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Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

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Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#141

Post by donretag »

claudiulodro wrote: post #132
donretag wrote: post #126

LinkedIn has made the process of finding an on-site position more difficult. They will list a position as being local to your search, but when you view the listing, it will actually be for a remote job. There is no way to really search for on-site jobs in LinkedIn.

This is definitely a recent change they did, because I had a job alert that went from getting a new truly local listing every few weeks to 50+ listings a day with all of them being remote. In the "All Filters" section, there's a new On-Site/Remote section where you can exclude remote listings now in the job search tool.

Thanks, that appears to work. Although, LinkedIn will reset the filter if I change another part of the search in attempt to increase results.

Offices are still closed, so many companies still do not know how they will truly operate once they will re-open.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#142

Post by hindsightbias »

jspash wrote: post #31
bfung wrote: post #14

> Are those days just over? Depending on your job function and industry. For tech, yes, those days are over for at least for another 5 to 10 years, is my guess. COVID has generally proven to both employers and employees that productivity doesn't drop that much. It will also weed out bad people managers who need to "see" people physically who need to "get a feel" as a management metric. The only major factor that woul…

"COVID has generally proven to both employers and employees that productivity doesn't drop that much" Is that a personal observation of yours, or has this now become "fact"? The reason I ask is that I would like to find studies - not just surveys or anecdotal evidence - that attempt to quantify the quality and productivity of WFH since the recently pandemic changes. At work, we've had countless discussions about this…

It’s close to two years. If WFH increased productivity, the entire front page of HN should be blitzed with studies and metrics proving that. But all we have anecdata from a population highly biased to lean introvert.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#143

Post by rsynnott »

chrsig wrote: post #115
sdevonoes wrote: post #42

Don't get it. Even if remote is becoming more common, the vast majority of tech jobs out there are not 100% remote. Note: a lot of companies are advertising themselves as "100% remote while corona lasts" though.

> Note: a lot of companies are advertising themselves as "100% remote while corona lasts" though. This is the thing that gets me...Haven't people in tech figured out how exponential growth works? Covid isn't going away, ever.

I think you’re taking that a bit too literally. “While COVID is a massive office-closing problem” might be closer to the mark. Before Omicron showed up, a lot of places were moving to re-open everything mode. Omicron will slow that, but probably not by much.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#144

Post by gwbas1c »

pc86 wrote: post #111
gwbas1c wrote: post #90

I suspect it depends on where you live. I live in Massachusetts, but because I live too far away from Boston, I need to primarily work remote. (And, oh, I'd much rather be in the office 80-90% of the time.) Believe me, it's easier to get an in-person job than a remote job! Most positions that I see still want staff primarily in-house. Do you live in the Bay Area, or in a generally high cost of living area? I suspect…

I've seen this for Boston specifically, and a bit for New York, but I don't think it generalizes. I live in a MCOL area and 90%+ of the jobs I see are remote. Controlling for the ones outright lying and the ones that think remote means coming into a main office every MWF, let's call it 75% are actually remote. However, most of the jobs I've seen posted from Boston companies seem to require in-person for some reason.…

Many Boston companies work with physical items and high-cost assets and thus have a real reason for in-person work. Also, even though the cost of living is high, it's well-balanced with wages, so someone doesn't have to telecommute just to afford a decent home. (Unlike the Bay Area where your huge paycheck hardly covers a reasonable apartment.)

But... There's also a weird "prep school" attitude where someone's thinks they're "the boss" instead of a manager. (These are usually people who micromanage and have bad leadership skills.) These are the managers who insist on no remote work, or put weird rules on it, because they just can't trust their team or won't hire people they can trust.

Fortunately, the shift to remote work has made these kinds of bosses easier to weed out.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#145

Post by bfung »

jspash wrote: post #31
bfung wrote: post #14

> Are those days just over? Depending on your job function and industry. For tech, yes, those days are over for at least for another 5 to 10 years, is my guess. COVID has generally proven to both employers and employees that productivity doesn't drop that much. It will also weed out bad people managers who need to "see" people physically who need to "get a feel" as a management metric. The only major factor that woul…

"COVID has generally proven to both employers and employees that productivity doesn't drop that much" Is that a personal observation of yours, or has this now become "fact"? The reason I ask is that I would like to find studies - not just surveys or anecdotal evidence - that attempt to quantify the quality and productivity of WFH since the recently pandemic changes. At work, we've had countless discussions about this…

Anecdotally - again, at least for tech and not the whole market.

It does really boil down to if your company has a culture of documentation, reading and writing, before needing to interface with someone in real-time.

Anyone who’s contributed to open source software understands this style of “remote” working, as that’s the default.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#146

Post by bfung »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #70
bencollier49 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this. Certain phases of work and types of teams do alright remotely - typically a team with a lot of senior engineers in mid-project flow with few external dependencies. But a team with a significant number of juniors, faced with multiple blockers or external dependencies will underperform badly compared to in-person working. Whole days will go missing because of a lack of effective communicat…

> Whole days will go missing because of a lack of effective communication A friend in the construction industry has been dealing with this since COVID WFH started. He works with a lot of different architects, designers, suppliers, and so on that have to coordinate work. He also has to track the costs of mistakes and extra time lost due to drawing issues, errors, missed change orders and so on. As soon as COVID WFH st…

Sounds ripe for disruption for a coordination app of some sort to track different progress of things…

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#147

Post by bfung »

datavirtue wrote: post #94
bencollier49 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with this. Certain phases of work and types of teams do alright remotely - typically a team with a lot of senior engineers in mid-project flow with few external dependencies. But a team with a significant number of juniors, faced with multiple blockers or external dependencies will underperform badly compared to in-person working. Whole days will go missing because of a lack of effective communicat…

"But a team with a significant number of juniors, faced with multiple blockers or external dependencies will underperform badly compared to in-person working." So, like every corporation.

That really falls on management and having the right docs and communications written ready before the juniors need it.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#148

Post by rsynnott »

midjji wrote: post #104
acwan93 wrote: post #98

I'll give you an anecdote for my company (we're a software firm with developers, support staff, and sales reps): We offered hybrid and remote options to all of our employees once lockdowns ended. All of them (except for one) wanted to come back full-time, with some notable exceptions for hybrid. Some employees have kids so they went hybrid, but once schools reopened they all went back full-time in the office. The lon…

Is it the lack of communication or the lack of spontaneous socializing with coworkers? Dont get me wrong, I think the latter is probably underrated, but I dont know if thats what you are missing?

I think there’s also another aspect that gets missed; the lack of being around other humans, which is subtly different to socialising.

Pre-covid, most people were around multiple other people for most of their waking life. I don’t think it’s at all surprising that a mode of working where you spend every working day without seeing another human is causing some people difficulty.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#149

Post by Arubis »

niemenmaa wrote: post #24

Before pandemic I started working remotely and soon noticed that, like OP, working alone doesn't suit me. I solved this by joining a co-working hub that offers offices to remote workers / entrepreneurs. My employer pays for the hub membership. I drive to our offices around once a month, but rest of the time I sit in a room with an accountant and gym owner. They are fun to chat and go to lunch with but they don't inte…

+10000%. Coworking is, for me, remote working done right: you get to separate your "work family" from your employer/clientele, which means you can change one without changing the other at your discretion.

Re: Ask HN: How to find a job in 2021 if I dislike remote?

#150

Post by tablespoonsruby »

titanomachy wrote: post #134
chrsig wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real crux. It's not that people who hate wfh want to be in the office, it's that people that hate wfh want me to be in the office. It's not that one's superior to the other, it's that one wants to force itself on the other.

I don’t want to force anyone to do anything. I want to find a team that has the same primary work mode that I do: in-person collaboration. My current team has a loose agreement that this is how we’ll work after covid, but I just joined in the last year so we’ll see. If there are also teams (or whole companies) of people who work best over Zoom, then that’s great. Of course I can be flexible about things like covid va…

> I don’t want to force anyone to do anything. I want to find a team that has the same primary work mode that I do: in-person collaboration.

I think of this the way I think of full-time pair programming: nobody should be forced to do it, but it's perfectly fine to form a team where it's a key part of the culture, as long as it's made abundantly clear to new hires before they join that it will be expected of them.

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