Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Winners of Remote Work

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 276 posts

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#81

Post by mLuby »

ThePadawan wrote: post #44
pvm3 wrote: post #22

The Winners of Remote Work don't live in the United States. The pandemic has accelerated globalization.

Only if you consider Remote Global Work. As a European, it is very disheartening to see how many companies espouse "we are now embracing remote work company-wide", which on closer inspection means "California hours +-2h time difference".

It's unfortunate for North Americans who want to work elsewhere too. A globalized workforce is good for peace, prosperity, and human rights.

Another comment pointed out that shared time zone "remote working mercilessly exposes some of the flaws in the organization." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369657)

I'll add that global/fully async remote work is even more merciless, especially on Agile figuring-it-out-as-we-go-along orgs. Communication has to be written and clear enough to avoid back-and-forth, changes are possible on the order of a day, not an hour so planning ahead and evaluating critical paths is more important, and everyone has to be able to pick up and put down work that's become blocked by someone on the other side of the planet. It's a tall order, but I'd like to think that the benefits are worth it for both individual and company.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#82

Post by gringoDan »

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 salary) having remote workers in the US is functionally equivalent to having remote workers in Mexico or Argentina. US workers are in for a rude awakening when they realize they're competing in a labor market with a more driven, lower cost-of-living population in the rest of the world.

Shameless plug – I wrote a blog post about all of this back in December: https://paranoidenough.com/2020/12/07/Labor-Market-Arbitrage...

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#83

Post by orwin »

ghaff wrote: post #47
mlac wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do think the “old guard” has the most to lose from commercial real estate investments. Think about who sits on the board for a major company… It’s owners and executives from commercial real estate firms. There is a ton of money around commercial real estate, so letting it all just collapse (or losing even 10% of that market) is billions of dollars shifted around the economy. Most “normal” people who are work…

I'm skeptical that executives in commercial real estate have that much leverage over major corporations. I expect things like a bias towards the status quo, sunk cost fallacies, concerns about long-term culture/productivity, and so forth are more than enough to make companies hesitant to go mostly/fully remote.

Looking at this in another way. Of the 5 managers i know at the bank i'm working in (and i'm pretty high up since the sbject i'm working on is transversal to 90% of devs teams in the bank), all of them have real estate. Either because they are now old and invested early (in the 2000's), or because they inherited it. I'm not talking about one or two appartments, i'm talking about whole buildings in Paris and Villas on the Cote d'azur. The incentives are here, not only for the executive but also for the middle-high managment.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#84

Post by astockwell »

iainctduncan wrote: post #38

I have done remote work for a long time (because ...Canada), and the real issue is that it requires management to have their shit together. I also assess companies for acquisitions now so I talk every month to companies about what's working and what isn't. I've seen some very successful companies with partially remote or even 100% remote teams. And... they have their shit together. Managers have to actually know what…

The #1 question I wish I could get answered for any prospective company (as an interviewee):

"Do you have your shit together?"

Seriously. This could avoid so much heartache.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#85

Post by ThePadawan »

handrous wrote: post #77
quadrifoliate wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen many European companies as well who do this unintentional duplicity of "remote" meaning "anywhere in the EU/EEA". In addition to the obvious time zone constraints, I think payroll taxes and such are a major regulatory boundary that you need to cross in addition to having "all your shit together" as one of the top comments puts it.

> In addition to the obvious time zone constraints, I think payroll taxes and such are a major regulatory boundary that you need to cross in addition to having "all your shit together" as one of the top comments puts it. This can be annoying even across state boundaries, let alone internationally, for smaller companies that aren't already operating in several states. Consider also things like group health insurance,…

Right?

It boggles the mind that the biggest companies on Earth are the likes of Instagram instead of a huge company called "Adapt" which takes care of all that between employee and employer as a third party.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#86

Post by luffapi »

vehemenz wrote: post #46
ghaff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is commuting, which stems from a lack of housing. I think you'll find that a great many people don't want to live in the denser areas where offices often tend to be. You can scold about that all you want, but you could make cities arbitrarily dense and a lot of people, indeed more, wouldn't want to live in them if they weren't making a commuting tradeoff because of work.

If you're going to quote a line, quote the context. The OP was talking about "boom cities" as a problem, which they aren't by themselves. The problem is the unaffordability of the cities, caused by lack of housing, which leads folks to live outside of the city and commute. My main point was that arguing for remote work/sprawl was not a ecologically-friendly argument. Sure, lots of people want to live in the middle of…

Wouldn’t wfh decrease the cost of living in the city, since currently most high paying jobs make living within commuting distance a requirement? To make an extreme example, cost of living on the Bay Area should go down if wfh becomes widespread. There are other reasons to want to live in SF aside from getting paid a high salary in tech, so housing prices should “fallback” to whatever people value the culture/scenery… at. What you would probably see is a more even (and healthy) distribution of growth in all metro areas instead of being centered in a few with all of the cost of living increases associated with that.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#87

Post by orwin »

pc86 wrote: post #56
luffapi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> love working from home but it’s easy to get distracted with side projects, feeding birds, germinating seeds etc. For programmers at least “productivity” comes from writing leveragable code, not by working more hours. Watching birds, gardening and generally being relaxed and rested will increase the quality of the code you write. It may even allow you to envision solutions impossible to come up with under the daily…

There are also plenty of programmers who are just lazy and don't want to work a lot. Check out any of the dozens (hundreds?) of comments on Blind of people working 15, 20, 25 hours a week. Total. "I'm sitting on my porch drinking a beer and watching birds but trust me I'm totally working right now " doesn't take you very far.

I've had weeks were i worked 60 hours of crunch, but most weeks, even if i was at the office i work barely more than 25 hours. Between reading tech news, gossip, researching a bit on this totally new tech that seems nice, trying to justify a POC to my n+1/n+2 and preparing slides on "why leaving Jenkins totally make sense", i did so much false work that honestly would annoy me if i was a manager. Now i'm leaving my computer for 30 minute pauses, it is far healthier for me, i'm more effective at my job and i stopped wasting my time and the time of my collegues on meaningless presentations. I still do somes on "clean code" or "how to rework your commits to prepare efficient code reviews", but it is for the benefit of the team, while the one i did pre-covid were for my entertainment.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#88

Post by skrtskrt »

pc86 wrote: post #56
luffapi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> love working from home but it’s easy to get distracted with side projects, feeding birds, germinating seeds etc. For programmers at least “productivity” comes from writing leveragable code, not by working more hours. Watching birds, gardening and generally being relaxed and rested will increase the quality of the code you write. It may even allow you to envision solutions impossible to come up with under the daily…

There are also plenty of programmers who are just lazy and don't want to work a lot. Check out any of the dozens (hundreds?) of comments on Blind of people working 15, 20, 25 hours a week. Total. "I'm sitting on my porch drinking a beer and watching birds but trust me I'm totally working right now " doesn't take you very far.

Good for those people, I have worked plenty of jobs where I really don't actually work much over 20 hours a week and still get top ratings.

Screw the grind culture crap

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#89

Post by shock-value »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #14

The whole thing is complicated and companies do, eventually, adjust. Anecdote. I am in process of looking for a full time remote since my mega boss decided that hybrid is good enough for me and no amount of paperwork could convince her otherwise. Right now I am remote until delta dies off or HR changes its mind. I told no to recruiter 2 weeks ago, because the job was not remote. Just today it seems the company receiv…

> Now.. the companies are trying to make remote less appealing ( and trying to argue that you should be paid less ), but, quite frankly, remote is worth a lot to me now.

If remote is itself valuable to you then it would stand that companies could get away with offering a lower salary for remote work, at least in your case.

Re: The Winners of Remote Work

#90

Post by mlac »

orwin wrote: post #83
ghaff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical that executives in commercial real estate have that much leverage over major corporations. I expect things like a bias towards the status quo, sunk cost fallacies, concerns about long-term culture/productivity, and so forth are more than enough to make companies hesitant to go mostly/fully remote.

Looking at this in another way. Of the 5 managers i know at the bank i'm working in (and i'm pretty high up since the sbject i'm working on is transversal to 90% of devs teams in the bank), all of them have real estate. Either because they are now old and invested early (in the 2000's), or because they inherited it. I'm not talking about one or two appartments, i'm talking about whole buildings in Paris and Villas on…

Exactly - board members / senior executives are the people who can afford to invest in commercial real estate.
Post reply on HN