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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

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.
s-shellfish 8y ago
You might want to try using a writing style less similar to coding. I don't know if I'm noticing a trend between an influx of new users from reddit after their BS UI redesign, but your text can get quite dense (it's not lacking in information that makes sense). Did upvote you because I feel you made some very experienced and work-aware points.
- existencebox 8y ago
  Meta-comment: You're right, and it's a weakness I've observed in my own posts for years now. There are other commentators that often come into HN threads I post in, and make my point better+more succinctly than I could have. I wish I could replicate/learn from those examples better. I think it's less of a redditism and my own overly-loquatious style/attempting to avoid misunderstanding through verboseness. The feedback is really appreciated.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    It's a life long habit to unlearn, because you have to balance the skill set. When you are intending to speak to an audience, I think it matters to know your audience, which gets complicated, when the audience is constantly shifting. Cheers!
  - Nav_Panel 8y ago
    I found Twitter helped me unlearn Reddit verbosity. You learn to write succinctly or else you'll have trouble expressing your thoughts at all.
nemothekid 8y ago
>I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." This is incredibly dismissive. Almost all the "advantages for employees" are personal. How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit? The advantages for remote work are almost entirely being sold that they are better for people. If someone has a personal problem with an aspect of it, then it should be taken seriously. Imagine if you told an employer that the commute to work was rough so you would like to work remote and he told you "that sounds like a personal problem, why don't you move closer to work?"
- existencebox 8y ago
  Where do we draw the line though? Do we draw the line? At what point do my personal preferences/issues (and trust me I have plenty of my own) become my team's/workplace's problem? I certainly fall closer to the side of "it's my job as a professional to find a situation that doesn't drive me nuts", which is probably where our disagreement might arise. (Candidly, and unfortunately, it's probably born out of the pragmatic "a job don't owe you nothing" upbringing) You aptly point out that "no commuting or stress" is a personal benefit; to play devils advocate with that, wouldn't having a "typical job" then be "dismissive" in not catering to someone who might be incredibly sensitive to the commute? I bring up this contrast since I think a lot of the friction with remote is that it's a change from the status quo, not necessarily that the status quo doesn't incur its own comparable (if inverted) costs. Let me try and rephrase my point better, regardless. I don't think there's a one size fits all, period. Some people simply want/like/work better in some environments than others, and to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters. You asked the question at the end re: a boss telling me that about my commute. Honestly, yes, this has happened to me. And I switched teams, to the one I'm currently on, which is extremely remote friendly. I don't mean to whitewash remote work for any given person or say that everyone has such a lucky opportunity, I see it as two sides to the same coin, in which we shouldn't assume highly-granular personal choices to be a global downside to remote work, and we should enable as many opportunities for that choice to be present as possible. Edit: After rereading my posts, I'll concede that "personal problem" may not have been the best way to put it, and comes off as far too accusatory. I want to delineate between problems I expect a professional adult to be able to understand their own exposure to and handle via their own autonomy, vs problems that are only in the purview of the workplace to solve/that we can't expect individuals to navigate feasibly.
zerostar07 8y ago
I think a lot of it has to do with HN being frequented by people in SF who do like their workplaces, and are being overwhelmingly incentivized monetarily to like them. People outside US seem to be a lot more sympathetic to the idea. If the downside is "lack of separate workspace / human contact", then it is blown way out of proportion imho. It's easily solved by using a coworking space, and it's not reason enough to dismiss remote work.

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.

s-shellfish 8y ago

You might want to try using a writing style less similar to coding. I don't know if I'm noticing a trend between an influx of new users from reddit after their BS UI redesign, but your text can get quite dense (it's not lacking in information that makes sense). Did upvote you because I feel you made some very experienced and work-aware points.

existencebox 8y ago
Meta-comment: You're right, and it's a weakness I've observed in my own posts for years now. There are other commentators that often come into HN threads I post in, and make my point better+more succinctly than I could have. I wish I could replicate/learn from those examples better. I think it's less of a redditism and my own overly-loquatious style/attempting to avoid misunderstanding through verboseness. The feedback is really appreciated.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  It's a life long habit to unlearn, because you have to balance the skill set. When you are intending to speak to an audience, I think it matters to know your audience, which gets complicated, when the audience is constantly shifting. Cheers!
- Nav_Panel 8y ago
  I found Twitter helped me unlearn Reddit verbosity. You learn to write succinctly or else you'll have trouble expressing your thoughts at all.

nemothekid 8y ago

>I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." This is incredibly dismissive. Almost all the "advantages for employees" are personal. How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit? The advantages for remote work are almost entirely being sold that they are better for people. If someone has a personal problem with an aspect of it, then it should be taken seriously. Imagine if you told an employer that the commute to work was rough so you would like to work remote and he told you "that sounds like a personal problem, why don't you move closer to work?"

existencebox 8y ago
Where do we draw the line though? Do we draw the line? At what point do my personal preferences/issues (and trust me I have plenty of my own) become my team's/workplace's problem? I certainly fall closer to the side of "it's my job as a professional to find a situation that doesn't drive me nuts", which is probably where our disagreement might arise. (Candidly, and unfortunately, it's probably born out of the pragmatic "a job don't owe you nothing" upbringing) You aptly point out that "no commuting or stress" is a personal benefit; to play devils advocate with that, wouldn't having a "typical job" then be "dismissive" in not catering to someone who might be incredibly sensitive to the commute? I bring up this contrast since I think a lot of the friction with remote is that it's a change from the status quo, not necessarily that the status quo doesn't incur its own comparable (if inverted) costs. Let me try and rephrase my point better, regardless. I don't think there's a one size fits all, period. Some people simply want/like/work better in some environments than others, and to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters. You asked the question at the end re: a boss telling me that about my commute. Honestly, yes, this has happened to me. And I switched teams, to the one I'm currently on, which is extremely remote friendly. I don't mean to whitewash remote work for any given person or say that everyone has such a lucky opportunity, I see it as two sides to the same coin, in which we shouldn't assume highly-granular personal choices to be a global downside to remote work, and we should enable as many opportunities for that choice to be present as possible. Edit: After rereading my posts, I'll concede that "personal problem" may not have been the best way to put it, and comes off as far too accusatory. I want to delineate between problems I expect a professional adult to be able to understand their own exposure to and handle via their own autonomy, vs problems that are only in the purview of the workplace to solve/that we can't expect individuals to navigate feasibly.

zerostar07 8y ago

I think a lot of it has to do with HN being frequented by people in SF who do like their workplaces, and are being overwhelmingly incentivized monetarily to like them. People outside US seem to be a lot more sympathetic to the idea. If the downside is "lack of separate workspace / human contact", then it is blown way out of proportion imho. It's easily solved by using a coworking space, and it's not reason enough to dismiss remote work.