211–220 of 492 posts
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How do you replicate water cooler talk in a fully remote environment? Do people do work while tuned in to a meeting where anyone can drop in and talk to them?
Lots of public slack channels works pretty well in my experience. People end up talking about a lot in plain view and people hop in etc
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…
It’s just not the same
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I have a friend who's physically in the UK and works for a US company. I was interviewing for a remote job in the UK while being physically in France. In both situations, the setup is a local company (possibly self-owned) that bills the actual company. So you're not UsCorp's employee, you're an YourOwnCorp employee, and UsCorp is YourOwnCorp's client. This way, all taxes and related issues are handled locally. Sure,…
How do you deal with health insurance, pension, unemployment benefits, &c. ? Sounds like a massive headache
"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 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…
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I have a friend who's physically in the UK and works for a US company. I was interviewing for a remote job in the UK while being physically in France. In both situations, the setup is a local company (possibly self-owned) that bills the actual company. So you're not UsCorp's employee, you're an YourOwnCorp employee, and UsCorp is YourOwnCorp's client. This way, all taxes and related issues are handled locally. Sure,…
How do you deal with health insurance, pension, unemployment benefits, &c. ? Sounds like a massive headache
You have to ensure the rate includes a premium to pay all those costs. Otherwise it isnt worth doing.
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But the fact that you don't go out is because you don't put any effort into it. I work remotely from Kent, we also have an office in Central London but I made the effort to make local friends with whom I go out all the time, even week nights. I prefer this to spending £40 for the train to then drink £8 pints in overfilled London pubs while standing outside and shouting over each other. I actually don't want to spend…
"I" "I" "I" This works great for you but for many it doesn't. Both are valid perspectives.
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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…
Disclaimer: Working for remote-only company. “People that like social interaction are average performers” is such a wild take to me. I’ve worked with incredibly talented people in the past, where we’d go for lunch beers, travel together, come back to the office, finish up pretty complicated features. I don’t consider myself a “top performer”, but those people certainly were, and downplaying their talent and abilities…
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…
I've personally worked with engineers at "hot SF startup" and also engineers from Croatia. Both were folks I'd consider of equivalent skill. #anecdata
> 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 remotely than hiring in NYC/SF.
Do you have any articles or references for this? I'd love to learn more about this.
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> 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)
There will be a reckoning when we collectively realize that putting more and more, and eventually all, of our lives on the internet is not good for us.
The argument would be a lot stronger if most office work wasn't perpetually online to begin with.