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3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

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Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#11

Post by tessierashpool »

holoduke wrote: post #10
dangwu wrote: post #2

It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.

Working from home doesn't work. People need to be together physically to create trust in each other. Trust is the base ingredient for successful collaboration. Many teams in current covid situation suffer from team issues. Demotivation, unaligned, conflicts. The fun is gone. Specially visible in software dev teams in which generally people are not the most proactive talkers. Most positive feedback you hear today are…

This is just provably false. Basecamp and GitHub are the famous counterexamples, but there are many, many more. (Although GitHub changed course when they got larger.)

Working from home doesn't work for companies who don't know how to do it. It's not the same as working in an office and of course many companies are doing it wrong right now because they leaped into it without any knowledge of how to do it.

But plenty of companies have done very well with working from home, and had all the healthy teamwork anyone could ask for. It's not a matter of opinion, it's proven fact.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#12

Post by giantandroids »

It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skills are even more in demand (Security Engineering in my case).

I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board.

COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#13

Post by redisman »

holoduke wrote: post #10
dangwu wrote: post #2

It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.

Working from home doesn't work. People need to be together physically to create trust in each other. Trust is the base ingredient for successful collaboration. Many teams in current covid situation suffer from team issues. Demotivation, unaligned, conflicts. The fun is gone. Specially visible in software dev teams in which generally people are not the most proactive talkers. Most positive feedback you hear today are…

Sounds like your personal experience. Which is fine but there are thousands of companies and teams that have found it to be just as good or better than butts at the same physical office

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#14

Post by giantandroids »

holoduke wrote: post #10
dangwu wrote: post #2

It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.

Working from home doesn't work. People need to be together physically to create trust in each other. Trust is the base ingredient for successful collaboration. Many teams in current covid situation suffer from team issues. Demotivation, unaligned, conflicts. The fun is gone. Specially visible in software dev teams in which generally people are not the most proactive talkers. Most positive feedback you hear today are…

This is simply false. There have been plenty of companies running 100% remote based teams successfully for a while now. Further to that, some of the worlds best open source projects are all coded as a type of remote team. Any problems that there are, are from management not being able to make the jump in culture and harness remote tooling.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#15

Post by [deleted] »

dejv wrote: post #9
nexthash wrote: post #4

Does anybody think this might be a permanent shift? I would love it if I could have the convenience of a top-paying remote job in software development. The twitter thread voiced concerns about this trend being like a pendulum that could swing back to the dominance of in-person work, even within a year. Covid has proved that remote employment is possible, but the question remains: will companies rescind their current…

My two cents as a remote dev for past two decades I think we are not going back as the landscape changed a lot: the scene used to consist of code me a facebook clone for 200USD to getting rich iOS apps towards seeing more bootstrapped high margin businesses and VC backed startups. This last group starting to learn doing remote work effectively and they manage to mine this talent pool profitably

[deleted]

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#16

Post by 4eor0 »

holoduke wrote: post #10
dangwu wrote: post #2

It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.

Working from home doesn't work. People need to be together physically to create trust in each other. Trust is the base ingredient for successful collaboration. Many teams in current covid situation suffer from team issues. Demotivation, unaligned, conflicts. The fun is gone. Specially visible in software dev teams in which generally people are not the most proactive talkers. Most positive feedback you hear today are…

Open source developers across the world would like to have a chat.

Forcing people into the office isn’t about producing useful output.

It’s about embedding an expectation, and routine.

Kegerators, snack bars, they’re not about motivation. But embedding buy in.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#18

Post by caseysoftware »

dangwu wrote: post #2

It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.

While I haven't seen a formal plan announced, I think there are financial, logistical, social, and political headwinds to it.

- Financial: Companies are saving major cash by reducing office space and the associated perks. It's no longer a fight to serve the best meals, have the best designed space, and the greatest views. Further, eliminating business travel increased margins across the board.

- Logistics: Many companies in the Bay Area (especially SF proper), NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and other places are highly dependent on mass transit. How many people will want to use it after this?

- Social: Some % of the population has been convinced that anyone can contract and die of covid quickly and easily. All the restaurants, coffee shops, bars, etc, etc around their offices have withered and many have died in the last year. If companies don't feed their people, will they hope everyone brings a lunch?

- Political: The Biden Admin just announced masks are likely necessary into 2022. Further, we're seeing new covid variants/mutations triggering lockdowns all over again.

Any one of those may not be enough but collectively, it will create major resistance to any sort of "in the office" demands.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#20

Post by axaxs »

nexthash wrote: post #4

Does anybody think this might be a permanent shift? I would love it if I could have the convenience of a top-paying remote job in software development. The twitter thread voiced concerns about this trend being like a pendulum that could swing back to the dominance of in-person work, even within a year. Covid has proved that remote employment is possible, but the question remains: will companies rescind their current…

Yes, but not the utopia devs in big cities want. They're in for a rude awakening when they realize people with way more talent will do the job for less, not only in the US but worldwide. And I don't mean typical outsourcing bodyshops, but truly talented people in say, the midwest US or eastern Europe.
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