People love working remotely • Hacker News Board

Re: People love working remotely

#271

Post by jdbernard » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #246

wolco wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happened to me. What I did was go into the office and constantly talk to the vp's and ceo. Not about anything important really boring weather/how are you doing? The more removed the person from my department the more I would go out of my way to talk to them. Start asking difficult questions at the all staff forums. Always threw in doubts in meetings with non-tech people. I asked for a special chair for my back. Start…

This sort of sabotage wouldn't get past the management where I work. They'd see right through it and fire me.

But maybe that same competence would prevent them from making self-sabotaging decisions like cancelling a long-standing WFH policy.

Re: People love working remotely

#272

Post by andreasklinger » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

turingbike wrote: post #204

jackmodern wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you find those companies?

* Search "Who's Hiring?" for remote - https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/#%22remote%22 https://weworkremotely.com https://remoteok.io/ and of course, word-of-mouth / loose social connections.

FYI: I would also add angel.co/jobs

AngelList has the largest amount of remote jobs right now out there

(Disclaimer: work at AngelList)

Re: People love working remotely

#273

Post by shrimpx » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #32

ken wrote: post #19

Elephant in the room: how many of these people would prefer it to having a private office ? Strangely, this article/survey/infographic never mentions that option. I'd prefer remote work, too, over sitting in an open floorplan office, but I'd much prefer an actual office to either one. The easy "why" is: despite all the drawbacks, a lot of us will do pretty much anything to get out of an open floorplan.

Not me. Not most of my remote team. Most of them do have a private office, in their own home. The flexibility to work when you want, where you want, live where you want, visit family without needing to take vacation, etc. That all adds up to a great working life. One of our guys even spent the summer road tripping out of a custom camper van, and working the whole time from various parks. The problem people have with…

How do you visit family without needing to take vacation?

I guess you're blurring the line between "full-time from a stable remote (home/coworking/etc.) office" and full on "digital nomad".

I work full-time remote and I think there's a huge difference between working from a stable office and wandering around working from a camper van or ducking out for personal travel while on the clock? It's hard to imagine that the latter type of employee would be ready to quickly respond to incidents, to sync with their team on short notice, etc.

Re: People love working remotely

#274

Post by saganus » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #218

dls2016 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is straight out of the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual, see Section 4.11 General Interference with Organizations and Production . https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/... Re: a special chair for your back... "Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don't get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work."

> "Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don't get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work." Memories work in funny ways. The first thing that jumped to my mind was the Asterix book where the Romans capture the druid (Getafix, in the English versions) and want him to make the magic potion. He insists that he must have fresh strawberries to make it, which are out…

Off-topic, but, it's very interesting how they translate the Asterix and Obelix character names across languages.

In Spanish the druid is called Panoramix for whatever reason :)

Re: People love working remotely

#275

Post by brailsafe » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 7:59 PM UTC

I'm currently remote for a grant funded initiative at a University. The work is great, but I'm the sole developer. I move around a lot and don't keep a home office. I like it, it's technically satisfying most of the time, but there are only so many days I can spent just working through technical problems at a coffee shop. It's also really great if I want to go off on a road trip or something. I'd like a bit of diversity in the types of problems I'm working on, and miss building something up with people who have different skills or knowledge than me. So I'm looking for work that's at least partly onsite, but that lets me do whatever I want to isolate myself and work through a problem on my own if necessary (in Vancouver if anyone's looking). At a previous position, eyebrows were raised when I chose to take my laptop away from my desk to sit in the lobby and code so I could get away from Bill, the jackass who brought in a mechanical keyboard and screamed through sales calls on his bluetooth earpiece. Bill, of course wasn't a jackass. I eventually brought him aside and simply asked him to be a bit quieter.

Re: People love working remotely

#276

Post by barbs » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 8:00 PM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #168

What I hate is being lonely. They're shutting down our offices for cost savings. As such I've basically been straight work from home. Working from home reminds me of the isolation of being homeschooled. I love having the flexibility to work remote on certain days, for example when I need to bang out a bunch of code. But, having a place to interact with people is invaluable for me. I imagine countless others feel the…

Personally, I've found a good coworking space helps with this. I don't work directly with anyone there, but having people around from similar disciplines that you can chat with/have lunch with has been so valuable for me.

Re: People love working remotely

#277

Post by thrwaway4833 » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

donretag wrote: post #270

I have been working remotely for 3-4 years, and I am currently job hunting. I did not like working remotely honestly. As an extrovert, I did not like the isolation. However, the major drawback was not being able to steer any of the tech/political discussion because I was remote. I had poor managers/CTO that needed a good smack to the head because they were too scatterbrained, but I was not there to do it. Impossible…

The cost savings to employers is so extraordinary ($0 per square foot in office space, $0 on HVAC, electricity, $0 on corporate wifi and the building's ethernet, $0 on cleaning bills, $0 on toilet paper, ink, toner, desks, etc etc - the employer literally is happy to buy all of the above), and to employees a free 5-20% reduction of work hours due to the total loss of mandatory unpaid commute, plus all transportation costs, that I can't help but think something must be missing.

Any employer that could leverage remote workers could have the equivalent of a $1 trillion headquarters employing 1 billion people, tomorrow: at a cost of exactly $0.

So it stands to reason that there is SOMETHING keeping remote-only workplaces from eating their competitors for lunch. Something turns off that growth or ruins the economics.

What is that something?

Re: People love working remotely

#278

Post by antonioaguilar » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

Many friends from Latin America work via Upwork, but they barely make enough for a living as they charge around 30% commission (end-to-end). I would rather look for companies that focus on remote work. For example, I have a Mexican friend working remotely from SF at www.lionmint.com/en. It's a german IT consultancy that focuses on digital platform development. He told me they pay great rates and have top-notch projects.

Re: People love working remotely

#279

Post by jaggederest » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

weaksauce wrote: post #236

RyanDagg wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#6 might be the only real chance the US has of having less divisive politics. Moving the upper middle class and wealthy out of cities could change the game entirely by making the political extremes less concentrated geographically.

rural broadband would need to be improved for this to work in general.

I'm extremely hopeful for Starlink and similar services. <100ms ping rural internet would change the game in a lot of significant ways.

Re: People love working remotely

#280

Post by notJim » Tue, Aug 20, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #273

codingdave wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not me. Not most of my remote team. Most of them do have a private office, in their own home. The flexibility to work when you want, where you want, live where you want, visit family without needing to take vacation, etc. That all adds up to a great working life. One of our guys even spent the summer road tripping out of a custom camper van, and working the whole time from various parks. The problem people have with…

How do you visit family without needing to take vacation? I guess you're blurring the line between "full-time from a stable remote (home/coworking/etc.) office" and full on "digital nomad". I work full-time remote and I think there's a huge difference between working from a stable office and wandering around working from a camper van or ducking out for personal travel while on the clock? It's hard to imagine that the…

Not the person you're replying to, but my family works too, so I can visit them and then we hang out on the evenings and weekends. Everyone is still working during the day.

Where I work, we have core hours (12-4 Eastern) that everyone is supposed to be online, but otherwise your schedule is up to you, so it allows considerable flexibility. In practice though, it's even more flexible. Part of remote work is that you're no longer glued to your desk. Your output is what matters, not where your butt is.