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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

#241

Post by Tade0 »

tjr225 wrote: post #45
notadoc wrote: post #36

Now the developed world will compete with the developing world to lower wages in the developed world. The high salaries and perks for many USA tech jobs may not last much longer. No need for companies to pay more for premium locations / perk offices. No need for companies to deal with the hassle of H1B visas. From a company perspective, why pay someone in the USA $165k/year to work from home in Trendyville when an In…

Have you worked with someone in Bangalore? No offense my Bangalore homies, but I’ve only had bad experiences. Same with Bulgaria. Weird communication issues and bad work. This was especially the case in customer facing work. Ive had better experience with people in the NL but still obvious communication issues, bad experiences with Australia and Asia. For better or for worse(I think worse) engineering culture is heav…

Have you considered the thought that perhaps the problem could be on your end?

Especially implying that there's less of an engineering culture in a country that brought us ASML - the company behind the machines used by TSMC to produce the Apple M1?

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

#242

Post by jayd16 »

01100011 wrote: post #161
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.

Did the developers of the Linux kernel need to share the same physical space on a continuous basis? I think open source software is a testament the the idea that software does not require physical collaboration most of the time.

I love Linux but I can think of two quite popular OSes developed by companies with centralized offices/campuses. Linux also has a lot of contributions that were written in an office, I'm sure.

All this just to say I don't think its all that valid of a argument.

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

#243

Post by ninipp »

I couldn't agree more, and companies like Crewscale make certain that developers are properly recognised and that clients receive the highest quality of work. As a result, this is a win-win situation for both parties.

However, there are a lot of myths about remote work. Naturally, people who have never done this before have a lot of reservations about it.

https://www.crewscale.com/blog/remote/busting-remote-myths

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

#244

Post by koonsolo »

bigwavedave wrote: post #223
koonsolo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the other people in the room are also knowledgeable, you will come to an even better conclusion much faster face-to-face. In my experience, having "group reasoning" is faster and with better results.

> If the other people in the room are also knowledgeable, you will come to an even better conclusion much faster face-to-face. > In my experience, having "group reasoning" is faster and with better results. Why is face-to-face required for "group reasoning"?

You want high and fast bandwidth between the different brains.

Me writing something in my cocoon for 15 minutes, then someone reading that and replying what is wrong with that is not very efficient.

Just throwing some thoughts in the open air and others responding to that, crystallizes much faster.

Same with giving feedback about user interfaces. It's so much easier to just walk to someone's desk and point at what you think should be changed. You can interact instantly.

That is not to say that I don't see the value in written communication, documentation and having a log of what happened. It's very much a trade-off.

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

#245

Post by js4ever »

MauroIksem wrote: post #149
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…

What sort of projects are 10x engineers working on?

They work on projects that can afford them, and they are not necessarily the most interesting ones

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

#246

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

tticvs wrote: post #203
nootropicat wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There's no room for current American dev salaries in a world where remote-first jobs are a norm. Sure there are timezone differences, but EST is doable for Europe. 08:00 EST = 13:00 UTC, so working 8h in EST means 13:00-15:00 -> 21:00-23:00 in European timezones. Some people may even prefer it. Europe has a larger population of devs that's underutilized because it's dispersed among multiple countries. India is t…

This happening. I live in Europe and number of American companies hiring here has skyrocketed over the last 18 months. And it's great. European tech compensation is finally starting to rise. I don't think it will ever match the insanity that is the Bay Area. But a senior engineer making ~€200k total compensation while living in Germany is no longer unheard of. Anecdotally I've heard from Indian colleagues that wages…

The only people in Palo Alto who should really be worried are landlords :)

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

#247

Post by sillysaurusx »

onion2k wrote: post #211
sillysaurusx wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty cool. And I think that kind of work needs people who think it's cool, or else it'll only attract evil people. There's nothing wrong with building weapons for defense. It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point. Even for offense, other countries are working hard to build out their arsenals. I'm personally fine with building AI weapons, for example. If a contract opportunity appears, I…

It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point. That is absolutely not true. There are people in the governments of every nuclear power would use their weapons aggressively given the chance. That's why policies of disarmament are so necessary. As long as humans have nuclear weapons the probability of practically annihilating our species and leaving any survivors living in the stone age again remains higher t…

For what it's worth, I agree with you. One of my sneaky reasons for joining the military establishment would be to help make those sorts of changes from within. Or at least that's what I'd like to tell myself while designing devastating weapons.

I really do feel that reasonable people need to join such organizations, though, otherwise only unreasonable people will be in them. I recently found (to my dismay) that Von Neumann argued vehemently in favor of bombing the Russians before their nuclear program could be built, and all I could think was "This isn't the type of scientist that should have a lot of influence."

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

#248

Post by pharmakom »

I think remote first is more efficient for companies because they have a wider pool of candidates to select from.

I think the productivity bump during covid WFH was actually due to there being little else to do and people had not established proper work boundaries.

I still think individuals are, for the most part, more productive in the office. However, smart companies will recognise that top talent will refuse to come in every day.

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

#249

Post by names_are_hard »

zeroday28 wrote: post #159
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.

Give the devs some credit - maybe they know about this and are not closing the loophole because they want it to stay open? The majority of readers won't take advantage of it and those who will likely wouldn't have paid anyway.

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

#250

Post by meheleventyone »

koonsolo wrote: post #212
nirui wrote: post #210

> ... There is a more intriguing possibility, however. Work that is largely done remotely may be more efficient compared with an office-first model. I don't think in-person real-time communication is always effective. No, I personally think it's one of the least method of communication that can happen in an office environment when the topic gets slightly complex (that is, if the topic is complex enough for you to wri…

If the other people in the room are also knowledgeable, you will come to an even better conclusion much faster face-to-face. In my experience, having "group reasoning" is faster and with better results.

One example of where this is counter-intuitively wrong is that you end up with more diverse ideas if people brainstorm in private than in a group.

I think the reality of face to face meetings is that the result is often almost predetermined based on the existing group dynamics. How many people are turning up to the meeting feeling their input will make a difference versus people with (probably) the dominant personalities who are happy their established conclusion is chosen. And seeing the later as naturally coming to a better conclusion, faster.

As a dominant personality in meetings I definitely think about the effects of that a bunch.

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