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Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

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Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#91

Post by eternalny1 »

ericmcer wrote: post #69
EMM_386 wrote: post #13

I am a fully remote worker nowhere near my "office", which is simply where our company is technically HQd. I have never met my boss or any of my coworkers in person. I do highly technical work, on a team that only hires very senior developers who have prior remote work experience. And I can say, it is NOT for everyone. If you do not have a life out of work, if you live alone, if you do not have a good network of real…

The ideal remote work situation to me would revolve around the ability to travel, want to go to Hawaii for two weeks? No big deal. People who talk about using a remote job to move to X city seem a bit detached from reality in my opinion.

I've done this, and it isn't great. It's not quite the "vacation" type experience you'd think it is.

You still have to do work. So yes, you can fly to Hawaii for two weeks, pay for flights, hotel bills, meals, none of which are reimbursed because these are not corporate expenses we're talking about.

And then you stay in the hotel or somewhere else plugged in for a long time to do the actual work they are paying you for.

And then maybe go do something in Hawaii for a few hours.

Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#92

Post by oldboyFX »

When I was younger (~18 yo), I always dreamed of leaving my small central European country and moving to the States, Canada, or somewhere in Australia. I couldn't imagine staying at home. It simply wasn't exciting enough and I didn't see my future here.

My buddy and I used to hype ourselves up and talk about our future plans, which country we'd move to, in which ways we'd survive (our brightest idea at the time was driving cabs in Sydney, haha).

A couple of years later we started doing web development and got our first gigs. Now that we had some cash in our hands, we decided to — for a start — move to Berlin.

My buddy moved right away and got a job in local startup. I followed him a month later and had a remote US based client. I arrived in January. It was quite cold, often raining, and all around kind of depressing. I didn't know anyone and lived in a small apartment with a bunch of hippy roommates I didn't vibe with. Since I worked remotely I didn't have any coworkers to hang out with. I ended up renting an overpriced desk in a hipster co-working place where everyone kept to themselves and pretended to work. After a month I started getting depressed and it affected my work, so I bought a one-way ticket and moved back to my home country.

Shortly after moving back, I finally found my flow. I co-created a passion project with another friend (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547351), started increasing my contracting rates, found higher quality clients, etc. I rented a small apartment in the city centre, hung out with friends and family, and basically loved my life (still do!). When I wanted some excitement and a change of scenery, I would jump on a plane and do a road trip abroad.

My buddy who didn't work remotely stayed in Berlin, made friends with some of his co-workers, expanded his social circle, and all in all had a great time. He then proceeded to get married, moved to San Francisco, worked at a FAANG-like corp, got divorced, and in the end moved back to the home country as well. Not (entirely) because of the divorce, but because he craved real friendship which he couldn't find in SF.

I guess the point of this story is... Being lonely sucks and having friends and family close is important? Yeah.

Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#93

Post by gabriel-uribe »

vfc1 wrote: post #9

I bet he is right that its harder for younger people. Having a family means having a routine built-in, you take your kids to school and go pick them up always at the same hour, play a bit, make dinner, bedtime, etc. For younger people, maybe going to the gym almost every day? I bet that there are shared workspaces with people in the same situation in a lot of large cities at least.

As a young person working remotely, I just realized the value of that this week; breaking up my workday at the climbing gym has helped me feel less isolated. I enjoy my solitude, but I still need to socialize during work hours somehow. While there aren’t many people at my climbing gym around noon, those who are there also seem open to chatting or being a climbing partner.

There is also a cafe upstairs which is convenient for lunch and the second half of the workday.

Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#94

Post by jpgvm »

ben_jones wrote: post #83
EMM_386 wrote: post #13

I am a fully remote worker nowhere near my "office", which is simply where our company is technically HQd. I have never met my boss or any of my coworkers in person. I do highly technical work, on a team that only hires very senior developers who have prior remote work experience. And I can say, it is NOT for everyone. If you do not have a life out of work, if you live alone, if you do not have a good network of real…

Are you me? Some of my personal anecdotes going through the exact same circumstances (I'm also currently applying for dual US/Irish citizenship): 1) I hate working out. I don't want to do it. But when I do, I feel momentously better afterwards. I have not worked out consistently in the last 12 mo. 2) I hate cooking and cleaning up after cooking. I don't want to do it. But when I do, I feel better afterwards. I have n…

The only real piece of advice I have for changing those things is committing to it. Losing weight is a good place to start, it has easily observable results and you can go at your own pace. I lost 20kg in 6mo when I started travelling, it was my first "change my life" goal and it made it a lot easier to start on other things that I hoped would be beneficial for me long-term - like finally starting on getting my teeth fixed despite my fear of dentists.

Finding the first win helps a ton. :)

Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#95

Post by jpgvm »

hodgesrm wrote: post #61
b112 wrote: post #49

As others have said, in this thread, there are a lot of mixed issues in this article. Living a nomad/traveling lifestyle =! remote work. Loads of people remote-work from home, but change nothing else in their lifestyle. I've been working remotely my entire life. 30+ years now. One thing that is key, is looking at the blue sky . Being outside occasionally. You will note that the article talks about work/life balance,…

Speaking as an employment _provider_ I fully agree nomad != remote. I'm actually hesitant to employ nomads if they are likely to move without warning to time zones that aren't convenient for the rest of the team. For example, one of the things that makes distributed teams work is to have a small number of very stable meeting times that remain invariant for long periods of time. The reason is that people need to struc…

I have been on remote teams with 2 different types of coordination.

Meeting coordinated, which is usually centered around 1 or 2 weekly meetings when status updates and some amount of discussion of planning occurs. This model works best when a large portion of the team is on the same timezone or there is a physical office somewhere but isn't ideal for nomads or people that are permanently located in an inconvenient timezone. These meetings often come at a very high cost so if someone isn't getting value out of them then they don't feel great about them usually.

The other is async/adhoc coordinated that mostly does synchronisation and planning through async means like chat, email and issue tracking. This I found works way better for travellers/nomads and people that generally don't need or want structured meetings. Especially if you mostly work on long tasks and the vast majority of your updates are "still doing the thing". If you couple this with adhoc/on-demand meetings where you grab small portions of the team to talk about smaller scoped things I find it works really well. Managers (well less good ones) in particular are less of a fan of this model because instead of having well defined sync points they need to be continually on top of how things are changing.

Both have trade-offs, I find the second one works way better but is much rarer. I experienced my most productive time as an engineer working under such a model.

Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#96

Post by yoz-y »

> Articles about the remote work lifestyle have tended to focus on drinking piña coladas on the beach, traveling the world, and otherwise enjoying a life that inspires envy in your social media following.

Did they though? I have the impression that the last dozen of articles I've seen on remote working on HN concentrate on the negatives. Mainly because the positives are rather obvious.

Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#97

Post by matt74827289 »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #39

This shocked me: "to encourage wellbeing: 40 days paid vacation per year: True disconnection is fundamental to help people de-stress and recharge." Is this common elsewhere in the world? In the US, it Seems like 10 or 15 days is the norm, and maybe 20 after 5 years. What do the FAANG+ companies offer? Does the 2 months of vacation also contribute to that disconnected feeling, I wonder?

I realize I got an above average offer, but as a new grad I'll be getting 25 days a year starting out, up to 30 days after 5 years with the company. Not a FAANG company but a tech company backed by a Fortune 500 company.

Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#98

Post by infinity0 »

A lot of the comments in this thread are a bit self-defensive and unempathetic to the problems described in this post.

This post, and many unrelated others in general, are talking about their own experiences. They don't seek to deny other people's experiences; and being slightly too general in their wording so that there might be an implication that their experiences apply to everyone, is a mistake that everyone makes and is an intrinsic part of natural everyday language. Pointing this out, and seeing others point it out, gets really tedious after a while, not to say uneducational and uninformative.

Personally, I've definitely been through a similar thing that this article describes. Remote work is indeed very draining indeed for the reasons described. If you have some ways to make it work for you, just say and state them, there is no need to say "the article is wrong / too general, actually it's only true when specific circumstances [X, Y and Z] apply that didn't apply to me", this adds nothing to the discussion and makes it sound like you're denying other people's experiences.

Re: Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

#99

Post by oldboyFX »

ben_jones wrote: post #83
EMM_386 wrote: post #13

I am a fully remote worker nowhere near my "office", which is simply where our company is technically HQd. I have never met my boss or any of my coworkers in person. I do highly technical work, on a team that only hires very senior developers who have prior remote work experience. And I can say, it is NOT for everyone. If you do not have a life out of work, if you live alone, if you do not have a good network of real…

Are you me? Some of my personal anecdotes going through the exact same circumstances (I'm also currently applying for dual US/Irish citizenship): 1) I hate working out. I don't want to do it. But when I do, I feel momentously better afterwards. I have not worked out consistently in the last 12 mo. 2) I hate cooking and cleaning up after cooking. I don't want to do it. But when I do, I feel better afterwards. I have n…

> I hate doing a healthy thing. I don't want to do it. But when I do, I feel momentously better afterwards.

Ah yes, that's familiar.

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