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Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

economist.com

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Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#151

Post by suzzer99 »

EMM_386 wrote: post #32
icelancer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world". Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be p…

> Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing. What's interesting is that I flew in for a meeting with my company recently, the first I've had since I've been hired. This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working. We spen…

From my 20+ years of experience working the spectrum from fully remote to fully in-office - there seems to be something primal that happens when you make a real human connection with someone. In person > zoom > phone > email.

It doesn't matter much in the good times when everything is going smoothly. But when the crap hits the fan and you don't have that connection - things tend to get contentious a lot faster. If you're the only one on the team without a human connection to the rest of the team, you're set up to be the scapegoat when things go wrong. It's just human nature.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#152

Post by irrational »

aybs wrote: post #52
EMM_386 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing. What's interesting is that I flew in for a meeting with my company recently, the first I've had since I've been hired. This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working. We spen…

I’m doing something similar with my team in a few weeks, and I’d measure our in person value on a different scale than just what we produce in person together. I don’t know if this is naive, but I still feel like it’s important to celebrate our accomplishments together and if we have a chance to do that in person, even if velocity suffers and some money is spent, we get something out of that shared experience togethe…

We are finishing up a major project right now. At the last zoom meeting the business lead excitedly suggested that we should all get together in real life once it is totally completed for a celebration. All of us engineers slacked each other and said that we had less than zero interest in this and wondered how we could tell the business person thanks, but no thanks. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I still don't understand the desire of business people to go get a beer together or go eat together or whatever. I do have friends I'd like to do those things with, but that is not you. Please don't make this awkward.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#153

Post by siva7 »

EMM_386 wrote: post #124
siva7 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not so different as one might believe. Those exact arguments about off-shoring and remote work already existed back then. Even your first argument was pretty much the same in all those other events as “has been shown that every code monkey can do their job remotely”. Turned out pretty soon that Software engineering is much more than just churning out code.

> This is not so different as one might believe. Those exact arguments about off-shoring and remote work already existed back then. This is far different than then. In 2000, remote work was almost an impossibility... between bandwidth, protocols and everything else. These days it's as easy as enabling your built-in HD cam and mic and getting to business.

Successful off-shoring isn’t about enabling a bandwith-hungry HD cam streaming your team in 4K. Neither back then nor nowadays. The right communication tools for the job existed back then but that wasn’t the reason why it didn’t work out in 2000 or in 2009. Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers all those last years where nothing of that was a major issue but the problems aren’t primarily about tooling, protocol or bandwith.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#154

Post by user3939382 »

EMM_386 wrote: post #19

Everyone should keep in mind that water seeks its own level. And think of this on a global scale. I've been working remotely for almost a decade as a senior software engineer. Now, post-Covid, almost everyone realizes they can do the same. Salaries are going to drop in the "rich world", and it's not just because people are now fleeing places like SF/SV to lower cost of living areas. We are also beginning to compete g…

I don’t see it. Cultural barriers and lost in translations are huge, I’m surprised anyone who’s worked with foreign teams doesn’t think so. It’s not cheap or easy to collaborate with people you have a hard time communicating with.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#155

Post by panda88888 »

judge2020 wrote: post #57
jodrellblank wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " [0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary. " CheckSalary.co.uk puts the average salary for "a programmer" in the UK at £43K, Reed.co.uk says £41k, Glassdoor says £35K, Payscale says £31K... maybe devs here should upskill in English? https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/programmer-salary-SRCH_...

programmer is very vague, and glassdoor does show the jobs bringing that down as php/web development, which is highly saturated and competitive.

Doesn’t Facebook use Hack, a PHP derivative, internally?

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#156

Post by [deleted] »

EMM_386 wrote: post #19

Everyone should keep in mind that water seeks its own level. And think of this on a global scale. I've been working remotely for almost a decade as a senior software engineer. Now, post-Covid, almost everyone realizes they can do the same. Salaries are going to drop in the "rich world", and it's not just because people are now fleeing places like SF/SV to lower cost of living areas. We are also beginning to compete g…

[deleted]

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#157

Post by hogFeast »

closeparen wrote: post #107
hogFeast wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cities used to have all the industry located in the centre. It led to huge slums (because there was insufficient supply and massive demand) and everyone leaving the city when the slums got cleared. Even if you have great transportation (Tokyo, London, New York), the commute is still pretty brutal. The only real "solution" that was ever presented to this problem was to create smaller garden cities that would have…

Slum is a comment about the quality of the structures. That happens when your civilization is poor and a typical worker’s wages don’t buy much building material. Marginal structures are a thing in rural settings too, only there it’s “rustic” instead of “slum.” Anyway, we are not that fledgling economy anymore. Contemporary high-rise apartments are really nice! Even the mass-produced 5+1s are perfectly comfortable and…

No, it is a comment about overcrowding. The point is: there was no way to move lots of people into these areas to do work and maintain living standards. Buildings also cost labour to produce, now that society is rich, can everyone just buy infinite building materials?

Correct, the ones we have now that only rich people can buy and which exist during a shortage of housing. Assuming that this can just scale up to house millions of people makes no sense (and has never occurred anywhere, the reason why public transit systems are so important is because it has never been possible to economically build enough housing within cities).

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#158

Post by lmm »

EMM_386 wrote: post #71
icelancer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working. What engineers and people on this site seem to not grasp is that "working" is not a strict definition that maps to "writing code" to management, business operations, marketing, sales... basically every non-engineering department. If that concept starts to take root in the mind, then it becomes a bit more clear why people like the office. Engin…

> Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent. I do this all day in private Slack communications, 1-1 video conferences, and everything else. This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I…

> This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.

That doesn't just happen. I'm glad your company/team has apparently figured it out; mine certainly hasn't.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#159

Post by zeroday28 »

LyalinDotCom wrote: post #134

I wish we wouldn't allow upvoting here of articles behind a paywall, this just wastes everyone's time. And yes someone might post a link to get around the paywall but this is hurting our news industry so I cant support this as a workaround.

I wouldn't recommend doing this nor saying I do this, but just FYI; The entire article loads way before the paywall.

This means two things:

1) If you disable JavaScript, the paywall goes away.

2) If you can quickly ctrl + a, ctrl + c the entire article you can read it on your IDE.

We need to tell economist.com developers to patch this.

Re: Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why

#160

Post by Root_Denied »

outside1234 wrote: post #73

We’ve been through this multiple times and each time we discover how important communication is in software engineering. I don’t doubt that some people will be remote - but the ones that get ahead will be local - and that will draw people back.

Open source community has been successfully creating high quality and complex products for years without ever meeting, let alone having a shared physical space to work from.
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