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Remote startups will win the war for top talent

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141–150 of 492 posts

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#141
I've been working 100% remotely for about 6.5 years now. Overall I love it. However, there are very real drawbacks that have taken me awhile to fully realize.

For me, the primary one is that it's _way_ too easy for everyone to get deeply frustrated with each other. Social interactions and chit-chat lead to a better understanding of people and a more accurate mental model of what people actually mean when they say something.

Written text is the majority of remote communication. That's both good and bad. It's a much lower bandwidth form of communication than face-to-face in terms of being able to pick up intent and understand the context of someone's mood/etc in what they're saying. The same goes of communication over webcam. It's higher bandwidth than written text, but still lower than in-person.

When you're fully remote, you'll much more commonly misinterpret folks intent. You'll also more commonly have your intent misinterpreted.

At least in my experience, this tends to lead to a much higher rate of frustration and more frequent extreme misbehavior when everyone is remote.

I don't have an easy solution. Occasional in person meetings help a lot, but they're hard to do well, and easy to do poorly. Having 200 people in the same room for 2 days doesn't really help the situation, as there's zero time to get to know anyone.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#142
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that those of your view and those espousing that remote is more difficult might have different personalities, levels of need of social interaction, or lifestyles? Have you considered that your company is self-selecting for those who flourish in remote, but that those whose personalities differ are self-selecting for working in an office environment? It's OK for there to not be a one size fits all…

> It's OK for there to not be a one-size fits all solution. Funny, because before COVID, like 90% of the IT companies out there were using a "one-size fits all" solution (i.e., 100% office-based work).

[deleted]

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that those of your view and those espousing that remote is more difficult might have different personalities, levels of need of social interaction, or lifestyles? Have you considered that your company is self-selecting for those who flourish in remote, but that those whose personalities differ are self-selecting for working in an office environment? It's OK for there to not be a one size fits all…

Throughout my career it's been my experience that the type of people you describe are never the top performers, and seldom average performers. The ones craving social interactions often are just looking for distractions (like spending too long at the water cooler chatting) cause either they hate their job, hate the work, can't do the actual work or view work (exchange of labour/time for money) as a predominantly soci…

In my experience, the top performers find more work if they finish what they're working on. But we all have our own anecdotes.

Edit: Find more work or help the rest of the team out.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#144

"Your remote team is my company's opportunity." Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, but at my company we have some people who work in an office and lots more that work remotely. The in office staff contribute more ideas, work, fixes, and functional software than the remote teams by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. Those are hard numbers right out of our project m…

I wouldn't assume the in office workers get more done because they go to the office, correlation != causation.

It seems just as likely to me that the most dedicated, hard working employees are the ones willing to commute in to the office in the first place, and they would get more work done than others regardless of where they work.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that those of your view and those espousing that remote is more difficult might have different personalities, levels of need of social interaction, or lifestyles? Have you considered that your company is self-selecting for those who flourish in remote, but that those whose personalities differ are self-selecting for working in an office environment? It's OK for there to not be a one size fits all…

Right. During my somewhat passive job search, I've only been considering companies that have an office local to me (i.e. Central London). I've been working remotely since the start of the pandemic, and I simply don't like it. Sure, I don't miss having to commute or offices with bad noise pollution controls, but I miss everything else. Most of all, I miss being in town at the end of the day and being able to pop to th…

> yes, this is a me thing, but it's also always been a me thing

I feel like picking jobs off of a desire to live a social life and feel like part of a community is extremely normal and valid. Remote work is essentially accepting that the primary way you'll engage with your colleagues and labor is through a screen, and that is an uncomfortable feeling (to some people at least)

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#146

I never really understood why people say productivity and socializing is difficult remote. It's difficult because people aren't putting thought into it. At my last big-co job the leadership just kept waiting for 'covid to be over' and not improving our remote work culture. Hybrid models will always struggle and 1/3/1 is going to be probably the best you can do. My company is fully remote, we embraced the GitLab model…

I don’t enjoy remote collaboration. I’ve done a few different styles and I just vastly prefer being around people.

You’ve described an entirely different dynamic and that’s fine, but it’s not the dynamic I’m interested in having.

I already stare at a screen for programming I don’t want to stare at one for collaborating with people.

For me it isn’t around the effort or lack thereof put into remote.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#147

Remote startups with what cheap money? That era is coming to an end. They won't win anything, with cheap or expensive labor.

I'm always surprised that more people can't see the writing on the wall. The startup boom exists because money was so cheap you had to spend it. Then consumer spending started to ramp up again and money was flowing both ways. Worrying about profits was viewed as silly since that would get in the way of maximizing growth under the assumption that you could one day flip a switch and generate profit. With inflation risi…

There is no scenario in which tech declines without the US entering a recession and when the US enters a recession, the "cheap money" is going to be coming back.

There is no way the dotcom crash is repeated because today IT is integrated inside every aspect of every business. It will be just another regular recession.

The biggest threat to programming jobs in the US is outsourcing (and, in the longer term - automation), not an imaginary apocalyptic event.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that those of your view and those espousing that remote is more difficult might have different personalities, levels of need of social interaction, or lifestyles? Have you considered that your company is self-selecting for those who flourish in remote, but that those whose personalities differ are self-selecting for working in an office environment? It's OK for there to not be a one size fits all…

Throughout my career it's been my experience that the type of people you describe are never the top performers, and seldom average performers. The ones craving social interactions often are just looking for distractions (like spending too long at the water cooler chatting) cause either they hate their job, hate the work, can't do the actual work or view work (exchange of labour/time for money) as a predominantly soci…

That has been nearly the exact opposite of my experience.

As one advisor put it: researchers who prefer to keep their door closed often publish more papers over the course of a year, but researchers who keep their door open often publish more impactful research over the course of their lifetime.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the thinking that VCs will stop funding remote companies? Because one advantage a fully remote org will have a slightly extended runway not spending money on rent, office furniture, and other costs associated with operating in-person operations. To me, an office sounds like something a tech company should only obtain after a strong and established revenue stream.

The thinking is that VCs will stop funding startups period. In the post dotcom bust startups were exceedingly rare, and what's happening right now is much larger than the dotcom burst.

Its trending downward, but Q2 saw roughly the same number of deals as Q2 2018, with funding up 25% from the same period.

The funding levels of 2001-2005 are a long way down from here.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#150
post #31

The $1M question in my mind is: Will wages in, say, Lagos or Buenos Aires rise to SF/NYC levels? Or will the reverse happen? Economics says that it depends on the value of the labor, but cost of living matters too (or at least, has in the past within say, the USA). I think this essay https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... shows evidence that says the answer is "yes", that we'll see a weird fr…

There are virtually no engineers in Lagos and very few in Buenos Aires who compete with engineers in SF/NYC (the one getting SF/NYC salary) in terms of skill set. One thing that many people overestimate is number of competent engineers outside of well known tech hubs. I know that it was big surprise for FB and other big tier 1 companies when they started to hire remotely was that it was not actually easier to hire re…

>One thing that many people overestimate is number of competent engineers outside of well known tech hubs.

I think at this point, the meaning of competent is the top 1% of engineers

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