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70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

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Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#301

Post by rr808 »

azemetre wrote: post #157
rr808 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of part time but realistically you have to spend loads of time outside regular hours just to keep up to date.

I have a hard time believing this for most software roles (which is just basic web development, scaling issues aside). I can easily envision myself working part time on a react application or creating a spring app. Not exactly ground breaking stuff here.

The problem is in 10 years when no one uses react or spring. Like my friends that know Visual Basic.

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#302

Post by noelherrick »

missedthecue wrote: post #204
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, in ideal conditions your office might approach what you get working at home, In my experience I am more productive in office, lots of other people seem to feel the same. I guess I'm just lucky to have worked in lots of more than ideal offices, or, as seems more likely people's home conditions vary to such an extent that you can't make a blanket statement.

It's interesting to me how everyone seems to agree that remote school and college are huge failures and students are falling behind, but when it comes to their remote jobs, they'll go to great lengths to deny any reduction in efficiency, collaboration, or productivity.

The thing about schools and universities is that took the same thing they do in person and tried to do that online. Remote work requires rethinking what work means, and remote education requires you to do the same thing. I can say that Duolingo is a fantastic way to learn a language because they spent the time and money to make excellent software. Throw in some one-on-one Zoom time with a native speaker and you would far outdo all the language classes I have taken. Imagine an art history class that actually has excellent VR.

Let's separate kids (say younger than 14) from older teens and young adults here. I would agree that remote learning just feels like a disaster for the younger ones because kids just don't sit quietly for extended periods of time to learn. Older teens and young adults probably have developed the skills to sit down for long stretches. I can honestly say classroom instruction is the worst way to learn for me. By myself, I can read, re-read, take notes, watch a video and rewind, do additional searches for more background info, etc.

This does come to another point: some work and some study is physical and some people do not do well by themselves at home. I am not arguing that everyone has to work remotely, but think of the quality of life improvements if most folks get 2 hours back every day, if they have access to their kitchens to make lunch, if they're not burning gas or clogging metros, if they're sick, there's no way to catch their cold, and if housing gets expensive, they have the flexibility to move to a cheaper area.

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#303

Post by avidphantasm »

avidphantasm wrote: post #98

I get why remote work is popular, and for some tasks/jobs I think it can work well. However, I think in-person interaction is critical for breaking new ground, starting new initiatives, etc. So far, nothing replaces being in the same room hashing out ideas on the whiteboard, etc.

I also forgot to mention serendipity, which in my experience is critical to innovation. For me, working remotely drastically reduces serendipitous interactions. And I say this as an introvert who loves to be left alone for long stretches to do focused work. (note, my experience is mostly in academia, but with 4 years of commercial experience out of 24 years total.)

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#304

Post by sanderjd »

sanderjd wrote: post #46
dag11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myself and many people I know can't stand permanent WFH and specifically seek jobs with offices.

Yeah I think the steady state is that the number will very closely match the percentage of people that other remote vs. offices. I don't have a good sense for how that breaks down, but my sense is that it's over 50% that prefer remote, but not 90%.

Edit: prefer* not other

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#305

Post by noelherrick »

missedthecue wrote: post #209
MattGaiser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seems really willing to tackle improving remote learning. It would be as if companies worked remotely by putting everyone on Zoom calls all day. Education in general refuses to move beyond the damn lecture.

I don't think the problems that plague remote learning are technical in nature. They are fundamental. It's just hard to learn in a non-collaborative environment.

I replied to you above, but I disagree. Many subjects could be vastly improved by excellent software. And I would say that in-person high school and university are fundamentally plagued by people who just want to lecture for an hour. That's just a fundamentally poor way to teach.

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#306

Post by d3nj4l »

sokoloff wrote: post #241
d3nj4l wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company that’s been fully remote for 2 years but they keep trying to target a Return to Office date that keeps getting pushed back. Likewise, and it's maddening, because I don't have any sense of long term stability to invest in my home as I'll have to move if the Return to Office actually happens.

> I’ll have to move Move houses or companies?

Houses, but maybe the latter...

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#307

Post by namelosw »

tclancy wrote: post #276
namelosw wrote: post #250

Meanwhile, I'm happy to see some startups trying to fix the "remote (US only)" stuff. It could be a great business. On one hand, many great talents (including me) around the world are blocked from these opportunities (like those from India, Russia, China, etc). On the other hand, many companies would like to have great talents with lower cost, but most of them don't want to deal with the hassle.

Small companies really can’t fix this. It means having the capability to legally comply with whatever US and foreign laws govern the hiring of a worker from that country. If you’re a tiny startup, there’s little incentive to take time to incorporate in a foreign country on the chance this potential hire is a superstar. So you work out some kind of contracting arrangement instead.

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I was saying maybe there could be startups tackling this issue, and offering their solutions as services, making the process as easy and smooth as possible.

There should be quite some companies are willing to pay for this kind of service, because remote working is booming, and the compensation varies a lot in different parts of the world.

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#308

Post by jokethrowaway »

moises_silva wrote: post #113
tikhonj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. > People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason. Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be payi…

> People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true. How is it obviously not true? I mean. I love remote work. I started working remotely way before it was mainstream and I'm advocate for it. I've managed remote teams for many years too. Even so, I can't claim there's no performance hit. I just think the performance hit is small enough that in most cases the benefits for people and businesses outweigh it.

I can't disagree more.

The story is always the same. If you're in the office you don't need to prove you're working: you obviously put in your 8 hours, even if you had 3 coffees breaks, played ping pong, smoked a pack of cigarettes watched a few youtube videos with your friend, checked social media.

If you are home, you may do a subset of the above non-work activities - but you're either producing some amount that is reasonable for your manager or you're not.

A lot of the employees in my team were working longer hours than when they were in-office.

In my experience performance reviews are a joke and based more on luck than anything else (was the project a success or was it cancelled?), so your manager's perception is more important than anything else to you keeping your job.

Being remote you miss out on a lot of socialisation and employees may leave your company more quickly (and don't get nearly as attached as they would with a in-office workplace), but they'll definitely produce more.

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#309

Post by jokethrowaway »

missedthecue wrote: post #204
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, in ideal conditions your office might approach what you get working at home, In my experience I am more productive in office, lots of other people seem to feel the same. I guess I'm just lucky to have worked in lots of more than ideal offices, or, as seems more likely people's home conditions vary to such an extent that you can't make a blanket statement.

It's interesting to me how everyone seems to agree that remote school and college are huge failures and students are falling behind, but when it comes to their remote jobs, they'll go to great lengths to deny any reduction in efficiency, collaboration, or productivity.

Online meetings are worse than in-person meetings.

Meetings are not the core work activity, they're a tool to achieve the real job of building a product.

I can build a product even better if I don't have idiots setting up 200 meetings and I don't need more than a few short meetings with my reports to get things done. And there is an argument to be made that the better the tech is for online meeting, the worse everyone's productivity is. I wasn't bogged down by all these meetings 15 years ago and I was building products remote just fine. Also the more non-agile agile coaches poison companies with their crap which goes against the agile manifesto (like scrum) and impose more and more meetings (standups, retrospectives, backlog grooming), the lower everyone's productivity is.

In education, the current model is that the educator is filling the "empty vases" that students are with knowledge. I find it completely stupid and I think it doesn't work for most people (especially boys, no wonder they fall behind in education compared to girls). That model doesn't work in the online world because online meetings are sub-par.

Besides, the only valuable thing I send my kids to school is so they can socialise with kids their age. The crap teachers are teaching is mostly useless and they can learn it by themselves even better and without having to wake up at 7am.

Re: 70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

#310

Post by speby »

Selfishly, from a hiring perspective, it bums me out that the secret is now well-known. I've been working remote/hybrid-remote and recruiting remote/hybrid-remote teams for 12 years. I absolutely LOVED that all the dinosaurs were resistant to remote work because it was a recruiting magic wand. Then the pandemic came along and suddenly everyone was more or less forced to see that remote work works and now that recruiting advantage has lessened some.

Besides that, though, things are not binary. We're never going to go to a world where 100% of all people/all-roles that could be done remotely will ONLY be done remotely. There will always be a mixture, however small perhaps, of people that will do in-person companies and/or in-person jobs even if they don't need to.

One thing is clear though... remote is and has been a trend for quite some time. COVID merely thru jet fuel on that existing trend and sped it up probably by 15 years. And I would say that's a good thing.

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