91–100 of 191 posts
Remote working can be a blessing during bad weathers or you want to take a little break from commuting.
I feel that gigantic metropolises are not optimal environments for software engineering. NYC, and it's helter skelter of noise and traffic and garbage and tiny living spaces, in my humble experience and opinion is not conducive to hard engineering problems. I am probably completely wrong here and just a hopeless introvert with an axe to grind, but from my experience, working in home offices in towns like Boulder, Col…
I haven't spent time in NYC, but I have spent time in a city that's about NYC density, in a neighbourhood that's about Manhatten density.
Honestly, all the above doesn't didn't me. I don't mind the constant drone of city noise. It feels natural and part of the backdrop. Conversely, I do get bothered by hearing a weed whacker on a quiet suburban sunday. The noises in low density areas feel like they "break the peace" so much more, and you can hear and take note of almost every single disturbance.
Though that was working on stuff in my own apartment, I shudder to think the kind of offices I'd have to work in. I agree it completely makes sense for more people to work at home.
I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain. The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend m…
> 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 meetin…
Blame is not easily assigned in this scenario. If your requirements changed have you conveyed these changes to the builder? Did the builder periodically reach out to checkpoint with you and get feedback? Communication is a two way street. No professional developer anymore can turn off their E-mail and phone and "turtle up" in their office, coding away in a vacuum. Only the most trivial software can be developed that way.
The time to travel to the office is often ignored too (it sounds lazy to even mention it because it's the norm). If you're working remotely and it takes 30 mins to get to the office, you're at an absolute minimum burning 5 hours a week going back and fourth from the office when you could be doing something else. Add in the extra time changing to and from work clothes, and having to leave the office to get food instea…
Yep, I've been 100% remote for 5 years now (wow, it feels weird to see that number!) and am never going back, for the same reasons. The only caveat is that it's important that you work in an organization that is aligned with remote work, if not remote-first. Just scoring 'permission' to work remotely somewhere not used to it, is probably a recipe for a pretty bad time.
Why is that?
I 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 re…
I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal. At first glance, a good indicator would be the salaries that remote companies pay, and most remote companies tend to pay peanuts, using 'remote' as an excuse to underpay, and thus also signaling that they do…
I wouldn't trade my daily lunch with my wife and kids for twice the salary.
The author blames this on a 9-6 schedule. But honestly I think it's way more likely a problem with drinking too much damn coffee. Everything he wrote in that part hit home, i was experiencing it very badly... until I started limiting myself to one big caffeinated drink before lunch a day. It's improved my quality of life a lot, I am tired way less.
I have been working remotely for nearly 3 years now. It is a necessity for me, my kids are very young and some some medical issues, so there is a lot of therapy and special schools involved with 1 pm dismissal times. I love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle.
I've heard people with families kids can struggle with this. The people I know who've been successful at it seem to always have some kind of office work space where they can close the door and get a bit of isolation, or, they invest in an offsite office of some kind.
I've worked remotely for years, I've worked in an open-office where presence was mandatory, and now I run a startup with a distributed team of engineers on several continents. While working in a shared office has pros and cons, the benefits are huge. One of the main benefits is in how information is shared. Sharing an office, you overhear conversations, and the chances of random but important information about how th…
I think the nature of what companies are best fits for remote work, and how best to mitigate the loss of passive information sharing/lower bandwidth of subtle communication cues would be a great subject for a book or article.
My short version would be: it primarily solves a recruiting problem in extremely difficult to recruit for fields, takes advantage of a bit of arbitrage in some people's utility of remote work (introvert, commute, family, etc), and information needs to be overshared (more meetings than one might prefer, more documentation, more explicit processes, etc).