9 ms·

> Disadvantages > Scares investors - Scares some partners - Scares some customers - Scares some potential employees, mostly senior non-technical hires - Onboard

> Disadvantages > Scares investors - Scares some partners - Scares some customers - Scares some potential employees, mostly senior non-technical hires - Onboarding is harder, first month feels lonely We do a full remote policy at SerpApi.com, however I found this disadvantages list a bit dishonest, they are more way numerous and important, the most obvious are missing real human contacts (and it doesn't get easier with time), and harder life and work separation.

lquist 8y ago
Came to the thread to say this. The site loses a lot of legitimacy by glossing over very real tradeoffs to having a fully remote team.
- thrill 8y ago
  One person's disadvantages is another's nirvana.
- khalilravanna 8y ago
  I'll start by saying that pushing to normalize remote-work is a noble endeavor. But that being said, as you said, glossing over the disadvantages leaves this site/post feeling very one-sided. I say this as someone worked fully remote for 2 years. It was a fantastic job but the main reason I left was the disadvantages of being remote. To say that the advantages are far more numerous, and far outweigh the disadvantages is subjective and myopic. It works for some people and some types of work but to say it's the Best Solution sadly seems to be to just be being disingenuous.
cgb223 8y ago
Can you expand on the disadvantages then? If you were to write that list, what would it look like?
- bradford 8y ago
  I'm not the parent poster, but I think the document glossed over the biggest perceived disadvantage: Despite technological advances, I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information and come to conclusions on difficult decisions. It's also the least susceptible to misinterpretation.
  - buvanshak 8y ago
    > I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information ... Why do people think this. For one thing, and I think it is most important, face to face communication does not give either parties time to think. It ends up with awkward, unproductive pauses. Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought...
    - BallinBige 8y ago
      "Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought..." wat.
      - buvanshak 8y ago
        You know, face to face communication is good if you are repeating stuff you heard from somewhere or stuff like "Hi there, how was your weekend" type of talk. When you want productive communication, you want thought backing content and framing of every one of your sentences...
    - varenc 8y ago
      I’ve found face to face communication effective for resolving contentious disagreements and, as the parent said, difficult conclusions. I’ve seen things get a bit out of hand over email that then get resolved quite efficiently after a face to face. Live video chat is a good alternative, but I think more natural human empthay comes out in face to face experiences. People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved quickly before they fester. Live video chat gets you much of this but isn’t quite as effective in my experience. To me this observation just means that on remote teams you need to be observant of such issues and spend a little more time to resolve them, which can be a fine trade off for remote teams. (Or ideally avoid overly contentious debates in the first place)
- Azeralthefallen 8y ago
  I worked for a company that was mostly a remote workplace for almost a year, and there were a lot of problems i found while trying to manage a team. Time zones, were a huge issue and pain point when trying to get a large number of people on the same page. I found my self often having to give the same meeting twice, which put more pressure on me. Even worse was when i would have to go over points only for someone who wasn't available for the first meeting, to raise issues that we didn't notice, and so on. After 6 months the team basically felt like it dissolved into the European team, and the North American Team. With me trying to ferry information from one team to another. So many times regardless of how amazing the latest tools we tried were, it still pales in comparison to a whiteboard. The company bought me a high end digital whiteboard, that allowed me to pass control to other people, it was a buggy POS. On top of that since i was the only one unfortunately with the white board, it meant i was the one who was always doing the drawing and trying to extrapolate a diagram from what someone says. Sometimes some team members would spend hours drawing up a digital mock up of what they were going to push for only for it to become completely useless within a very short time. I also found some people no matter how hard i tried, some people seemed to interpret working remote meant, they got to work in their own silo, and would ignore 99% of everything going on around them. This lead to numerous conflicts, and other issues. Also one other thing i found, was that 1 on 1's became super impersonal, and frankly felt extremely uncomfortable.
  - Yeroc 8y ago
    The website appears to emphasize communicating via the written word and other asynchronous forms of communication. I'm curious whether you found communicating asynchronously didn't work or wasn't as effective or if it was the team members specifically that were the issue?
existencebox 8y ago
I don't share your pessimism about the list of downsides, and am honestly surprised, as while normally I chuckle at the "HN is always negative" sentiment, this post being the top reply is a real head scratcher, as someone who is both 1. on a >75% remote team, and 2. who has been advocating/watching HN advocate for remote for quite some time. I'd say "missing real human contacts" is summarized well under a combination of harder rampup/scares some potential employees; as the lack of "Real contacts" seems more of a personal/subjective or team-process-and-tooling-rooted feeling than anything I've observed to be inherent and unsolvable; it's trivial for me to get a face to face with anyone on my multi-national team. Now, to try and read this charitably, if you meant something like "increased difficulty networking" I'd actually agree, but again, if you're at a place in your career where you accept that, it's significantly less of a downside. Mostly, that's the gist of a lot of the things people list as hard negatives to my ears, including your second point of harder life/work separation. I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." (Edit: see my clarification in child post re: this wording, I came off more accusatory than I'd have liked, but didn't want to rewrite history) With the broad slew of coworking spaces, home offices, coffee shops, and other ways to partition one's time and mental spaces, I don't accept that that's something that can't be solved in the same proactive fashion as a professional would approach any assorted social frictions one might run into in _any_ office environment. If you read any frustration in this, it comes from a place of, "a lot of the complaints I read are solvable problems or isomorphisms of in-office problems", and a hope that we'd be self-interested enough as a field to be more proactive in seeking solutions, given the benefits that can come from a more distributed workforce. I want to encourage and productively improve sites that try to support this, and part of that is avoiding a re-encroachment of remote work stigma/fear in many people's eyes. Edit: yes, I'm going to break the HN rules, but christ people, at least _respond_ before blindly downvoting. This was not a glib response, and this topic (remote work) is something we should be able to discuss in good faith without accruing negative score before I even finish grammar-checking my own writing.
- hartator 8y ago
  I actually do agree 100%, both issues that I've posted are personal issues, however, remote work is also meant to solve personal issues in the first place, so I don't think it's disconnected. I do have made my company fully remote so I do believe remote work is way of the future, but we can't be disingenuous about its downsides.
chpmrc 8y ago
This assumes that the only place a remote worker can work from is their home. There is nothing more detrimental to a person's psyche. Cafes and coworking spaces are the most obvious and effective solution to this problem. I made countless friends while working remotely and a good 90% of them I met in a coworking space (and the so called "digital nomad" community is made of some really awesome people). Plus you have the option to change coworking space if you don't like the people, the coffee, the wallpapers or whatever. You can't do that with a traditional office (or it would be reaaally hard to justify).
- baddox 8y ago
  I don’t think it’s very detrimental if you have a separate room or area of your home that is only used for your remote work.
  - chpmrc 8y ago
    That surely helps but at the end of the day it depends on your personality. Some people can go a lot longer working completely alone (e.g. if you have a family), others prefer working in a more social environment (e.g. solo travellers), at least occasionally. I definitely prefer the latter.
    - bmelton 8y ago
      I've worked exclusively remotely for a number of years, and while I tend to prefer it, there are times where I miss the hustle and bustle of an office place. For those occasions, I've always just relocated to either a coffee shop (or similar) or a co-working space with drop-in rates. If you're extremely rural, or those aren't options, I don't know what to tell you.
      - chpmrc 8y ago
        This is exactly what I said...?
- enraged_camel 8y ago
ozten 8y ago
Another disadvantage of global employees is the overhead of understanding employment law, taxes, etc for each of your employees' countries and/or provinces. Having clusters of remote workers, perhaps there is a sweet spot.
- piotrkaminski 8y ago
  This seems more like an opportunity for a company to come in and handle those details for you. I believe those exist already but they seem mostly targeted at larger multinationals rather than scrappy remote-only startups.
jSully24 8y ago
Working remote is not for everyone. I was in a 100% remote position for 3 - 4 months and really missed the human contact. We had numerous calls, great tools for sharing, but for me personally I need to be around people. Perhaps it would be better to remove "remote" from the title completely. You may have several locations where people can come together, don't call them headquarters and those not there remote, but instead everyone is team member who sits in various sites. Some of those sites have 1 person, others have 4 or 5 or 10. And those with more than an individual
iandanforth 8y ago
This is a valid criticism of the list. Please submit an issue for further discussion! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/issues/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/issues/
- hartator 8y ago
  Sure, will do!
- hartator 8y ago
  Added some changes here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_requests https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_reque... (username: hartator)
neeleshs 8y ago
...and timezone differences
jv22222 8y ago
> missing real human contacts For me, personally, working from home has amplified the good parts of working with people and human contact and removed the bad parts. When we do meet in person (4-5 times a year) we have a blast. When we communicate via video the communication is a lot of fun and very purposeful at the same time. Sometimes it feels like I speak to remote co-workers by video more than family and people in real life! So, lot's of human interaction there. At the same time, there is now no interruptions when someone gets bored and wanders over for a chat. There is no need to instantly answer questions when overly eager bosses have a brain... idea. There is no need to watch the clock and make it look like I'm staying late just cos everyone else is. And I can work on stuff anytime I like, like if I wake up at 5am by accident I can knock out the current sprint board and have a break during the day. So, in my case at least, saying "the most obvious are missing real human contacts" is simply not true. I do think that remote working is a bit difficult to pull off well and I've found the key is to really get to know people well when in person and on video chat.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  Yeah, "missing real human contacts" doesn't reflect my experience with remote work either. I'd characterize it as giving me much more control over my real human contact: I get to spend time with who I want on my own schedule to a much greater degree than I could in office jobs. Day to day that's mostly people who have nothing to do with my current work: girlfriend, friends, family, people at my krav maga classes, etc. and as a (sociable) introvert I don't burn through so much of my "social energy" just having to be around people in an office all day.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    I'm sitting at my desk with my noise-cancelling headphones doing a mediocre job of blocking the 20-minute "standup" happening next to me in our open office. I'm going to be transitioning to a remote position soon, and can't wait. I already have two unsolicited offers from friends with office space to let me work in their spaces occasionally, so I have options for getting human contact—when I want it.
- 8y ago
sytse 8y ago
I merged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_requests/18/diffs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_reque... which added a lot of advantages and disadvantages. Looking forward to more MRs to improve the list.
EugeneOZ 8y ago
I really hate "real human contacts", when absolutely everybody can interrupt you, when you need to listen somebody's else "interesting" stories just because saying "stop trash talking" is not polite.
wodenokoto 8y ago
I think the HN population is strongly skewed towards people who prefer to sit alone and work. I just changed job from an open office to remote work, and while everybody thought my new job sounded like a great opportunity, no one was jealous of the remote part - "So, now you have rent a shared office, huh?" (and yes, that is what I did)
BjoernKW 8y ago
There are ways to alleviate these problems though. By "disadvantages" in this respect I understand "inherent problems that can't easily be solved or at least alleviated". You can establish policies that ensure life and work separation (as in: "No calls outside of designated work hours") but you can't easily allay an instinctive as well as indistinct fear that everything will go the dogs if people don't work in the same office anymore.
pmlnr 8y ago
> the most obvious are missing real human contacts Human contact for me is more about friends and out of work activity. Colleagues are colleagues, if you want "real human" interaction, you'd need to get out of the office anyway.
- jenscow 8y ago
  Yeh. They don't pay us to socialise, and I can count the number of times on my middle finger of how many people who at the offices I've worked at I'd want to spend my free time with. Strangely, now that I'm working remotely, I actually do socialise with my colleagues when we meet every 3 months, and enjoy it. Apart from that, I'm around people who I enjoy being with instead of staring the clock or the rear of a car. And I have more social energy to do so.
efficax 8y ago
I've been working remote for 3 years now in software and I agree completely. The biggest downsides are: loneliness, feeling like a shut in, and working all the time because you're only two steps from your "office". These are NP-hard problems to solve, especially for an introverted 4-eyes like me.

lquist 8y ago

Came to the thread to say this. The site loses a lot of legitimacy by glossing over very real tradeoffs to having a fully remote team.

thrill 8y ago
One person's disadvantages is another's nirvana.
khalilravanna 8y ago
I'll start by saying that pushing to normalize remote-work is a noble endeavor. But that being said, as you said, glossing over the disadvantages leaves this site/post feeling very one-sided. I say this as someone worked fully remote for 2 years. It was a fantastic job but the main reason I left was the disadvantages of being remote. To say that the advantages are far more numerous, and far outweigh the disadvantages is subjective and myopic. It works for some people and some types of work but to say it's the Best Solution sadly seems to be to just be being disingenuous.

cgb223 8y ago

Can you expand on the disadvantages then? If you were to write that list, what would it look like?

bradford 8y ago
I'm not the parent poster, but I think the document glossed over the biggest perceived disadvantage: Despite technological advances, I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information and come to conclusions on difficult decisions. It's also the least susceptible to misinterpretation.
- buvanshak 8y ago
  > I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information ... Why do people think this. For one thing, and I think it is most important, face to face communication does not give either parties time to think. It ends up with awkward, unproductive pauses. Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought...
  - BallinBige 8y ago
    "Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought..." wat.
    - buvanshak 8y ago
      You know, face to face communication is good if you are repeating stuff you heard from somewhere or stuff like "Hi there, how was your weekend" type of talk. When you want productive communication, you want thought backing content and framing of every one of your sentences...
  - varenc 8y ago
    I’ve found face to face communication effective for resolving contentious disagreements and, as the parent said, difficult conclusions. I’ve seen things get a bit out of hand over email that then get resolved quite efficiently after a face to face. Live video chat is a good alternative, but I think more natural human empthay comes out in face to face experiences. People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved quickly before they fester. Live video chat gets you much of this but isn’t quite as effective in my experience. To me this observation just means that on remote teams you need to be observant of such issues and spend a little more time to resolve them, which can be a fine trade off for remote teams. (Or ideally avoid overly contentious debates in the first place)
Azeralthefallen 8y ago
I worked for a company that was mostly a remote workplace for almost a year, and there were a lot of problems i found while trying to manage a team. Time zones, were a huge issue and pain point when trying to get a large number of people on the same page. I found my self often having to give the same meeting twice, which put more pressure on me. Even worse was when i would have to go over points only for someone who wasn't available for the first meeting, to raise issues that we didn't notice, and so on. After 6 months the team basically felt like it dissolved into the European team, and the North American Team. With me trying to ferry information from one team to another. So many times regardless of how amazing the latest tools we tried were, it still pales in comparison to a whiteboard. The company bought me a high end digital whiteboard, that allowed me to pass control to other people, it was a buggy POS. On top of that since i was the only one unfortunately with the white board, it meant i was the one who was always doing the drawing and trying to extrapolate a diagram from what someone says. Sometimes some team members would spend hours drawing up a digital mock up of what they were going to push for only for it to become completely useless within a very short time. I also found some people no matter how hard i tried, some people seemed to interpret working remote meant, they got to work in their own silo, and would ignore 99% of everything going on around them. This lead to numerous conflicts, and other issues. Also one other thing i found, was that 1 on 1's became super impersonal, and frankly felt extremely uncomfortable.
- Yeroc 8y ago
  The website appears to emphasize communicating via the written word and other asynchronous forms of communication. I'm curious whether you found communicating asynchronously didn't work or wasn't as effective or if it was the team members specifically that were the issue?

existencebox 8y ago

I don't share your pessimism about the list of downsides, and am honestly surprised, as while normally I chuckle at the "HN is always negative" sentiment, this post being the top reply is a real head scratcher, as someone who is both 1. on a >75% remote team, and 2. who has been advocating/watching HN advocate for remote for quite some time. I'd say "missing real human contacts" is summarized well under a combination of harder rampup/scares some potential employees; as the lack of "Real contacts" seems more of a personal/subjective or team-process-and-tooling-rooted feeling than anything I've observed to be inherent and unsolvable; it's trivial for me to get a face to face with anyone on my multi-national team. Now, to try and read this charitably, if you meant something like "increased difficulty networking" I'd actually agree, but again, if you're at a place in your career where you accept that, it's significantly less of a downside. Mostly, that's the gist of a lot of the things people list as hard negatives to my ears, including your second point of harder life/work separation. I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." (Edit: see my clarification in child post re: this wording, I came off more accusatory than I'd have liked, but didn't want to rewrite history) With the broad slew of coworking spaces, home offices, coffee shops, and other ways to partition one's time and mental spaces, I don't accept that that's something that can't be solved in the same proactive fashion as a professional would approach any assorted social frictions one might run into in _any_ office environment. If you read any frustration in this, it comes from a place of, "a lot of the complaints I read are solvable problems or isomorphisms of in-office problems", and a hope that we'd be self-interested enough as a field to be more proactive in seeking solutions, given the benefits that can come from a more distributed workforce. I want to encourage and productively improve sites that try to support this, and part of that is avoiding a re-encroachment of remote work stigma/fear in many people's eyes. Edit: yes, I'm going to break the HN rules, but christ people, at least _respond_ before blindly downvoting. This was not a glib response, and this topic (remote work) is something we should be able to discuss in good faith without accruing negative score before I even finish grammar-checking my own writing.

hartator 8y ago
I actually do agree 100%, both issues that I've posted are personal issues, however, remote work is also meant to solve personal issues in the first place, so I don't think it's disconnected. I do have made my company fully remote so I do believe remote work is way of the future, but we can't be disingenuous about its downsides.

chpmrc 8y ago

This assumes that the only place a remote worker can work from is their home. There is nothing more detrimental to a person's psyche. Cafes and coworking spaces are the most obvious and effective solution to this problem. I made countless friends while working remotely and a good 90% of them I met in a coworking space (and the so called "digital nomad" community is made of some really awesome people). Plus you have the option to change coworking space if you don't like the people, the coffee, the wallpapers or whatever. You can't do that with a traditional office (or it would be reaaally hard to justify).

baddox 8y ago
I don’t think it’s very detrimental if you have a separate room or area of your home that is only used for your remote work.
- chpmrc 8y ago
  That surely helps but at the end of the day it depends on your personality. Some people can go a lot longer working completely alone (e.g. if you have a family), others prefer working in a more social environment (e.g. solo travellers), at least occasionally. I definitely prefer the latter.
  - bmelton 8y ago
    I've worked exclusively remotely for a number of years, and while I tend to prefer it, there are times where I miss the hustle and bustle of an office place. For those occasions, I've always just relocated to either a coffee shop (or similar) or a co-working space with drop-in rates. If you're extremely rural, or those aren't options, I don't know what to tell you.
    - chpmrc 8y ago
      This is exactly what I said...?
enraged_camel 8y ago

ozten 8y ago

Another disadvantage of global employees is the overhead of understanding employment law, taxes, etc for each of your employees' countries and/or provinces. Having clusters of remote workers, perhaps there is a sweet spot.

piotrkaminski 8y ago
This seems more like an opportunity for a company to come in and handle those details for you. I believe those exist already but they seem mostly targeted at larger multinationals rather than scrappy remote-only startups.

jSully24 8y ago

Working remote is not for everyone. I was in a 100% remote position for 3 - 4 months and really missed the human contact. We had numerous calls, great tools for sharing, but for me personally I need to be around people. Perhaps it would be better to remove "remote" from the title completely. You may have several locations where people can come together, don't call them headquarters and those not there remote, but instead everyone is team member who sits in various sites. Some of those sites have 1 person, others have 4 or 5 or 10. And those with more than an individual

iandanforth 8y ago

This is a valid criticism of the list. Please submit an issue for further discussion! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/issues/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/issues/

hartator 8y ago
Sure, will do!
hartator 8y ago
Added some changes here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_requests https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_reque... (username: hartator)

neeleshs 8y ago

...and timezone differences

jv22222 8y ago

> missing real human contacts For me, personally, working from home has amplified the good parts of working with people and human contact and removed the bad parts. When we do meet in person (4-5 times a year) we have a blast. When we communicate via video the communication is a lot of fun and very purposeful at the same time. Sometimes it feels like I speak to remote co-workers by video more than family and people in real life! So, lot's of human interaction there. At the same time, there is now no interruptions when someone gets bored and wanders over for a chat. There is no need to instantly answer questions when overly eager bosses have a brain... idea. There is no need to watch the clock and make it look like I'm staying late just cos everyone else is. And I can work on stuff anytime I like, like if I wake up at 5am by accident I can knock out the current sprint board and have a break during the day. So, in my case at least, saying "the most obvious are missing real human contacts" is simply not true. I do think that remote working is a bit difficult to pull off well and I've found the key is to really get to know people well when in person and on video chat.

mattnewport 8y ago
Yeah, "missing real human contacts" doesn't reflect my experience with remote work either. I'd characterize it as giving me much more control over my real human contact: I get to spend time with who I want on my own schedule to a much greater degree than I could in office jobs. Day to day that's mostly people who have nothing to do with my current work: girlfriend, friends, family, people at my krav maga classes, etc. and as a (sociable) introvert I don't burn through so much of my "social energy" just having to be around people in an office all day.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  I'm sitting at my desk with my noise-cancelling headphones doing a mediocre job of blocking the 20-minute "standup" happening next to me in our open office. I'm going to be transitioning to a remote position soon, and can't wait. I already have two unsolicited offers from friends with office space to let me work in their spaces occasionally, so I have options for getting human contact—when I want it.
8y ago

sytse 8y ago

I merged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_requests/18/diffs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_reque... which added a lot of advantages and disadvantages. Looking forward to more MRs to improve the list.

EugeneOZ 8y ago

I really hate "real human contacts", when absolutely everybody can interrupt you, when you need to listen somebody's else "interesting" stories just because saying "stop trash talking" is not polite.

wodenokoto 8y ago

I think the HN population is strongly skewed towards people who prefer to sit alone and work. I just changed job from an open office to remote work, and while everybody thought my new job sounded like a great opportunity, no one was jealous of the remote part - "So, now you have rent a shared office, huh?" (and yes, that is what I did)

BjoernKW 8y ago

There are ways to alleviate these problems though. By "disadvantages" in this respect I understand "inherent problems that can't easily be solved or at least alleviated". You can establish policies that ensure life and work separation (as in: "No calls outside of designated work hours") but you can't easily allay an instinctive as well as indistinct fear that everything will go the dogs if people don't work in the same office anymore.

pmlnr 8y ago

> the most obvious are missing real human contacts Human contact for me is more about friends and out of work activity. Colleagues are colleagues, if you want "real human" interaction, you'd need to get out of the office anyway.

jenscow 8y ago
Yeh. They don't pay us to socialise, and I can count the number of times on my middle finger of how many people who at the offices I've worked at I'd want to spend my free time with. Strangely, now that I'm working remotely, I actually do socialise with my colleagues when we meet every 3 months, and enjoy it. Apart from that, I'm around people who I enjoy being with instead of staring the clock or the rear of a car. And I have more social energy to do so.

efficax 8y ago

I've been working remote for 3 years now in software and I agree completely. The biggest downsides are: loneliness, feeling like a shut in, and working all the time because you're only two steps from your "office". These are NP-hard problems to solve, especially for an introverted 4-eyes like me.