The number one reason I see is remote work enables the ability to travel and explore. And some prefer async work also. It can't be possible in an in-office work.
Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
401–410 of 830 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now throw in minimum 0.5h + 0.5h commute or more realistically at least 1.5h total commuting time and suddenly you leave for work before your kids wake up and arrive back home 2-3h before they go to sleep. Who do you want to spend more time during the day, your coworker Bill the senior Java guy or your child Charlie, who has just learned to walk but you were not there to see their first steps? I mean, Bill's a great…
> Now throw in minimum 0.5h + 0.5h commute Minimum half hour commute? Definitely not a minimum. I've had a by bicycle , 5 minutes by car, and my kid's daycare is on the way. Minimum commute is more like 5 minutes. Sure, maybe average commute is a good bit higher, but then say average not minimum.
Thats lucky for you but you must be aware of how uncharacteristic that is. When you get a new job that commute disappears unless the new job is close to the old job or you up and move.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#403I felt the same, I was working for a startup in a startups incubator, and I enjoyed being at the office, with other startups, different projects, sometimes helping each other and weekly after hours meetups. During COVID the whole building was empty and it was sad. Also, at the same time, we started hiring remote employees on another time-zone, all of this started to feel impersonal and dehumanizing, so I left.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#404> And finally, I feel no one else is realizing that they are happily hacking away at the amazingly well-paid branch they're sitting on. As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south? German is hardly used in busine…
If you really want companies to just pay for "skills", then unfortunately that's going to mean a considerable drop in the average salary of a developer in the US and Europe. Globally the average salary of a skilled developer is not what folks are making in the valley.
I hope you know that the salary of a skilled developer in the valley could afford hundred acre palace estates in parts of the US....
Those salaries can afford to come down.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#405With all due respect, this is mostly my problem with the "work-from-office" (WFO for ease) crowd. Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy. Very few, if any, of the WFH crowd want mandatated WFH, it would make no sense. But then the WFO crowd often says no, I don't care what makes you happy, because you being in makes me happy. That doesn't…
WFO isn't necessarily about personal preference. People who want everyone to WFO believe that WFO produces better outcomes for the company. That is different than someone who desires to work from an office or remotely out of personal preference. For instance, I may prefer to WFH because it makes my life more convenient, but I can also accept that WFO produces better outcomes for the company. Personally, I haven't see…
One of the reasons I'm a big proponent of WFH (at least for tech careers) is precisely because WFO involves such a staggering amount of wasted time for everyone, but it's so baked into the business culture that few people seem to notice the full extent of it.
I think I understand where you're coming from, but I strongly disagree with the implication that WFO means collaboration/interaction and WFH doesn't. WFO makes the cost of interaction so low that it tends to get abused. YMMV, but I've been WFH almost entirely for the past decade and one of the key benefits is that gets things closer to the sweet spot in the right amount of interaction, and the collaboration is of higher quality. *
WFH vs WFO has so many facets and tradeoffs, but for software companies at least, I'd be extremely skeptical that WFO produces better outcomes for the company on average.
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* I don't fully know all the reasons for this, but I suspect it's because remote interaction encourages proficiency in a richer set of collaboration tools, and so we learn to naturally flow from tool to tool based on what is the best fit - chat for spitballing, email for thoughtful protracted debate, a Google doc for hammering out proposals and requirements, etc. In nearly every case there's automatically a searchable history created. In WFO, it's typical to lean way too heavily on face-to-face, which is extremely costly in the moment, it doesn't encourage putting much thought/preparation into the communication, and it also lacks any sort of history keeping (unless done manually), so information is lost or, worse, the face-to-face collaboration is then followed up with using the same tools to attempt to recreate what was discussed/decided (so redundant effort).
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to hop on the train of criticism, but there are plenty of other ways to invest yourself in your career other than being a social butterfly around the coffee pot. Admittedly I'm a bit socially awkward and fully aware of my flaws, but that's part of the reason I enjoy terminal work in the first place. Commits and Slack are about as social as I was in the office, anyway and when I was social, people wished I would k…
Maybe I have some sort of Office-PTSD or something, but I make it very clear to my coworkers that we can be friendly, but we aren't friends. You don't need my cellphone number, we don't need to go grab drinks after work, etc.. I've just noticed that if you turn your back for a second, then out come the wolves. Less coffee pot talk the better as far as I am concerned. I have my friends and life outside of work, and I…
That doesn't sound healthy.
Im no social butterfly, and understand initial boundaries are important, however stone walling everyone at work makes for a miserable work place for your colleagues, and for yourself (due to all interactions being ultimately pointless beyond strictly business).
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#407I don't like WFH, but I hate WFO more. Actually, what I like is WAFO: "Work Away From the Office".
I usually prefer cowork spaces, or coffee shops as a fallback. In such environments, socializing is possible, but opt-in. People around are not (usually) your colleagues. But they're still people, so if you're looking to make friends over coffee or lunch, it's available.
You also have expectation of privacy. No one looking over your shoulders and drawing conclusions. Whether your screen is filled with code for 10 straight hours (which often goes unnoticed in the office), or decide to spend your time watching YouTube clips (which may raise some eyebrows in the office), in a cowork, no one cares. It's your process, you're the adult.
> But shouldn't we rather work on fixing those things instead of...
People will be people. You can't fix that. The social dynamics are too complex. The challenge is akin to not thinking of a pink elephant.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#408There's nothing wrong with that, and I have many friends that like the social upsides of having an office. But I think it will become increasingly common to divide social life and work in the future. Imagine the following: You have a few good friends in Berlin and each of you work for different companies. But you all work remotely. You could rent a small office space with your friends everyone could work from there,…
Every time that this topic comes up it goes the same way. I wish that we could all collectively agree that this is a PREFERENCE . One way is not objectively better than the other. They both have trade-offs. We could actually make some progress if we focusing on having WFO and WFH people better able to collaborate together . One anecdote: I've been working fully remote for the last year. I prefer WFO but such is the w…
> I wish that we could all collectively agree that this is a PREFERENCE
If you read my comment, that's also what I'm saying in the first sentence. I think the issue is that living that preference within one company is really hard. A remote-first culture is usually very different from an office-first culture. I would never want to work remotely when most of my team is sitting in the same room every day (done that, been there).
So, what will happen is that will be an increasing number of remote-first companies, and people who like to work remotely, will work there. This way, the preferences can be shown.
What will the remote-first companies' share be of total companies? Who knows...
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#409As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south?
Outsourcing was happening long before the pandemic. If a company wanted to outsource work to cheaper devs they've been able to for decades. There's nothing about WFH that changes that.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
#410With all due respect, this is mostly my problem with the "work-from-office" (WFO for ease) crowd. Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy. Very few, if any, of the WFH crowd want mandatated WFH, it would make no sense. But then the WFO crowd often says no, I don't care what makes you happy, because you being in makes me happy. That doesn't…
Unless everyone on a single team chooses to work either from home or the office, communication will suffer for the people working from home, since it's just far easier to talk to people in the same room than it is to type stuff.
Personally, I find working in an office to be borderline unbearable unless I'm participating in making all the noise that's being generated around me.