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

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

#51
Hey there, I worked remotely for 4 of ~7.5 years at a medium-to-large tech company (I left in February). I'm very thankful I had the opportunity, since 99% of the engineering team was either onsite or in satellite offices.

In my experience, it was far easier for me to get burned out when working remotely versus in an office with other people. And when I did get burned out, I found it harder to get back on the other side of the hill when I didn't have a community around me.

Also, if I look at the ~7.5 year tenure at the company — my most productive and happiest times were when I was located onsite at their HQ.

Just my $0.02; happy to talk more in detail over email (in profile).

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

#52

I absolutely think you lose something from lack of face-to-face contact. Some of the most productive leadership and decison-making sessions I've had came from sitting around a table or sharing a meal or a drink with a team, and going back and forth about something. Additionally, casual contact helps too. I put a couch in my office, and people would come just sit down and talk. The setting set the vibe. I had some gre…

I don't think people necessarily disagree, but I also think that the benefits of that are limited by human biases and tendencies toward clique-ish behaviors, and that hurts both the people who inevitably get left out of those events and the broader company, because the opportunities for unpredictable synergies are limited by those biases/cliques.

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

#54
Isolation both physically and mentally.

As a serial entrepayneur in Saas and a degreed software architect I find little disruption and absolute silence a great benefit to be able to create in the confines and silence of my home. I have been working remote partially since dialup and full remote in the last 10 years. One must self motivate and while I can say that easily since my efforts result in my own success working for someone else is likely more difficult if you need constant feedback and oversight.

Stay Healthy!

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

#59
After years of working remotely, my only argument against remote work is that it requires that your direct team members also be working in the same manner to be most effective. It's all or nothing if you want it to work long-term.

Whenever you have a case where some team members work in an office together, and others work remotely - it creates undue stress on personal relationships. Even if your team makes a great effort to be inclusive, there will always be times (lunches especially) where important conversations will happen in-person, and the remote person will be left out. In the worst case scenario, it can lead to being intentionally left out of even important technical conversations (Example: I had a remote coworker on a sibling team who scheduled a meeting about a technical architecture issue he wanted to have input on. The in-person team didn't show up to the call, but then had the meeting in person without him and told him the outcome of the decision.) The remote workers will end up feeling hobbled from a relationship building standpoint - and their growth opportunities will feel limited.

Those issues can be easily avoided by keeping teams either all-remote, or all-in-person. When you are in an all-remote team, everyone is on the same level communication-wise. So you'll see real effort go into using slack and other tools to build up comaraderie. With a mixed setup, that effort is usually asymmetric - causing the remote workers to bond and develop trust with other remote workers, but not with the in-person teams.

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

#60
Lack of engagement is the strongest argument I can think of.

Immersion in problems is a really cheap way for product managers, engineering leads, and data scientists to engage with problems. When you're in office it's easier to get that engagement, thereby getting business-relevant exposure and feedback on your work.

Remote work can also confound lack of skill for communication difficulties (another form of lack of engagement). One of the weakest leads I've ever worked with was remote. He was ineffectual and effectively invisible to execs, except when they wondered why his team wasn't delivering more value.

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