15 ms·

Why I Only Work Remotely

316 points by ylhert 10y ago

sgt 10y ago
Some employers would argue that your privacy is forfeited during working hours. After all they pay you a salary, and if they want you in the office so be it - even if it is a less effective environment. Needless to say, I sympathize with the OP view here.
- tswartz 10y ago
  Good point. It's often stipulated in the contract or made clear during the interview process what the expectations are, which is good. The unfortunate part is that employers may not realize that their policies are actually decreasing productivity.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Maximizing individual employee productivity may not be even in the top ten list of company priorities. For one, making sure that what the company wants to be built is actually built is massively more important. This seems to be hard for many companies. My roommate's startup has gutted their remote team, only one guy is still there and his days are numbered. From what my roommate told me, managing remote employees can be more trouble than it's worth. I remain unconvinced that the clamor for remote work environments is really in company's best interests. When push comes to shove, doing remote right requires an investment on the parts of both the team and the company, and if one side doesn't or cannot pull their weight, then it becomes unmanageable, bringing the company down with it. Employees can bitch about the employers, but they're the ones paying the salaries.
    - jgrant27 10y ago
      It's a fact that having everyone in an office 5 days a week sadly and far too often does not result in a company getting what it wants built. The problem with that lies elsewhere, usually with management and hiring.
- imesh 10y ago
  Employers can argue what they want, but I argue solely for myself and what I want is to not work for an employer that needs me to be in an office. So I don't.
tswartz 10y ago
I agree that forcing the same strict work hours (9am - 7pm) is not always effective. The author explains exactly why that doesn't work for them and why they are much less effective. However, I've found that when people all have different hours (especially over different timezones) it's difficult for the one-off meetings when something needs to be hashed out in person or skype. I suppose this problem may actually be a side effect of our office having strict working hours so we don't know how to operate on the days when most of the office is remote and working on different hours. Companies like 37Signals have clearly figured out how to build a collaborative and productive company across multiple timezones.
elliotec 10y ago
I work at a company which has a beautiful building, I spend the majority of time in the office which is fantastic, the social aspect plus internal networking is very good. I work from home on average maybe 0.8 days a week, for various reasons, but I get lots of work done and am quite productive from home. There are some things that you just can't do the same from home. You can be much more agile when working in proximity. Face to face conversations are important and effective. There is a lot of missing out if you work 100% remotely in companies that aren't 100% remote.
- mwcampbell 10y ago
  To me, that last bit is an argument for more companies being 100% remote. After all, many open-source projects have been developed by 100% distributed teams.
  - ssharp 10y ago
    It's not that fair to compare the work put out by open-source project teams vs. the work put out by a company trying to make a profit. They are two much different goals, the latter of which typically has much more mobile goal posts.
    - elliotec 10y ago
      And they have many people that aren't just developers who have far less flexibility in what they can actually accomplish remotely
- Klathmon 10y ago
  My workplace is 80% remote, but not in the way you might think. Just about everyone works from home 4 days a week, and comes into the office one day. It expands the hiring pool by a pretty significant amount, one of our devs is 2 hours away (4 hours round trip, and he still commutes less than his wife does every week), it lets us get a lot of the "face to face" benefits done in one day, and the rest of the time is remote. We do also have a couple fully remote, and a couple "always in office". It works out nice though as we tend to remember to include the "always remote" people on our in office day because most of us know how much it sucks getting left out.
iguanayou 10y ago
Agreed. I've been working remotely for 2 years now and don't think I could go back to an office. The open office floor plans are just horrendous for actually getting any work done. The article doesn't talk about the high cost of commuting but this is the biggest factor for me. Having that extra two hours per day, and not being exhausted when I get home, has really expanded the amount of living (social, fitness, hobbies) I've been able to do and has expanded my life more than anything else. Not to mention the cost savings. It's a lot more difficult to find remote jobs than traditional office jobs, especially ones that pay well. But the extra effort in the job search more than pays off.
- el_benhameen 10y ago
  How do you generally look for and find jobs?
  - iguanayou 10y ago
    My first remote job started as an on-site office job, and I was able to convince my boss over time to eventually go 100% remote. My current contract is with a local company that happens to support remote work. I found this job through a recruiter. But like I said, it was a rare find. The recruiters I work with know that I'm looking for remote-only, but those positions are few and far between. My contract is ending soon so I'll be looking at the online job boards in addition to working with recruiters; it remains to be seen how much success I'll have with that.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      > The recruiters I work with know that I'm looking for remote-only, but those positions are few and far between. The biggest problem is that many companies that refuse remote work, don't have any issues outsourcing big piles of it to the other side of the planet.
      - wott 10y ago
        Or having several offices across the country and departments/teams split between theses offices, resulting in having just 1 or 2 department/team members in a few of the offices. The only difference with home office and the only thing that matters to them is that there is a warder (they call him a manager).
pzh 10y ago
I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal. At first glance, a good indicator would be the salaries that remote companies pay, and most remote companies tend to pay peanuts, using 'remote' as an excuse to underpay, and thus also signaling that they don't care to pay a premium for software engineers because their projects don't really need top talent or a lot of experience. From all this, it also follows that career development is quite stagnant at remote companies. I wish things were different, but until the Big Five start allowing and encouraging remote-only distributed work, things won't change a lot...
- seanwilson 10y ago
  > I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal. I've managed to find many good remote contracts but from local companies (which sounds funny). It's either just assumed you will work in your own space or they're happy for you to work remotely after a couple of face-to-face meetings.
- pbhowmic 10y ago
  Wouldn't generalize as much but point taken. Frankly,my project pays well enough and it is remote too but what really makes the pay great in my case is a no income tax state for me. Otherwise the pay would be meh if I had to shell that out.
  - bdavisx 10y ago
    I don't think most state income taxes are that burdensome. My state's is 3%, so on a $100,000 salary not considering any deductions, the difference would only be $3,000 between my state and a non-income tax state. If you were making $200,000, it would still only be $6,000. Neither amount is peanuts, I realize, but it's not the difference between good and meh either.
    - 10y ago
stevesearer 10y ago
For as much as people like to hate on open offices on HN, it still baffles me why there aren't more Y Combinator startups founded with remote work or private offices as core company principles. Just a guess, but I wonder if the decision to just go with open offices has to do with the ability to scale such a plan quickly and easily, whereas scaling a remote team is too difficult or building or rearranging private offices takes too long and costs too much. A possibly poor analogy might be the difference between going with some cloud provider which scales more quickly vs building out your own server which is more costly and possibly more difficult to maintain.
- iaw 10y ago
  I think most people running start-ups are not anywhere near as talented or insightful as they are portrayed, in fact I think some of them are super insecure and have to portray themselves as "thought leaders." This leads to a situation where leadership can't honestly acknowledge when they've made a bad decision.
- eob 10y ago
  We (Cloudstitch, YC S15) are building remote work into our company DNA right from the start. It's been an educational journey, and we're stronger team because of it. One thing we've learned is that "diversity" is so much more than just race/gender/ethnicity. Geographic location, even within the US, can be a profound contributor to the diversity of ideas, experiences, and opportunities. Makes you realize a non-remote team is living in a [geographic] bubble by definition. If you're interested in building a better web stack / CMS that integrates with your office suite, give us a holler at hello@cloudstitch.com :-) PS: Re open office plans in early-stage startups, I suspect cost savings are a driving factor.
- jgrant27 10y ago
  What would you guess the average years of experience are for a Y Combinator founder ? I say this not as a judgement but simply because people earlier on in their careers often need more face to face guidance to help them get to the point where they have more experience.
- wott 10y ago
swozey 10y ago
At home I can control the noise & temperature of my work environment. These aren't brought up often but they're huge to my productivity. I can't work well when I'm uncomfortable. Trying to code with numb fingers or while sweating is miserable to my productivity.
- Raphmedia 10y ago
  My home office has a $3000 computer, $600 chair, high end keyboard and mouse, a huge 4k screen. My office temperature is at the optimal for my body and my setup is positioned according to the sun coming in the window. At work it usually* is a $600 computer, a $60 chair, low end dirty keyboard and mouse, small low quality screen. The office is cold, I have glare in my screens... and I share a room with 60 persons. It's hilarious how my personal setup outclass my professional one. * I am lucky enough to have found an employer which value his employees and that's not the case right now for me.
  - criddell 10y ago
    Have you ever thought about buying your own keyboard, mouse, monitor, and chair?
    - Raphmedia 10y ago
      I'm not going to invest money into my employer's company unless I get a return on that investment. Edit: That's a slippery slope. What next? Buying a new microwave, new window blinds, a modern thermostat, softer toilet paper ...
      - swozey 10y ago
        If it's something that isn't standard or I know is so peculiar to me (mechanical keyboard, expensive mouse, headphones) that the company can't redistribute it when I leave, I just buy it myself and bring it in. That slippery slope is also slippery on the other end, ok, company A bought you "xyz gamer laptop" when everyone uses MBPs or what not. 99% chance it's going to go sit in the closet for a few years after you leave until donated or sold whereas if you used the standard equipment it can be cleaned and released. I'd rather skip the hassle and bring my own things in if it's not a change to the standards.
501startups 10y ago
I feel this works best for companies under 20 people (Lawn Love, MailJoy, et al.) and greater than 1000 (i.e. Google, Facebook, et al.).
deleted 10y ago
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notliketherest 10y ago
As much as I agree with the sentiment, 0/10 would not hire such a outspokenly high maintenance individual, no matter the technical chops or brilliance.
- deleted 10y ago
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alistproducer2 10y ago
Different Strokes for different folks. My personal feeling is that a company should allow employees to do what they want. If the company has an office setting and an employee wants to do the office thing then let them. But if you have an employee who is telling you that they work better from home take them at their word and let the results the judge of whether or not they're telling the truth.
gdulli 10y ago
I've had good results with finding companies that don't force bad working conditions, and asking for an alternative to open seating when necessary. I've always been accommodated. If people aren't at least asking for flexibility, they should be. I haven't had to sacrifice the ability to have face to face communications and relationships with my co-workers. I'm not saying these are my best friends, just that there's subtly more that comes across in person vs. remote.
willholloway 10y ago
I feel that gigantic metropolises are not optimal environments for software engineering. NYC, and it's helter skelter of noise and traffic and garbage and tiny living spaces, in my humble experience and opinion is not conducive to hard engineering problems. I am probably completely wrong here and just a hopeless introvert with an axe to grind, but from my experience, working in home offices in towns like Boulder, Colorado, with a central, easily bikable office/startup HQ, would present the optimal small company setting. A quality employee cares, they care about the problems of your company when they shower, when they sleep, when they are knowing their spouse in a biblical sense. The problems of the company they have pledged their allegiance to, like a knight in Game of Thrones pledges allegiance and service to their lord, are always on their mind. So if you are paying for knowledge work, you would do well to dispel any notions of body/mind duality. Physical health equates to mental health, and a town like Boulder, CO is about the perfect size for optimal maintenance of a human body/mind. And there are hundreds of other communities in America with similar attributes to Boulder, CO. And if you can take advantage of the space that your workers are already paying for in their rent or mortgages. Spaces that may have gyms and/or pools which are physically and mentally rejuvenating, well you will come out ahead. I think the future of work will be semi-distributed, and this mad consolidation into a few coastal cities will be seen in the future as a gross inefficiency.
- Nav_Panel 10y ago
  > I think the future of work will be semi-distributed, and this mad consolidation into a few coastal cities will be seen in the future as a gross inefficiency. I disagree with this prediction. 1) If given the choice, most people would prefer to walk to their day-to-day destinations rather than drive. 2) In order to create an area in which most destinations are within walking distance of the residents, a certain level of density is needed. This level of density manifests itself in "the traditional city", ranging from the relatively low traditional density San Francisco Mission district (25k ppl/sq mi) to the medium density neighborhoods in Brooklyn (for example, my neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, has a density of 57k ppl/sq mi. Williamsburg is similar) to ultra high density Manhattan areas, such as the Upper East side, which supports a population density of 120k ppl/sq mi (!!!). Older European cities are often within these density bounds. Less density than the Mission and other forms of transportation become necessary for day-to-day tasks, and the city's face starts to resemble more driving-oriented (midwestern) cities. 3) In order to go beyond one's immediate neighborhood, quality public transit is important, as owning a car is an extreme unnecessary expense if the neighborhood is truly walkable. 4) Very few walkable metropolitan areas exist in the USA today, as transit is insufficient and neighborhoods are sparsely populated relative to a traditional city. Most that do are historic urban cores: for example, I'm writing this reply from Downtown LA, which appears visually similar to parts of Manhattan, is relatively walkable, and has decent transit options, but not nearly on the level of NYC. 5) Since so few desirable, walkable metropolitan areas exist with sufficient public transit, the ones that do featuring housing that is either extremely expensive (supply/demand) or, as mentioned, poorly maintained/insufficient. This forces the vast majority of people to live much further than walking distance from their workplaces -- often up to an hour or more away -- if they want to live in a pleasant apartment in a pleasant neighborhood within their means. 6) The result is that (due to shipping, coastal) cities predating cars are the only ones that can offer this living experience, and you will pay considerably for the privilege of walking to the bodega at 3 AM while extremely intoxicated, saying hello to the friendly person behind the counter, and buying a gatorade before you pass out in your 8'x10' bedroom. ----------------- NYC had a chance to remain at least somewhat affordable (by building transit options when acquiring right-of-way in undeveloped Long Island and Queens from the 30s thru the 60s), and Robert Moses completely blew it (because of his personal hatred of minorities and poor people). If you want to find out more about that particular topic, I suggest you read Robert Caro's book "The Power Broker". One idea espoused in the book is that when you build mass transit before you build the community, you end up with a medium-to-high density community. When you build highways before you build the community, you end up with a low density community. These community patterns are nearly impossible to change -- this is why people complain Los Angeles builds "trains to nowhere" -- the existing communities are low density, but medium density is a prerequisite for a train line to be useful to sufficient numbers of people. The only way to fix this in the future is to build cities with this idea in mind (or, alternatively, pray that self-driving cars fix everything). Redevelop existing areas to support new transit (an older Uber driver pointed out to me multiple new, high density developments in downtown LA, and suggested they were helping improve the area's safety and commercial diversity). Urban areas don't have to feel like NYC, but we chose a path back in the 1950s whose ultimate result was to dissolve the communities and lifestyles necessary for individual human happiness. Looking forward, I'm seeing this "mad consolidation into a few coastal cities" become a "consolidation into a larger number of smaller cities" considerably more dense than Boulder, CO, and we will see this redevelopment of urban cores as a sign of what's to come.
doughj3 10y ago
The first question I now ask recruiters when they reach out is whether or not the position is on-site or remote. Google, Microsoft, Amazon... no remote work, at least not for any of the positions they frequently contact me about.
Aldur42 10y ago
The article mentions that strict rules hurt good actors and help bad actors, and you should fix this by filling your organization with good actors. For very small startups this might be possible. However if you need to hire a large number of developers this becomes increasingly difficult. It is far easier to hire "bad actors". If a company finds itself in a situation where adding a bad actor will increase company revenue beyond the actors cost, it financially imperative to hire bad actors. Eventually the good to bad ratio slips in the direction of bad, and strict rules end up helping more than they hurt. Good people leave to new places, and the vicious cycle continues.
seanwilson 10y ago
The time to travel to the office is often ignored too (it sounds lazy to even mention it because it's the norm). If you're working remotely and it takes 30 mins to get to the office, you're at an absolute minimum burning 5 hours a week going back and fourth from the office when you could be doing something else. Add in the extra time changing to and from work clothes, and having to leave the office to get food instead of eating at home and the time adds up. If you're freelance and bill by the hour as well then those hours easily add up to an extra day a week you could be working.
- criddell 10y ago
  I actually enjoy my commuting time. I listen to podcasts or think about what I need to do when I get to work (or home). If I'm on my bicycle, I find that my mine really wanders and I enjoy that. Once I'm at work, I get down to it and am good for about 4 hours or so (on good days) of really good work. Spend an hour or two on email, light reading, talking to coworkers, and that's my day.
  - hash-set 10y ago
    You're the only one. Commuting SUCKS!
    - morganic 10y ago
      Just haven't found good enough podcasts
      - bbcbasic 10y ago
        Is there a podcast that will stop me wanting to vomit as the bus driver breaks hard every 10 seconds, or help me battle my way through the queue to get onto said bus?
- ylhert 10y ago
  Such a great point, and I regret not touching on this!
mwcampbell 10y ago
Other reasons to allow or even encourage remote work: In the US, there's a growing polarization between the coasts and middle America ("flyover country"). I, for one, don't want all the good programming jobs to be on the west coast. Remote work, where the workers bring their own equipment and office setup, is probably better for people with disabilities. For example, an employer doesn't have to care or possibly even know that a worker is using a screen reader or other assistive technology. Assuming, of course, that all the applications one has to use on the job are accessible. In fact, let's take it a step further, and propose remote work with strictly text-based communication. Yes, yes, we lose the nuances that are communicated through tone of voice, facial expressions, etc. But think of all the kinds of discrimination, whether overt or accidental, that disappear. Disabilities (including hearing and speech impairments), accents, race, and age are now completely irrelevant. Sounds like a big win to me.
- dennisgorelik 10y ago
  > we lose the nuances that are communicated ... But think of all the kinds of discrimination That reminds me communist utopia: lets make all people equal ... by making everyone poor.
  - mwcampbell 10y ago
    That's a good point. And on further reflection, I'm not sure I'd actually want to go with what I suggested at the end. After all, I work remotely, but I've talked to my boss by phone several times just today, because it's so convenient.
d357r0y3r 10y ago
I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain. The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend months regularly obtaining "flow" with few interruptions or meetings, only to have the projects scrapped because they weren't what the business needed. The fact that the code was immaculate didn't end up mattering at all. Informal, personal communication can make a big difference. Yes, getting up and talking to someone is more efficient than starting an email thread or slack conversation in many cases. Many of those conversations are engineer to engineer and involve important technical decisions. And, an aside: remote meetings are simply worse than in-person meetings. Having worked on several teams where some members were in completely different locations (and time zones), I never want to experience that again. Give me every person relevant to my work in the same physical space; I don't want to get blocked from doing my work because you've gone dark on slack. I promise, I get it. If I had my way, I'd work on whatever I wanted to work on, with no meetings or interruptions. I'd just be a lone wolf cranking out awesome features and feeling great about it. That's just not what any business needs, and it's certainly not what they pay me for.
- NumberSix 10y ago
  There are the notions of: o clear written requirements expressing the business and high level technical needs. o well defined acceptance test procedures to ensure that the delivered software (or hardware or whatever) meets those requirements o thoughtful partitioning of the work between team members to minimize the needed communication and enable the team members to focus and work on their part without having a committee meeting every few minutes on every minor issue. None of these are new practices. They, or something similar, is needed to work effectively remotely or for that matter in quiet offices with closed doors.
  - d357r0y3r 10y ago
    These are good ideals and they're hard to get right in practice. There's always a certain amount of ambiguity that arises when pen meets paper and it's ambiguity that puts any given task at risk of being done incorrectly or not at all. A positive trait in an engineer is the ability to resolve ambiguity. That isn't to say that all ambiguity can be solved by a single engineer working in isolation, though. What you don't want is people going with their best guess in an isolated, unilateral fashion, so you need good ways of handling uncertainty when it inevitably comes up. My contention is that, according to my experience, remote work results in a "dead in the water" status more often than office work.
pbhowmic 10y ago
I have been working remotely for nearly 3 years now. It is a necessity for me, my kids are very young and some some medical issues, so there is a lot of therapy and special schools involved with 1 pm dismissal times. I love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle.
- noxplode 10y ago
  > I love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle. Sooo hard to do. I worked remote over the summer and tried convincing my wife that yes, I am working, even though I am home and sitting down staring into a screen. Not sure she ever got it but I'm working in office now so not an issue anymore. If I were to do it again I would definitely get a small office to go to or go to a co-working space. Good luck!
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Same issue here. Spouse/kids/pets who can't respect "work time" make remote work impossible. I have more distractions at home than I do in an open office at work. There's no way I can get anything meaningful done there.
- ylhert 10y ago
  I've heard people with families kids can struggle with this. The people I know who've been successful at it seem to always have some kind of office work space where they can close the door and get a bit of isolation, or, they invest in an offsite office of some kind.
  - sparrish 10y ago
    This is the key - separate office. I've been working from home for 7+ years. My wife and I homeschool our 7 kids. They all know when dad is in the office, he's working and the only interruption I allow is a request for a hug. When I take breaks, we have fun, get rowdy, and help with school work and chores. But when dad's in the office, he's working (even if I'm just burning cycles on HN!)
ebbv 10y ago
The main problem I see with this article is the author is totally focused on himself. If you are a solo developer this is fine, but if you are part of a team then his attitude is detrimental. I work as part of a team and we all work remotely most of the time, but we work the same hours because working different hours would cause problems. It's hard to conduct a daily stand up if everyone's working weird hours. We have some flexibility for people but everybody has to be around for the 9:30 stand up. This helps with coordinating of larger projects and bringing up blockers which the PO or Scrum Master can remove. If some lone developer is working 3pm to 11pm then that person is not really coordinating with the rest of the team. Also I'd really hate to hear what this guy thinks of pair programming.
- eip 10y ago
  There are a lot of good code review tools. If you want to do pair programming then do it async using code reviews. Doing it sync is just wasting two peoples time.
  - ebbv 10y ago
    Code reviews != pair programming. Code reviews are great, but it's not remotely the same.
- ylhert 10y ago
  I love the teams I work with, but that doesn't mean I want them to interrupt me all day long while I'm trying to do meaningful work. I think it's important to be flexible with work hours, but that goes both ways. My concern is with places where strict requirements are set up for hours, and places that are not willing to be more open minded about crossover work hours. As far as I am concerned, 4 hours of overlap per day amongst the team is sufficient. If more overlap than that seems necessary, it is probably a process problem. I love pair programming! However I cannot pair program in an open office plan with tons of noise/distractions.
  - ebbv 10y ago
    Four hours of overlap CAN work but it depends on the overlap. For example, if the rest of the team is working more "normal hours", starting before 10am and you don't start until 3pm, that means they can't have the whole team can't have a stand up meeting until 3pm when you get on. End of the day stand up meetings CAN work, but the natural flow is to start the day with it so you can talk about what you WILL be working on today and what you DID work on yesterday, rather than what you think you'll be working on tomorrow. Also, it's hard to ensure the whole team has overlap if the times are too flexible. I have a teammate who starts at 7am, if we had another teammate who wanted to start at 4pm, they would never overlap.
hkarthik 10y ago
Remote work optimizes for the individual employee, and often the short term gain of finding early talent before you have an established brand and network effects where talent starts gravitating towards you. However, at the later stages of a company when you want 100+ engineers or more, it can be a major damper to organizational growth. Front line management becomes a necessity to keep teams healthy and get a consistent culture across the company. Career paths also require curation that is hard to do with people spread across offices and timezones. So essentially what we end up with is remote work being optimized for small startups and slow growth companies. Large companies that will always waver back and forth on it, without actually figuring out how to make it work at scale. From a career stability standpoint, it's kind of a beating. Every job will seem awesome for a short period and then devolve into a shit show. Those of you who are betting the farm on remote work should keep all this in mind. The smartest remote folks I know have realized this and just do consulting/contracting and making lifestyle choices to support this way of life. I say this as someone who worked remote for 3 years from Texas and moved out to SF to work in a big office for a major tech company. There's huge benefits to remote work, but it's not a panacea.
ceejay 10y ago
IMO humans are just bad at communicating in a precise / efficient way. Most people I meet / work with who are not in a technical field are usually very bad at explaining their business needs in face-to-face let alone by email or over the phone, etc... And ironically isn't it usually the case that these are the people who are (a) the stakeholders, or (b) the ones writing the paychecks. Until technical folks start taking over the world (maybe we're in the infancy stages of that?) I think most people who want to work remotely will need to expect to be in the office regularly if not every work day.
dan_m2k 10y ago
The author sounds super fucking bitchy. Shared workspaces are crap for getting work done - proper focussed work that you go home and puts a skip in your step. But this isn't the reality of delivery - you should be able to adapt to your client and delivering the best value can be more than cutting code. Alas, Working as a remote dev can frustrate and stifle creativity and problem solving - having my expert set at the other end of a phone, Skype, IM or slack when I need that dev to step up and become architect, because, it's a start up, and I've seen some excellent products come from pivots that happened because the Devs could weigh in, apply technical reality and end up with a viable product. As that dev, I came in to a project that was on its ass, they took a glass door off its hinges, set that up as my desk and we knocked it out of the park. I was spent afterwards but the reward of a great delivery and a happy client was worth it.
ClayFerguson 10y ago
I agree with every word of this article and after 25yrs experience as a developer I have all similar experiences. Being a computer programmer is about the same as being a 'writer' (book author), and no one expects an author to sit with other authors in a special building to be able to write. With modern technology, and the wastefulness of time and energy spent commuting, there is just no longer any reason for a programmer to not be able to work remote. I mean even if all you are considering is gasoline use and pollution savings, even that alone is enough of a reason for society to say let developers work at home. There's just no downside to it. I have been working at home for the past year, and I don't think there's any way i'd ever accept another non-remote job again. In any large city you're gonna be sitting in traffic a total of 10hrs a week. That's insanity. That's well over one full work day. With a web-cam you can still have face to face meetings. The only thing that I find missing occasionally is the use of a whiteboard, but that is a very minor thing. Having a whiteboard is not a good trade-off for 10hrs spent in traffic. Not even close. Of course in 10yrs VR will totally make it irrelevant where someone's physical location is, but i think even the basic webcams we have today already does as well.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Most books don't require 10-100 authors, each focusing on the paragraph that they are experts in, needing to hold the pages together with APIs that are agreed upon by all co-authors. The collaborative aspect of a software project is much greater than that of a book. Yes, there are books that have a multiple of co-authors, but these co-authors tend to not operate lone-wolf.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    There are different models for joint authorship. Some are pretty course-grained. In a lot of cases even if the writing used is pretty collaborative, one author does a final editing pass to come up with an integrated end product. From what I've seen, "collective ownership" models mirroring current fashions in software development remain relatively rare. And while some software projects do need 100 people, most don't -- and most don't even need 10. I get the feeling that a lot of project managers don't even think about the possibility that something could be built by a focussed individual working in a low-distraction environment.
edblarney 10y ago
Great post - with a very huge caveat: being out of the office means you miss a lot of nuance that is very, very important. There is a cultural language, and a lot of facts outside the scope of normal direction. I've worked remotely often and this has always been a huge issue: requirements can almost never be communicated succinctly, they come in waves and indirections. So if we can solve that one ... this makes more sense. As for the 'open office' concept, I can't think of anything more absurd. When I visit my clients I can't get anything done.
X86BSD 10y ago
A question to all of you who only work remotely, and I'm sure it's been covered by HN so forgive me, but where do you find reliable work that's remote? I can see getting lucky maybe and scoring one maybe two gigs that allow remote but a caterer doing it? When my wife's gig is up she would love to work from home. She already works from home two days a week. But she has no idea how to make a career out that reliably. She started out doing QA/testing, now she is all into oracle and DB2. Using oracle tools and IBM tools for managing/writing SQL for enormous databases. Government sized databases. She is making low six figures now here in KC. Thanks for any advice or leads on remote only work as a career!
- citizens 10y ago
  I only work remotely, but it does really limit the pool of available work. Weworkremotely.com is a good resource.
  - X86BSD 10y ago
    Thanks for taking the time to reply both of you. I've always wondered how those of you who are able to do remote 100% of the time do it. This helps get us started. Thank you.
- e15ctr0n 10y ago
  My favorite places to look for remote tech work are 1. Remote job boards https://remoteok.io/ https://remoteok.io/ https://www.wfh.io/ https://www.wfh.io/ https://weworkremotely.com/ https://weworkremotely.com/ 2. Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=true https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=true 3. Who Is Hiring? thread posted on Hacker News the first weekday of every month. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring
imsofuture 10y ago
Yep, I've been 100% remote for 5 years now (wow, it feels weird to see that number!) and am never going back, for the same reasons. The only caveat is that it's important that you work in an organization that is aligned with remote work, if not remote-first. Just scoring 'permission' to work remotely somewhere not used to it, is probably a recipe for a pretty bad time.
- ylhert 10y ago
  5 years is a long time, I'm sure you've got some great experience on the subject, would love to read more about your experiences! I really agree with your caveat, and I've seen a number of places that have some pretty unmotivated individuals try it, and have it fail. This left a bad taste in everyones mouth, and they wrote off remote work. The reality was that they had crappy employees, and not that remote work can't work.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  Just scoring 'permission' to work remotely somewhere not used to it, is probably a recipe for a pretty bad time. Why is that?
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Because the processes and mindset won't be setup for it. Decisions will get made in hallway conversations or even in meetings in which no one thought to send out a phone number for the remote employee to attend. Hence the idea that remote working is probably most effective when companies treat it as the norm--at least on a group by group basis.
    - lacampbell 10y ago
      Right. I've actually never worked at a place with a large number of devs under the same roof.
kin 10y ago
Everyone has something that works really well for them. It's nice to have an employer that respects that. Personally, I find a lot of value in putting a face on everyone in my team. To me, it's a lot easier to work through a problem in person vs. over Slack or Skype. But that's not to say I disagree with the OP. I totally value the efficiency of working in isolation if and when I'm at a point where I just need to be heads down to finish a task. At my office, we have the luxury of isolated couch rooms where it feels like working from home w/ the office and your coworkers steps away.
- hash-set 10y ago
  I have had the same issues, but you have to know when to pick up a phone.
late2part 10y ago
Richard Hamming said [1] it best: Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame. [1] - http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
- qntty 10y ago
  You can't keep your door open in an open office because you have no door.
- RUG3Y 10y ago
  This is anecdotal. It seems to me that there's a time for the door to be open and a time for the door to be closed. Having the option to either at the appropriate time makes a huge difference.
framebit 10y ago
Lone wolves can and do produce a lot of valuable output for businesses. However, on bigger teams, somebody's gotta take care of the juniors. Junior devs, interns, even moderately experienced devs can all benefit immensely from mentoring by senior devs. Mentoring is a fuzzy thing that happens in the margins, and that's exactly the kind of thing that's hard to replicate in full-remote work. Of course, everything in moderation. Senior devs need some time alone to churn and burn through tasks, but less experienced devs need guidance, leadership, and experienced perspective. And sometimes you need a mercenary like the author to just run solo and get it done. Different strokes for different folks.
- ilaksh 10y ago
  How can anyone seriously believe, at this point, that effective mentoring or other collaborative work cannot take place over the internet with things like git, Github, Skype, Google Hangouts, Facetime, WebRTC, Slack, Screenhero, telephones, etc., etc.?
  - intern4tional 10y ago
    No one is saying that effective mentoring cannot take place over the internet; the statement is simply being made that it is much easier to do in person. Less tooling may be required, less time invested, etc. to have effective mentoring happen when you are in person.
vonnik 10y ago
I've worked remotely for years, I've worked in an open-office where presence was mandatory, and now I run a startup with a distributed team of engineers on several continents. While working in a shared office has pros and cons, the benefits are huge. One of the main benefits is in how information is shared. Sharing an office, you overhear conversations, and the chances of random but important information about how things work and how people relate to each other is much higher. In addition, the bandwidth of the non-verbal and paraverbal information is much richer. People working remotely forego most of that information, and their understanding of the org and its culture is diminished. So why do we have a distributed team? Because we hire the top contributors to our open-source project without imposing a geographic filter, and it's the best, most efficient way we've found to build a really strong engineering team. We're aware of the shortcomings of how information flows, and struggle constantly to improve how we communicate.
- throwaway5752 10y ago
  Left my work computer to go to my personal computer only to reply and upvote your comment. I have worked for and managed teams in both shared office and remote companies. I could hardly say what you said any better myself. I think the nature of what companies are best fits for remote work, and how best to mitigate the loss of passive information sharing/lower bandwidth of subtle communication cues would be a great subject for a book or article. My short version would be: it primarily solves a recruiting problem in extremely difficult to recruit for fields, takes advantage of a bit of arbitrage in some people's utility of remote work (introvert, commute, family, etc), and information needs to be overshared (more meetings than one might prefer, more documentation, more explicit processes, etc).
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Did this at a previous workplace and it seemed to work but the company culture has to be aligned as well. There is an intangible touch-feely stuff that gets lost behind the unfeeling glare of the monitor and if the rest of the company is ill-equipped to deal with that missing piece then it won’t work out.
LeanderK 10y ago
Having to work remotely is one of the main reasons why it's so hard for me to contributed to open source projects (i am a student btw). I guess it's not for everyone. I need people to function, people to work with, people to talk about work, people to discuss decisions with and people to not talk to one another. It's what's motivating me, what keeps thinking for hours about problems.
amichal 10y ago
None of the authors headings are necessary in an in-person office environment. We have both "open" areas and offices with doors. We don't enforce a specific work hours and we most definitely could care less about butts-in-seats, results are what matter. That said I just spent an hour in an office with a co-worker comparing notes on our two separate projects with similar needs and scored a sample of some nice fudge his partner made. Yesterday i spent the morning at the cafe and last week I sat at my desk and got 9hr straight coding without talking to anyone.
brilliantcode 10y ago
I think a right balance between remote & on-site is a better argument. I've worked remotely for a few years and I quickly found myself very isolated and it's contributed to my social anxiety. Remote working can be a blessing during bad weathers or you want to take a little break from commuting.
lacampbell 10y ago
I am restless in bed and can’t sleep because I drank too much coffee and I’m worried about getting up early. By the end of the week I am tired, frustrated, angry, and disappointed with my performance. The author blames this on a 9-6 schedule. But honestly I think it's way more likely a problem with drinking too much damn coffee. Everything he wrote in that part hit home, i was experiencing it very badly... until I started limiting myself to one big caffeinated drink before lunch a day. It's improved my quality of life a lot, I am tired way less.
chriogenix 10y ago
I've been 100% remote for the last 8 years. I recently have been commuting for personal reasons and its only 30 min each way and I can already feel the drain it causes. Over a working career a normal commute(30min-1hour) each way can add up to a massive amount of lost time. Working remote is optimal for the kind of work I'm doing now. Previously I was running a larger business and we started to run into issues around 50 people on a remote team. There's advantages to both. I think the ideal environment is 4 days remote, 1 day in an office for in person meetings. To combat being out of contact with people in the business/industry, I attend as many conferences and meetups as I can.
blizkreeg 10y ago
In my experience, both, an entirely distributed team and an entirely localized team do well. It becomes exponentially harder to pull it off when you have some people working in the office, and others distributed.
gumby 10y ago
I pretty much strongly agree but I will offer one defence of "work rules" that isn't completely pointy-haired. The reality is that not everyone has the same level of productivity or commitment. With a few rules it's often possible to get more than their salary's cost out of them. Sure, we'd all like to work in an environment of nothing but awesome co-workers, but that doesn't scale. Hell, you presumably support "rules" like "we've decided that the implementation language is L" so everybody's code works together. What is brain damaged is that some companies are too stupid or fearful to understand when the rules do and don't apply.
RMarcus 10y ago
>It’s the same reason that communism does not work nearly as well as capitalism — things work best when you give people freedom as individual actors. You said "capitalism" but you meant "liberalism," and you said "communism" when you meant "authoritarian dictatorship." But setting aside this equally unnecessary and inaccurate argument, the whole tone of this article seems to glorify the archetype of the "110%" employee. I'm "passionate" about programming and computer science, but I also don't just want to pull up a JIRA and bang away code. Even if we accept the author's premise that open offices and social work environments are bad for productivity (which many people here have already pushed back against), I didn't try to find a job with lots of smart people so I could only interact with them via email. Sure, an open office occasionally distracts me and gets me out of the "flow," but it's almost always to help someone or join an interesting conversation. These things are valuable to me on their own, because (1) I like interesting conversations and (2) it means I can ask someone for help whenever I need it. And that's a better long-term feeling than slamming out code every day, which, by month two or three, starts to feel a little uninspiring.
desireco42 10y ago
This is super important. I can sign under this text like I wrote it. I can say that I like to see people in person and interact with them, but all the problems, not only with startups, but with office environment in general were spot on.
yahyaheee 10y ago
This article summarizes everything I think about workplaces. Thanks for the write up, we need to stay vocal for people to get an understanding
Heraclite 10y ago
I'm still trying to figure out the ideal lifestyle. When you work remotely, it gets boring after a while not being able to socialize. When you have to go to work every day, it gets tiring commuting. I'm thinking the perfect mix is to live 1.5 hours from a big city where the jobs are. Go to the office if needed once/twice a week. Do the rest remotely, enjoy living in a house instead of a cramped appartment. Is anyone doing this?

316 points by ylhert 10y ago

sgt 10y ago

Some employers would argue that your privacy is forfeited during working hours. After all they pay you a salary, and if they want you in the office so be it - even if it is a less effective environment. Needless to say, I sympathize with the OP view here.

tswartz 10y ago
Good point. It's often stipulated in the contract or made clear during the interview process what the expectations are, which is good. The unfortunate part is that employers may not realize that their policies are actually decreasing productivity.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  Maximizing individual employee productivity may not be even in the top ten list of company priorities. For one, making sure that what the company wants to be built is actually built is massively more important. This seems to be hard for many companies. My roommate's startup has gutted their remote team, only one guy is still there and his days are numbered. From what my roommate told me, managing remote employees can be more trouble than it's worth. I remain unconvinced that the clamor for remote work environments is really in company's best interests. When push comes to shove, doing remote right requires an investment on the parts of both the team and the company, and if one side doesn't or cannot pull their weight, then it becomes unmanageable, bringing the company down with it. Employees can bitch about the employers, but they're the ones paying the salaries.
  - jgrant27 10y ago
    It's a fact that having everyone in an office 5 days a week sadly and far too often does not result in a company getting what it wants built. The problem with that lies elsewhere, usually with management and hiring.
imesh 10y ago
Employers can argue what they want, but I argue solely for myself and what I want is to not work for an employer that needs me to be in an office. So I don't.

tswartz 10y ago

I agree that forcing the same strict work hours (9am - 7pm) is not always effective. The author explains exactly why that doesn't work for them and why they are much less effective. However, I've found that when people all have different hours (especially over different timezones) it's difficult for the one-off meetings when something needs to be hashed out in person or skype. I suppose this problem may actually be a side effect of our office having strict working hours so we don't know how to operate on the days when most of the office is remote and working on different hours. Companies like 37Signals have clearly figured out how to build a collaborative and productive company across multiple timezones.

elliotec 10y ago

I work at a company which has a beautiful building, I spend the majority of time in the office which is fantastic, the social aspect plus internal networking is very good. I work from home on average maybe 0.8 days a week, for various reasons, but I get lots of work done and am quite productive from home. There are some things that you just can't do the same from home. You can be much more agile when working in proximity. Face to face conversations are important and effective. There is a lot of missing out if you work 100% remotely in companies that aren't 100% remote.

mwcampbell 10y ago
To me, that last bit is an argument for more companies being 100% remote. After all, many open-source projects have been developed by 100% distributed teams.
- ssharp 10y ago
  It's not that fair to compare the work put out by open-source project teams vs. the work put out by a company trying to make a profit. They are two much different goals, the latter of which typically has much more mobile goal posts.
  - elliotec 10y ago
    And they have many people that aren't just developers who have far less flexibility in what they can actually accomplish remotely
Klathmon 10y ago
My workplace is 80% remote, but not in the way you might think. Just about everyone works from home 4 days a week, and comes into the office one day. It expands the hiring pool by a pretty significant amount, one of our devs is 2 hours away (4 hours round trip, and he still commutes less than his wife does every week), it lets us get a lot of the "face to face" benefits done in one day, and the rest of the time is remote. We do also have a couple fully remote, and a couple "always in office". It works out nice though as we tend to remember to include the "always remote" people on our in office day because most of us know how much it sucks getting left out.

iguanayou 10y ago

Agreed. I've been working remotely for 2 years now and don't think I could go back to an office. The open office floor plans are just horrendous for actually getting any work done. The article doesn't talk about the high cost of commuting but this is the biggest factor for me. Having that extra two hours per day, and not being exhausted when I get home, has really expanded the amount of living (social, fitness, hobbies) I've been able to do and has expanded my life more than anything else. Not to mention the cost savings. It's a lot more difficult to find remote jobs than traditional office jobs, especially ones that pay well. But the extra effort in the job search more than pays off.

el_benhameen 10y ago
How do you generally look for and find jobs?
- iguanayou 10y ago
  My first remote job started as an on-site office job, and I was able to convince my boss over time to eventually go 100% remote. My current contract is with a local company that happens to support remote work. I found this job through a recruiter. But like I said, it was a rare find. The recruiters I work with know that I'm looking for remote-only, but those positions are few and far between. My contract is ending soon so I'll be looking at the online job boards in addition to working with recruiters; it remains to be seen how much success I'll have with that.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > The recruiters I work with know that I'm looking for remote-only, but those positions are few and far between. The biggest problem is that many companies that refuse remote work, don't have any issues outsourcing big piles of it to the other side of the planet.
    - wott 10y ago
      Or having several offices across the country and departments/teams split between theses offices, resulting in having just 1 or 2 department/team members in a few of the offices. The only difference with home office and the only thing that matters to them is that there is a warder (they call him a manager).

pzh 10y ago

I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal. At first glance, a good indicator would be the salaries that remote companies pay, and most remote companies tend to pay peanuts, using 'remote' as an excuse to underpay, and thus also signaling that they don't care to pay a premium for software engineers because their projects don't really need top talent or a lot of experience. From all this, it also follows that career development is quite stagnant at remote companies. I wish things were different, but until the Big Five start allowing and encouraging remote-only distributed work, things won't change a lot...

seanwilson 10y ago
> I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal. I've managed to find many good remote contracts but from local companies (which sounds funny). It's either just assumed you will work in your own space or they're happy for you to work remotely after a couple of face-to-face meetings.
pbhowmic 10y ago
Wouldn't generalize as much but point taken. Frankly,my project pays well enough and it is remote too but what really makes the pay great in my case is a no income tax state for me. Otherwise the pay would be meh if I had to shell that out.
- bdavisx 10y ago
  I don't think most state income taxes are that burdensome. My state's is 3%, so on a $100,000 salary not considering any deductions, the difference would only be $3,000 between my state and a non-income tax state. If you were making $200,000, it would still only be $6,000. Neither amount is peanuts, I realize, but it's not the difference between good and meh either.
  - 10y ago

stevesearer 10y ago

For as much as people like to hate on open offices on HN, it still baffles me why there aren't more Y Combinator startups founded with remote work or private offices as core company principles. Just a guess, but I wonder if the decision to just go with open offices has to do with the ability to scale such a plan quickly and easily, whereas scaling a remote team is too difficult or building or rearranging private offices takes too long and costs too much. A possibly poor analogy might be the difference between going with some cloud provider which scales more quickly vs building out your own server which is more costly and possibly more difficult to maintain.

iaw 10y ago
I think most people running start-ups are not anywhere near as talented or insightful as they are portrayed, in fact I think some of them are super insecure and have to portray themselves as "thought leaders." This leads to a situation where leadership can't honestly acknowledge when they've made a bad decision.
eob 10y ago
We (Cloudstitch, YC S15) are building remote work into our company DNA right from the start. It's been an educational journey, and we're stronger team because of it. One thing we've learned is that "diversity" is so much more than just race/gender/ethnicity. Geographic location, even within the US, can be a profound contributor to the diversity of ideas, experiences, and opportunities. Makes you realize a non-remote team is living in a [geographic] bubble by definition. If you're interested in building a better web stack / CMS that integrates with your office suite, give us a holler at hello@cloudstitch.com :-) PS: Re open office plans in early-stage startups, I suspect cost savings are a driving factor.
jgrant27 10y ago
What would you guess the average years of experience are for a Y Combinator founder ? I say this not as a judgement but simply because people earlier on in their careers often need more face to face guidance to help them get to the point where they have more experience.
wott 10y ago

swozey 10y ago

At home I can control the noise & temperature of my work environment. These aren't brought up often but they're huge to my productivity. I can't work well when I'm uncomfortable. Trying to code with numb fingers or while sweating is miserable to my productivity.

Raphmedia 10y ago
My home office has a $3000 computer, $600 chair, high end keyboard and mouse, a huge 4k screen. My office temperature is at the optimal for my body and my setup is positioned according to the sun coming in the window. At work it usually* is a $600 computer, a $60 chair, low end dirty keyboard and mouse, small low quality screen. The office is cold, I have glare in my screens... and I share a room with 60 persons. It's hilarious how my personal setup outclass my professional one. * I am lucky enough to have found an employer which value his employees and that's not the case right now for me.
- criddell 10y ago
  Have you ever thought about buying your own keyboard, mouse, monitor, and chair?
  - Raphmedia 10y ago
    I'm not going to invest money into my employer's company unless I get a return on that investment. Edit: That's a slippery slope. What next? Buying a new microwave, new window blinds, a modern thermostat, softer toilet paper ...
    - swozey 10y ago
      If it's something that isn't standard or I know is so peculiar to me (mechanical keyboard, expensive mouse, headphones) that the company can't redistribute it when I leave, I just buy it myself and bring it in. That slippery slope is also slippery on the other end, ok, company A bought you "xyz gamer laptop" when everyone uses MBPs or what not. 99% chance it's going to go sit in the closet for a few years after you leave until donated or sold whereas if you used the standard equipment it can be cleaned and released. I'd rather skip the hassle and bring my own things in if it's not a change to the standards.

501startups 10y ago

I feel this works best for companies under 20 people (Lawn Love, MailJoy, et al.) and greater than 1000 (i.e. Google, Facebook, et al.).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

notliketherest 10y ago

As much as I agree with the sentiment, 0/10 would not hire such a outspokenly high maintenance individual, no matter the technical chops or brilliance.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

alistproducer2 10y ago

Different Strokes for different folks. My personal feeling is that a company should allow employees to do what they want. If the company has an office setting and an employee wants to do the office thing then let them. But if you have an employee who is telling you that they work better from home take them at their word and let the results the judge of whether or not they're telling the truth.

gdulli 10y ago

I've had good results with finding companies that don't force bad working conditions, and asking for an alternative to open seating when necessary. I've always been accommodated. If people aren't at least asking for flexibility, they should be. I haven't had to sacrifice the ability to have face to face communications and relationships with my co-workers. I'm not saying these are my best friends, just that there's subtly more that comes across in person vs. remote.

willholloway 10y ago

I feel that gigantic metropolises are not optimal environments for software engineering. NYC, and it's helter skelter of noise and traffic and garbage and tiny living spaces, in my humble experience and opinion is not conducive to hard engineering problems. I am probably completely wrong here and just a hopeless introvert with an axe to grind, but from my experience, working in home offices in towns like Boulder, Colorado, with a central, easily bikable office/startup HQ, would present the optimal small company setting. A quality employee cares, they care about the problems of your company when they shower, when they sleep, when they are knowing their spouse in a biblical sense. The problems of the company they have pledged their allegiance to, like a knight in Game of Thrones pledges allegiance and service to their lord, are always on their mind. So if you are paying for knowledge work, you would do well to dispel any notions of body/mind duality. Physical health equates to mental health, and a town like Boulder, CO is about the perfect size for optimal maintenance of a human body/mind. And there are hundreds of other communities in America with similar attributes to Boulder, CO. And if you can take advantage of the space that your workers are already paying for in their rent or mortgages. Spaces that may have gyms and/or pools which are physically and mentally rejuvenating, well you will come out ahead. I think the future of work will be semi-distributed, and this mad consolidation into a few coastal cities will be seen in the future as a gross inefficiency.

Nav_Panel 10y ago
> I think the future of work will be semi-distributed, and this mad consolidation into a few coastal cities will be seen in the future as a gross inefficiency. I disagree with this prediction. 1) If given the choice, most people would prefer to walk to their day-to-day destinations rather than drive. 2) In order to create an area in which most destinations are within walking distance of the residents, a certain level of density is needed. This level of density manifests itself in "the traditional city", ranging from the relatively low traditional density San Francisco Mission district (25k ppl/sq mi) to the medium density neighborhoods in Brooklyn (for example, my neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, has a density of 57k ppl/sq mi. Williamsburg is similar) to ultra high density Manhattan areas, such as the Upper East side, which supports a population density of 120k ppl/sq mi (!!!). Older European cities are often within these density bounds. Less density than the Mission and other forms of transportation become necessary for day-to-day tasks, and the city's face starts to resemble more driving-oriented (midwestern) cities. 3) In order to go beyond one's immediate neighborhood, quality public transit is important, as owning a car is an extreme unnecessary expense if the neighborhood is truly walkable. 4) Very few walkable metropolitan areas exist in the USA today, as transit is insufficient and neighborhoods are sparsely populated relative to a traditional city. Most that do are historic urban cores: for example, I'm writing this reply from Downtown LA, which appears visually similar to parts of Manhattan, is relatively walkable, and has decent transit options, but not nearly on the level of NYC. 5) Since so few desirable, walkable metropolitan areas exist with sufficient public transit, the ones that do featuring housing that is either extremely expensive (supply/demand) or, as mentioned, poorly maintained/insufficient. This forces the vast majority of people to live much further than walking distance from their workplaces -- often up to an hour or more away -- if they want to live in a pleasant apartment in a pleasant neighborhood within their means. 6) The result is that (due to shipping, coastal) cities predating cars are the only ones that can offer this living experience, and you will pay considerably for the privilege of walking to the bodega at 3 AM while extremely intoxicated, saying hello to the friendly person behind the counter, and buying a gatorade before you pass out in your 8'x10' bedroom. ----------------- NYC had a chance to remain at least somewhat affordable (by building transit options when acquiring right-of-way in undeveloped Long Island and Queens from the 30s thru the 60s), and Robert Moses completely blew it (because of his personal hatred of minorities and poor people). If you want to find out more about that particular topic, I suggest you read Robert Caro's book "The Power Broker". One idea espoused in the book is that when you build mass transit before you build the community, you end up with a medium-to-high density community. When you build highways before you build the community, you end up with a low density community. These community patterns are nearly impossible to change -- this is why people complain Los Angeles builds "trains to nowhere" -- the existing communities are low density, but medium density is a prerequisite for a train line to be useful to sufficient numbers of people. The only way to fix this in the future is to build cities with this idea in mind (or, alternatively, pray that self-driving cars fix everything). Redevelop existing areas to support new transit (an older Uber driver pointed out to me multiple new, high density developments in downtown LA, and suggested they were helping improve the area's safety and commercial diversity). Urban areas don't have to feel like NYC, but we chose a path back in the 1950s whose ultimate result was to dissolve the communities and lifestyles necessary for individual human happiness. Looking forward, I'm seeing this "mad consolidation into a few coastal cities" become a "consolidation into a larger number of smaller cities" considerably more dense than Boulder, CO, and we will see this redevelopment of urban cores as a sign of what's to come.

doughj3 10y ago

The first question I now ask recruiters when they reach out is whether or not the position is on-site or remote. Google, Microsoft, Amazon... no remote work, at least not for any of the positions they frequently contact me about.

Aldur42 10y ago

The article mentions that strict rules hurt good actors and help bad actors, and you should fix this by filling your organization with good actors. For very small startups this might be possible. However if you need to hire a large number of developers this becomes increasingly difficult. It is far easier to hire "bad actors". If a company finds itself in a situation where adding a bad actor will increase company revenue beyond the actors cost, it financially imperative to hire bad actors. Eventually the good to bad ratio slips in the direction of bad, and strict rules end up helping more than they hurt. Good people leave to new places, and the vicious cycle continues.

seanwilson 10y ago

The time to travel to the office is often ignored too (it sounds lazy to even mention it because it's the norm). If you're working remotely and it takes 30 mins to get to the office, you're at an absolute minimum burning 5 hours a week going back and fourth from the office when you could be doing something else. Add in the extra time changing to and from work clothes, and having to leave the office to get food instead of eating at home and the time adds up. If you're freelance and bill by the hour as well then those hours easily add up to an extra day a week you could be working.

criddell 10y ago
I actually enjoy my commuting time. I listen to podcasts or think about what I need to do when I get to work (or home). If I'm on my bicycle, I find that my mine really wanders and I enjoy that. Once I'm at work, I get down to it and am good for about 4 hours or so (on good days) of really good work. Spend an hour or two on email, light reading, talking to coworkers, and that's my day.
- hash-set 10y ago
  You're the only one. Commuting SUCKS!
  - morganic 10y ago
    Just haven't found good enough podcasts
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      Is there a podcast that will stop me wanting to vomit as the bus driver breaks hard every 10 seconds, or help me battle my way through the queue to get onto said bus?
ylhert 10y ago
Such a great point, and I regret not touching on this!

mwcampbell 10y ago

Other reasons to allow or even encourage remote work: In the US, there's a growing polarization between the coasts and middle America ("flyover country"). I, for one, don't want all the good programming jobs to be on the west coast. Remote work, where the workers bring their own equipment and office setup, is probably better for people with disabilities. For example, an employer doesn't have to care or possibly even know that a worker is using a screen reader or other assistive technology. Assuming, of course, that all the applications one has to use on the job are accessible. In fact, let's take it a step further, and propose remote work with strictly text-based communication. Yes, yes, we lose the nuances that are communicated through tone of voice, facial expressions, etc. But think of all the kinds of discrimination, whether overt or accidental, that disappear. Disabilities (including hearing and speech impairments), accents, race, and age are now completely irrelevant. Sounds like a big win to me.

dennisgorelik 10y ago
> we lose the nuances that are communicated ... But think of all the kinds of discrimination That reminds me communist utopia: lets make all people equal ... by making everyone poor.
- mwcampbell 10y ago
  That's a good point. And on further reflection, I'm not sure I'd actually want to go with what I suggested at the end. After all, I work remotely, but I've talked to my boss by phone several times just today, because it's so convenient.

d357r0y3r 10y ago

I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain. The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend months regularly obtaining "flow" with few interruptions or meetings, only to have the projects scrapped because they weren't what the business needed. The fact that the code was immaculate didn't end up mattering at all. Informal, personal communication can make a big difference. Yes, getting up and talking to someone is more efficient than starting an email thread or slack conversation in many cases. Many of those conversations are engineer to engineer and involve important technical decisions. And, an aside: remote meetings are simply worse than in-person meetings. Having worked on several teams where some members were in completely different locations (and time zones), I never want to experience that again. Give me every person relevant to my work in the same physical space; I don't want to get blocked from doing my work because you've gone dark on slack. I promise, I get it. If I had my way, I'd work on whatever I wanted to work on, with no meetings or interruptions. I'd just be a lone wolf cranking out awesome features and feeling great about it. That's just not what any business needs, and it's certainly not what they pay me for.

NumberSix 10y ago
There are the notions of: o clear written requirements expressing the business and high level technical needs. o well defined acceptance test procedures to ensure that the delivered software (or hardware or whatever) meets those requirements o thoughtful partitioning of the work between team members to minimize the needed communication and enable the team members to focus and work on their part without having a committee meeting every few minutes on every minor issue. None of these are new practices. They, or something similar, is needed to work effectively remotely or for that matter in quiet offices with closed doors.
- d357r0y3r 10y ago
  These are good ideals and they're hard to get right in practice. There's always a certain amount of ambiguity that arises when pen meets paper and it's ambiguity that puts any given task at risk of being done incorrectly or not at all. A positive trait in an engineer is the ability to resolve ambiguity. That isn't to say that all ambiguity can be solved by a single engineer working in isolation, though. What you don't want is people going with their best guess in an isolated, unilateral fashion, so you need good ways of handling uncertainty when it inevitably comes up. My contention is that, according to my experience, remote work results in a "dead in the water" status more often than office work.

pbhowmic 10y ago

I have been working remotely for nearly 3 years now. It is a necessity for me, my kids are very young and some some medical issues, so there is a lot of therapy and special schools involved with 1 pm dismissal times. I love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle.

noxplode 10y ago
> I love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle. Sooo hard to do. I worked remote over the summer and tried convincing my wife that yes, I am working, even though I am home and sitting down staring into a screen. Not sure she ever got it but I'm working in office now so not an issue anymore. If I were to do it again I would definitely get a small office to go to or go to a co-working space. Good luck!
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Same issue here. Spouse/kids/pets who can't respect "work time" make remote work impossible. I have more distractions at home than I do in an open office at work. There's no way I can get anything meaningful done there.
ylhert 10y ago
I've heard people with families kids can struggle with this. The people I know who've been successful at it seem to always have some kind of office work space where they can close the door and get a bit of isolation, or, they invest in an offsite office of some kind.
- sparrish 10y ago
  This is the key - separate office. I've been working from home for 7+ years. My wife and I homeschool our 7 kids. They all know when dad is in the office, he's working and the only interruption I allow is a request for a hug. When I take breaks, we have fun, get rowdy, and help with school work and chores. But when dad's in the office, he's working (even if I'm just burning cycles on HN!)

ebbv 10y ago

The main problem I see with this article is the author is totally focused on himself. If you are a solo developer this is fine, but if you are part of a team then his attitude is detrimental. I work as part of a team and we all work remotely most of the time, but we work the same hours because working different hours would cause problems. It's hard to conduct a daily stand up if everyone's working weird hours. We have some flexibility for people but everybody has to be around for the 9:30 stand up. This helps with coordinating of larger projects and bringing up blockers which the PO or Scrum Master can remove. If some lone developer is working 3pm to 11pm then that person is not really coordinating with the rest of the team. Also I'd really hate to hear what this guy thinks of pair programming.

eip 10y ago
There are a lot of good code review tools. If you want to do pair programming then do it async using code reviews. Doing it sync is just wasting two peoples time.
- ebbv 10y ago
  Code reviews != pair programming. Code reviews are great, but it's not remotely the same.
ylhert 10y ago
I love the teams I work with, but that doesn't mean I want them to interrupt me all day long while I'm trying to do meaningful work. I think it's important to be flexible with work hours, but that goes both ways. My concern is with places where strict requirements are set up for hours, and places that are not willing to be more open minded about crossover work hours. As far as I am concerned, 4 hours of overlap per day amongst the team is sufficient. If more overlap than that seems necessary, it is probably a process problem. I love pair programming! However I cannot pair program in an open office plan with tons of noise/distractions.
- ebbv 10y ago
  Four hours of overlap CAN work but it depends on the overlap. For example, if the rest of the team is working more "normal hours", starting before 10am and you don't start until 3pm, that means they can't have the whole team can't have a stand up meeting until 3pm when you get on. End of the day stand up meetings CAN work, but the natural flow is to start the day with it so you can talk about what you WILL be working on today and what you DID work on yesterday, rather than what you think you'll be working on tomorrow. Also, it's hard to ensure the whole team has overlap if the times are too flexible. I have a teammate who starts at 7am, if we had another teammate who wanted to start at 4pm, they would never overlap.

hkarthik 10y ago

Remote work optimizes for the individual employee, and often the short term gain of finding early talent before you have an established brand and network effects where talent starts gravitating towards you. However, at the later stages of a company when you want 100+ engineers or more, it can be a major damper to organizational growth. Front line management becomes a necessity to keep teams healthy and get a consistent culture across the company. Career paths also require curation that is hard to do with people spread across offices and timezones. So essentially what we end up with is remote work being optimized for small startups and slow growth companies. Large companies that will always waver back and forth on it, without actually figuring out how to make it work at scale. From a career stability standpoint, it's kind of a beating. Every job will seem awesome for a short period and then devolve into a shit show. Those of you who are betting the farm on remote work should keep all this in mind. The smartest remote folks I know have realized this and just do consulting/contracting and making lifestyle choices to support this way of life. I say this as someone who worked remote for 3 years from Texas and moved out to SF to work in a big office for a major tech company. There's huge benefits to remote work, but it's not a panacea.

ceejay 10y ago

IMO humans are just bad at communicating in a precise / efficient way. Most people I meet / work with who are not in a technical field are usually very bad at explaining their business needs in face-to-face let alone by email or over the phone, etc... And ironically isn't it usually the case that these are the people who are (a) the stakeholders, or (b) the ones writing the paychecks. Until technical folks start taking over the world (maybe we're in the infancy stages of that?) I think most people who want to work remotely will need to expect to be in the office regularly if not every work day.

dan_m2k 10y ago

The author sounds super fucking bitchy. Shared workspaces are crap for getting work done - proper focussed work that you go home and puts a skip in your step. But this isn't the reality of delivery - you should be able to adapt to your client and delivering the best value can be more than cutting code. Alas, Working as a remote dev can frustrate and stifle creativity and problem solving - having my expert set at the other end of a phone, Skype, IM or slack when I need that dev to step up and become architect, because, it's a start up, and I've seen some excellent products come from pivots that happened because the Devs could weigh in, apply technical reality and end up with a viable product. As that dev, I came in to a project that was on its ass, they took a glass door off its hinges, set that up as my desk and we knocked it out of the park. I was spent afterwards but the reward of a great delivery and a happy client was worth it.

ClayFerguson 10y ago

I agree with every word of this article and after 25yrs experience as a developer I have all similar experiences. Being a computer programmer is about the same as being a 'writer' (book author), and no one expects an author to sit with other authors in a special building to be able to write. With modern technology, and the wastefulness of time and energy spent commuting, there is just no longer any reason for a programmer to not be able to work remote. I mean even if all you are considering is gasoline use and pollution savings, even that alone is enough of a reason for society to say let developers work at home. There's just no downside to it. I have been working at home for the past year, and I don't think there's any way i'd ever accept another non-remote job again. In any large city you're gonna be sitting in traffic a total of 10hrs a week. That's insanity. That's well over one full work day. With a web-cam you can still have face to face meetings. The only thing that I find missing occasionally is the use of a whiteboard, but that is a very minor thing. Having a whiteboard is not a good trade-off for 10hrs spent in traffic. Not even close. Of course in 10yrs VR will totally make it irrelevant where someone's physical location is, but i think even the basic webcams we have today already does as well.

ryandrake 10y ago
Most books don't require 10-100 authors, each focusing on the paragraph that they are experts in, needing to hold the pages together with APIs that are agreed upon by all co-authors. The collaborative aspect of a software project is much greater than that of a book. Yes, there are books that have a multiple of co-authors, but these co-authors tend to not operate lone-wolf.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  There are different models for joint authorship. Some are pretty course-grained. In a lot of cases even if the writing used is pretty collaborative, one author does a final editing pass to come up with an integrated end product. From what I've seen, "collective ownership" models mirroring current fashions in software development remain relatively rare. And while some software projects do need 100 people, most don't -- and most don't even need 10. I get the feeling that a lot of project managers don't even think about the possibility that something could be built by a focussed individual working in a low-distraction environment.

edblarney 10y ago

Great post - with a very huge caveat: being out of the office means you miss a lot of nuance that is very, very important. There is a cultural language, and a lot of facts outside the scope of normal direction. I've worked remotely often and this has always been a huge issue: requirements can almost never be communicated succinctly, they come in waves and indirections. So if we can solve that one ... this makes more sense. As for the 'open office' concept, I can't think of anything more absurd. When I visit my clients I can't get anything done.

X86BSD 10y ago

A question to all of you who only work remotely, and I'm sure it's been covered by HN so forgive me, but where do you find reliable work that's remote? I can see getting lucky maybe and scoring one maybe two gigs that allow remote but a caterer doing it? When my wife's gig is up she would love to work from home. She already works from home two days a week. But she has no idea how to make a career out that reliably. She started out doing QA/testing, now she is all into oracle and DB2. Using oracle tools and IBM tools for managing/writing SQL for enormous databases. Government sized databases. She is making low six figures now here in KC. Thanks for any advice or leads on remote only work as a career!

citizens 10y ago
I only work remotely, but it does really limit the pool of available work. Weworkremotely.com is a good resource.
- X86BSD 10y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to reply both of you. I've always wondered how those of you who are able to do remote 100% of the time do it. This helps get us started. Thank you.
e15ctr0n 10y ago
My favorite places to look for remote tech work are 1. Remote job boards https://remoteok.io/ https://remoteok.io/ https://www.wfh.io/ https://www.wfh.io/ https://weworkremotely.com/ https://weworkremotely.com/ 2. Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=true https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=true 3. Who Is Hiring? thread posted on Hacker News the first weekday of every month. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

imsofuture 10y ago

Yep, I've been 100% remote for 5 years now (wow, it feels weird to see that number!) and am never going back, for the same reasons. The only caveat is that it's important that you work in an organization that is aligned with remote work, if not remote-first. Just scoring 'permission' to work remotely somewhere not used to it, is probably a recipe for a pretty bad time.

ylhert 10y ago
5 years is a long time, I'm sure you've got some great experience on the subject, would love to read more about your experiences! I really agree with your caveat, and I've seen a number of places that have some pretty unmotivated individuals try it, and have it fail. This left a bad taste in everyones mouth, and they wrote off remote work. The reality was that they had crappy employees, and not that remote work can't work.
lacampbell 10y ago
Just scoring 'permission' to work remotely somewhere not used to it, is probably a recipe for a pretty bad time. Why is that?
- ghaff 10y ago
  Because the processes and mindset won't be setup for it. Decisions will get made in hallway conversations or even in meetings in which no one thought to send out a phone number for the remote employee to attend. Hence the idea that remote working is probably most effective when companies treat it as the norm--at least on a group by group basis.
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    Right. I've actually never worked at a place with a large number of devs under the same roof.

kin 10y ago

Everyone has something that works really well for them. It's nice to have an employer that respects that. Personally, I find a lot of value in putting a face on everyone in my team. To me, it's a lot easier to work through a problem in person vs. over Slack or Skype. But that's not to say I disagree with the OP. I totally value the efficiency of working in isolation if and when I'm at a point where I just need to be heads down to finish a task. At my office, we have the luxury of isolated couch rooms where it feels like working from home w/ the office and your coworkers steps away.

hash-set 10y ago
I have had the same issues, but you have to know when to pick up a phone.

late2part 10y ago

Richard Hamming said [1] it best: Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame. [1] - http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

qntty 10y ago
You can't keep your door open in an open office because you have no door.
RUG3Y 10y ago
This is anecdotal. It seems to me that there's a time for the door to be open and a time for the door to be closed. Having the option to either at the appropriate time makes a huge difference.

framebit 10y ago

Lone wolves can and do produce a lot of valuable output for businesses. However, on bigger teams, somebody's gotta take care of the juniors. Junior devs, interns, even moderately experienced devs can all benefit immensely from mentoring by senior devs. Mentoring is a fuzzy thing that happens in the margins, and that's exactly the kind of thing that's hard to replicate in full-remote work. Of course, everything in moderation. Senior devs need some time alone to churn and burn through tasks, but less experienced devs need guidance, leadership, and experienced perspective. And sometimes you need a mercenary like the author to just run solo and get it done. Different strokes for different folks.

ilaksh 10y ago
How can anyone seriously believe, at this point, that effective mentoring or other collaborative work cannot take place over the internet with things like git, Github, Skype, Google Hangouts, Facetime, WebRTC, Slack, Screenhero, telephones, etc., etc.?
- intern4tional 10y ago
  No one is saying that effective mentoring cannot take place over the internet; the statement is simply being made that it is much easier to do in person. Less tooling may be required, less time invested, etc. to have effective mentoring happen when you are in person.

vonnik 10y ago

I've worked remotely for years, I've worked in an open-office where presence was mandatory, and now I run a startup with a distributed team of engineers on several continents. While working in a shared office has pros and cons, the benefits are huge. One of the main benefits is in how information is shared. Sharing an office, you overhear conversations, and the chances of random but important information about how things work and how people relate to each other is much higher. In addition, the bandwidth of the non-verbal and paraverbal information is much richer. People working remotely forego most of that information, and their understanding of the org and its culture is diminished. So why do we have a distributed team? Because we hire the top contributors to our open-source project without imposing a geographic filter, and it's the best, most efficient way we've found to build a really strong engineering team. We're aware of the shortcomings of how information flows, and struggle constantly to improve how we communicate.

throwaway5752 10y ago
Left my work computer to go to my personal computer only to reply and upvote your comment. I have worked for and managed teams in both shared office and remote companies. I could hardly say what you said any better myself. I think the nature of what companies are best fits for remote work, and how best to mitigate the loss of passive information sharing/lower bandwidth of subtle communication cues would be a great subject for a book or article. My short version would be: it primarily solves a recruiting problem in extremely difficult to recruit for fields, takes advantage of a bit of arbitrage in some people's utility of remote work (introvert, commute, family, etc), and information needs to be overshared (more meetings than one might prefer, more documentation, more explicit processes, etc).

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Did this at a previous workplace and it seemed to work but the company culture has to be aligned as well. There is an intangible touch-feely stuff that gets lost behind the unfeeling glare of the monitor and if the rest of the company is ill-equipped to deal with that missing piece then it won’t work out.

LeanderK 10y ago

Having to work remotely is one of the main reasons why it's so hard for me to contributed to open source projects (i am a student btw). I guess it's not for everyone. I need people to function, people to work with, people to talk about work, people to discuss decisions with and people to not talk to one another. It's what's motivating me, what keeps thinking for hours about problems.

amichal 10y ago

None of the authors headings are necessary in an in-person office environment. We have both "open" areas and offices with doors. We don't enforce a specific work hours and we most definitely could care less about butts-in-seats, results are what matter. That said I just spent an hour in an office with a co-worker comparing notes on our two separate projects with similar needs and scored a sample of some nice fudge his partner made. Yesterday i spent the morning at the cafe and last week I sat at my desk and got 9hr straight coding without talking to anyone.

brilliantcode 10y ago

I think a right balance between remote & on-site is a better argument. I've worked remotely for a few years and I quickly found myself very isolated and it's contributed to my social anxiety. Remote working can be a blessing during bad weathers or you want to take a little break from commuting.

lacampbell 10y ago

I am restless in bed and can’t sleep because I drank too much coffee and I’m worried about getting up early. By the end of the week I am tired, frustrated, angry, and disappointed with my performance. The author blames this on a 9-6 schedule. But honestly I think it's way more likely a problem with drinking too much damn coffee. Everything he wrote in that part hit home, i was experiencing it very badly... until I started limiting myself to one big caffeinated drink before lunch a day. It's improved my quality of life a lot, I am tired way less.

chriogenix 10y ago

I've been 100% remote for the last 8 years. I recently have been commuting for personal reasons and its only 30 min each way and I can already feel the drain it causes. Over a working career a normal commute(30min-1hour) each way can add up to a massive amount of lost time. Working remote is optimal for the kind of work I'm doing now. Previously I was running a larger business and we started to run into issues around 50 people on a remote team. There's advantages to both. I think the ideal environment is 4 days remote, 1 day in an office for in person meetings. To combat being out of contact with people in the business/industry, I attend as many conferences and meetups as I can.

blizkreeg 10y ago

In my experience, both, an entirely distributed team and an entirely localized team do well. It becomes exponentially harder to pull it off when you have some people working in the office, and others distributed.

gumby 10y ago

I pretty much strongly agree but I will offer one defence of "work rules" that isn't completely pointy-haired. The reality is that not everyone has the same level of productivity or commitment. With a few rules it's often possible to get more than their salary's cost out of them. Sure, we'd all like to work in an environment of nothing but awesome co-workers, but that doesn't scale. Hell, you presumably support "rules" like "we've decided that the implementation language is L" so everybody's code works together. What is brain damaged is that some companies are too stupid or fearful to understand when the rules do and don't apply.

RMarcus 10y ago

>It’s the same reason that communism does not work nearly as well as capitalism — things work best when you give people freedom as individual actors. You said "capitalism" but you meant "liberalism," and you said "communism" when you meant "authoritarian dictatorship." But setting aside this equally unnecessary and inaccurate argument, the whole tone of this article seems to glorify the archetype of the "110%" employee. I'm "passionate" about programming and computer science, but I also don't just want to pull up a JIRA and bang away code. Even if we accept the author's premise that open offices and social work environments are bad for productivity (which many people here have already pushed back against), I didn't try to find a job with lots of smart people so I could only interact with them via email. Sure, an open office occasionally distracts me and gets me out of the "flow," but it's almost always to help someone or join an interesting conversation. These things are valuable to me on their own, because (1) I like interesting conversations and (2) it means I can ask someone for help whenever I need it. And that's a better long-term feeling than slamming out code every day, which, by month two or three, starts to feel a little uninspiring.

desireco42 10y ago

This is super important. I can sign under this text like I wrote it. I can say that I like to see people in person and interact with them, but all the problems, not only with startups, but with office environment in general were spot on.

yahyaheee 10y ago

This article summarizes everything I think about workplaces. Thanks for the write up, we need to stay vocal for people to get an understanding

Heraclite 10y ago

I'm still trying to figure out the ideal lifestyle. When you work remotely, it gets boring after a while not being able to socialize. When you have to go to work every day, it gets tiring commuting. I'm thinking the perfect mix is to live 1.5 hours from a big city where the jobs are. Go to the office if needed once/twice a week. Do the rest remotely, enjoy living in a house instead of a cramped appartment. Is anyone doing this?