Why I Only Work Remotely

> only to have the projects scrapped because they weren't what the business needed.

That is most definitely not the programmers fault whatsoever. Scope, feature set, product/market fit, and current status should be reviewed on a weekly basis by a product owner or project manager. If a general contractor builds you the house you demanded 6 months ago but your not happy with it now, who's fault is that?

> remote meetings are simply worse than in-person meetings

You give no explanation as your reasoning for this. Generally speaking, all meetings need to have an organized flow. I work on a team of 15 people where we can easily cover all our checkins remotely in under an hour. One meeting per week.

A question to all of you who only work remotely, and I'm sure it's been covered by HN so forgive me, but where do you find reliable work that's remote? I can see getting lucky maybe and scoring one maybe two gigs that allow remote but a caterer doing it? When my wife's gig is up she would love to work from home. She already works from home two days a week.

But she has no idea how to make a career out that reliably. She started out doing QA/testing, now she is all into oracle and DB2. Using oracle tools and IBM tools for managing/writing SQL for enormous databases. Government sized databases.

She is making low six figures now here in KC.

Thanks for any advice or leads on remote only work as a career!

Developers at the small companies that I have worked at have had at least some input into business needs.

Developers are often aware of solutions that do not occur to the business people. A business person might think we are being as efficient as we can be in process P, but then a developer may come along and say we can automate parts of process P by implementing solution S, for example.

A lot of the time this sort of thing does not happen in the scheduled, structured meetings, or in email chains, or in video conferences. It happens when people in the office approach each other "out of the blue" and decide to grab a conference room and work something through face-to-face.

I agree with you. I personally am much more distracted at home because "I'm home". When I'm at work, I'm in work mode. I also find that I solve a lot of yesterdays roadblocks during my commute (20 mins each way) and the shower. Solving problems is not always about characters per second of new code.

Over the years, I can't even count the number of times that I heard a conversation taking place and was able to step in and say "that's wrong" and stop several people from a multiple day detour.

I do think 40 person open spaces are bad but small ones for a team of 2-5 that are all working on the same project are great (ideal imo), especially in a sealed room with lots of white boards, etc.

I do think that remote will become more and more common as companies see it as a way to reduce costs.

It seems like the author is mainly concerned about what is best for them, not the team. Requirements and clarifications constantly evolve. It is expensive to have every requirement exactly defined with full test cases when you aren't sure what you need to build. Being involved in that process gets everyone to good enough quicker. Also, I'm not sure what to do when a customer calls (8-6, presumably) and has an issue and the night owl is the one who knows that part of the system, telling the customer to call back at 1:00 cause that's when Bob is awake seems pretty silly.

Most tech companies have hours ~8-6, because that is their customers hours too, not out of a mandate to irritate employees. I do agree with the author that if the employer only cares about butts in seats, then it is a bad place to work but that has nothing to do with remote vs on site.

Fashions and preferences come and go. And, for many people, they change based on their stage in life and changing priorities.

There are tradeoffs associated with life in, especially dense, cities. Yes, walking to restaurants/stores/etc. can be nice. So can stepping out onto a deck or patio without a lot of noise and nearby neighbors--or the ability to hop in a car and be in forests or mountains in 30 minutes.

Also, while I think that fully autonomous vehicles are further out than many people here seem to think, I have to believe that once they do eventually exist, they'll make dispersed living relatively more attractive. If you have a "personal driver" at your beck and call, I have to believe that makes being able to walk to a nearby restaurant or taking the subway to see a play less compelling as tradeoffs against more crowded/noisier/etc. housing.