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I am skeptical on this. Yes, currently the desireability and price of central, metropolitan housing is skyrocketing, and rural communities are declining. But I

I am skeptical on this. Yes, currently the desireability and price of central, metropolitan housing is skyrocketing, and rural communities are declining. But I think once technology catches up to emulate or near-emulate in person contact, that more distributed, more at-distance work will be more common. We are not there yet, but I do think we will arrive there sometime. On a tangent, I highly recommend "Internet of Shit" Twitter account if you want to have a laugh: https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en

mathnmusic 8y ago
In fact, it should already be possible to gain competitive advantage to hire talent from cheaper locations using remote work. There's some great talent out there that's hungry for quality work.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  Isn't this just outsourcing? Wasn't it tried? What are the differences between "remote work" and "outsourcing"?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    For one, many companies are open to outsourcing, but refrain to allow remote work to their own employees, or just allow a couple of days. Because productivity is all about being seated on the office.
    - Fifer82 8y ago
      It really baffles me how that is the case (I understand the tongue in cheek). I have been working remotely for just shy of 10 years. That capability was a primary reason for going into programming in the first place. I find it so old fashioned how by default, they expect me to stand in the rain for 2 hours a day to travel to the centre of a city to sit at a desk and log into the internet for 38 out of 40 hours a week. That is a real life equivalent of a code smell.
      - montenegrohugo 8y ago
        Have you tried having a conversation with your employer? If they view it as a negative maybe you could forego your next salary increase and ask for maybe two work-at-home days per week or something similar. PS: Where did you first learn of the expression "code smell"? I'm curious because I recently heard of it and would like to know if it was from the same source
        wott 8y ago
        He said he has been working remotely for 10 years.
        montenegrohugo 8y ago
        You are right. I completely oversaw that somehow.
  - hvidgaard 8y ago
    When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline. If you have a remote team, you'll still have teamleaders and/or managers that keep things in sync with the company goals. This is of course quite a caricature, but it illustrates the issue unless the company is willing to allocate manpower to be in continues dialog with an outsourcing company.
    - freddie_mercury 8y ago
      > When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline. I have worked for an outsourcer and that's not what happened. I know dozens of people who continue to work for outsourcers, that is not what happens. They have daily standups with the team in Toronto, London, Berlin, etc. They fly back & forth at least monthly. They have video calls nearly daily. They have shared Slack instances, shared Confluence instances, shared JIRA instances. And that's not just in software; when Tesla outsources a part, they don't just throw a spec over the wall. When Apple outsources manufacturing, they also don't have this caricatured approach. When Nike outsources manufacturing, they have Nike employees in the factories. And so on. Since your caricature doesn't reflect the reality that I have years of experience with, I'm not sure it adds much to the argument.
      - dnomad 8y ago
        But, as your own comment makes clear, outsourcing simply means moving work from an expensive city to a cheaper city. It doesn't mean collaboration between a bunch of random Joe Schmoes living in various tiny villages here and there. The reality though is that remote work will always be priced down. Even if remote workers show up everyday by some kind of robotic telepresence, once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet. Everybody seems to think its corporations that are resistant to remote work when in reality its actually workers who are very hesitant to take on remote roles and do not want to be seen as some sort of outsourced and easily replaceable remote provider. It will take a sea change in the culture and desires of workers to make remote work a real possibility at scale. Workers will have to embrace a vision of themselves as freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
  - joefourier 8y ago
    Outsourcing can be used to mean offshoring: physically moving part of the business to a distant country, but there could still be a physical office, just (for example) in Delhi instead of San Francisco. Alternatively it can mean delegating the work to a different company, often employing cheap engineers in a foreign country. Meanwhile remote work means having the worker not need to come into the office at all - each employee can theoretically be anywhere in the world, whether that be in the midwest or in Eastern Europe.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    Doesn't outsourcing imply you're working with other companies? If I outsource my IT staff, generally that means I am hiring another company to handle my IT work, right? With remote work, the workers are still employees of your company, they just don't always sit in your office.
    - UncleMeat 8y ago
      Largely it just means "hiring non US/European engineers". When a company fires some people in the US and replaces them with people in India people lose their shit. But remote work is also considered the pinnacle of enlightened hiring. The problem is that employees want something and then justify that thing being good in whatever way works.
      - freddie_mercury 8y ago
        As someone who doesn't live in the US/Europe this is how "remote work" on HN comes across to me.
        freehunter 8y ago
        I'd wager that most of the "remote work" employees at US companies are US citizens living inside the US. In my experience (I'm an IT consultant who works remotely and visits many other companies) companies who hire remote employees outside of the US tend to do so as contractors, not as employees.
      - freehunter 8y ago
        If a company fires their local staff and hires someone in a cheaper location for the same job, that's really shitty for the people who got fired. If a company keeps their current staff but also then hires more people, regardless of where they live, that's remote work and is far less shitty. I mean... of course getting fired sucks. I'm actually surprised that you seem to be arguing that getting fired should be considered a good thing?
- Kalium 8y ago
  You're right! It should be possible! We certainly have the ability to collaborate on code over networks and video links. Is it possible that there might be some complexity to this beyond boring old corporate inertia? As you so correctly say, there are talented people hungry for work everywhere.
  - awvcs 8y ago
    I don't think there is any complexity as such. It is mostly just that power centralizes. This is hard to argue though since so many people an incentive to believe otherwise. But ask yourself if there is any concrete indication that e.g. the Internet has lead to decentralization? People used to say that companies were too centralized compared to co-operatives. That companies were "one dollar, one vote" instead of "one person, one vote". Today with different class shares most tech companies aren't even "one dollar, one vote". Everything is going the other way.
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Kalium 8y ago
      I think it might be worth considering that there might be some value to be gained by sharing space, rather than just the blind hoarding of power. Which, as you say, most certainly encourages people to accumulate more.
Wellshit 8y ago
Well. My servers are on the cloud. My IDE is on the cloud. My everything is accessible through the internet. I need to be at office everyday, for some reason.
iainmerrick 8y ago
What technology do we need that we’re currently lacking? We already have fiber broadband and decent VR. If it’s just a case of the future being unevenly distributed, where in the world is an example of the distributed future? It’s certainly not the Bay Area, for a start.
- WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
  VR isn't decent yet and won't be until it's comfortable enough to slap a VR headset on and watch a movie. That's comfortable both in terms of literal headset weight but also latency, resolution, sound, etc. When I sit down in front of a 48" TV I'm absorbed into a different world and forget where I am. When VR is good enough you can spend hours inside the virtual world, that's when it can be called good enough. It's not there yet, but sure we might be there in a generation or two.
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    Hardware generation or human generation? :)
na85 8y ago
I take the opposite view. Most of these debates overlook the fact that for a lot of people, it's simply more desirable to live in cities. Compare Vancouver with a small town of less than 100k people just up the Fraser valley (Chilliwack). I've lived in both. Vancouver has better restaurants, more concerts of every sort, better transit, access to the ocean, better internet, is more diverse, more liberal politics, better social services for the homeless and those needing mental health services, better access to diverse foods at the grocery stores, better night life, etc. Sure, I paid a lot more when I was living in Vancouver that. I was in Chilliwack, but it's worth it. No amount of videoconferencing technology can make up for the fact that if I want to go out for good sushi and I live in Chilliwack, I have to spend 2 fucking hours in the car each way.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Completely agreed that it takes a lot more to make a community desirable to yuppies than just fixing telecommuting. But it seems like at least some of this can change? Smaller cities are not universally conservative. Decent coffee can be found in most places, and this didn't used to be true. Many smaller cities that get some tourist traffic have small downtowns with good restaurants; maybe not every kind of ethnic restaurant, but some good choices. There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough.
  - lmm 8y ago
    > There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough. Could just be that retirees can't afford to live in the big cities.
    - twic 8y ago
      Or that they want different things. When i was in my mid 20s, living in inner London was vital to me, because it meant i was close to the cool bars, nightclubs, art galleries (really!), and all my friends, who also lived in inner London. Now i am approaching my 40s, none of those things are much use to me, but i appreciate the fact that in my not-quite-inner-London suburb i have a good neighbourhood coffee shop, and some excellent bakeries and a big DIY shop nearby. I should imagine that in my 60s, i will value different things, and in my 80s, different things again.

mathnmusic 8y ago

In fact, it should already be possible to gain competitive advantage to hire talent from cheaper locations using remote work. There's some great talent out there that's hungry for quality work.

freddie_mercury 8y ago
Isn't this just outsourcing? Wasn't it tried? What are the differences between "remote work" and "outsourcing"?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  For one, many companies are open to outsourcing, but refrain to allow remote work to their own employees, or just allow a couple of days. Because productivity is all about being seated on the office.
  - Fifer82 8y ago
    It really baffles me how that is the case (I understand the tongue in cheek). I have been working remotely for just shy of 10 years. That capability was a primary reason for going into programming in the first place. I find it so old fashioned how by default, they expect me to stand in the rain for 2 hours a day to travel to the centre of a city to sit at a desk and log into the internet for 38 out of 40 hours a week. That is a real life equivalent of a code smell.
    - montenegrohugo 8y ago
      Have you tried having a conversation with your employer? If they view it as a negative maybe you could forego your next salary increase and ask for maybe two work-at-home days per week or something similar. PS: Where did you first learn of the expression "code smell"? I'm curious because I recently heard of it and would like to know if it was from the same source
      - wott 8y ago
        He said he has been working remotely for 10 years.
        montenegrohugo 8y ago
        You are right. I completely oversaw that somehow.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline. If you have a remote team, you'll still have teamleaders and/or managers that keep things in sync with the company goals. This is of course quite a caricature, but it illustrates the issue unless the company is willing to allocate manpower to be in continues dialog with an outsourcing company.
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    > When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline. I have worked for an outsourcer and that's not what happened. I know dozens of people who continue to work for outsourcers, that is not what happens. They have daily standups with the team in Toronto, London, Berlin, etc. They fly back & forth at least monthly. They have video calls nearly daily. They have shared Slack instances, shared Confluence instances, shared JIRA instances. And that's not just in software; when Tesla outsources a part, they don't just throw a spec over the wall. When Apple outsources manufacturing, they also don't have this caricatured approach. When Nike outsources manufacturing, they have Nike employees in the factories. And so on. Since your caricature doesn't reflect the reality that I have years of experience with, I'm not sure it adds much to the argument.
    - dnomad 8y ago
      But, as your own comment makes clear, outsourcing simply means moving work from an expensive city to a cheaper city. It doesn't mean collaboration between a bunch of random Joe Schmoes living in various tiny villages here and there. The reality though is that remote work will always be priced down. Even if remote workers show up everyday by some kind of robotic telepresence, once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet. Everybody seems to think its corporations that are resistant to remote work when in reality its actually workers who are very hesitant to take on remote roles and do not want to be seen as some sort of outsourced and easily replaceable remote provider. It will take a sea change in the culture and desires of workers to make remote work a real possibility at scale. Workers will have to embrace a vision of themselves as freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
- joefourier 8y ago
  Outsourcing can be used to mean offshoring: physically moving part of the business to a distant country, but there could still be a physical office, just (for example) in Delhi instead of San Francisco. Alternatively it can mean delegating the work to a different company, often employing cheap engineers in a foreign country. Meanwhile remote work means having the worker not need to come into the office at all - each employee can theoretically be anywhere in the world, whether that be in the midwest or in Eastern Europe.
- freehunter 8y ago
  Doesn't outsourcing imply you're working with other companies? If I outsource my IT staff, generally that means I am hiring another company to handle my IT work, right? With remote work, the workers are still employees of your company, they just don't always sit in your office.
  - UncleMeat 8y ago
    Largely it just means "hiring non US/European engineers". When a company fires some people in the US and replaces them with people in India people lose their shit. But remote work is also considered the pinnacle of enlightened hiring. The problem is that employees want something and then justify that thing being good in whatever way works.
    - freddie_mercury 8y ago
      As someone who doesn't live in the US/Europe this is how "remote work" on HN comes across to me.
      - freehunter 8y ago
        I'd wager that most of the "remote work" employees at US companies are US citizens living inside the US. In my experience (I'm an IT consultant who works remotely and visits many other companies) companies who hire remote employees outside of the US tend to do so as contractors, not as employees.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      If a company fires their local staff and hires someone in a cheaper location for the same job, that's really shitty for the people who got fired. If a company keeps their current staff but also then hires more people, regardless of where they live, that's remote work and is far less shitty. I mean... of course getting fired sucks. I'm actually surprised that you seem to be arguing that getting fired should be considered a good thing?
Kalium 8y ago
You're right! It should be possible! We certainly have the ability to collaborate on code over networks and video links. Is it possible that there might be some complexity to this beyond boring old corporate inertia? As you so correctly say, there are talented people hungry for work everywhere.
- awvcs 8y ago
  I don't think there is any complexity as such. It is mostly just that power centralizes. This is hard to argue though since so many people an incentive to believe otherwise. But ask yourself if there is any concrete indication that e.g. the Internet has lead to decentralization? People used to say that companies were too centralized compared to co-operatives. That companies were "one dollar, one vote" instead of "one person, one vote". Today with different class shares most tech companies aren't even "one dollar, one vote". Everything is going the other way.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kalium 8y ago
    I think it might be worth considering that there might be some value to be gained by sharing space, rather than just the blind hoarding of power. Which, as you say, most certainly encourages people to accumulate more.

Wellshit 8y ago

Well. My servers are on the cloud. My IDE is on the cloud. My everything is accessible through the internet. I need to be at office everyday, for some reason.

iainmerrick 8y ago

What technology do we need that we’re currently lacking? We already have fiber broadband and decent VR. If it’s just a case of the future being unevenly distributed, where in the world is an example of the distributed future? It’s certainly not the Bay Area, for a start.

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
VR isn't decent yet and won't be until it's comfortable enough to slap a VR headset on and watch a movie. That's comfortable both in terms of literal headset weight but also latency, resolution, sound, etc. When I sit down in front of a 48" TV I'm absorbed into a different world and forget where I am. When VR is good enough you can spend hours inside the virtual world, that's when it can be called good enough. It's not there yet, but sure we might be there in a generation or two.
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  Hardware generation or human generation? :)

na85 8y ago

I take the opposite view. Most of these debates overlook the fact that for a lot of people, it's simply more desirable to live in cities. Compare Vancouver with a small town of less than 100k people just up the Fraser valley (Chilliwack). I've lived in both. Vancouver has better restaurants, more concerts of every sort, better transit, access to the ocean, better internet, is more diverse, more liberal politics, better social services for the homeless and those needing mental health services, better access to diverse foods at the grocery stores, better night life, etc. Sure, I paid a lot more when I was living in Vancouver that. I was in Chilliwack, but it's worth it. No amount of videoconferencing technology can make up for the fact that if I want to go out for good sushi and I live in Chilliwack, I have to spend 2 fucking hours in the car each way.

skybrian 8y ago
Completely agreed that it takes a lot more to make a community desirable to yuppies than just fixing telecommuting. But it seems like at least some of this can change? Smaller cities are not universally conservative. Decent coffee can be found in most places, and this didn't used to be true. Many smaller cities that get some tourist traffic have small downtowns with good restaurants; maybe not every kind of ethnic restaurant, but some good choices. There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough.
- lmm 8y ago
  > There is not a big migration of retirees to big cities, so it seems pretty clear that it's all about the jobs. Without the attraction of a big paycheck, people look for smaller "nice" cities that have enough. Could just be that retirees can't afford to live in the big cities.
  - twic 8y ago
    Or that they want different things. When i was in my mid 20s, living in inner London was vital to me, because it meant i was close to the cool bars, nightclubs, art galleries (really!), and all my friends, who also lived in inner London. Now i am approaching my 40s, none of those things are much use to me, but i appreciate the fact that in my not-quite-inner-London suburb i have a good neighbourhood coffee shop, and some excellent bakeries and a big DIY shop nearby. I should imagine that in my 60s, i will value different things, and in my 80s, different things again.