateveracct »

I've been fully remote for 5 years. For me, life feels more like retirement now than it ever did in the office. Despite having full income.

I do various hobbies, take better care of my home, spend time with family and pets. Before the pandemic, I would go to events, happy hours, brunch, parks, etc all the time. Not to mention the extra time for side projects.

I'm loving the cushy life remote work has afforded me - things really change when you spend So I guess my question is, why do you want your job to be such a big deal in your life?

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

#218

Post by chrsig »

spookthesunset wrote: post #210
chrsig wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Do you understand the difference between a novel virus and the flu?

> We have marvelous vaccines that knock Covid to the level of a cold or mild flu for most people in the “office worker” demographic.

And now we have omicron, which is still quite infectious in spite of the vaccines. Thankfully it seems less dangerous than delta. Who knows what the next variant will bring.

> Because part of saying “Covid isn’t going away ever” means “get on with your damn life”.

Part of “getting on with your damn life” includes accepting that there’s a new endemic virus that the population has no natural immunity to, and changing behavior appropriately.

Sorry, but time marches forward — 2019 is a thing of the past.

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

#219

Post by niemenmaa »

alecbz wrote: post #166
niemenmaa wrote: post #24

Before pandemic I started working remotely and soon noticed that, like OP, working alone doesn't suit me. I solved this by joining a co-working hub that offers offices to remote workers / entrepreneurs. My employer pays for the hub membership. I drive to our offices around once a month, but rest of the time I sit in a room with an accountant and gym owner. They are fun to chat and go to lunch with but they don't inte…

Not knocking what works for anyone else, but for me this really doesn't at all address the "working remotely" issue. Working around a bunch of strangers is better than being alone in my apartment all day, a bit better still if we're in similar industries, but the real thing I want is being physically present with the actual people on my team that I'm working with. Right now I'm working from my company's local office,…

This is definitely one of the bigger downsides of remote work, so I fully agree.

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

#220

Post by chrsig »

spookthesunset wrote: post #211
chrsig wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, I think others are taking it too loosely. There’s going to be a continual stream of new variants, and vaccines will always lag behind them. Reopening everything will always accelerate this. Gathering is always going to be a mortal risk for the rest of our lives. I just wish the world would accept that and adapt rather than resign to it and downplay it.

I dunno how to put this but consider seeking therapy. 2 years of constant fear being cranked out by public health “experts” and the media have done a number on people. Fretting over Covid forever and trying to usher in some “new normal” is not rational thinking at all. I know plenty of smart people whose brains have been seriously messed up by all this Covid crap. Learning to live with Covid doesn’t mean accepting so…

> I dunno how to put this but consider seeking therapy. 2 years of constant fear being cranked out by public health “experts” and the media have done a number on people

No, two years of half the population refusing to wear a fucking mask did a number on people. “Some crazy dystopian new normal” would actually be an improvement.

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