I feel this works best for companies under 20 people (Lawn Love, MailJoy, et al.) and greater than 1000 (i.e. Google, Facebook, et al.).
Why I Only Work Remotely
11–20 of 191 posts
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#12I work at a company which has a beautiful building, I spend the majority of time in the office which is fantastic, the social aspect plus internal networking is very good. I work from home on average maybe 0.8 days a week, for various reasons, but I get lots of work done and am quite productive from home. There are some things that you just can't do the same from home. You can be much more agile when working in proxi…
My workplace is 80% remote, but not in the way you might think.
Just about everyone works from home 4 days a week, and comes into the office one day.
It expands the hiring pool by a pretty significant amount, one of our devs is 2 hours away (4 hours round trip, and he still commutes less than his wife does every week), it lets us get a lot of the "face to face" benefits done in one day, and the rest of the time is remote.
We do also have a couple fully remote, and a couple "always in office".
It works out nice though as we tend to remember to include the "always remote" people on our in office day because most of us know how much it sucks getting left out.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#13For as much as people like to hate on open offices on HN, it still baffles me why there aren't more Y Combinator startups founded with remote work or private offices as core company principles. Just a guess, but I wonder if the decision to just go with open offices has to do with the ability to scale such a plan quickly and easily, whereas scaling a remote team is too difficult or building or rearranging private offi…
I think most people running start-ups are not anywhere near as talented or insightful as they are portrayed, in fact I think some of them are super insecure and have to portray themselves as "thought leaders."
This leads to a situation where leadership can't honestly acknowledge when they've made a bad decision.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#14[deleted]
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#15Agreed. I've been working remotely for 2 years now and don't think I could go back to an office. The open office floor plans are just horrendous for actually getting any work done. The article doesn't talk about the high cost of commuting but this is the biggest factor for me. Having that extra two hours per day, and not being exhausted when I get home, has really expanded the amount of living (social, fitness, hobbi…
How do you generally look for and find jobs?
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#16As much as I agree with the sentiment, 0/10 would not hire such a outspokenly high maintenance individual, no matter the technical chops or brilliance.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#17Different Strokes for different folks. My personal feeling is that a company should allow employees to do what they want. If the company has an office setting and an employee wants to do the office thing then let them. But if you have an employee who is telling you that they work better from home take them at their word and let the results the judge of whether or not they're telling the truth.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#18I've had good results with finding companies that don't force bad working conditions, and asking for an alternative to open seating when necessary. I've always been accommodated. If people aren't at least asking for flexibility, they should be.
I haven't had to sacrifice the ability to have face to face communications and relationships with my co-workers. I'm not saying these are my best friends, just that there's subtly more that comes across in person vs. remote.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#19Some employers would argue that your privacy is forfeited during working hours. After all they pay you a salary, and if they want you in the office so be it - even if it is a less effective environment. Needless to say, I sympathize with the OP view here.
Good point. It's often stipulated in the contract or made clear during the interview process what the expectations are, which is good. The unfortunate part is that employers may not realize that their policies are actually decreasing productivity.
Maximizing individual employee productivity may not be even in the top ten list of company priorities. For one, making sure that what the company wants to be built is actually built is massively more important. This seems to be hard for many companies.
My roommate's startup has gutted their remote team, only one guy is still there and his days are numbered. From what my roommate told me, managing remote employees can be more trouble than it's worth.
I remain unconvinced that the clamor for remote work environments is really in company's best interests. When push comes to shove, doing remote right requires an investment on the parts of both the team and the company, and if one side doesn't or cannot pull their weight, then it becomes unmanageable, bringing the company down with it.
Employees can bitch about the employers, but they're the ones paying the salaries.
Re: Why I Only Work Remotely
#20Some employers would argue that your privacy is forfeited during working hours. After all they pay you a salary, and if they want you in the office so be it - even if it is a less effective environment. Needless to say, I sympathize with the OP view here.
Employers can argue what they want, but I argue solely for myself and what I want is to not work for an employer that needs me to be in an office. So I don't.