The Remote Manifesto • Hacker News Board

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#61

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

hnarn wrote: post #2

> For example, onboarding can be more difficult when you're remote, because it involves more self-learning and you're not physically with your new coworkers and fellow new hires. This can cause the first month in a remote role to feel lonely, especially if you're transitioning from a traditional office setting. As someone whose primary experience from going between jobs in IT is that almost the singularly most import…

This is a very bizarre conclusion to me. But I suppose I’m one of those people that goes to work, to work, not for a fraternity experience. I want to (and am) friendly with my co-workers but I don’t really want to be their friends, or have “social experiences” filled after my work day with more work stuff. I’d like the freedom to choose myself and sometimes that includes people I know from work.

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#62

Post by Conjoiner » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:28 PM UTC

lnsru wrote: post #29

fyfy18 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of existing jobs where people have to spend many hours by themselves. Think about truck drivers, they may spend weeks alone with nothing more than a few minutes chat to a fellow trucker they see at a truck stop.

That‘s not true. Truckers have radios (at least in Europe) and they they are interacting with other truckers in radius of ~10 miles. I had radio in my car and and it was even entertaining sometimes. I could ask advice, ask for fuel when I was empty, ask for police checkpoints. On private channel one can have virtually private conversation.

We should invent something like that, 'radio', thing for computers

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#63

Post by geofft » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

hnarn wrote: post #2

> For example, onboarding can be more difficult when you're remote, because it involves more self-learning and you're not physically with your new coworkers and fellow new hires. This can cause the first month in a remote role to feel lonely, especially if you're transitioning from a traditional office setting. As someone whose primary experience from going between jobs in IT is that almost the singularly most import…

> almost the singularly most important factor is the social life of interacting with your colleagues

I'd like to make a slightly different response than "I don't want my company to be responsible for my social well-being": I think part of what you're saying is less that your (pure) social life is derived from work than that work itself is a social experience and that helps productivity/morale.

I think many of the productivity benefits to being work-social don't apply in a remote environment. For instance, at my current non-remote job, one of my teammates is going through a divorce, and it's helpful for me to know that and how it's going so that I'm aware that he'll be out at random times to meet with lawyers or pick up kids or whatever, and that if I needed something from him and he wanders by my desk with his coat on, I should probably drop what I'm doing and switch context because he's heading out the door and this is my only chance to catch up until tomorrow. But if we were working remote, we'd just have some communication system that's geared toward async work, and if he needs to head out and be online at home, that's fine with me—I expect everyone to be online intermittently, and I only expect real-time communications during scheduled meetings. So, I don't need to know what's going on with his personal life, and honestly he might be happier not telling us.

And the second-order effect is that when my team is communicative about what's going on with their lives and willing to let me be communicative about what's going on with mine, and we have matched expectations about whether you're there (both physically and mentally) between 9 and 5, things work well, and when they're not, things work poorly. But again, those expectations would be fundamentally different in a remote-first culture. So the fact that people would be less communicative about personal stuff would not be as much of a negative impact.

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#64

Post by Conjoiner » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

sime2009 wrote: post #27

fyfy18 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of existing jobs where people have to spend many hours by themselves. Think about truck drivers, they may spend weeks alone with nothing more than a few minutes chat to a fellow trucker they see at a truck stop.

Those solo jobs are a small minority of the workforce.

Trucking is the single largest job category in the US

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#65

Post by pault » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

mieseratte wrote: post #58

onion2k wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why pay more for the same skill? Because people aren't stupid and when they realise they're being paid less than they're worth they'll leave, and then you'll have to go through the pain of recruiting someone else.

> Because people aren't stupid and when they realise they're being paid less than they're worth they'll leave, and then you'll have to go through the pain of recruiting someone else. I just took a 20% pay-cut to go work somewhere I thought I might like. There is more to a position than the compensation package.

Sure, in those rare cases where you can find a company that really does interesting work (this is doubly difficult if you are limited to companies that allow remote work). For boring company A vs boring company B you are going to follow the money, I think (unless you actually work for The Boring Company).

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#66

Post by geofft » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:32 PM UTC

fipar wrote: post #52

hnarn wrote: post #2

> For example, onboarding can be more difficult when you're remote, because it involves more self-learning and you're not physically with your new coworkers and fellow new hires. This can cause the first month in a remote role to feel lonely, especially if you're transitioning from a traditional office setting. As someone whose primary experience from going between jobs in IT is that almost the singularly most import…

I would expect that a significant portion of the money that a corporation saves by having a "remote only" policy would go into alleviating the social issues caused by that same policy. I'm not seeing any of that here, which indicates to me a company that does not prioritize the well-being of their employees. With all due respect, I think if you feel that way it's probably because remote work is not something you woul…

Yeah, I think having responsibility for raising children influences this a lot - at the non-remote-friendly places I've worked, the senior people are disproportionately people who have stay-at-home partners taking care of the kids. If you either don't have a family or have someone else to do the bulk of the work of raising/caring for them, office work is just fine (and it gets you an easy social circle that isn't just your family).

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#67

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:32 PM UTC

rofo1 wrote: post #25

I've been working remotely (for companies that are not all 100% remote) for some time now and other than the occasional communication problems, there is simply no downside to it (for me). I am much more focused, I do better work, in a better health mentally and physically (I can exercise since I can organize my time), I don't waste time on commute. The people I work with are interested in results and that's what I de…

I’ve also worked most of my life in 100% remote companies. I also find this fixation on work being a social experience to be quite odd. I go to work to work. I have made many friends working remotely but it happened organically. But some of the people commenting here make it sound like a fraternity with forced (or strongly implied that you go) social events tied to your employment.

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#68

Post by ilikehurdles » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:34 PM UTC

jypepin wrote: post #6

My observation is that there are 2 schools of thought about remote salaries. One side will pay SF-based competitive salaries no matter where you are, are the other side will have a "cost of living" adjusted salary. Gitlab is in the latter group. I recently thought about it, and was wondering if this could create some bias / unfair preferential treatment when interviewing and competing with other candidates. If candid…

My remote gig has several people who are pretty much digital nomads -- they move around often, travel even more often, and work from various states. We all get paid on the same scale (north-east coast based) so there's no issue; but, how would Gitlab handle this? Change their salary every time they log work from a new location?

Even with that, it seems arbitrary and unbalanced. One person's cost of living paying for a mortgage in the city, raising children, or having college debt is very different from another's renting a 2 bedroom with their partner in midwestern suburbs. You might say that it's not the company's duty to compensate you for the financial impact of the life choices you make, yet they're doing exactly that by adjusting compensation based on the broad geographical area one chooses to work from.

I guess for our situation, the folks on the east coast have the worse deal as their rents/mortgages are higher than remote workers' in other states, but the pay is also competitive for that area so there are still people choosing to be local. On the other hand, if my pay was lower I'd just find work with an NYC or SF based company that is remote or happens to have an office in my metro as they tend to pay higher salaries.

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#69

Post by pault » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

arsenico wrote: post #17

codegeek wrote: post #4

I feel like that whole Remote issue has become too binary. Either people advocate for complete remote option OR employers mostly don't provide any flexibility when it comes to work location or schedules. I personally believe that human interaction is a key to our well being since humans are not designed to stay in a remote room/office somewhere by themselves. I am not quite on the 100% remote thing to be honest and o…

The biggest challenge is implementation of Remote at scale. It is fine if you're running a remote company of 10, but with a remote company of 50 it becomes a very detailed and documented process. You're pretty much spending "overhead" on supporting the remote working norms, documentation and principles, and all of that is a similar effort to running an office, but with completely different skills and people required.…

I don't buy this argument. The things you have to do to support remote workers are the things you should be doing anyway. I am currently in an office gig after 10 years remote and I explicitly tell people to pretend I'm not in the office so they will have to document their conversations with me, and I won't have a conversation where decisions are made outside of the confluence wiki where we keep our project requirements and technical documentation. It works wonders (but I am sometimes viewed as a bit of a monster).

Re: The Remote Manifesto

#70

Post by geofft » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #4

I feel like that whole Remote issue has become too binary. Either people advocate for complete remote option OR employers mostly don't provide any flexibility when it comes to work location or schedules. I personally believe that human interaction is a key to our well being since humans are not designed to stay in a remote room/office somewhere by themselves. I am not quite on the 100% remote thing to be honest and o…

The article addresses this: "The only way to not have people in a satellite office is not to have a main office." You need to have no main office to have a remote-friendly culture. Otherwise you have second-class citizens who aren't privy to in-person conversations: even if you have good electronic communications system, people are going to just say stuff in person because it's easier. So if someone's looking for someone from a team to do something, they'll be more likely to pick someone in the office. Otherwise you'll have less attention to whether meeting rooms have working AV. Otherwise you'll keep an expectation of people working synchronously during working hours, and the remote benefit of "if you need to take care of your kids/run errands/etc. and work a little later, that's fine" doesn't materialize: it might be acceptable but it's not normal.

I think if I were applying to your company and I knew that you and your buddies were working together in person and that I was living in a different city, I would be so concerned about being out of the loop on conversations and whether that would limit my career growth that I wouldn't want to work there unless I could move to your headquarters.

(I'm not sure I buy the "room by themselves" argument; I'm quite happy working in coffee shops or libraries. And the article points this out, too. Certainly one thing a company could do with its unspent office budget is reimburse the cost of coworking spaces. But also, the traditional office arrangement before the open-floor-plan fad was that you're working by yourself in an office with a closable door or at least in a cubicle with limited sight / sound. And that seemed to work fine.)