Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?

The 24/7 office people won't be happy until we're collaborating at hot desks with no headphones 100% of the time. Otherwise they might have to wait to ask a question.

> And finally, I feel no one else is realizing that they are happily hacking away at the amazingly well-paid branch they're sitting on. As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south? German is hardly used in business context here anyway and lower-wage countries within ±3 hours timezones abound.

Funny. If I was a person from the east or south, my answer would be: Great, bring it on, share the wealth! Why should Berlin get all the best jobs?

Edit:

Incidentally, there was a now-deleted reply to my comment that made mention of the danger of a race to the bottom, and I'd add the following in response to that:

Eh, I have a less pessimistic view. For at least 30 years now we've been frightened by the spectre of outsourcing, and in the end, those fears never really materialized. Certainly a lot of work moved to India, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and so forth, but it certainly hasn't come at the expense of tech in more expensive markets.

The reality is a) there's more than enough tech work to go around, and b) outsourcing is incredibly complicated for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the physical location of labour. There's no shortage of factors for this--regulatory differences, labour quality differences, cultural differences, communication barriers, timezone issues, etc--and Zoom hasn't magically fixed them.

At this point COVID is about as over as it will ever be. So do you plan to continue living as you are for the rest of your life?

"The quiet guy who just likes listening to intelligent conversations and chiming in when they can" also misses the social interactions that happen by default in an office.

Overhearing conversations about other tech stacks/problems, conversations about vacations or plans, conversations about random political/education/local/global events - and learning something from those conversations is what's missing for me.

Switching from a vibrant office built around a family doctor's practice, with people who'd worked there for 15 years - to working from home where the only regular conversations with your wife are about her manual labor job or the details of what needs to be done around the house - has been super frustrating.

I don't want to go back to spending 30 minutes each way in the car, and going into some random office at a new job seems painful. The office building I was at was closed and the team's mostly disbanded, so that life is gone.

I miss the intellectual stimulation and I'm not sure how to get it back, the loneliness of not having someone with the same interests as you is killing me.

I've been working remote for a year and a half now at a company that has never had an office. First off, I will say that I really love remote work. Despite that, I do miss the social interactions that you get with your coworkers.

When your social interaction is limited to time before meetings start, you lose a lot of what you had in an office. I personally have never worked a job where I didn't like at least a few of my coworkers, and I always felt like it made my days a bit more fun when I could stop by Chris's desk to chat before we grab a cup of coffee.

Remote work attempts to emulate that, but a video call can have one real speaker at a time, where a physical room can have multiple side conversations that don't interrupt each other. We've done off sites and those are a blast since I finally get to talk to my coworkers in person, but those are obviously temporary.

All that said, I love remote work. I love that I can move back to my home town with low cost of living and be paid the same as I do working in a higher COL area. I love having no commute, and I love slipping out to do async tasks like laundry.

I feel like the social fix I'm looking for can be answered another way, but I don't know how.