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The Winners of Remote Work

nytimes.com

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Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#231

Post by thayne »

Johnny555 wrote: post #223
InitialBP wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in general you'll just see a lot of those restaurants and businesses that provide services to office employees move to where they can provide services to remote employees. Service industry businesses generally follow people and if people aren't going downtown everyday and instead hanging around the suburbs, then you'll likely see more starbucks etc in the suburbs serving that crowd.

My town already had one Starbucks before the pandemic and still has one Starbucks after the pandemic -- moving people to work from home doesn't change the economics of running a service business like a coffee shop or restaurant. My office building had 25 floors, and probably over 1000 people worked there. That's a lot of foot traffic, probably more than my small downtown sees in a day. When I work from home I just ma…

It will take time for businesses to follow the workers. At the very least I would imagine the distribution of such businesses won't fully adjust until after the pandemic is over.

I think it is too early to say.

And given the shortages in servering labor, we may see a shift in the jobs people have as well.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#232

Post by smogcutter »

tkgally wrote: post #228

My anecdatum: I worked from home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator from 1986 to 2005. I lived all that time in or near Tokyo, Japan's business and government center where the majority of translation clients were located. From 1986 to the mid-1990s, being physically located in Tokyo was a definite competitive advantage for me. While I knew some translators who worked remotely even then, having to send and…

The singular of “anecdote” is, in fact, “anecdote”.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#233

Post by tkgally »

smogcutter wrote: post #232
tkgally wrote: post #228

My anecdatum: I worked from home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator from 1986 to 2005. I lived all that time in or near Tokyo, Japan's business and government center where the majority of translation clients were located. From 1986 to the mid-1990s, being physically located in Tokyo was a definite competitive advantage for me. While I knew some translators who worked remotely even then, having to send and…

The singular of “anecdote” is, in fact, “anecdote”.

I intended to use a singular form of “anecdata,” not of “anecdote.” See, for example, [1] and [2].

[1] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/anecdat...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#234

Post by chana_masala »

smogcutter wrote: post #232
tkgally wrote: post #228

My anecdatum: I worked from home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator from 1986 to 2005. I lived all that time in or near Tokyo, Japan's business and government center where the majority of translation clients were located. From 1986 to the mid-1990s, being physically located in Tokyo was a definite competitive advantage for me. While I knew some translators who worked remotely even then, having to send and…

The singular of “anecdote” is, in fact, “anecdote”.

This is anecdotal data, and while it is not common anymore, the singular of data is datum, thus anecdatum.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#235

Post by grecy »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #48

> Avoiding the office saves employees money — in commuting costs, for example It saves money for businesses exponentially more. The office space, associated utilities, physical security, cleaning, supplies, insurance, etc. are insane amount of savings. I owned a small "remote business" in the 90's and it allowed me to be competitive with multi-million ventures.

This times 10,000.

A friend worked for a company in Vancouver that rented a building big enough for the 30 person team to work. Before covid they went almost entirely remote, and all 30 people are flown to Vancouver ~8-10 times a year, put up in fancy hotels to do a 4 or 5 day course in the hotel function room.

It's cheaper for the company to pay for all of that than to rent the office space permanently.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#236

Post by curuinor »

drewburg wrote: post #168

I haven't seen any mentions here if being in a startup fundamentally changes the argument. I think startups would want to leverage the individual talent and personal time sacrifice to bootstrap themselves and build their dream team. I have found the opposite, that they want to be even more controlling in work environment. I am probably biased as it did take a few months to adjust to remote work and find a decent bala…

the most important thing about startups is that they're much less uniform. there's no over-overlord megalomaniac at the head to make sure anyone does anything. Half seems to be about a good ratio, but I also bet the best remote folks are also startups, they just don't talk to folks about it

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#237

Post by mariojv »

justaguy88 wrote: post #144
gringoDan wrote: post #82

This makes complete sense – just another example of power law dynamics of the internet. Short-term, we're going to see companies pursue a remote model in order to attract talent. This will be great for employees; live in Colorado, go on hikes and have a great lifestyle while commanding a SF salary! Longer-term, companies are going to realize that (except for the top ~10% of performers, who will always command a high…

Time zone 'compatibility' is extremely important Happily hire north/south, but too many hours east/west and people have to give up off-time just to have regular meetings

I think it really depends on the type of work and people involved whether east/west can work well.

We're working with some contractors with a 9 hour time difference between headquarters and their office, but having really efficient weekly check-ins against concrete, written goals, good async communication, and a lot of people scattered in timezones in between is helping us succeed.

It definitely takes coordination and a good team, but I think it can be really useful. Most of the experts for the super specific thing we're working on are actually in Europe, so it would be more challenging to do this project if we limited ourselves to north/south hiring.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#238

Post by eric4smith »

cblconfederate wrote: post #175
eric4smith wrote: post #3

The only winners of remote work will be those who are self disciplined enough to get work done without outside supervision or motivation. That goes for every single field that does remote work - learning, teaching, Knowledge work etc. But let’s be honest - some people need the motivation of a workplace — and that’s ok! We are all different. Im somewhere in the middle… love working from home but it’s easy to get distr…

> enough to get work done without outside supervision or motivation. Sounds like a business opportunity

Absolutely. The people who can come up with the right tools to motivate at home workers, will be very rich.

Human failings are always a super-large business opportunity.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#239

Post by sebular »

masterof0 wrote: post #194
sebular wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer is that "whatever metrics you prefer to use" include qualifications that overseas engineers often cannot satisfy. Great engineers are human members of a team, and there's more to a team member than their LeetCode score (seriously?) and/or how many GitHub stars they've obtained. Just some examples off the top of my head: If you're building products to target US-based consumers, you don't need to prov…

> Great engineers are human members of a team, and there's more to a team member than their LeetCode score (seriously?) and/or how many GitHub stars they've obtained. I was referring to performance metrics in general, I didn't said those were the ones to take into account. I have definitely seen people here in HN referring to github stars, stackoverflow points, etc... as some sort of badge of honor. Also I find your…

My apologies. Your anecdotal experiences on a random team at Google clearly prove that anyone who hires US-based engineers at market rates is making a giant financial blunder.

Also it wasn’t even slightly condescending of you to declare that US-based engineers are overpaid and ask HN for validation. It was just a brave stance taken by a bold intellectual who knows better than everyone else.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#240

Post by smogcutter »

tkgally wrote: post #233
smogcutter wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The singular of “anecdote” is, in fact, “anecdote”.

I intended to use a singular form of “anecdata,” not of “anecdote.” See, for example, [1] and [2]. [1] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/anecdat... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Yes, hn search comes up with lots of results for obnoxious hn-isms
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