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Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

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Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cannot get work... at the price they want. Plenty of low-paying remote jobs out there

in my experience, the process is the same at any salary or compensation package it isnt “easier” to get an offer at lower ranges, those companies think they are taking a risk with their comp ranges too

The lowest end TC still requires you to do a 7 stage interview + colonoscopy.

They're doing this to age-out a large portion of the industry. No other reason.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#112
I've been remote since 2005. Organizations that pioneered that kind of work didn't do it because they were forced to, so there is a whole different vibe in such companies. It's not seen as a "perk", and there's never anxiety about "RTO".

It's never been exactly easy to find the opportunities, but I always managed to. I'm glad now that the baseline of available remote work seems to be permanently higher.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#113

Obviously this can only count jobs that say they are remote, I've seen many complaints about remote jobs that turn out to require significant time in an office location. -- Personally I'd prefer not to WFH mostly. While it is very useful to be able to (I have for a day or two here & there for years, and over the last year for a few days at a time while looking after ill parents and a terminal pet) but I hate it full…

> Obviously this can only count jobs that say they are remote, I've seen many complaints about remote jobs that turn out to require significant time in an office location.

This happened to me.

The company wanted to fly people to offices any time something important or urgent came up. It led to ridiculous situations where something urgent broke, and instead of sitting at our computers and working on it we'd be scrambling through airports and sitting on airplanes for a day, getting rental cars, checking in to hotels, and then driving to an office the next morning for a meeting.

Then we'd end up working the problem in transit anyway. Solving problems from a cramped airplane seat from spotty in-cabin WiFi instead of home with my big monitor, reliable internet, and camera for video conferencing.

The company also had a mix of empty-nesters and young single people in charge of company events. They wanted to put together quarterly on-site meetups where everyone was supposed to travel and stay in hotels and do team-building exercises. I pointed out that having to travel 4 weeks out of the year was equivalent to a job with an 8% travel requirement, which they scoffed at because it was for "fun" activities.

That job was "remote" but ended up having 20% travel time.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#114
I'm at my best at writing (code, text, everything) when I'm working remotely. The option to sit down and focus in the apartment all to myself has done wonders to my code and ability to solve problems.

However I'm still a bit unsure how this affects my career. I feel like conventional corporate success depends more on your relationships and politics than the quality of your code and writing. It's really hard to build quality relationships and see the politics and status games people are playing in my company by being a remote worker. I met most of my current network by sitting in the same office with them.

I wonder if this is everyone else's experience too, or maybe I'm just missing something obvious, like scheduling more face-to-face meetings with people.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been working full time remote since Sept 2021 (correction, 2020, just before pandemic). It's not even that I don't value the face-to-face conversations and human interaction, I absolutely do. It just doesn't come close to the immense value I gain by WFH. A side benefit: I was able to move closer to my church community, so my "human interaction" need is being fulfilled richer than ever now. (One of the most fru…

> I was able to move closer to my church community, so my "human interaction" need is being fulfilled richer than ever now. This is what the "but you need human interaction" return-to-office crowd doesn't understand. WFH !== Being alone WFH means surrounding yourself with the people you choose to be around. Whether that's your church community, fellow hobbyists, intramural sports teams, the local co-working space, et…

Yeah but it's not a choice to work 40ish hours a week talking and communicating for introverts that's pretty taxing. At least in office we had a few laughs and good times and some face to face. Now it's all the soul sucking without any of the benefits like grabbing lunch together or skivving off a meeting and smoking cigarettes behind the dumpster. After 40hr/s having to go out and do even more socializing is hard because i used my socializing juice up at work

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a question for people here. I absolutely value the time with my daughter and I actually enjoy working for home, I had been for the last couple of years, but it's becoming increasingly unbearable to do that with a nagging and micromanaging partner by my side who's life is COMPLETELY unstructured. So I find myself longing for office time, not because I like office time, but rather because I feel like it might br…

Try telling your partner to leave you alone? Also, what’s your workspace? It helps if you work in a separate room with a door. Working in a central open spot like the kitchen table invites more interruption. Of course this is hard to do if you’re in a small apartment.

> Try telling your partner to leave you alone?

Some people who we love deeply, just cannot do this. If we're physically there, a reason to interrupt will always be found. IMHO it's not worth damaging the relationship.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#117
I don't mind working from home, but I find WFH-accommodating calls exhausting; it feels they take far longer than the equivalent in person discussion, in addition to losing the ad-hoc nature of office conversations. The context switch feels heavier on calls than it does in person. Also, the way daily calls tend to be scheduled (everyone at once, let's hash out everything for everyone so we can then get on with things) means I have to sit in on conversations that are irrelevant to me and for some reason having noise coming out of my headphones means I can't focus on anything else. On the opposite end, I'm now sat in the office while colleagues are having a meeting right next to me and I am able to focus on writing this reply (or maybe coding, if I wasn't procrastinating on HN).

Maybe it's my audio setup, but I've tried multiple types of headphones to no avail. I feel the quality of my work (and life) would improve if I could cope better with calls, but despite my efforts, I can't do it. I've removed myself from calls with an adjacent team that mostly don't concern me, and asked them to ping me only if they need me. That saved 30m to 2 hours of my life and saved me from becoming exhausted before the day has properly begun.

There's also a problem in that _some_ people prefer WFH because they can slack off more (or have multiple jobs); that means they're not always available and not fully committed, with whatever implications for the people who rely on them and the company/product.

Maybe it's down to the pace of the work. Startups, I feel, benefit from in office huddling. Corporations with ample time on their hands could be better suited to WFH.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#118
post #14

Also, I would post to HN only when hiring remotely, because it's a great source to find remote workers? A better analysis would be job boards in general?

But the relative variation might still carry some information , right ?

Depends on the sample size.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#119
post #28

> on HN The most important subtext. There are engineer friends of mine laid off from remote companies that, almost 5 months later, cannot get work. These aren't braindead seatwarmers either. The software engineer market has shifted under our feet DRAMATICALLY. Any software engineer with a position should try to keep it for as long as they possible can.

I support remote work, but moving out to a rural area is putting yourself at risk if you expect to get high software engineer pay. There’s a lot more competition for remote jobs and you’re also competing with highly qualified candidates in lower cost of living places outside the US.

> you’re also competing with highly qualified candidates in lower cost of living places outside the US.

Thats true for anyone in the US. I find it far stranger to work remotely from SF or NY.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been remote for a similar amount of time. Likewise, I've enjoyed the time saved on commutes. Since COVID I've felt like the dynamic of my remote work experience has changed. I've worked with two remote companies since then and both were struggling with a lot of inexperienced or absent remote workers. Dealing with them on a case-by-case basis is the right call, of course, but it takes a toll on management's trust…

> Apparently they had so many problems with remote employees (and their managers!) barely getting any work done This was most likely also happening in the office, it was just masked with the appearance of work in the form of in-person meetings and people zoning out at their desks. When you have a bunch of people in a room together progress grinds to a halt because it becomes completely about performance.

> This was most likely also happening in the office

Not in this case. They even had a chart showing the sharp decline in several different metrics when they let people go remote.

If you subtracted out the outliers, most of the company was fine going remote. About 20% of people dropped their productivity to a fraction of before, though.

Some people can't handle remote work. I think it's time we stopped pretending like everyone handles remote work just fine. That lie is making it harder to get companies to admit that they need to differentiate between employees who can and cannot successfully work remote.

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