Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?

It's hard to train people remotely. At least it is in my experience anyway.

Agreed. But as soon as a company gets mature creativity and innovation get killed. If anything, I feel that in larger companies remote people have a better chance to be creative because they don't have to go through the whole meeting circus. My team is onsite with the exception of me another guy. I feel we have the chance to fly under the radar and do stuff whereas the in-office people immediately get sucked into tons of meetings where ideas go to die.

> Hiring is more difficult. It's not that you can't find applicants, but the people capable of performing without direct supervision is (mostly) a subset of those capable of performing in an office.

OTOH, your applicant pool is limited only to the time zones and legal jurisdictions you're willing to hire from. If you're office-based, it's limited to those who can reasonably commute there.

A bit of the out of sight out of mind at play? Curious too as to how much visibility into efforts of remote employees (wins) were shared, celebrated and known across the company vs. folks in person that have a better platform to promote themselves.

I used to be strongly against it. I felt like I would never be able to be productive or efficient from home with a pile of books sitting on one side, a tv on the other and so on. Boy, was I wrong... As a matter of fact things have never been easier. While on-site you constantly have people around you, and countless distractions and annoyances, this is not the case at home.

This isn't the case for everyone of course - if you have kids, families, pets and whatnot, I'm sure that changes.

In addition, since I am a really die-hard linux user and I know my way around a system and networks, it's safe to say I do most of the work locally on my computer. rsync, mounting small partitions over sshfs with just the files I need, tunneling and so on, I honestly can't tell the difference after spending two hours writing a few shell scripts for common stuff. Generally I am a command line guy, I rarely bother with fancy IDE's and vim is often my first weapon of choice. With a couple of macros I've been able to simplify just about all common tasks to a few keystrokes. And being really familiar with the code that already exists, I rarely need reference. As long as I have SSH and the most basic of tools like vim, grep, git, find and whatnot, I feel right at home, no pun intended.

But for people who are used to more modern, fancy stuff(coming from a 30 year old...), this might sound like a nightmare. Also if your work involves a lot of graphics, it's probably a nightmare. Looking at people using rdp... Them poor poor souls...

The only drawback I initially saw was the absence of physical movement for me. This worried me a lot because until several years ago I was a bit overweight to put it mildly(185cm, 110+ kg). Before the lockdown I used to walk to and back from work, exercise and all of a sudden all of that went away. But there was another strange side effect of the lockdown - I started exercising on daily basis(having weights, pull up bar, yoga mats and whatnot and 5 minutes every couple of hours). To my greatest surprise, in the last month and a half I've gotten in a better shape then ever. In terms of body fat I'm certainly in the single digits without loosing muscle mass.

So in the case of people who have the chance to work in solitude, have a good working ethic, can handle their work efficiently over the internet, don't require social interactions and can take care of their physical and mental health(highly specific demographic, I know), at this point I have 0 arguments against remote work. If anything, I absolutely love it.