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Paul Graham on Remote Work

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Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#51

Post by sillyfluke »

It's pointless arguing with the remote naysayers at this point, which apparently now includes pg.

Like the title of an oft shared post on this site says: "You Can't Tell People Anything."

Show them instead. Just create successful remote companies and stop wasting your time arguing with these people. Or if you just sold your remote-first company, start a remote-first only vc fund and do well.

A random SEO-driven post says PagerDuty, Dropbox, Unquork, Coinbase, Superhuman, Twitch, Gitlab etc. are remote companies. Is this even true?

If it is, then pg should try to argue against this self-evident reality. If he has the intellectual honesty to do so that is.

The past few years has been so saturated with "Never expect a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it"-type low quality pontificating that it's become unbearable nauseating.

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#52

Post by cratermoon »

I suppose a significant aspect of this to upper management is their need to face-to-face in person interaction to for some of their sociopathic non-verbal control behaviors to work. You know the sort, where some senior manager says something banal about goals or performance but his body language is clearly threatening or intimidating. Stuff that doesn't work over video.

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#53

Post by goofy_goober »

sillyfluke wrote: post #51

It's pointless arguing with the remote naysayers at this point, which apparently now includes pg. Like the title of an oft shared post on this site says: "You Can't Tell People Anything." Show them instead. Just create successful remote companies and stop wasting your time arguing with these people. Or if you just sold your remote-first company, start a remote-first only vc fund and do well. A random SEO-driven post…

Let us not forget DuckDuckGo, also a successful fully remote company (and it was that way before COVID-19). MatterMost as well.

I am sure there are plenty of others

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#54

Post by goofy_goober »

40yearoldman wrote: post #17
surfingdino wrote: post #16

Like all generalisations, this one is wrong. What companies need to do is work out a hybrid approach or prove to their employees that it is necessary to come to the office. If you are working on a prototype robotics project you do need to be in the office, but if you are writing microservices you do not need to come to the office to watch the chest thumping antics of your CEO or sales people. I don't write better cod…

The problem is not that work like micro services can be done remote. The problem is remote workers end up doing other things than working. It makes a mess for meeting scheduling and collaboration. Effectively slowing the progression of the project down. I work at a company who his hybrid and has remote. Every remote engineer is damn near impossible to work with, a forget anything happening on Mondays or Fridays. “Oh…

This point is moot, because those people would be out of office on PTO dealing with those contractors anyway. At least they can hop in and out of the meetings when working remotely, which is an upgrade from them not even being there to be honest. If tools like Outlook or Google Calendar are not enough to help someone schedule meetings without a struggle, that is a personal failure.

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#55

Post by goofy_goober »

MichaelRo wrote: post #38
40yearoldman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not that work like micro services can be done remote. The problem is remote workers end up doing other things than working. It makes a mess for meeting scheduling and collaboration. Effectively slowing the progression of the project down. I work at a company who his hybrid and has remote. Every remote engineer is damn near impossible to work with, a forget anything happening on Mondays or Fridays. “Oh…

Some people are and will always be assholes, dishonest, crooks, borderline criminals. We shouldn't all be imprisoned in the office because management is incapable of at least dealing with these offenders. After COVID we switched to almost 100% work from home. Office became mandatory 3 days a week but only on paper. In practice workers applied "passive aggressive" method, just didn't show up. And management didn't do…

Sometimes I just leave people on read for a bit because I have more important things to be dealing with. This happens to me too sometimes with people leaving me on read,and I understand because there is almost always something more important than whatever someone is messaging about. If it were important, they would have told me explicitly or sent a meeting request.

I sincerely doubt everything you were asking this guy was very important, so perhaps you need to learn how to handle more of your own issues and ask more people for help other than that one guy. It is not that guy's job to do your job; it is your job to do your job.

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#56

Post by goofy_goober »

drumhead wrote: post #10

The biggest loss from homeworking is the learning element for newer or more junior staff. Many of the learn the job by watching, listening or being shown in person. You can still do it remotely but it's way more difficult. The benefits of bouncing ideas off one another is also gone, that can affect creativity. Talking to each other, arguin, breaking down ideas or processes, drawing quick diagrams or knocking up a pro…

Heavily disagree with that first part; I have never worked at a company where the juniors learned by watching a senior do his job over his shoulder. They learned by absorbing information over time, doing work, going through code reviews, looking at architecture diagrams, etc. Anything else was done mostly over screen sharing even before COVID.

The same is the case at my current company, and the new juniors have had zero troubles with learning. Why? Because all of that can be done remotely.

You only need to learn by watching if you are engaging in the physical world, and software itself is not physical at all, so there is never a reason to do anything in "real life" unless your software happens to be operating a robot or other physical device of some kind. There are endless wonderful cheap or free tools to enable everything that was previously in the physical world to be done remotely now, and if a company and it's employees can't use them right then it is a mix of organizational and personal failings.

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#57

Post by goofy_goober »

wanderingmind wrote: post #36

Is there an expectation for Ycombinator funded startups to have employees at workplace?

If they have non-negligible amounts of office space then staffing said office space to a certain level will end up in the local government granting some tax breaks to the company (for that property and possibly for other things).

Companies that were remote before COVID-19 anyway are not suddenly realizing that remote work doesn't work (because it does work), so they are staying remote. They had no offices and aren't getting any so there is no incentive to bring people into an office.

Companies that weren't remote before COVID-19 are usually locked into long term leases, and conveniently enough, these are the same companies extolling the "benefits" of in-office work and the "downsides" of remote work that (also very conveniently) only they have observed.

This all boils down to whether or not the company has a significant amount of skin in the game with regard to office space.

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#58

Post by MichaelRo »

haspok wrote: post #46
MichaelRo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are and will always be assholes, dishonest, crooks, borderline criminals. We shouldn't all be imprisoned in the office because management is incapable of at least dealing with these offenders. After COVID we switched to almost 100% work from home. Office became mandatory 3 days a week but only on paper. In practice workers applied "passive aggressive" method, just didn't show up. And management didn't do…

> One guy in my team would be idle for long swathes of time although it would appear "green" on Teams - first sign someone's an asshole: they put a mouse move program but don't reply for hours. Maybe his job was not to be on standby for your service 8 hours a day. Maybe he also had a job to do? Why would he be obliged to reply to your messages immediately? The whole point of Slack / Teams communication is that it can…

>> Maybe he also had a job to do?

Yeah, he had a second job, that's what he had. In parallel to running a brick and store business (set up a bar and organized events).

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#59

Post by MichaelRo »

goofy_goober wrote: post #55
MichaelRo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are and will always be assholes, dishonest, crooks, borderline criminals. We shouldn't all be imprisoned in the office because management is incapable of at least dealing with these offenders. After COVID we switched to almost 100% work from home. Office became mandatory 3 days a week but only on paper. In practice workers applied "passive aggressive" method, just didn't show up. And management didn't do…

Sometimes I just leave people on read for a bit because I have more important things to be dealing with. This happens to me too sometimes with people leaving me on read,and I understand because there is almost always something more important than whatever someone is messaging about. If it were important, they would have told me explicitly or sent a meeting request. I sincerely doubt everything you were asking this gu…

Strangely that it worked well with the vast majority of other team members, except for liars and scum who couldn't even handle properly having multiple jobs and not giving a fuck.

Re: Paul Graham on Remote Work

#60

Post by sharemywin »

rlupi wrote: post #19

I have worked remotely for 10 years in smaller companies before going to a large FAANG and working in office for 10 years, then remotely since 2020. Working remotely for the smaller companies and startups was much faster faced and productive. Part of it is due to company size and not remote vs. non-remote. We met regularly (once a month or so) to set direction, we executed at 2x - 3x the speed than at a larger compan…

they have to also make introductions to the people that can help new employees and invest in creating useful on boarding material.
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