9 ms·

Beyond Remote

119 points by antgoldbloom 6y ago

a_imho 6y ago
Might be projecting here but I find this minutiae regarding embracing remote as a first class is just beating around the bush, people are pro/con depending on how they expect it would affect their salary. https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-wage-gap-look-like/ https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
- ghaff 6y ago
  That post isn't really about remote work as such though. (Which tends to focus on a desire for people working remotely for SV companies to earn SV developer compensation while living in Des Moines.) It's about complete offices/teams in Europe earning much less than if they were in the US. Which is, indeed, one of the reasons (though not the only one) that many larger companies have significant software development offices in places like Eastern Europe and India.
  - a_imho 6y ago
    Do you think there is a difference between remote and remote in the US? That post is about work done remotely, nothing more nothing less. It is merely an artifact of the current implementation that some can be vastly undercompensated due to their lack of bargaining power. Or you can say it is engineered to be that way if you are less generous. If covid makes companies transition to remote first, what advantage remains over overseas workers? Will it justify the much higher salaries? That is what makes people uneasy imo, not that they have to do standups over zoom, I don't buy that. The answer is obviously not much, but it has been the case for quite some time. Personally I don't think this mass transition will happen this time either.
bfdm 6y ago
I think the points about challenges or switching and the likely future of heterogeneous office/remote balances are all strong. Where this lost me was on this claim about salaries: > I suspect the multipliers companies use to determine wage per city will even out to the efficient frontier of wage to cost of living as employees allocate themselves to the optimal locations. I think this is a temporary situation until there is a critical mass of remote roles/companies. If I live in a lower COL region but looking at remote roles I'm not competing with people near me, and the employers are not competing with employers near me. I'm competing with people who can do the work I do, and the employer is competing with all other remote-capable companies. I think the only shape of this that might work is treating the target time zone as a single market. Assuming comparable skills, a worker in Boston, Atlanta, NYC, Toronto, Nassau or Bogota shouldn't have wide compensation differences. It's possible that this leads to a net reduction in salary for many, as big companies "figuring out" remote might make formerly-painful offshoring more workable and attractively inexpensive.
- andrejserafim 6y ago
  I agree with you, but this is predicated on there being a healthy demand-supply ratio. My personal expectation is that there is a lot of developers out there and at least at non-junior levels the differentiating factor is skill, experience and timezone, as you say.
- satysin 6y ago
  As someone who has worked remotely (from home) for many years now I find this whole enlightenment employers and employees are having right now quite interesting/entertaining. However one thing that I dislike is this talk, mostly started by Facebook as far as I can tell, about reducing salaries for employees who move to cheaper places to live. Sorry but that is BULLSHIT. When I take on work I have my fixed daily rate that I charge whether I am working from Paris, SF, London or the Welsh Highlands. My employer is paying for my time, expertise, knowledge, experience and delivery quality. I am not worth more or less because of where I work. This is typical of employers trying to maintain that dominant position over the employee because suddenly they have been forced to adapt to this changing world and they don't like. My wife works a normal office job for a big, global company. Like most others they had to adapt to 100% WFH with a few days notice and after some teething problems it is working exceptionally well. This realisation has upset a lot of middle managers and "old school" types who live for the office. However the facts don't lie. Meetings still happen. Everything has been delivered on time. All of the things middle managers say require being in the office continue to happen with an issue. It is almost as if all of these middle managers and old school thinkers are suddenly scared everyone will see through their bullshit and that flexibility works best for everyone. Now I feel this evidence gives employees a lot of leverage to push for more flexibility in where they work. This upsets the employer/employee dynamic. It may well be much easier for an employee to find another job for a better salary at a company the other side of the country and that is a risk for the employer. Sure you can say "yes but now that employee is competing with people all over the country as well!" and that us true. However it is easier for an employee to change job than it is for an employer to recruit and get a new employee up to speed. This gives the employee a much better deal hence this bullshit display of "we're still the ones with power damnit!" from companies needing to change but being scared shitless about the advantages that gives all their employees. As I said at the beginning I have been a remote worker for a number of years now and for me it is perfect. I can (and do) pop into the office when needed but I get to live in a nicer, cheaper area with more space and an overall nicer environment. Where I live suddenly wasn't restricted to "how long will it take me to get to work from here?" and that is fucking freedom. I fully appreciate I am not like everyone else. There are people who need an office. That's fine, nobody is saying ditch all the offices and we all work from home. Just that it should be an option rather than being forced into a single location for no quantifiable reason. For all the crap companies talk about the environment, quality of life, etc. there needs to be a serious change to how we work. Forgetting everything else, just reducing the number of cars on the road every day for a pointless commute to the office would be worth it from an environmental standpoint.
benatkin 6y ago
"Beyond Remote" makes me think of dystopias. I think in the future much fewer people will commute, so if it isn't remote, what will it be? I can think of several possibilities: 1) Living near a corporate campus, with plentiful housing nearby, perhaps company provided? How about if this is one way besides Basic Income, that people are protected from automation? Guaranteed Jobs is an alternative that is proposed to Basic Income. 2) Remote but you aren't really remote, because you're hooked into a VR system. Travel is in video games. This helps solve the climate problem by people flying and driving less. 3) Remote but you aren't really remote because your employer is watching your every move while you're on the clock. There is plenty of this happening, and everyone who loves remote work thinks this is bad. 4) Virtually everybody is remote so people stop calling it remote, much like people started referring to their mobile phone as simply "my phone" instead of "my cell phone" in the early 2000s.
- ehnto 6y ago
  You weren't kidding when you said it reminded you of dystopias! Riffing on your ideas in a not so serious way: Guaranteed Jobs would be more like Mandatory Jobs, or "Work for Welfare", a step toward government indentured workers maybe? Couple that with supplied housing and we're basically at serfdom again. Sell their time to corporates to add in that capitalist twist we know and love! Remote but hooked into VR sounds like it's just another way to measure butts in seats. Monitor peoples time and actions while they're on the clock. Fuck it, sell that data too. How can we monetize knowing how often people pick their noses? The first step into a VR first society perhaps, all the better as the environment around us collapses. We stop travelling thanks to various catastrophes, then we stop noticing the world being further exploited. While Australia was held captive by catastrophic fires, barely able to breath the air in our cities, our government was fresh off the phones selling vast forests to mining companies and opening up clearing rights to export farmers.
29athrowaway 6y ago
One important aspect is missing in this analysis: Timezones. Timezone differences make a big difference in day to day collaboration.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  another possible difference is language competency on a project basis, not everyone speaks English that well, which means local work may have a benefit over remote work if customer default language is not English. Other things may also pertain, for example working on government projects requiring security clearance or at least no criminal record.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    There's proficiency and fluency, and they may not be the same for written and spoken English.
vimota 6y ago
Author of the post here. Most of this is speculation obviously so I expect lots of opposing opinions - happy to discuss or answer any questions about my perspective!
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  Hi Victor, Enjoyed your post, and as someone who has worked remote-only for >5 years, can only agree with "not enough [focus] on what work will actually look like and how culture needs to adapt". One area you didn't touch on, which I find most interesting in these present (challenging) times is, "How do we improve the tools?" Right now, experienced remote-workers know to do things like explicitly tell co-workers stuff like "brb, afk 5 min." -- all that much-needed overcommunication that is necessary to replace face- and body-language cues. Is it just a question of aculturation as remote-work undergoes its own Endless September, or could we build better, richer, more intuitive tools? (And not just for devs/knowledge workers! Think of all the GPs triaging their patients with Zoom right now. There have to better tools for them!)
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >explicitly tell co-workers stuff like "brb, afk 5 min." I guess it depends. I don't do development but none of the people I work with have any expectation that if they send me a chat message/SMS/email that I'll respond to them this very second.
    - mikro2nd 6y ago
      Yep, it's very context-dependent. I was just pulling an example from a hat. Point being that, in general, you learn to communicate a lot more and a lot more explicitly than people are generally used to doing.
  - vimota 6y ago
    Good point - I think tools/technology can definitely help a lot like you pointed out. In some ways, the tools can act as an extension of the culture, promoting the processes and values you want your team to have. To me, this implies picking the right tools, and establishing the right expectations about how to use them, is something every team has to do with company culture in mind as opposed to being a purely technical decision. As these tools for communication, creation and management become the substrate of the team (the new "office" in some ways), it'll be interesting to see how the tool designers change. Shouldn't product managers for tools like Slack work with organizational researchers, sociologists, and psychologists to determine the impact of features on organizational behaviour (if they don't already).
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I wouldn't mind so much working from home I think, but I'm privileged in that I'm a homeowner and have a desk in a bedroom away from the rest of the family; a lot of people don't have this. So if remote-first becomes a thing, the workers have to be able to afford and live somewhere comfortably. But if I were to work for a remote-first company, I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage, equivalent to the amount of money they save by not having office space. A quick Google indicates office space costs about $500-$650 a month per person (in Amsterdam, according to Google's summarized results from instantoffices.com), or between 150 and 450 euros / month per m². With that money, as an individual, you could also afford a spot in a co-working space if need be. I think a $500 or €500 / month stipend or reward for working from home is fair; it's a decent amount of money, and I'm pretty confident it's still cheaper than renting an office - you don't just save on rent, but personnel as well, and things like support and maintenance contracts on the utilities, coffee machines, etc.
- badpun 6y ago
  > I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage Your wage is already arbitrary so you can just assume that it includes this stipend.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Since wages are typically part of a contract, which requires or implies a meeting of the minds, any new assumptions resulting in a new interpretation of the contract and its applicability may support an argument for renegotiation of said contract.
    - anamexis 6y ago
      In the US, wages are not typically part of a contract.
      - blarglechien 6y ago
        Oh, you do sign a contract, stating in details that you have no contractual relationship. ( 'at will' ) At least that was my experience in the last 6 years.
blunte 6y ago
> perhaps in your twenties you prefer to be nomadic, but in your 40s you'd like to have the stable work hours of having teammates in your timezone I think regardless of your age, you probably prefer to have teammates in your timezone - or at least have the ability to communicate with them reasonably easily (when you need them). Regarding nomadic vs stable, I suspect that's more of a family/relationship factor rather than an age factor. With family and kids, stability is just easier. Just having a family with kids is a special challenge, so being a traveling family is a special challenge that few people seem to do (although I admire the ones who pull it off well! their kids get such a broad and dynamic taste of life early).
- eloisant 6y ago
  The timezone question is also about your family status. When you're single it's OK to work late at night for meetings with a far away team, when you have kids and they go to school: - the 5pm-8pm time when they're awake and at home is a time you want to spend with your kids. Can be challenging when you're in Europe working with the US west coast, because that's precisely the best overlap time - you have to wake up anyway to send them to school, so you can't just move your sleep schedule However, when you do have this flexibility, sometimes the timezone difference can be helpful by splitting you day between one "communication period" (timezone overlap) and "no distraction period" (coworkers are asleep)
- benibela 6y ago
  >you probably prefer to have teammates in your timezone Probably, but not everyone at one location actually lives in the same timezone My personal timezone is shifted three hours to the west from everyone else here
dependsontheq 6y ago
I think it's pretty funny that people seem to miss some central rules of the internet. The more connected something becomes the more centralized it becomes. So having more remote work will shift the best people even more to the GAFAM job opportunities and that's the main reason why they are doing this.
draw_down 6y ago
Well, at this late date I can’t imagine who still has the stomach for questions around whether remote employees can be productive etc. The thing to note about FB’s announcement at least, is that it isn’t really drastic. They just said that some number of roles over time will be remote. If you’re seriously handwringing over whether those roles will be productive, don’t bother. If you’re not productive they’ll throw you out on your ass. Simple. This is ultimately about two things: labor costs, real estate costs. You can guess what the idea is to do with both of those costs.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
Ok a question about all this remote work - why hasn't outsourcing generally been that great an experience for companies? I've worked at a few places that have outsourced and it was not particularly productive. Funny enough at one place we had some people from India in India, and some people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India in India seemed lower quality. Why? If the outcome of the great remoting experiment here is that remote work is generally fantastic?
- dean177 6y ago
  Outsourcing is usually done as a cost saving measure, often in the knowledge that they might be getting less than before. The cost savings are often overestimated and many companies can't evaluate quality well in the first place. Also outsourcing doesn't always mean remote, lots of companies hiring consultants (developers, or even teams of developers) require them to be on-site. The problem is often the outsourced and the company doing the outsourcing have incentives which don't line up.
- MiroF 6y ago
  > some people from India in India, and some people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India in India seemed lower quality. There is a massive selection effect occurring here.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    Probably, but actually I've had the same situation in a couple places, but I think marcosdumay had a good explanation as to why it would be like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23301586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23301586
    - MiroF 6y ago
      > Probably, but actually I've had the same situation in a couple places ? I'm confused how this would impact the selection bias, marcosdumay's comment seems to jive with mine - here what I mean is the average Indian-American who has moved to America for tech jobs is going to be different from the average Indian hired in an outsourcing capacity in India, so you can't compare the two and attribute the differences solely to remote work.
zcw100 6y ago
Everyone is trying to understand what wfh is going to look like but I don't think they really understood what working from an office was really all about. Working from home is going to involve some very minor and inconsequential technical issues. WFH is really about power and control. Being able to physically control your body is a large part of that. It also severely curtails your alternative employment options. It isn't very easy to buy a home or even to break a lease which limits you to about a 120mi radius. Now compete with opportunities offered by the world. That's the problem. What's really going to keep employers up at night is the thought that their work from home employees realize that they're more like free agents than employees and there really isn't a need for middle management.
- bernawil 6y ago
  I don't think they really understood what working from an office was really all about. So right. Working from a big corporate campus: gee, this team member is in another floor, I better talk to him via IM and email. Working from small startup open office: gee, this team member is opposite myself from this small common table, better talk to him via IM, we don't want to bother every single person in the open-plan office.

119 points by antgoldbloom 6y ago

Might be projecting here but I find this minutiae regarding embracing remote as a first class is just beating around the bush, people are pro/con depending on how they expect it would affect their salary. https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-wage-gap-look-like/ https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

ghaff 6y ago
That post isn't really about remote work as such though. (Which tends to focus on a desire for people working remotely for SV companies to earn SV developer compensation while living in Des Moines.) It's about complete offices/teams in Europe earning much less than if they were in the US. Which is, indeed, one of the reasons (though not the only one) that many larger companies have significant software development offices in places like Eastern Europe and India.
- a_imho 6y ago
  Do you think there is a difference between remote and remote in the US? That post is about work done remotely, nothing more nothing less. It is merely an artifact of the current implementation that some can be vastly undercompensated due to their lack of bargaining power. Or you can say it is engineered to be that way if you are less generous. If covid makes companies transition to remote first, what advantage remains over overseas workers? Will it justify the much higher salaries? That is what makes people uneasy imo, not that they have to do standups over zoom, I don't buy that. The answer is obviously not much, but it has been the case for quite some time. Personally I don't think this mass transition will happen this time either.

bfdm 6y ago

I think the points about challenges or switching and the likely future of heterogeneous office/remote balances are all strong. Where this lost me was on this claim about salaries: > I suspect the multipliers companies use to determine wage per city will even out to the efficient frontier of wage to cost of living as employees allocate themselves to the optimal locations. I think this is a temporary situation until there is a critical mass of remote roles/companies. If I live in a lower COL region but looking at remote roles I'm not competing with people near me, and the employers are not competing with employers near me. I'm competing with people who can do the work I do, and the employer is competing with all other remote-capable companies. I think the only shape of this that might work is treating the target time zone as a single market. Assuming comparable skills, a worker in Boston, Atlanta, NYC, Toronto, Nassau or Bogota shouldn't have wide compensation differences. It's possible that this leads to a net reduction in salary for many, as big companies "figuring out" remote might make formerly-painful offshoring more workable and attractively inexpensive.

andrejserafim 6y ago
I agree with you, but this is predicated on there being a healthy demand-supply ratio. My personal expectation is that there is a lot of developers out there and at least at non-junior levels the differentiating factor is skill, experience and timezone, as you say.
satysin 6y ago
As someone who has worked remotely (from home) for many years now I find this whole enlightenment employers and employees are having right now quite interesting/entertaining. However one thing that I dislike is this talk, mostly started by Facebook as far as I can tell, about reducing salaries for employees who move to cheaper places to live. Sorry but that is BULLSHIT. When I take on work I have my fixed daily rate that I charge whether I am working from Paris, SF, London or the Welsh Highlands. My employer is paying for my time, expertise, knowledge, experience and delivery quality. I am not worth more or less because of where I work. This is typical of employers trying to maintain that dominant position over the employee because suddenly they have been forced to adapt to this changing world and they don't like. My wife works a normal office job for a big, global company. Like most others they had to adapt to 100% WFH with a few days notice and after some teething problems it is working exceptionally well. This realisation has upset a lot of middle managers and "old school" types who live for the office. However the facts don't lie. Meetings still happen. Everything has been delivered on time. All of the things middle managers say require being in the office continue to happen with an issue. It is almost as if all of these middle managers and old school thinkers are suddenly scared everyone will see through their bullshit and that flexibility works best for everyone. Now I feel this evidence gives employees a lot of leverage to push for more flexibility in where they work. This upsets the employer/employee dynamic. It may well be much easier for an employee to find another job for a better salary at a company the other side of the country and that is a risk for the employer. Sure you can say "yes but now that employee is competing with people all over the country as well!" and that us true. However it is easier for an employee to change job than it is for an employer to recruit and get a new employee up to speed. This gives the employee a much better deal hence this bullshit display of "we're still the ones with power damnit!" from companies needing to change but being scared shitless about the advantages that gives all their employees. As I said at the beginning I have been a remote worker for a number of years now and for me it is perfect. I can (and do) pop into the office when needed but I get to live in a nicer, cheaper area with more space and an overall nicer environment. Where I live suddenly wasn't restricted to "how long will it take me to get to work from here?" and that is fucking freedom. I fully appreciate I am not like everyone else. There are people who need an office. That's fine, nobody is saying ditch all the offices and we all work from home. Just that it should be an option rather than being forced into a single location for no quantifiable reason. For all the crap companies talk about the environment, quality of life, etc. there needs to be a serious change to how we work. Forgetting everything else, just reducing the number of cars on the road every day for a pointless commute to the office would be worth it from an environmental standpoint.

benatkin 6y ago

"Beyond Remote" makes me think of dystopias. I think in the future much fewer people will commute, so if it isn't remote, what will it be? I can think of several possibilities: 1) Living near a corporate campus, with plentiful housing nearby, perhaps company provided? How about if this is one way besides Basic Income, that people are protected from automation? Guaranteed Jobs is an alternative that is proposed to Basic Income. 2) Remote but you aren't really remote, because you're hooked into a VR system. Travel is in video games. This helps solve the climate problem by people flying and driving less. 3) Remote but you aren't really remote because your employer is watching your every move while you're on the clock. There is plenty of this happening, and everyone who loves remote work thinks this is bad. 4) Virtually everybody is remote so people stop calling it remote, much like people started referring to their mobile phone as simply "my phone" instead of "my cell phone" in the early 2000s.

ehnto 6y ago
You weren't kidding when you said it reminded you of dystopias! Riffing on your ideas in a not so serious way: Guaranteed Jobs would be more like Mandatory Jobs, or "Work for Welfare", a step toward government indentured workers maybe? Couple that with supplied housing and we're basically at serfdom again. Sell their time to corporates to add in that capitalist twist we know and love! Remote but hooked into VR sounds like it's just another way to measure butts in seats. Monitor peoples time and actions while they're on the clock. Fuck it, sell that data too. How can we monetize knowing how often people pick their noses? The first step into a VR first society perhaps, all the better as the environment around us collapses. We stop travelling thanks to various catastrophes, then we stop noticing the world being further exploited. While Australia was held captive by catastrophic fires, barely able to breath the air in our cities, our government was fresh off the phones selling vast forests to mining companies and opening up clearing rights to export farmers.

29athrowaway 6y ago

One important aspect is missing in this analysis: Timezones. Timezone differences make a big difference in day to day collaboration.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
another possible difference is language competency on a project basis, not everyone speaks English that well, which means local work may have a benefit over remote work if customer default language is not English. Other things may also pertain, for example working on government projects requiring security clearance or at least no criminal record.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  There's proficiency and fluency, and they may not be the same for written and spoken English.

vimota 6y ago

Author of the post here. Most of this is speculation obviously so I expect lots of opposing opinions - happy to discuss or answer any questions about my perspective!

mikro2nd 6y ago
Hi Victor, Enjoyed your post, and as someone who has worked remote-only for >5 years, can only agree with "not enough [focus] on what work will actually look like and how culture needs to adapt". One area you didn't touch on, which I find most interesting in these present (challenging) times is, "How do we improve the tools?" Right now, experienced remote-workers know to do things like explicitly tell co-workers stuff like "brb, afk 5 min." -- all that much-needed overcommunication that is necessary to replace face- and body-language cues. Is it just a question of aculturation as remote-work undergoes its own Endless September, or could we build better, richer, more intuitive tools? (And not just for devs/knowledge workers! Think of all the GPs triaging their patients with Zoom right now. There have to better tools for them!)
- ghaff 6y ago
  >explicitly tell co-workers stuff like "brb, afk 5 min." I guess it depends. I don't do development but none of the people I work with have any expectation that if they send me a chat message/SMS/email that I'll respond to them this very second.
  - mikro2nd 6y ago
    Yep, it's very context-dependent. I was just pulling an example from a hat. Point being that, in general, you learn to communicate a lot more and a lot more explicitly than people are generally used to doing.
- vimota 6y ago
  Good point - I think tools/technology can definitely help a lot like you pointed out. In some ways, the tools can act as an extension of the culture, promoting the processes and values you want your team to have. To me, this implies picking the right tools, and establishing the right expectations about how to use them, is something every team has to do with company culture in mind as opposed to being a purely technical decision. As these tools for communication, creation and management become the substrate of the team (the new "office" in some ways), it'll be interesting to see how the tool designers change. Shouldn't product managers for tools like Slack work with organizational researchers, sociologists, and psychologists to determine the impact of features on organizational behaviour (if they don't already).

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I wouldn't mind so much working from home I think, but I'm privileged in that I'm a homeowner and have a desk in a bedroom away from the rest of the family; a lot of people don't have this. So if remote-first becomes a thing, the workers have to be able to afford and live somewhere comfortably. But if I were to work for a remote-first company, I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage, equivalent to the amount of money they save by not having office space. A quick Google indicates office space costs about $500-$650 a month per person (in Amsterdam, according to Google's summarized results from instantoffices.com), or between 150 and 450 euros / month per m². With that money, as an individual, you could also afford a spot in a co-working space if need be. I think a $500 or €500 / month stipend or reward for working from home is fair; it's a decent amount of money, and I'm pretty confident it's still cheaper than renting an office - you don't just save on rent, but personnel as well, and things like support and maintenance contracts on the utilities, coffee machines, etc.

badpun 6y ago
> I'd expect them to pay a stipend on top of my wage Your wage is already arbitrary so you can just assume that it includes this stipend.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Since wages are typically part of a contract, which requires or implies a meeting of the minds, any new assumptions resulting in a new interpretation of the contract and its applicability may support an argument for renegotiation of said contract.
  - anamexis 6y ago
    In the US, wages are not typically part of a contract.
    - blarglechien 6y ago
      Oh, you do sign a contract, stating in details that you have no contractual relationship. ( 'at will' ) At least that was my experience in the last 6 years.

blunte 6y ago

> perhaps in your twenties you prefer to be nomadic, but in your 40s you'd like to have the stable work hours of having teammates in your timezone I think regardless of your age, you probably prefer to have teammates in your timezone - or at least have the ability to communicate with them reasonably easily (when you need them). Regarding nomadic vs stable, I suspect that's more of a family/relationship factor rather than an age factor. With family and kids, stability is just easier. Just having a family with kids is a special challenge, so being a traveling family is a special challenge that few people seem to do (although I admire the ones who pull it off well! their kids get such a broad and dynamic taste of life early).

eloisant 6y ago
The timezone question is also about your family status. When you're single it's OK to work late at night for meetings with a far away team, when you have kids and they go to school: - the 5pm-8pm time when they're awake and at home is a time you want to spend with your kids. Can be challenging when you're in Europe working with the US west coast, because that's precisely the best overlap time - you have to wake up anyway to send them to school, so you can't just move your sleep schedule However, when you do have this flexibility, sometimes the timezone difference can be helpful by splitting you day between one "communication period" (timezone overlap) and "no distraction period" (coworkers are asleep)
benibela 6y ago
>you probably prefer to have teammates in your timezone Probably, but not everyone at one location actually lives in the same timezone My personal timezone is shifted three hours to the west from everyone else here

dependsontheq 6y ago

I think it's pretty funny that people seem to miss some central rules of the internet. The more connected something becomes the more centralized it becomes. So having more remote work will shift the best people even more to the GAFAM job opportunities and that's the main reason why they are doing this.

draw_down 6y ago

Well, at this late date I can’t imagine who still has the stomach for questions around whether remote employees can be productive etc. The thing to note about FB’s announcement at least, is that it isn’t really drastic. They just said that some number of roles over time will be remote. If you’re seriously handwringing over whether those roles will be productive, don’t bother. If you’re not productive they’ll throw you out on your ass. Simple. This is ultimately about two things: labor costs, real estate costs. You can guess what the idea is to do with both of those costs.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

Ok a question about all this remote work - why hasn't outsourcing generally been that great an experience for companies? I've worked at a few places that have outsourced and it was not particularly productive. Funny enough at one place we had some people from India in India, and some people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India in India seemed lower quality. Why? If the outcome of the great remoting experiment here is that remote work is generally fantastic?

dean177 6y ago
Outsourcing is usually done as a cost saving measure, often in the knowledge that they might be getting less than before. The cost savings are often overestimated and many companies can't evaluate quality well in the first place. Also outsourcing doesn't always mean remote, lots of companies hiring consultants (developers, or even teams of developers) require them to be on-site. The problem is often the outsourced and the company doing the outsourcing have incentives which don't line up.
MiroF 6y ago
> some people from India in India, and some people from India in the office. The people from India in the office were generally pretty good and a pleasure to work with, and the people from India in India seemed lower quality. There is a massive selection effect occurring here.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Probably, but actually I've had the same situation in a couple places, but I think marcosdumay had a good explanation as to why it would be like that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23301586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23301586
  - MiroF 6y ago
    > Probably, but actually I've had the same situation in a couple places ? I'm confused how this would impact the selection bias, marcosdumay's comment seems to jive with mine - here what I mean is the average Indian-American who has moved to America for tech jobs is going to be different from the average Indian hired in an outsourcing capacity in India, so you can't compare the two and attribute the differences solely to remote work.

zcw100 6y ago

Everyone is trying to understand what wfh is going to look like but I don't think they really understood what working from an office was really all about. Working from home is going to involve some very minor and inconsequential technical issues. WFH is really about power and control. Being able to physically control your body is a large part of that. It also severely curtails your alternative employment options. It isn't very easy to buy a home or even to break a lease which limits you to about a 120mi radius. Now compete with opportunities offered by the world. That's the problem. What's really going to keep employers up at night is the thought that their work from home employees realize that they're more like free agents than employees and there really isn't a need for middle management.

bernawil 6y ago
I don't think they really understood what working from an office was really all about. So right. Working from a big corporate campus: gee, this team member is in another floor, I better talk to him via IM and email. Working from small startup open office: gee, this team member is opposite myself from this small common table, better talk to him via IM, we don't want to bother every single person in the open-plan office.