Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Remote First at Quora

greylock.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 127 posts

Re: Remote First at Quora

#71

Post by pX3q54Q55945w7E »

zhdc1 wrote: post #55
D895n9o33436N42 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when everyone’s work environment is the same across a given company? Doesn’t this level the playing field? Evergreen communication seems to specifically serve the goal of reducing or even eliminating the need to be “close to the flagpole”, as you called it.

There were a lot of companies that were remote work first before COVID. The issue is that this is only possible for companies in certain fields (tech being one of them) that have the right tools and management structures in place, and where explicit knowledge is more important than tacit knowledge. I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication (the closest I could find was a consulting-ish company online), but I'm su…

> I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication

I saw the words "evergreen communication" in a job posting this week, and they stuck with me. I've no idea if this is a common expression, but it seems to make sense to me. My interpretation of it is: words said during an in-person conversation tend to fade away into participants' imperfect memories as soon as they're said. Words that make up written communication (Slack, wiki, ...) tend to stick around, thus allowing others to who weren't directly around for the conversation to benefit from the knowledge later on.

"Asynchronous communication" likely refers to the same thing.

Re: Remote First at Quora

#72

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

iagooar wrote: post #10

Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…

I met the majority of my friends at clubs and bars and house parties. I would be much happier with WFH if we still had bars and restaurants.

Re: Remote First at Quora

#73

Post by jefurii »

D895n9o33436N42 wrote: post #30
iagooar wrote: post #10

Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…

> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. Eh, there’s enough anecdata to swing this in either direction. I have not grown up in the US, so I’ve truly started my social network from scratch when I began my professional career almost two decades ago. The people I’ve become friendly at work make poor friends. Perhaps my definition of “friend” is d…

> you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.

Coworking spaces offer this plus - depending on the space - potential friendships with people in your field. I was at a space for awhile and there was a great group of fellow software people who all sat together.

Re: Remote First at Quora

#74

Post by panzagl »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #64
malechimp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true but it also goes the other way. Assume you're living in a mid-range western-world city, e.g. Berlin. And assume you're competing with a similar to you dev who's living in Cebu (Philippines). The difference of what constitutes a good salary between you two is way too large for the company offering a position to ignore.

Insert obligatory warning about timezones here. Seriously, I've been working with the US west coast for most t of the last decade (i'm in Europe) and its reall realluy hard because of timezones.

So companies offshore north-south instead of east-west, I don't want to compete with Latin American or African salaries any more than Asia.

Re: Remote First at Quora

#75

Post by doopy-loopy2 »

iagooar wrote: post #10

Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…

This.

Re: Remote First at Quora

#77

Post by silveroriole »

iagooar wrote: post #10

Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…

> I have some friend who have been working at a company who went remote-first and after 5 years they do not feel identified with the company anymore. It's just a job. You could work for someone else and you wouldn't even notice.

I think feeling “identified with your company” is kind of pathological. If remote work gets more people to realise it’s just a job, it’s not their company, and they shouldn’t work themselves to death over it, good.

Re: Remote First at Quora

#78

Post by onion2k »

panzagl wrote: post #74
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insert obligatory warning about timezones here. Seriously, I've been working with the US west coast for most t of the last decade (i'm in Europe) and its reall realluy hard because of timezones.

So companies offshore north-south instead of east-west, I don't want to compete with Latin American or African salaries any more than Asia.

If SV companies genuinely embrace the idea of working with much cheaper remote developers I don't think you'll have a choice.

Re: Remote First at Quora

#79

Post by dang »

fogetti wrote: post #38
iagooar wrote: post #10

Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…

[flagged]

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future. You may not owe better to late-stage capitalism, but you do owe better to this community if you're posting to it.

Re: Remote First at Quora

#80

Post by tonystubblebine »

iagooar wrote: post #10

Working remotely has a very high cost, but it only gets visible in the long term. Working from home isolates you. There is no way around this. You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office. For the company, people that work remote start drifting away from the company vision and spirit - you get an army of people working individually most of the time,…

When we went remote first we were pretty aggressive about organizing our work so that people could work more independently, i.e. we got rid of a lot of meetings. By aggressive, I mean as the CEO, I often have zero working meetings in a given week. That's more aggressive than most people will do.

But what we did instead was start a nearly daily standup video call that is primarily social. Often people will bring challenging questions and we'll all riff on them. We call it a standup meeting but maybe we should call it a water cooler meeting. It's just about knowing and relating to each other.

Team is about 25 people with another 200-300 contractors in a given month and I count six major concurrent projects right now.

Post reply on HN