It’s really hard to “step up” remotely. Getting your foot in the door, getting promoted to senior, becoming a manager, are much easier if you are in person.
Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
241–250 of 399 posts
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
They investigated this, but it was impossible to find anyone who wanted the space. Everyone was working at home. Nobody needed office space.
There are no bad products, only bad prices. Subletting for 30% of what you're paying is more than 0% too.
No there are definitely bad products.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#243The era of remote work is not over. It’s just arrived. We overshot the equilibrium point by a lot during the pandemic height and that will regress back to something closer to long term trend. No matter how much the HN crowd vociferously defends remote work, it’s simply an inferior mode of operation for many creative jobs. People are not machines. We’re evolved to congregate and share space, to read body language, sha…
> Time zone is not a moat, I promise you. It may not be a moat, but it does serve as constant friction that adds latency. Sometimes you can plan your way so latency doesn't slow things down too much - but anything that requires operational coordination is going to be very difficult.
It may be difficult. It may be better in some cases. Around the clock pager support might be much easier. You can ship some features quicker by working on them around the clock. You only need 2-4 hours of overlap to cover the majority of meetings.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I meant is that I learned a lot watching senior members of the team interact. I was like a fly on the wall during their discussions just because I happened to be sitting near their desks when the discussion started. Or when there was an outage, I could overhear how they were debugging the issue. Also, I've run a remote work company over the pandemic. Maybe you don't feel working remotely is different, but many,…
> many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone in person vs. online. Also many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone online vs. in person. Seeing your arguments here, I'll guess that you're just more social than many people. When I was a junior, a long time ago, I learned most things by trying and studying on my own. I always learned very little from senior engineers directly. I would…
> Seeing your arguments here, I'll guess that you're just more social than many people.
I'm not, at all. In fact, I'm very introverted. I think you're missing a number of nuances to this argument.
It's very true that some people are more comfortable approaching people online vs. in person, but that's actually an argument for in-person work. When you're in-person, you can get insight into your team and learn new things just by being around conversations. You don't need to actively participate in any way. Even if you're more comfortable approaching people online, it's still more overhead to approach people online than it is to sit at your desk literally doing nothing.
Second, saying "many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone online vs. in person" isn't a good argument for two reasons:
1. What you're comfortable with isn't likely to be what's best overall. It's very often that you need to grow your comfort zone to grow as a person. For instance, it can feel very uncomfortable the first time you play a sport or do a hobby in front of others. It definitely feels more comfortable to stay at home. But you'll never get better that way.
2. Apparently, extroverts outnumber introverts by a large margin, so if you had to pick one method of work and apply it to the general population, then it would make sense to pick a method that favors extroverts. I'm not saying in-person working favors extroverts. I think the opposite, actually, because socializing online is harder so only those with a high social drive will actually do it. But I'm just pointing out a logical issue with that statement.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well de-facto the balanced approach is here already. If you don't like OpenAI, you can go work for Gitlab. The actual interview is not as extreme as the title, and since Altman mentioned they have remote workers too, he seems to be trying to say that 100% remote for everyone is over.
> he seems to be trying to say that 100% remote for everyone is over. That is not a balanced take. In fact, it's pretty extreme. Plenty of companies are 0% remote, plenty of companies are 100%, and plenty others are somewhere in between. His take that 100% remote is over is bizarre and somewhat confrontational, without any data to back it up. It's plain bullshit.
fwiw my personal take is if 100% remote actually worked for the mainstream companies, all of us would have been outsourced to Kenya or Pakistan at 1/10th the cost instead of taking leisurely dog walks between the zoom meetings in Austin, but this simple thought seems to not have crossed the advocates' minds.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly we differ on how we feel about approaching people. I’d rather get a simple message. When people have to write things they tend to think more about what they want to say. And what you’re describing about the fly on the wall is still simply they aren’t communicating well if they aren’t including coworkers that may only be included for the benefit of learning how to handle situations. One way to handle that is t…
> And what you’re describing about the fly on the wall is still simply they aren’t communicating well if they aren’t including coworkers that may only be included for the benefit of learning how to handle situations. One way to handle that is to approach your boss and ask to be included in those situations because you’d like to learn how to respond. That's kind of the point though. When you're together, you don't nee…
> There is always an element of rejection when it comes to approaching someone online.
If your primary reason for wanting to be in office is fly on the wall lurking and not wanting to feel rejected then those aren't very good reasons. Ask to be apart of solutions, groups, teams, emergency responses and projects. You'll learn 10x as much working with those co-workers to solve the problem than you would by listening to some coworkers doing it.
> So, you might not be willing to drive to an office for my feelings. But if you're not willing to drive to an office for the majority of your team's feelings, you might just be an asshole?
I work in a group of 10 developers and 0 out of 10 want to be in office, but hey, I don't mind if you want to take shots at me. I'm not against working in an office, I just want to have real reasons why it's needed.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - ICs & seniors are required to host at least a weekly office hour to assist juniors or teach something of their choice. When I was a junior engineer working in-person, I was learning from senior engineers multiple times a day, not just once a week.
and now you may learn from them multiple times a day, not in person, but over the internet
And also from people in multiple geographic regions!
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone in person vs. online. Also many, many people feel more comfortable approaching someone online vs. in person. Seeing your arguments here, I'll guess that you're just more social than many people. When I was a junior, a long time ago, I learned most things by trying and studying on my own. I always learned very little from senior engineers directly. I would…
> Seeing your arguments here, I'll guess that you're just more social than many people. I'm not, at all. In fact, I'm very introverted. I think you're missing a number of nuances to this argument. It's very true that some people are more comfortable approaching people online vs. in person, but that's actually an argument for in-person work. When you're in-person, you can get insight into your team and learn new thing…
> When you're in-person, you can get insight into your team and learn new things just by being around conversations.
Those are distractions. Those conversations, for the most part, bring no insight and destroy my productivity. As I said, that's not how I learn. You are applying your personal perspective unto others, but what you are describing is alien to me. I learn by experimenting and exploring on my own.
It's the reason why during most of my professional life I had to drown outside noise with headphones.
> It's very often that you need to grow your comfort zone to grow as a person. For instance, it can feel very uncomfortable the first time you play a sport or do a hobby in front of others. It definitely feels more comfortable to stay at home. But you'll never get better that way.
And I got out of my comfort zone many times. Taking on projects that didn't perfectly suited my skills and having to learn new things on the run. Switching roles and finding myself having to take on responsibilities without any proper training or hand over, etc and so forth.
Having my energy and focus drained by navigating meaningless social interaction has nothing to do with "getting out of my comfort zone", but everything to do with being able to maintain the focus I need to be actually productive.
> Apparently, extroverts outnumber introverts by a large margin
I have no idea, and honestly I'm not so sure. I certainly don't think they are the majority in Software Development.
> because socializing online is harder so only those with a high social drive will actually do it. But I'm just pointing out a logical issue with that statement.
I don't need work to socialize, when I have the need for socialization. Just make friends outside of work. Find a hobby. There's plenty of people out there.
Re: Sam Altman says era of remote work is over
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together. If your work can be done in isolation and doesn't require a team to deal with any uncertainty, then by all means work fully remote. However, if your work is about innovation and collaboration, then it's going to be more effective to spend time together. I think it's telling that you talk about…
> The point of the article is that for team work with unclearity you are more creative by working in a physical space together. The article also has no data supporting it. Only feelings. It's very typical for these sort of articles. I am a lot more productive, and even creative working from home, where I have full control of the environment I'm in and not wasting effort on social interactions. Collaboration happens e…
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