Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – research hints at why • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by decafninja » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

abyssin wrote: post #369

jalfresi wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you’re creating an incentive for many workers to increase the distance between where they work and where they live" Having commuted for many many years, I literally cannot fathom how this line of thinking is even considered a reasonable counter. Do some poeple get to commute through a utopic wonderland? Have I been living/working in the wrong places all these years?

The people I know who choose to live outside the city underestimate the impact of commuting on their quality of life, and overestimate the benefits associated to living in the “countryside”. They want a backyard and a dog. Once they’re stuck in their lifestyle, they develop a blindness to alternatives. Their experience of the city is the one of a commuter – a terrible one. They end up really believing that city life…

Speaking from the perspective of a US commuter, the typical commuter here is probably not living in an urban city core, but rather the outskirts or suburbs due to affordability issues. So they’re not experiencing urban city life anyways to begin with.

I live outside Manhattan, NYC, into which I and countless others commute into for work. An astounding amount of collective hours is absolutely wasted on commuting into and out of Manhattan. The public transit system here is arguably the best in the US, but still utterly horrible compared to the systems in place in many Asian cities and probably European ones too.

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

#452

Post by idrios » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #441

idrios wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar situation, WFH/lockdown massively degraded the quality of my life. Work became more stressful and metric-driven, social life died as all my friends & coworkers moved to their hometowns and I did too, and I've gained weight / fallen into a rut. I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was…

Sorry to hear that. Any tips for mentors? I feel peer collaboration hasn't been too bad and honestly I strongly favor remote-style work even in the office. However, effectiveness in mentoring junior engineers has nosedived. There's more to programming than a pull request. Workflows, tools, and behaviors are also things that people learn from others. You don't get that over infrequent screen sharing and quick daily sy…

By asking that question I think you've identified part of the problem, because around the time Covid started we lost a very competent senior dev and nobody has been hired to replace him.

Still, I used to have some pretty cool impromptu conversations in the hallway with people from other teams about projects they're working on at home, and they were great to learn from. With WFH I'd have never met some of those people. No idea how to recreate that environment.

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

#453

Post by emrah » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #402

evenhovercraft wrote: post #349

Very grateful that my employer has committed to remaining flexible with remote work. Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual. Full time remote has done wonders for my health - instead of a 2 hour commute I get to exercise. Instead of coming home stressed, annoyed, and sitting in front of the TV, I go outside for a solid hour+ after I close my laptop. I travel more liberally now…

Just as a contrast, I think I've had the exact opposite WFH/lockdown experience as you. My quality of life has tangibly and significantly degraded across every positive point you listed. Even if my employer began offering office access, I don't think it will ever be the same as what I had before. I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy, mentally and physically. I got to see…

One is not better than the other. It's not a contest. Kudos to employers who can acknowledge that different people have different needs and cater to both!

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

#454

Post by nottorp » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #260

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.

Newspapers are businesses. Reporting costs money. Free news is generally paid for by the funder. Given the above, how is paywalled content hurting the news industry?

It's not hurting the news industry... maybe. It's polluting the HN newsfeed... maybe.

I for one won't subscribe to paywalled sites i only occasionally get links to on HN or other news aggregators just because they're linked here.

Funny enough, I am subscribed to a site that gets linked on here semi regularly. Not paywalled, ads or pay for no ads/tracking. But I've been reading it longer than I've read HN.

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

#455

Post by vineyardmike » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #413

vineyardmike wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is face-to-face required for "group reasoning"? Because it raises the bar on starting a meeting. And it keeps half the meeting from being muted/camera-off and totally zoned out.

If your meeting attendees are zoned out, they either need to be held accountable for not being attentive, or they shouldn't have been invited in the first place.

I agree, but with WFH its so easy to invite the entire team. I found the number of meetings I attend has skyrocketed in WFH - most would be better off with 1/3 of the attendants who took time to prepare instead of the whole team just to gather info.

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

#456

Post by VirusNewbie » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #173

siva7 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are…

> Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers I've had my share of severe pushbacks with "management" over the years. They've often been burned by shopping projects out to the lowest bidder and suddenly realize you need competent engineers to make it happen. The problem is you can find competent engineers now across the planet for far less than what you would pay a US-based engine…

So in 20012, when Skype was huge, why didn't this take over? It's not like it didn't happen, people have been poaching rockstars across the globe forever.

But are you really saying that it's only in 2020 that people put effort into outsourcing to cheaper foreign talent?

Or that the technology of remote work is now what makes it possible? I dispute that as well, good remote collaboration has been happening in open source for forever. People who can make it work make it work. It's not the issue and never has been.

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

#457

Post by VirusNewbie » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

VirusNewbie wrote: post #55

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've been hearing this argument for 20 years. I was doing ASP/Perl programming while I was in high school in 2000, and I remember being told that I need to move into management because soon all the jobs would be offshored to India. Then in 2008 when the economy crashed I had one bizdev guy tell me that pretty soon everyone was going to be able to code with these new 'no code apps' and that I was going to be a fossil…

Just in case anyone misreads my point, I want to emphasize I've worked (and continue to work with) brilliant, great, Indian and Chinese programmers, both immigrants and remote.

It's just that good people aren't cheap, even remote ones. And they're hard to find.

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

#458

Post by nottorp » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

Sodman wrote: post #438

znpy wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My social skills are absolutely fine, i can assure you of that. But I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office because they can't go bike for two hours or some other dumb reason. It's okay if you got a bit lazy during the pandemic and no one is denying that... but you don't have to pull all your coworkers to the office, you can just go bike or do some other…

Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed. Hope you weren't planning on collaborating using physical media such as whiteboard or post-it notes. Obviously we can do our best to reduce unnecessary meetings, but for those remaining necessary meetings, an in-p…

> Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed.

And that is why you should seek remote only companies if possible. Add in asynchronous work culture. Let the "productive" people waste their time in video meetings.

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

#459

Post by Sodman » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #458

Sodman wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed. Hope you weren't planning on collaborating using physical media such as whiteboard or post-it notes. Obviously we can do our best to reduce unnecessary meetings, but for those remaining necessary meetings, an in-p…

> Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed. And that is why you should seek remote only companies if possible. Add in asynchronous work culture. Let the "productive" people waste their time in video meetings.

Asynchronous culture and no-meetings-ever is great if you're a somebody who has the ability/experience/authority to take a high level task and run with it without needing to collaborate with or have input from anyone else, but that's not how most companies work in reality.

If you're waiting for multi-day turnaround times on agreements because there's back and forth where two parties are trying to have a debate over requirements in a document but both only check for updates every few hours, I'd argue you're not being as "productive" as you think.

It's true that many meetings could have been an e-mail, but there are a few crucial meetings that can save days by just getting everyone together in a room for 30 minutes to reach an agreement.

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

#460

Post by futevolei » Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

joelbluminator wrote: post #303

ramphastidae wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying this for decades but it hasn’t come true. Remote work can’t make up for the significant challenges caused by differences in time zone and culture.

What's stopping SV startups from hiring in Argentina/Brazil/Mexico ? Similar time zone...and that's a pool of hundreds of millions of people.

My employer keeps hiring more argentinos. It’s a few notches better than India IMO but is not without challenges. It’s still a few hours time difference and the language issues remain. Giving them well capsulated or boilerplate work seems like a slam dunk but if it’s code that we need to work with as well then it sucks.