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

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

#381

Post by er4hn »

iamthirsty wrote: post #335
turdprincess wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree - the hybrid model where some are in office and some on video is unfair to the remote folks. Watching coworkers whiteboard from a zoom call makes it much harder to collaborate as the remote employee. It’s also harder to get a turn to speak when you are a face on the camera vs in the room. For these reasons I’ve insisted that in hybrid meetings, everyone dials in individually and whiteboards on a virt…

> This is effectively demanding “all remote” from the in-office crowd and taking away their face to face interaction. How is this at all a good thing? It's basically saying: "I've got a limitation because of my choice of working environment, therefore to make life "fair" — which it isn't at all ironically — I'm going to impose my limitation artificially on the rest of the group." Because I can't play with that toy, n…

To be fair, audio quality and the ability to communicate with remote people goes up much more when everyone dials in. You can still look at each other in the room and whiteboard just fine.

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

#382

Post by balaji1 »

jleyank wrote: post #366
dont__panic wrote: post #340

Most of my distaste for WFO comes from two places: - the USA's failure to provide even a single city that's pleasant to live in and travel around without a car - tech company insistence on open office layouts that are not conducive to deep work The first one sounds like a commute problem... but it manifests in more ways than you think. When you have to travel around in a car, everything is expensive. Parking is a pai…

Boston/Cambridge and NYC come to mind as cities where one can avoid having a car. Are there others that save sufficient public transport, housing and support buildings that should be considered. In Canada, Montreal fits that description. I’ve not lived in or talked to enough people from Toronto or Vancouver to know how liveable they are on foot. Open offices are a plague. Any company using them is interested in reduc…

Also open offices are the norm in many places -- so any company wanting a non-open office has to face going counter culture alone; apart from having to figure out logistics involved in setting up cubicles and offices. Some of us don't even know what non-open office looks like. Closest I have seen is the rooms of high ranking execs, doctors and professors lol.

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

#383

Post by slothtrop »

z9znz wrote: post #298
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also add that comments like this: > Now, I am fully aware that there's a low of people for whom the horror of commute doesn't make up for the gains of socializing and others that just abhor having to talk to real-life people. Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary. Are remarkably condescending. Folks opting for a better work-life balance, wh…

> remarkably condescending I suspect there are two big difference between OP and many of the readers here. At least for sure, Berlin vs most major US cities is night and day different in terms of commute and enjoyment opportunity. Berlin is a fun city full of things to do, places to eat, and clubs. Plus it's all accessible without a car. Meanwhile, in the US, it's usually a very different story. Doing something after…

I suspect commute/transport is the larger factor among the two you shared. The extracurricular usually comes down to eating and drinking. I'm sure particularly in the mid-west the options are more limited, but in a large enough city there's somewhere to go - it just might not be worth it. You'll still have to commute home in the end, and if you can't just walk to the fun destination from work then that's more time lost.

This all raises an interesting point. I wonder if attitudes towards WFH can be predicated by zoning / city density. Even before COVID was a thing, Japan's reputation for instance is for the expectation of going out drinking with the boss after work.

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

#384

Post by sahila »

Ancalagon wrote: post #346
criddell wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> improve housing policy so people can live closer to work Or, improve labor policy so work becomes a much smaller part of most people's lives.

Hot take this is the right line of thought. Restructure society so we work less, not so that we can work more.

But doesn’t this drive home OP’s point further? For people who work in service jobs - healthcare, schools, shopping, and restaurants/cafes, for example - how would you approach working less? People want to go out and eat and places are already struggling to hire. Parents want in person learning for their young kids.

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

#385

Post by d883kd8 »

I don't hate talking to real-life people.

I hate having practically no input on WHICH people I have to associate with. I hate the culture and vibe that proliferates in offices, it's like the worst aspects of a library and a cafeteria all at once. I'm tired of people acting like I have no emotional intelligence just because it's not my job to talk. I hate acting like a potted plant all day and feeling the body pains that come from sitting still and being quiet for an unnatural amount of time.

The office is not real life.

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

#386

Post by ameister14 »

adamhp wrote: post #87
munchausen42 wrote: post #73

If you wonder why an argument might be controversial, it can helpful to imagine how it would sound like in mirror world: Assume for a moment that working remotly and a flexible workday would have been always the default. And now some companies decide: Hey let's contractually enforce a 9 hour continuous workday where all our workers will be locked in a big ugly building that we build just for that purpose (Btw. at lea…

Disclaimer: I support fully remote work and will likely never be returning to office in my lifetime if I can help it. Here I play devil's advocate. Even though it is a hypothetical world you've constructed, you still framed it from the perspective of this world. I can do the same thing you did with a different bias. Imagine a world where everyone is socially isolated, forced to work 8 hours a day from their living sp…

>they must login to show activity on their computer every 15 minutes or else be fired.

This is the stupidest thing, I think - I don't care if you're at your computer all the time I am at my computer, I care if you get shit done

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

#387

Post by willcipriano »

jcpst wrote: post #207
andsoitis wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For twice a month you could probably Uber / rent a car and expense it, no?

Every time I’ve traveled for work, they do not expense the portion where you leave from your home. It’s up to you to get to work. So if you drive, you “leave from the office” (i.e. calc the distance from there), or drive to the airport, and getting from home to the airport is on you. Curious to hear if this is different for others.

This sort of reveals the problem I have with this calculus.

"Working from the office is more productive."

"Great do you offer higher rates to offset the costs and share some of that additional productivity?"

"Not really. We offer the market average of all jobs, wfh and wfo. We can't really afford more, renting office space is expensive."

"Would you lease a car for me, count commute time towards the workday and refund my gas and toll costs?"

"No! That wouldn't be cost effective!"

It may be that WFO does make the business a bit more, but it's actually less than the employees cost to get into the office each day. In my experience most employers would happily load their employees with thousands in costs to make a couple extra hundred bucks themselves.

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

#388

Post by joshvm »

dont__panic wrote: post #340

Most of my distaste for WFO comes from two places: - the USA's failure to provide even a single city that's pleasant to live in and travel around without a car - tech company insistence on open office layouts that are not conducive to deep work The first one sounds like a commute problem... but it manifests in more ways than you think. When you have to travel around in a car, everything is expensive. Parking is a pai…

This is basically how my company works. We're sort of remote-first in that we have plenty of foreign employees around the world, but we also have a coworking space that people in that city are free to work from. Nobody is forced to work in the office and we have bookable rooms for meetings so nobody is disrupted. It's open plan/hot desks, so I tend to do my coding work from home, but I'm <10 mins from the building so I'll pop in for in person meetings (and the Rocket espresso machine in the kitchen). We also have flexible rules around working abroad eg if you want to visit family and work in another country for a week, that's OK. The tax situation is your problem, but eg I work abroad but I can remote work legally in the UK for 2 weeks a year without affecting my tax liability.

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

#389

Post by janetacarr »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #316
janetacarr wrote: post #250

You're conflating not wanting to be in an office with being mediocre at their job, and that's simply not true. Some of the best developers I've met were remote long before COVID, and I'm certain it's because they were so good at what they did, they could just command such a work benefit. Now that such a benefit is widespread, the majority of people get to design their own lifestyle for the first time ever, and they r…

>Remote workers aren't enough to outsource, outsourcing is not a new thing, it's been around for a very long time. Outsourcing is not new, but the covid WFH was basically a manhattan project to sand down it's rough edges. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of very smart people around the world who are willing to work for a fraction of first world wages, and are proficient enough in english that timezones…

I'm skeptical of this to be honest.

The global employment market is a free market (of sorts), and so people will happily pay more for employee they perceive to be better whether they are or not. People still buy Rolexes, iPhones, and Teslas despite there being cheaper alternatives that do exact same things. So companies will hire employees they perceive to be better simply because they share a nationality. While I don't think it'll prevent every job from outsourcing, the high earners will flee to the unequal income areas to spend their wealth. If we see more equitable income in both countries (so to speak), it'll be far in the future if at all. Boots on the ground says internet connectivity in service-based economies remains unrivaled compared to the agricultural and industrial economies often touted as the outsourcing alternatives.

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

#390

Post by colinmhayes »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #339

> I used to love going to the office. Discussing our team's latest Python problems over a coffee. Looking over at their screen and then asking them why they look like they want to beat someone over the head with their keyboard repeatedly. Guessing people's emotions in a heated Retro from their body language. Grabbing dinner with a few colleagues after a long workshop meeting in the evening and then realizing that, as…

I don't want to be friends with my coworkers, but I do want to have a relationship with them. WFH has meant that we're basically all just doing our thing, occasionally talking on slack/jira but mostly just blissfully unaware of the interesting challenges others are facing, especially on other teams. Imo collaboration is much more difficult with people you have no relationship with, and video calls absolutely do not work as well as in person whiteboarding,
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