8 ms·

Oh, tech companies. If only there were a way to have conversations about, create, and transmit computer programs using some kind of long-distance network. Maybe

Oh, tech companies. If only there were a way to have conversations about, create, and transmit computer programs using some kind of long-distance network. Maybe we could break the data up into "packets". Just thinking out loud here. Then maybe everyone creating textual output for a living wouldn't have to transport their physical body to an office. We can dream.

blktiger 8y ago
There are companies out there that are fully remote (like my current employer https://www.sonatype.com/ https://www.sonatype.com/). Though I suppose many of them don't like to hire fresh graduates so you could be in a bit of a chicken/egg problem.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  I've been a fully remote developer for 4 1/2 years. My employer has no physical office. I live in a pleasant medium-sized town, I bought a house for less than a Bay-area toolshed, and I can commute myself downstairs to make a sandwich. If every worker were remote, can you even imagine how hard you'd have to work to justify a physical office to the CFO and potential hires?
  - briffle 8y ago
    I have a similar setup, but I also live 2 time zones from my employer. to make things easier, I work 6am-3pm. I often go run errands after work before traffic start getting bad, but sometimes, I end up caught in 'rush hour' traffic and I just feel sorry for all of them. (and I live in a small town of 150k people)
    - masklinn 8y ago
      > I live in a small town of 150k people Even to the US's outsized standards, 150k is a mid-size city, not a small town.
  - rubicon33 8y ago
    I've been remote for 5 years. I know about all the benefits, but I'm always curious how others are dealing with the drawbacks. I've written about it a few times here on HN: - Social isolation How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised? If I don't make a conscious & deliberate point of it, I can go an entire day without leaving the house, sometimes multiple days. Working from home can mean 8 solid hours of programming, but that can be difficult to sustain even if you have the environment for it. Natural social breaks are missing in this environment, it's just you and the code.
    - s_kilk 8y ago
      > How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised? I go play with my friends and family after work, sometimes also at lunchtime.
    - LyndsySimon 8y ago
      I do it by breaking up my work into chunks. Being remote allows me the leverage that isolation to give myself blocks of 100% productivity; I intersperse that with going out and doing things. I often work outdoors in the warmer months. I've got an office at home, but I've also got a handful of places where I can park my Jeep and either hang my hammock or pull out the back seat and work in the shade, with the background noise of nature and/or traffic depending on my mood. I'll do that for 2-4 hours, then go grab a coffee or go to the park with my kids (we homeschool). After a couple of hours of that, I usually go back to one of my spots and do it again. Other days I'll work at night after my wife and kids are in bed.
    - blktiger 8y ago
      My plan is to use after-work activities to make up for the social isolation. Though I'm more on the introverted side to begin with, I figure I'll find more people I enjoy spending time with by doing activities with people who like to do those same activities than I would by socializing with my co-workers. Plus even remote it's not like you can't socialize with co-workers over video and chat.
Kalium 8y ago
What's interesting is that I routinely see comments little different from this one. Just as routinely, companies choose to pay whole multiles times as much for engineers in-person instead of remote. Is it possible that we're missing something in this? And that there might be more to this than companies being unwilling to try remote workers? I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > Is it possible that we're missing something in this? And that there might be more to this than companies being unwilling to try remote workers? If open-plan offices are any hint, it's that actual knowledge worker productivity (let alone well-being) is pretty low on the list of things managers look for. > I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive. Sure but the same can be said of office work.
  - losteric 8y ago
    > knowledge worker productivity (let alone well-being) is pretty low on the list of things managers look for. Alternatively, leadership has decided the price of lower density seating is not worth the increased productivity. Realizing there was no expectation of working at 100% significantly improved my well-being.
  - geodel 8y ago
    I recently moved to low cost city for job. Though we still have cubes but now there are about 40% smaller and walls are lower than last workplace. So in effect it is quite louder for work. However manager cabins are now twice as larger than before. At the same time management has cracked down on any work from home requests. So somehow management does not care about individual productivity. As long as a crappy HP laptop is hooked on to 2 monitors every developer is good to go.
- mLuby 8y ago
  The benefits of remote work go disproportionately to workers, while the detriments seem to fall toward managers. Since it's managers deciding whether to hire remote or on-site, it's not that surprising that they act in their own interest and hire on-site, even if it's more expensive.
GuiA 8y ago
The article interviews a restaurant manager and a construction site superintendent. Non tech workers are significantly more affected than tech workers, because they cannot afford to live closer to their place of employment, and do not have access to the perks (work from home, shuttles, etc.) that tech workers have.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  Yes, I feel sorry for people whose jobs actually require them to go somewhere, and who are stuck in traffic behind a thousand nerds whose jobs arbitrarily demand a commute, and who have to compete with those highly-paid nerds to buy a house.
  - kolpa 8y ago
    > whose jobs actually require them to go somewhere This jobs exist where they are because the "nerds" work there. They could choose not to work at those nerd-service jobs (forcing nerds to buy there food closer to home) or form a union to demand higher pay, or organize and build housing there. Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking.
    - nathan_long 8y ago
      > This jobs exist where they are because the "nerds" work there. Right. And here's one nerd who goes to lunch a couple times a week in a not-huge town far from the Bay area, supporting the ability of restaurant managers to not live there, either. > Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking. I meant it to be humorous but not derogatory. I'm a programmer.
- acdha 8y ago
  Yes - one of the biggest perks simply being more flexible hours. If you show up 15 minutes late there are penalties in many jobs but the average tech worker won’t even notice unless they’re late for an important meeting or the on-duty admin when something breaks.
nwatson 8y ago
Doin' it from the North Carolina piedmont area, for a MV, CA company (not Google-affiliated). Works out very well, I'm happy, they're happy.
jasode 8y ago
>Then maybe everyone creating textual output for a living wouldn't have to transport their physical body to an office. Remote work hasn't taken off on a large scale because massively successful multi-billion dollar companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/SpaceX were not built with remote workers. You get (relatively) minor companies touting it such as Automattic and Basecamp. Those smaller businesses haven't achieved enough success to convince business leaders on a large scale. So to riff on your writing... "if only there were a multi-billion dollar company built on the competitive advantages of remote work." If that happened, we'd then have Harvard Business Review doing endless case studies on its superiority. EDIT TO ADD: There is a limited type of "remote" work that existing successful companies will allow (and even encourage): it's the offsite remote _team_. Some examples include IBM's team to build the "personal computer" down in Miami instead of working in the New York offices. Amazon (Seattle hq) has Lab126 (Silicon Valley) working on the Kindle. Google wanted a rewritten Javascript V8 engine and hired Lars Bak from Denmark. From the story I remember, Lars Bak made it a condition of employment to not relocate to California and because he already had the reputation, Google agreed. At first, he worked out of his home in Denmark but then he opened a Google office and his programming team then worked in that office. Those semi-remote scenarios are about as far as you're going to get until other businesses with full remote employees working from home proves to the business world that "remote working" is a competitive advantage. Remote office with an onsite team in that remote office -- yes. Remote telecommuting from home on a large scale? Not yet.
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  Isn't that the same for any new/fringe idea though? Working non-remotely has been the status-quo since before it was possible to work remotely. More curiously, I'd like to see if remote work was responsible for preventing a company from reaching milestones like being a multi-billion dollar company.
  - randomdata 8y ago
    > Working non-remotely has been the status-quo since before it was possible to work remotely. As a farmer, I like to think of it as the original working remotely career. Especially in history where your entire land-base and home were one in the same. Working in an office away from home is the 'new fangled' way to work.
umanwizard 8y ago
I'm a programmer. "Creating textual output" is only a small portion of what I do for a living. A huge amount of my job is discussing ideas with coworkers which is simply easier to do in person.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  Is there any professional idea conveyance you can do in person that you can't do over a modest video conference connection?
  - kevinconaway 8y ago
    Videoconferencing introduces friction in to the process. Those meetings must be planned and scheduled. There are no serendipitous hallway or kitchen conversations that flow easily when people are colocated There is also the friction of the software itself. Whiteboarding and freewheeling discussion is possible but it doesn’t have the same feel to it
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Also, you can pick up on the body language of people. When I want to discuss something with one of my colleagues, I can glance over at their desk and see if they're focused on something or just staring out of the window, waiting for something to compile. That way I don't have to rip him out of his focus like I would usually have to do with Slack etc.
      - LyndsySimon 8y ago
        I'm remote, and have largely fixed the Slack issue by keeping it silent on my desktop - no notifications. I have a very small set of filters for notification on my iPad, like if someone mentions me by name or certain people DM me. Otherwise, I tab over to Slack when I'm waiting for something else.
    - nathan_long 8y ago
      I agree with all your points. But consider the costs of that colocated time. 3 hours out of a worker's day is a lot - they could either do more work (boo) or be less stressed while they work (yay) without that commute. They'd also have fewer sick days (colds don't do TCP). And the flip side of serendipitous conversations is distracting chatter. Which one affects productivity more? Oh yeah, and office space costs a lot. Remote work isn't all roses. But colocation is extremely expensive. The question is whether it's worth it.
Waterluvian 8y ago
My current team is mostly remote. We are much more effective than the fully local team of my previous employer. I think it really just boils down to hiring talented people you can trust. Paying them plenty. And fighting off all the unnecessary project management nonsense that makes politics and therefore in person meetings important.
joker3 8y ago
The people profiled in the article are a restaurant manager and a construction superintendent. How are they going to telecommute?
- rhacker 8y ago
  Once there are unlimited remote jobs, the theory is they can live next door to the restaurant and construction site again. At least over the long term. In the meantime - that is playing out in smaller towns where remote employees are living.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    >the theory is they can live next door to the restaurant and construction site Yes, because construction sites remain under construction for 10-20 years. /s Not everyone wants to find a new home every month.
    - pessimizer 8y ago
      Not literally "next door." Closer than a 90-minute commute. It's strange that you would read it that way. (What if the restaurant weren't on a residential street, or the two houses next door to it were already rented?)
    - majewsky 8y ago
      > Yes, because construction sites remain under construction for 10-20 years. We're getting there.
    - rhacker 8y ago
      Actually many construction workers I've met on the road have RVs so yes they do ;) Not the kind of construction you're thinking of though - pipeline construction.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  They're not. But if all the nerds spread themselves out over the rest of the country, the restaurants and construction projects wouldn't all be crammed up in Traffic Jam City, either.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
BrainInAJar 8y ago
Not everyone can work remote. In fact I'd wager a majority, including many of those who think they can work remote, cannot. And teams dealing with remote workers is also a source of friction. Remote work is only part of the solution. Urbanism, prioritizing transit & deprioritizing cars, increasing density are also parts
- GFischer 8y ago
  As many mentioned elsewhere, there's a halfway point that are remote offices - or coworking spaces or whatnot. It is a source of friction, sure, but it also has a lot of positives. I'm pretty sure there's an equilibrium point for on-site vs remote, but I also believe we're nowhere near that right now - and technology might keep bridging the gap to swing it even more towards the remote side.
- chewyfruitloop 8y ago
  I used to remote work in my old job... now I have a commute of at least an hour... and it’s only 17 miles :(
booleandilemma 8y ago
I feel this every time I have to go to the office and it’s raining hard out. I think, why do we do this to ourselves?
rmk 8y ago
Well, the main problem is that creating textual output is a small part of the process of creating value for the customer (which is ultimately what most businesses do). This is a host of processes that go way beyond text manipulation, and they require collaboration. This is best done by getting in the same room (still!) and is not likely to change (unless of course someone develops some work collaboration application on top of VR).
- GFischer 8y ago
  Fortunately not every company is that close-minded. I work in a remote office, and I collaborate every day with my team in Dallas (and most company members are distributed mostly all through the U.S. but also Canada, the UK and India). There's a LOT of collaboration tools, we use Slack (well, we were forced on Microsoft Teams now), Jira, Skype, e-mail, WhatsApp... I still appreciate meeting in person, they flew me once to meet most of the team. Videocalling is decent, but still no substitute, but all those tools I outlined do enable us to create value :) .
  - rmk 8y ago
    I would not really call that close-minded. It's established practice that has worked very well when building many, many non-trivial, innovative, technologically complex things. There have been ginormous cost overruns, not to mention real technological problems and delays getting to market when collaboration has not been close. For example, the Airbus A380 (and to a larger extent the Boeing 787) were both massively delayed and over budget because far-flung suppliers of various major components faced big issues coming together on many details. A counterexample (mentioned in a book by the 'father of the 747', Joe Sutter) is how the 747 program was endangered in a big way when the Boeing company considered moving production (of the 747) to Walnut Creek, CA. Similar problems happen on a routine basis in many software shops; only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
    - GFischer 8y ago
      From personal experience, I disagree. You're assuming we cannot carry out non-well scoped work just because we're remote? The project I'm currently leading definitely gives lie to your assumption, and I'm a member of an offshore team. I'm not saying that projects with substantial manufacturing components don't benefit from proximity. Also, those project you mention had huge political issues (not great examples). And yes, the ideal situation is to have everyone on-site. But the disadvantages are that you have to pay them ridiculous wages to offset cost of living, and compete with a smaller subset of talent, or they have to do 90 minute super-commutes. Many people can't move to the Bay Area for various reasons. Does a top developer that leaves the U.S. magically become worse? Or is a top developer bad just because he hasn't tried hard enough to get into the U.S.? Even YCombinator believes that founders don't have to be physically present if it doesn't make sense.
slothario 8y ago
Or they just need to move to cities that have room to grow. I'm in Houston and I bought a gorgeous townhouse-style home in my favorite part of town near downtown, and it was in the $300k range. Can you buy a patch of dirt in the Bay Area for that much?

blktiger 8y ago

There are companies out there that are fully remote (like my current employer https://www.sonatype.com/ https://www.sonatype.com/). Though I suppose many of them don't like to hire fresh graduates so you could be in a bit of a chicken/egg problem.

nathan_long 8y ago
I've been a fully remote developer for 4 1/2 years. My employer has no physical office. I live in a pleasant medium-sized town, I bought a house for less than a Bay-area toolshed, and I can commute myself downstairs to make a sandwich. If every worker were remote, can you even imagine how hard you'd have to work to justify a physical office to the CFO and potential hires?
- briffle 8y ago
  I have a similar setup, but I also live 2 time zones from my employer. to make things easier, I work 6am-3pm. I often go run errands after work before traffic start getting bad, but sometimes, I end up caught in 'rush hour' traffic and I just feel sorry for all of them. (and I live in a small town of 150k people)
  - masklinn 8y ago
    > I live in a small town of 150k people Even to the US's outsized standards, 150k is a mid-size city, not a small town.
- rubicon33 8y ago
  I've been remote for 5 years. I know about all the benefits, but I'm always curious how others are dealing with the drawbacks. I've written about it a few times here on HN: - Social isolation How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised? If I don't make a conscious & deliberate point of it, I can go an entire day without leaving the house, sometimes multiple days. Working from home can mean 8 solid hours of programming, but that can be difficult to sustain even if you have the environment for it. Natural social breaks are missing in this environment, it's just you and the code.
  - s_kilk 8y ago
    > How do you ensure that your social brain is exercised? I go play with my friends and family after work, sometimes also at lunchtime.
  - LyndsySimon 8y ago
    I do it by breaking up my work into chunks. Being remote allows me the leverage that isolation to give myself blocks of 100% productivity; I intersperse that with going out and doing things. I often work outdoors in the warmer months. I've got an office at home, but I've also got a handful of places where I can park my Jeep and either hang my hammock or pull out the back seat and work in the shade, with the background noise of nature and/or traffic depending on my mood. I'll do that for 2-4 hours, then go grab a coffee or go to the park with my kids (we homeschool). After a couple of hours of that, I usually go back to one of my spots and do it again. Other days I'll work at night after my wife and kids are in bed.
  - blktiger 8y ago
    My plan is to use after-work activities to make up for the social isolation. Though I'm more on the introverted side to begin with, I figure I'll find more people I enjoy spending time with by doing activities with people who like to do those same activities than I would by socializing with my co-workers. Plus even remote it's not like you can't socialize with co-workers over video and chat.

Kalium 8y ago

What's interesting is that I routinely see comments little different from this one. Just as routinely, companies choose to pay whole multiles times as much for engineers in-person instead of remote. Is it possible that we're missing something in this? And that there might be more to this than companies being unwilling to try remote workers? I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive.

masklinn 8y ago
> Is it possible that we're missing something in this? And that there might be more to this than companies being unwilling to try remote workers? If open-plan offices are any hint, it's that actual knowledge worker productivity (let alone well-being) is pretty low on the list of things managers look for. > I know my own experiences with working remotely and having remote colleagues have upon occasion been other than an unalloyed positive. Sure but the same can be said of office work.
- losteric 8y ago
  > knowledge worker productivity (let alone well-being) is pretty low on the list of things managers look for. Alternatively, leadership has decided the price of lower density seating is not worth the increased productivity. Realizing there was no expectation of working at 100% significantly improved my well-being.
- geodel 8y ago
  I recently moved to low cost city for job. Though we still have cubes but now there are about 40% smaller and walls are lower than last workplace. So in effect it is quite louder for work. However manager cabins are now twice as larger than before. At the same time management has cracked down on any work from home requests. So somehow management does not care about individual productivity. As long as a crappy HP laptop is hooked on to 2 monitors every developer is good to go.
mLuby 8y ago
The benefits of remote work go disproportionately to workers, while the detriments seem to fall toward managers. Since it's managers deciding whether to hire remote or on-site, it's not that surprising that they act in their own interest and hire on-site, even if it's more expensive.

GuiA 8y ago

The article interviews a restaurant manager and a construction site superintendent. Non tech workers are significantly more affected than tech workers, because they cannot afford to live closer to their place of employment, and do not have access to the perks (work from home, shuttles, etc.) that tech workers have.

nathan_long 8y ago
Yes, I feel sorry for people whose jobs actually require them to go somewhere, and who are stuck in traffic behind a thousand nerds whose jobs arbitrarily demand a commute, and who have to compete with those highly-paid nerds to buy a house.
- kolpa 8y ago
  > whose jobs actually require them to go somewhere This jobs exist where they are because the "nerds" work there. They could choose not to work at those nerd-service jobs (forcing nerds to buy there food closer to home) or form a union to demand higher pay, or organize and build housing there. Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking.
  - nathan_long 8y ago
    > This jobs exist where they are because the "nerds" work there. Right. And here's one nerd who goes to lunch a couple times a week in a not-huge town far from the Bay area, supporting the ability of restaurant managers to not live there, either. > Also, "nerd" is unhelpful trash talking. I meant it to be humorous but not derogatory. I'm a programmer.
acdha 8y ago
Yes - one of the biggest perks simply being more flexible hours. If you show up 15 minutes late there are penalties in many jobs but the average tech worker won’t even notice unless they’re late for an important meeting or the on-duty admin when something breaks.

nwatson 8y ago

Doin' it from the North Carolina piedmont area, for a MV, CA company (not Google-affiliated). Works out very well, I'm happy, they're happy.

jasode 8y ago

>Then maybe everyone creating textual output for a living wouldn't have to transport their physical body to an office. Remote work hasn't taken off on a large scale because massively successful multi-billion dollar companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/SpaceX were not built with remote workers. You get (relatively) minor companies touting it such as Automattic and Basecamp. Those smaller businesses haven't achieved enough success to convince business leaders on a large scale. So to riff on your writing... "if only there were a multi-billion dollar company built on the competitive advantages of remote work." If that happened, we'd then have Harvard Business Review doing endless case studies on its superiority. EDIT TO ADD: There is a limited type of "remote" work that existing successful companies will allow (and even encourage): it's the offsite remote _team_. Some examples include IBM's team to build the "personal computer" down in Miami instead of working in the New York offices. Amazon (Seattle hq) has Lab126 (Silicon Valley) working on the Kindle. Google wanted a rewritten Javascript V8 engine and hired Lars Bak from Denmark. From the story I remember, Lars Bak made it a condition of employment to not relocate to California and because he already had the reputation, Google agreed. At first, he worked out of his home in Denmark but then he opened a Google office and his programming team then worked in that office. Those semi-remote scenarios are about as far as you're going to get until other businesses with full remote employees working from home proves to the business world that "remote working" is a competitive advantage. Remote office with an onsite team in that remote office -- yes. Remote telecommuting from home on a large scale? Not yet.

notheguyouthink 8y ago
Isn't that the same for any new/fringe idea though? Working non-remotely has been the status-quo since before it was possible to work remotely. More curiously, I'd like to see if remote work was responsible for preventing a company from reaching milestones like being a multi-billion dollar company.
- randomdata 8y ago
  > Working non-remotely has been the status-quo since before it was possible to work remotely. As a farmer, I like to think of it as the original working remotely career. Especially in history where your entire land-base and home were one in the same. Working in an office away from home is the 'new fangled' way to work.

umanwizard 8y ago

I'm a programmer. "Creating textual output" is only a small portion of what I do for a living. A huge amount of my job is discussing ideas with coworkers which is simply easier to do in person.

Karunamon 8y ago
Is there any professional idea conveyance you can do in person that you can't do over a modest video conference connection?
- kevinconaway 8y ago
  Videoconferencing introduces friction in to the process. Those meetings must be planned and scheduled. There are no serendipitous hallway or kitchen conversations that flow easily when people are colocated There is also the friction of the software itself. Whiteboarding and freewheeling discussion is possible but it doesn’t have the same feel to it
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Also, you can pick up on the body language of people. When I want to discuss something with one of my colleagues, I can glance over at their desk and see if they're focused on something or just staring out of the window, waiting for something to compile. That way I don't have to rip him out of his focus like I would usually have to do with Slack etc.
    - LyndsySimon 8y ago
      I'm remote, and have largely fixed the Slack issue by keeping it silent on my desktop - no notifications. I have a very small set of filters for notification on my iPad, like if someone mentions me by name or certain people DM me. Otherwise, I tab over to Slack when I'm waiting for something else.
  - nathan_long 8y ago
    I agree with all your points. But consider the costs of that colocated time. 3 hours out of a worker's day is a lot - they could either do more work (boo) or be less stressed while they work (yay) without that commute. They'd also have fewer sick days (colds don't do TCP). And the flip side of serendipitous conversations is distracting chatter. Which one affects productivity more? Oh yeah, and office space costs a lot. Remote work isn't all roses. But colocation is extremely expensive. The question is whether it's worth it.

Waterluvian 8y ago

My current team is mostly remote. We are much more effective than the fully local team of my previous employer. I think it really just boils down to hiring talented people you can trust. Paying them plenty. And fighting off all the unnecessary project management nonsense that makes politics and therefore in person meetings important.

joker3 8y ago

The people profiled in the article are a restaurant manager and a construction superintendent. How are they going to telecommute?

rhacker 8y ago
Once there are unlimited remote jobs, the theory is they can live next door to the restaurant and construction site again. At least over the long term. In the meantime - that is playing out in smaller towns where remote employees are living.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  >the theory is they can live next door to the restaurant and construction site Yes, because construction sites remain under construction for 10-20 years. /s Not everyone wants to find a new home every month.
  - pessimizer 8y ago
    Not literally "next door." Closer than a 90-minute commute. It's strange that you would read it that way. (What if the restaurant weren't on a residential street, or the two houses next door to it were already rented?)
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > Yes, because construction sites remain under construction for 10-20 years. We're getting there.
  - rhacker 8y ago
    Actually many construction workers I've met on the road have RVs so yes they do ;) Not the kind of construction you're thinking of though - pipeline construction.
nathan_long 8y ago
They're not. But if all the nerds spread themselves out over the rest of the country, the restaurants and construction projects wouldn't all be crammed up in Traffic Jam City, either.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

BrainInAJar 8y ago

Not everyone can work remote. In fact I'd wager a majority, including many of those who think they can work remote, cannot. And teams dealing with remote workers is also a source of friction. Remote work is only part of the solution. Urbanism, prioritizing transit & deprioritizing cars, increasing density are also parts

GFischer 8y ago
As many mentioned elsewhere, there's a halfway point that are remote offices - or coworking spaces or whatnot. It is a source of friction, sure, but it also has a lot of positives. I'm pretty sure there's an equilibrium point for on-site vs remote, but I also believe we're nowhere near that right now - and technology might keep bridging the gap to swing it even more towards the remote side.
chewyfruitloop 8y ago
I used to remote work in my old job... now I have a commute of at least an hour... and it’s only 17 miles :(

booleandilemma 8y ago

I feel this every time I have to go to the office and it’s raining hard out. I think, why do we do this to ourselves?

rmk 8y ago

Well, the main problem is that creating textual output is a small part of the process of creating value for the customer (which is ultimately what most businesses do). This is a host of processes that go way beyond text manipulation, and they require collaboration. This is best done by getting in the same room (still!) and is not likely to change (unless of course someone develops some work collaboration application on top of VR).

GFischer 8y ago
Fortunately not every company is that close-minded. I work in a remote office, and I collaborate every day with my team in Dallas (and most company members are distributed mostly all through the U.S. but also Canada, the UK and India). There's a LOT of collaboration tools, we use Slack (well, we were forced on Microsoft Teams now), Jira, Skype, e-mail, WhatsApp... I still appreciate meeting in person, they flew me once to meet most of the team. Videocalling is decent, but still no substitute, but all those tools I outlined do enable us to create value :) .
- rmk 8y ago
  I would not really call that close-minded. It's established practice that has worked very well when building many, many non-trivial, innovative, technologically complex things. There have been ginormous cost overruns, not to mention real technological problems and delays getting to market when collaboration has not been close. For example, the Airbus A380 (and to a larger extent the Boeing 787) were both massively delayed and over budget because far-flung suppliers of various major components faced big issues coming together on many details. A counterexample (mentioned in a book by the 'father of the 747', Joe Sutter) is how the 747 program was endangered in a big way when the Boeing company considered moving production (of the 747) to Walnut Creek, CA. Similar problems happen on a routine basis in many software shops; only routine, well-scoped work has been successfully carried out by offshore teams.
  - GFischer 8y ago
    From personal experience, I disagree. You're assuming we cannot carry out non-well scoped work just because we're remote? The project I'm currently leading definitely gives lie to your assumption, and I'm a member of an offshore team. I'm not saying that projects with substantial manufacturing components don't benefit from proximity. Also, those project you mention had huge political issues (not great examples). And yes, the ideal situation is to have everyone on-site. But the disadvantages are that you have to pay them ridiculous wages to offset cost of living, and compete with a smaller subset of talent, or they have to do 90 minute super-commutes. Many people can't move to the Bay Area for various reasons. Does a top developer that leaves the U.S. magically become worse? Or is a top developer bad just because he hasn't tried hard enough to get into the U.S.? Even YCombinator believes that founders don't have to be physically present if it doesn't make sense.

slothario 8y ago

Or they just need to move to cities that have room to grow. I'm in Houston and I bought a gorgeous townhouse-style home in my favorite part of town near downtown, and it was in the $300k range. Can you buy a patch of dirt in the Bay Area for that much?