46 ms·

For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

351 points by helsinkiandrew 5y ago

helsinkiandrew 5y ago
Hacker News in the News! https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/08/11/for-programmers-remote-working-is-becoming-the-norm https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/08/11/for-prog...
- the_cramer 5y ago
  I think that some of HN people don't like this. The more popular it gets the less quality (or more mod work) will HN comments have. But since the article is paywalled... maybe it's protecting HN :)
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    Indeed I don't want to sound like a 'get out of my lawn' kind of person but I am increasingly noticing an overlap between submissions on HN and posts on r/worldnews. Again I think for the most part the moderators are doing an amazing work but there is definitely a risk of just becoming another frontpage of the internet instead of sticking to the original ethos of submissions about 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity'.
    - dang 5y ago
      Comment about this from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28122734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28122734 From my perspective the baseline is pretty stable but the fluctuation around it has a fairly large amplitude. That makes for phases when certain types of story are more or less represented than others. If there were significantly more worldnews stories now than in years past, I'd be surprised. That's certainly not our intention.
      - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
        Indeed I have no real hard data on this, could very well be just a sort of Baader-Meinhof situation where the headlines that are common in both here and r/worldnews end up jumping at me more immediately.
jimbob45 5y ago
I don’t think this is going to last forever but I am trying to take advantage of this remote Pax Romana as long as possible by cramming my big life events in now while my stress and job time commitments are low. I’m certain that either wages will be depressed for remote workers, the jobs will be sent offshore, or companies will recall everyone but there’s a window to be taken advantage of right now. I’ll certainly point my kid toward a less volatile industry at any rate.
- adrianN 5y ago
  What are less volatile industries with well paying jobs?
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    Dentist. The Medical people seem to pay their blood up front and have the rest of their life set. Am I wrong about this? We seem to not have to pay anything up front, but at the cost of a life long rat race. If you want to talk flexibility, some of these doctors show up to the office like three times a week in the long run.
    - bluebit 5y ago
      That's the last thing I'd direct my kids towards. To spend a third of your waking life digging in people's dirty mouths because of the stable income is how dreams die.
      - hiddencache 5y ago
        Thanks for making me laugh out loud, appreciated.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      That's a good one, but I wonder whether improved dental hygiene practices will severely reduce dentists' incomes in the next decades. At least in my parent's generation all the expensive procedures were caused by poor nutrition and poor dental hygiene during their youth. There is also the possibility that one of those caries vaccines will finally make it to market.
flexie 5y ago
Perhaps jobs posted on HN are not representative of IT jobs in general, but the tendency is clear.
- rualca 5y ago
  It may not be about representing IT jobs in general, but representing how new IT job openings in general are being presented to prospective applicants to entice them. Those who are stuck in their old job don't tend to have a lot of flexibility to negotiate these changes other than quitting and finding a new job, which nowadays is predominantly remote because that's what IT pros want.
- jbigelow76 5y ago
  I'd say the more removed your job as a programmer is from those "posted on HN" or in the FAANGM realm and is more solid enterprisey "Line of Business" type work the GREATER leverage you have in telling an employer to go pound sand if they want to get back to a butts in seats world. We've been full remote for 18 months with only tentative plans to go to a 3/2 office/remote sitch by next year (with team options to go even less in office) and have still had multiple devs leave for 100% guaranteed full time remote roles.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    I don't share your optimism. From what I see in France, there's a ton of competition in "consulting". Not freelance, mind, but body shops renting out developers. The end clients have a tendency to think of those devs as completely interchangeable (that's the main reason they give when asked why they don't hire directly). I have a hard time seeing how telling them to pound sand can have a serious effect, especially since your employer (entity signing your paycheck) is not the same as the entity for whom you actually work. So aggravating a few too many clients might start having adverse effects with your actual employer.
    - jbigelow76 5y ago
      I don't necessarily disagree with anything you say but we are coming from different perspectives of FTE vs "staff aug". My company uses contractors as an FTE pipeline or funnel and by nature they have far less leverage (if they are good they will eventually be offered FTE spots and get more of the "leverage" I mentioned). There's also probably some nuance between the US job market and French job market of which I have no business speaking to. My overall point is, that in the US at least, for middle of the bell curve type talent to solve middle of the bell curve type problems, there is far less talent than there is problems.
chrismorgan 5y ago
> Share of Hacker News job postings mentioning “remote” and “onsite” I’d be interested in another chart considering all postings, not just ones that mention “remote” or “onsite”. I expect the trend would still be visible, but not quite so significant.
- BrissyCoder 5y ago
  Tend to agree. I'm not looking to move but for what it's worth whenever a recruiter HR messages me on LinkedIn I make it very clear that I won't consider jobs that aren't fully remote - just putting that energy out into the universe.
ram_rar 5y ago
Right now companies havent figured out how to handle this situation and are playing along. I'm sure, sooner or later tides will turn and either you'll be roped into coming to office or take a pay cut for working remotely. So enjoy while it last!!
- BrissyCoder 5y ago
  I don't get your reasoning on why you expect that people will have to take a pay cut for working remotely. Would have thought it would be the opposite. Office space, hardware and energy cost a bit.
  - willio58 5y ago
    This will only happen at companies that required people to live in extremely expensive areas like silicone valley. I’m not in that situation, but I’d quit immediately and go somewhere else. For example Google is doing this, there is no reason Google needs to save money on these developers. None at all.
  - hiddencache 5y ago
    Managers cite efficiency losses in terms of communication, team building, training new staff, and idea generation in general. Not my arguments, just what I've seen written...
    - Spare_account 5y ago
      The reasons you've cited ought to be reasons for an employer to require office attendance. If employees are less efficient when working from home, then they shouldn't be offered full-time wfh. As I understand it, the rationale behind offering pay-cuts to full time wfh employees is that the pay cut is relative to the employee's lower cost of living. The employer sees an opportunity to avoid including the cost-of-living salary-uplift that is required to attract people to San Francisco etc.
  - code_duck 5y ago
    It sounded unfair and summer opportunistic to me at first too, since like you say, employers could be saving a lot of money by having you use your house as an office. The rationale that Google is citing is that they pay based on location. They say remote workers will make the same as office workers in the same city, which sounds reasonable.
hiddencache 5y ago
This article probably originated as someone from The Economist looking for a way out of journalism and stumbling across a story...
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I'd hate to go back to working in an office. I live in the countryside now and it's great. However I realise it may not always be so easy. So: - I'm self employed. Foreign companies aren't going to set up a branch office just to employ me. Purchasing my services however is easy. - I've niched down to a business vertical, and I'm starting to niche down more technically as well. No more "I'm a full stack developer with a track record of delivering results across multiple industries". - I write software for the agricultural sector. It's not an industry that tends to cluster as much in big cities. A lot of companies are based in regional areas, and it's not realistic for them to source all the talent they need locally. People are open to networking online. It's not a raging success yet but it's a lot better than working in an office everyday in the city was for me. YMMV if you live in a US tech hub.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  > write software for the agricultural sector. Could you go into more detail? Enterprise software, embedded software, industrial PLC's? Agro is one industry that I would expect quite difficult to work remotely since there is usually some form of physical system that you deploy on a farm. I would be really curious to know more about your gig?
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    Web Apps mostly. There's a lot of IOT systems that capture data from farms & food. Fruit ripeness, water levels, livestock location, livestock weights. So plenty of frontend work required.
- brtkdotse 5y ago
  Point 1 and 2 are right on the money. Being self employed makes it easier for companies abroad to hire you - international invoicing is orders of magnitude easier than international hiring and usually comes from a different budget post. Choosing a business vertical and running with it is the secret sauce to getting ahead. I’ve focused on insurance and pensions and being able to speak the same lingo as the business people on day one has been a game changer.
- 5y ago
robertwt7 5y ago
How long will it last though after the pandemic is open? Would be good to have a company where we can still socialise with colleague like half a week, then I would just travel around while working. Flexibility all the way!
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Regardless of jobs containing "onsite" or "remote", the metric that really matters is - how many people are actually applying... Companies can advertise "onsite" all they want, but from all the stories I've heard about how hard it is to find good developers, and how developers are leaving their work-from-home jobs as soon as they're told to come into the office, you have to draw the conclusion that it's a buyer's market and employers are either going to have to fold to devs, or have their vacant roles stay open for longer than usual.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  This is exactly right. It's not just that the firms can choose among all the world's remote devs, the reverse is also true. I've been turned down when offering remote jobs to devs who found something more attractive, it happens and the market is a two way negotiation.
  - mech422 5y ago
    Yeah - I've stopped in the middle of the interview process when I found out the 'remote' position required 25% (or more travel). Now I just pick up the phone "not interested unless it's 100% WFH"...Doesn't seem to have slowed down the recruiting calls.
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    Also take into account the network effect... Every recruiter that calls me, I'll only pass onto friends if it's remote because I know nobody will even consider onsite. There's a hidden filter effect happening right now that's not being considered.
arwhatever 5y ago
I found plenty of remote opportunities for several years prior to the pandemic just by sticking to my guns, passing and passing and passing on all non-remote opportunities.
- mech422 5y ago
  Ditto - I've been 100% remote/WFH for 20 years now... It just gets easier and easier. Especially if you work with tech that's in high demand.
phil-martin 5y ago
This is unfortunately not the experience I have had in Australia. I looked into a few jobs earlier in the year, and spoke with a few recruiters. Despite the initial remote-friendly job description, it ended up being full time or more, with 1 day work from home a week. I look forward to when remote working is common, with internal processes and culture adapted to suit multiple modes of working.
- InvertedRhodium 5y ago
  That's interesting - I've always found Australia to be more welcoming to remote work than other countries like the US. Both my wife and I have lived in Christchurch, NZ, for the past 6 years now and worked 100% remotely for multiple companies based out of Sydney.
- MrGilbert 5y ago
  ah yeah... Here in Germany, I got offered one day per month.
iblaine 5y ago
Here's a related graph [1] supporting this conclusion, that remote work has recently increased. This graph shows the frequency of "remote" in HN Who's Hiring posts over time. [1] https://iblaine.github.io/assets/images/projects/graph-remote-by-month.png https://iblaine.github.io/assets/images/projects/graph-remot...
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  But: - the count of any word probably increases over time. Need proportion instead. But maybe I misunderstood your graph - “the job is currently remote but you will be expected to work from our office in X in the near future”
  - iblaine 5y ago
    Valid point, that was some hand wavy analysis on my part. Here's a new graph [1] showing the frequency with a denominator. "remote" seems to show up in every post these days, could be something like "no remote" throws this off... [1] https://github.com/iblaine/hn-whoshiring-analysis/blob/main/charts/graph-remote-by-num-posts-by-month.png https://github.com/iblaine/hn-whoshiring-analysis/blob/main/...
phreeza 5y ago
The arguments in this comment section have been rehashed so many times on HN now it is becoming hilarious. Who would have thought that office vs remote is the emacs vs vim of the 2020s.
- adouzzy 5y ago
  We need a evil mode
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    Work from the office but closed off in a meeting room/private office and never talk to anyone in person? Or work remotely but you have to do it from a noisy coffee shop and the company provides a card to buy snacks?
- jacksonkmarley 5y ago
  The ideas may have been covered before, but at least this thread (so far) seems more constructive than some others on this topic that are just alternating chains of 'I like remote', 'but I like the office, so you're wrong', 'but I like remote, so YOU'RE wrong'.
- jstx1 5y ago
  I had my own little but-I-like-the-office rant cached and ready to go as soon as I read the title. Had to stop myself from posting because it really feels like treading water at this point.
- Accacin 5y ago
  Well it's new for a lot of people. I always wanted to work remotely, and overall I do like it but there are certain things I miss that I didn't think I'd miss. People have been given a taste of remote working, and now certain companies are trying to get us back into the office. I can see how that'd spark discussion.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago
mojuba 5y ago
Didn't read the article - no access, just some thoughts: the downward pressure on wages will probably become a norm for WFH. Google has already set a precedent. However, unless it takes another unexpected turn, WFH is win-win-win: companies can save on office space and a bit on reduced salaries too; employees will have a healthier life and the freedom to live in cheaper locations; and finally WFH is good for the environment! Potentially yet another "win" for the companies: some of the unnecessary engineering manager jobs will be eliminated. My impression is that in fully remote companies the opportunities to prove your importance when there's little to none, are limited. The occasional video call situation as opposed to always-in-the-office one means everyone becomes more efficient in communicating things.
- jmfldn 5y ago
  Agree on most counts apart from the efficient communication angle. Purely anecdotal but I find that the number of meetings has grown significantly since constant WFH became the norm. In the past, most meetings required a meeting room whereas now, as long as the meeting organiser can see that most people have an open space in their calendar, a meeting can be arranged. Not an insurmountable problem but I find myself protesting about this regularly.
  - mojuba 5y ago
    I know what you mean, but we can hope it's temporary. Remote work requires some adjustment in work culture. I just thought there's another interesting upside for workers: you are now more flexible in changing jobs since obviously you are no longer tied to the location. So eventually you might find an employer who is more WFH friendly and manages the communication better. And that should put pressure on your existing employer too!
  - anothernewdude 5y ago
    Even in an office, if you want to get work done, you block out your own time.
  - Accacin 5y ago
    We also noticed this. We have added a rule saying that almost all meetings are optional and there's no pressure to go to them (scrum meetings are not optional i.e. daily, refinement and retro). It's helped a lot and helped managers see which meetings weren't found to be helpful.
Cookingboy 5y ago
As preferable as WFH is for many and as productive as many people can be while working remote, at the end of the day, you can't change human nature. There is a reason why companies like Google are doubling down in Silicon Valley real estate. They believe that the best, most innovative type of work are the results of organic discussions and unscheduled, unplanned, casual human interactions. So many cool ideas and new projects were the results of a casual lunch discussion even just random hallway chats. You can't duplicate that with Slack messages or scheduled Zoom meetings. The reason for that isn't because of process or infrastructure deficiency with remote working, it has to do with simple human nature. Even as recently as this summer I've personally seen entire teams get sidelined for important projects because their engineering leadership didn't bother to physically attend an optionally in-person offsite. Guess what, all the most important conversations took place after the Zoom camera was shut off. An entire major initiative came into idea during a casual walk to grab coffee. As long as companies are run by human there will be politics, off the record discussions, darkroom decisions, favoritism, subjective impressions, subconscious biases, and "out of sight, out of mind" selective memories. Again, that's just human nature. A C suite executive at a top tier tech company is driven by the same human nature as a caveman. You can't engineer human nature away with process and you sure as hell can't undo them with technology. Obviously you don't have to care about any of that and there is nothing wrong to focus on other things in life other than work (and many people should), but the inevitable end result will be there will be two categories of workers, even within the same company, if they allow optional remote work. All the best, shiniest projects will be local right under exec’s noses. The "A-team" will be kept close, or just as likely, the ones who stay close/in office will be recognized as the "A-team". I believe there will be a lot of jobs that will be fully remote at first, then companies will lower comp for those jobs and start giving them less sexy/boring/keep the lights on type of work, and then eventually they will be outsourced out or automated away, yes, even for highly paid FAANG software engineers. Edit: Some people have brought up the unique benefits of Slack messages like them being async, and by definition clearer and with better record keeping, etc. By people going back to the office 1 or 2 days a week we aren't going to be dumping Slack or Zoom. They will still serve as nice complements. Edit: Haha I really ruffed some feathers here. I get it, many on HN believe anyone who derive value from in-person interaction are sub-par employees who aren't actually productive. I also do believe that you can have life-long relationships with people without ever hearing their voices or seeing their faces. But I'd just like to remind people that HN is a relative unique group of individuals (even among engineers) that probably prefers dealing with code than dealing with fellow human beings. But the very fact that all of our communication based technology has been progressing to mimic in-person meetings as much as possible (text -> voice -> video -> telepresence -> VR?) says a lot on this subject.
grawprog 5y ago
I dunno, for a group of people who seem to believe you're worth a ridiculous amount of money per hour, think of what your time is worth. You folks that make a living programming off exceedingly decent wages. You don't break your bodies every day, you're not forced to spend all day moving wood and metal, filling bags full of garbage, hauling shit that weighs 50+ lbs all day every day. You just gotta sit and think and come up with solutions to problems. Having done both, I'd fucking far rather receive large amounts of money to sit in front of a computer all day than break myself for $20-$30 an hour. If there's one thing I have to say about computer programmers and their entitlement. Suck it up, take a pay cut and take your free time, you're already overpaid for shit that's not going to kill you and now you get the option to sit at home and work for slightly less money, still more than someone who kills themself every day for a pay cheque.
- arcturus17 5y ago
  > you're already overpaid Assuming that: a) A market such as the dev labor market is fairly efficient, and increasingly so b) Agents on both the supply and demand sides transact freely and uncoerced c) Individual feelings regarding the value of the work being carried out are meaningless There is no thing such as "overpaid".
  - phreeza 5y ago
    I would say over and underpaid both do exist in scenarios where one party has undue/extortive power over the other. They don't exist in a well-functioning labor market.
    - arcturus17 5y ago
      What is extortive power?
      - phreeza 5y ago
        On the employers side it could be something like monopsony where the employee can only chose to work at any wage or starve because no other jobs are available. On the employees side it could be something like a politicians relatives getting high paying job because otherwise the politician will cause problems for the company. Edit: I don't know if I misread your comment or you edited it, but it I think these coercions are covered by it.
can16358p 5y ago
I don't understand why it is NOT the norm already and we still need to have a global crisis like a pandemic to "force" this.
makach 5y ago
Different problems require different solutions. Working from home is here to stay and will probably be much more accepted moving into the future. If it is going to eliminate working in the office, I don't think so. If it will, it will be gradually over many years - and if it does disappear (working in the office) I hope that new devs will find new ways to collaborate that has equal or better benefits. Future is bright!
quanticle 5y ago
The entire article is based off scrapes of HN "Who is Hiring" threads. Why do we think that they're a sufficiently representative sample of the overall software job market?
higeorge13 5y ago
Most HN posts always compare with FAANG jobs and salaries, while there is a whole different world out there. For instance, in Europe and especially low-paid countries in the south or eastern Europe, i foresee zero chance that top talent will stay in their countries to be given low salaries for jobs with local/low impact. These people are already working or looking to work remotely to companies in richer countries (e.g. UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland) and are already profiting for this. I personally switched to a remote-only job and got the biggest raise of my career, with a salary that no local company can match unless we are talking C-level manager position.
- ca01an 5y ago
  I'm curious, what sort of salary range would there be for engineers in your country?
  - _wolfie_ 5y ago
    For Czech republic, based on seniority and skill level I would say between ~$2.5k and ~$7k salary per month before tax. But you lose like a half to the various taxes.
    - SynasterBeiter 5y ago
      That's why you're supposed to be a contractor at that pay level.
      - _wolfie_ 5y ago
        In lot of cases that is illegal. Of course does not mean people do not do it.
        ornornor 5y ago
        It’s illegal if the employer has a local entity and could hire you as an employee and they’re your only gig, but if it’s a foreign company with no way to employ you in your country, what else are you supposed to do? Decline the job because of that? I don’t think that situation would be illegal because there is no legal alternative.
nextlevelwizard 5y ago
I can't wait to get back to the office. I don't have dedicated remote work space and that really eats into my productivity. Also being home and having no external pressure to keep working I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office. (Now someone is going to tell me that this just shows that people need more breaks, but I don't believe that) It also helps with my physical fitness. Now it is super hard to go to the gym in the morning just to come back home. When I commuted to work the gym was just on the way and it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out. Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food. That's extra stress and cognitive pressure that is completely avoided when I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria. And of course other social aspects i.e. since I am already outside it is easier to do other stuff, but when I'm still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Just rent an office space or coworking desk. Problem solved.
  - dagw 5y ago
    Using a significant chunk of my own salary each month to pay for something I used to get for free (and that my employer should provide) hardly seems like the ideal solution.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      I would rather pay a few hundred dollars for a private space and have control over my time/work hours, than be forced to physically commute to an office. Time > money. In my experience, most decent employers have a stipend for co-working anyway.
      - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
        But I already have control over my work hours. I don't have to work 9-5 as long as I work 37.5 hours a week. My commute is at worst 25 minutes with car (at best 15 minutes if no traffic). I can easily get up at 6 go workout for 1-1.5h then drive to work when the morning rush is gone.
peterkelly 5y ago
https://archive.is/qK9Mk https://archive.is/qK9Mk
stepbeek 5y ago
I've worked remotely for four years now and I think the primary advantage for me was being able to have my own - quiet - office. I found working in an open office to be incredibly distracting and the productivity uplift in working in a private home office was significant. I would be more willing to work in an office again if I could be given either a personal office or one shared only with a small number of colleagues.
cwp 5y ago
Once all the furor has subsided and the pandemic ebbs, I think it's safe to say that many companies will got back to in-person collaboration and others will remain remote. It's clear that remote work is feasible, but not everyone enjoys it. Rather than argue the pros and cons, I'm more interested in seeing how distributed organizations will evolve. Slack and Zoom are getting the job done, but they are wearying. Organizations that aren't deliberate in designing their collaboration process will probably spin their wheels a lot. Software development does have more focussed tools for collaboration, like GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Basecamp, Trello, StackOverflow, Figma and so on. So what are remote-first companies doing to improve productivity and minimize coordination overhead? Is it about finding the right modes of communication? Is it about distributing work differently? Is it building shared context to make communication more efficient? I'm aware of (at least some of) the things that companies like GitLab and Automattic have written about their practices. Who else is thinking and writing about this?
- ProZsolt 5y ago
  Zapier wrote an entire book on the subject: https://cdn.zapier.com/storage/learn_ebooks/e4fbeb81f76c0c13b589cd390cb6420b.pdf https://cdn.zapier.com/storage/learn_ebooks/e4fbeb81f76c0c13...
  - cwp 5y ago
    This is great, thanks. I've only read a bit of it, but what leaps out at me is that it's clearly written prepandemic. It assumes its audience only knows in-person work, and remote work is this weird radical thing that only a few companies do. Understandable, as that was true 18 months ago, but wow have things changed! Oddly, I bet it'll be hard or impossible for Zapier to write an updated edition, as they don't know what the pandemic has been like for the rest of us. Heck, I bet the experience of pandemic remote work varies widely.
blazespin 5y ago
WFH works OK, but the majority of staff needs to be WFH. When it's the other way around, I find it just becomes a political nightmare. Office workers band together and it's rather trivial for them to sideline WFH. (eg, lunch / hallway / watercool, etc) Also, it takes awhile for the DNA of company to become WFH. Just sending office drones home rarely works. Ideally it would start out WFH. Likely these big time ceos that talk about going back to the office understand all this and would prefer not to kill their company by completely changing how work is done. No doubt the pandemic was largely a set back in terms of innovation and real (ie, money making) productivity. That said, starting up new teams as purely WFH with new hires and WFH culture is a good way to stick their toes in the water. Don't expect immediate success, however, unless you have some senior / veteran WFH managers with a track record of excellence. It's really a different biz. Even trickier, the products you build will likely reflect the organization and therefore seem alien compared to what you're used to. But it's all good! Everyone is remote (one way or another) these days, so why not have a workforce that reflects that? And, after all, the probability of finding the smartest people in your timezone(+/-) within X miles of your office isn't that great, even in SV / Seattle.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > Office workers band together and it's rather trivial for them to sideline WFH. (eg, lunch / hallway / watercool, etc) What? I mean it is way easier to sideline in a WFH environment. Just send a mail, DM or do a call. WFH does not solve sidelining if that is a problem.
  - blazespin 5y ago
    Well, majority rules. But also working from an office has definite benefits. Whiteboards, people can generally talk / use body language to communicate much faster than chat. Where WFH is superior is a much broader labor pool to pull upon as well as reducing the astronomical amounts of time wastage than can occur in commuting. Also, WFH really benefits companies building distributed projects. I always find it hilarious how people who do this in office don't actually use their own products.
SjorsVG 5y ago
I don't live alone. Having multiple people in the house all joining calls for different jobs around the same time is really impractical. Also I don't have an ergonomic workspace at home. I miss my coworkers and actually leaving the house.
rajeshmr 5y ago
I am pro remote working as i do not see a need for physical presence in office for software professionals. The commute kills my soul, and the pointless dressing up for office chores do not excite me at all. And i have observed that am far more effective / productive working from home than i am working from office and the commute time which got freed up, i can spend with family which is great for me. But i can understand if some would like to work out of office. I guess it is individual preference and i hope in the near future both choices are available to employees with no disparities in pay between remote and office workers since value shouldn’t be determined by location.
DrBazza 5y ago
In London, at least, there's probably two categories of programmers, those with families and modest-to-large houses in the suburbs or further out in the home counties, with long commutes, and those that are without families, living in flats (apartments) in London. The former want to stay remote, the latter, want to go into the office. I'm sure it's an xkcd/meme Venn diagram, but in broad strokes, that's my impression of how the cards have fallen in the UK from speaking to friends and colleagues. There's further overlap with age, too. As home ownership increases with age. So it's the 20-30s want to be back in the office, and the 30+ don't. Again, broad strokes, but that's what I understand from friends, family, even sites like this.
antisol 5y ago
I really wish people would stop posting links to paywalls on HN. You should at least have to mark it as a paywall in the subject so that I don't waste my time accidentally clicking on it.
woutr_be 5y ago
My company (a large multinational bank) (about 100K employees) introduce their "future way of working" back in April. This came after most of our offices in different regions working from home due to covid. Much to my surprise, this was actually pretty well thought out. This new way, would give people the flexibility to choose wether they work from the office or work from home, or even combine both. (They also offered the flexibility to pick your own schedule) Obviously this is all based on the team that you're in. I opted to work from home 5 days per week (since it really made no difference to me anyway), instantly got approved, and received a US$750 one-time payment to buy some home equipment. I feel like this was a great way to handle it, give people the choice what they want to do. Some jobs require being in the office, so those people only got 1 or 2 days working from home. Also everyone who was approved for working from home (even just one day), received that one-time payment of US$750.
- fuzzylama 5y ago
  What is that 750 USD supposed to cover? - Monitor - PC/ laptop - desk - chair ... either one of those things can cost as much as that
  - nickjj 5y ago
    > What is that 750 USD supposed to cover? - Monitor - PC/ laptop - desk - chair ... either one of those things can cost as much as that If I were to guess it's maybe all of those things except the PC / laptop because chances are the company would issue that separately with a $750 budget. My sample size is only 3 based on people I know who have similar deals: - One of them got $2,000 to buy whatever work supplies they wanted but no company computer was included. - Another got $1,000 to buy whatever work supplies they wanted but the company issued a laptop separately (~$2k). - The last one can request any computer related items within reason as long as it's not abused. For the last one that translated to 2 laptops and a few monitors over 7 years but things like a desk and chair aren't included. I'd be curious to see what others have gotten for home office supplies. There's other ancillary things too like internet and phone bills. Companies that go all-in with remote workers often partially help pay those bills too.
legerdemain 5y ago
I used to walk to the office. Now, I need to buy office furniture and use up space in my own apartment, which my partner and I used for something else before. Either that, or rent a desk at a co-working space that I will need to drive to. (I don't own a car yet, but probably will need to buy one soon anyway to pick up groceries and restaurant meals.) I used to eat almost all my meals at work. Meals were subsidized by my company, and they were a lot healthier than restaurant food or takeout. That's several thousand dollars per year of compensation that I'm not getting anymore, not to mention time I didn't use to spend on cooking. Not to mention compensation for gym membership and fitness classes that I'm not getting anymore. The work gym has closed, and I don't have space to set up a decent home gym. After all, I now have to use up space on a home office! Working from home for me has meant losing space in my home, losing free healthy meals daily, and losing my shape. I admire y'all who can stay buff with one left kettlebell and practice breast stroke on the carpet, but I can't, and even if I could, this is a lot worse than what I used to enjoy.
- option_greek 5y ago
  Not directed at you and not a popular opinion but in a way this is good. Companies like FAANG wants to run adult daycares where all the employee needs are taken care of. At some point in life, employees will have to face these issues when they no longer have a job/retired/have kids. This forced WHF has shown people there is life outside of work and work is a way to earn money to keep life flourishing with things that people want to do not the goal in it self. Its like removing VR goggles from someone after long play - a different perspective is forced on everyone.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    Being forced to lose income and benefits is good...? And up is down, no doubt.
brainless 5y ago
Remote work is not for everyone. I am saying this as a remote software engineer for a decade. I don't like offices, I don't like those little gossip corners, I don't like commute. I love to travel, have a small corner at a cafe where no one knows me, put on headphones and work. In the last 14 years I have moved 12 times. It says something about me I had not realized for a while. I build my own small routines, like walking, cleaning the house, cooking, daily grocery. Currently I live in a small Himalayan village and I am starting to build engineering for a super early stage US based startup. Met the founder through On Deck. I love my routine, and I love staying outside socially busy places. I have anxiety issues. Living in a village, people assume I must be a less productive person. My US founder worked with me for a couple weeks and decided it is in best interest if I lead all engineering. She/he is ex Uber, really high caliber person. There are people like me, I have met them, I know them. They all want to live away from busy places and do not like offices.
genezeta 5y ago
I'm doing interviews now and, naturally, the question comes up. Am I looking for a remote position? Would I mind that the position is only partially so? Or that it is fully on-site? Obviously it's just anecdotal data, and I'm in Europe. So take this with a grain of salt, but I'd say: * There has undoubtedly been a big rise in remote positions, but not a huge one. Many of these seem to come from companies willing to hire people living in other cities/countries, given how they write the ads. * A lot do mention that they are most certainly going back to the office soon or soon-ish, or that they have already started going back at least partially. * Many have taken the option of partial remote. Most of these have stricter "2 days per week" or "Mondays on-site, rest of the week at home" rules, but some are still experimenting and are more flexible. * Very few offer the option for the employee to choose, whatever their decision is.
- higeorge13 5y ago
  I am from Europe as well, and did similar searching a few months back. These are not remote jobs. If you are looking for such, you should change your job filter or check websites offering strictly such jobs. Then there is another obstacle: timezone. There are a few remote-only jobs which require you to be on the same country or a couple timezones away (e.g. US-only). Then you need to adapt your scope to your preferred region.
  - genezeta 5y ago
    > These are not remote jobs. If you are looking for such, you should change your job filter or check websites offering strictly such jobs. The point was how jobs in general are becoming or not becoming remote. If I limit my search to remote jobs, then sure, all I will see is remote jobs everywhere.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  I can confirm the anecdotal observation, companies are becoming more open to work from home, but most still have a "at least X/days week in the office" rule, which kind of defeats the main benefit for me as I still have to live close to the office (instead of moving to cheaper parts of the country or event world).
whitepaint 5y ago
Power naps, workouts, travelling / working from different places almost whenever I want. For me, it's just really really much better working remotely. I don't think I'll ever come back from this. And I hope my circumstances will allow me to continue having this luxury.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/qK9Mk https://archive.is/qK9Mk
aussieguy1234 5y ago
Since working remotely, I've been able to take on more challenging projects because the energy saved from the commutes and dealing with office distractions can be put to productive use elsewhere. I moved to Tasmania to work remotely. Weekends are alot more interesting compared to Sydney and that helps with recharging. I've been able to afford a 3 bedroom house for the same as I was paying for a 2 bedroom apartment back in Sydney, with its own dedicated office.
yodsanklai 5y ago
I'm surprised so many people are so angry about the pay cut. Using my company's simulator, the pay cut seems to be at most 15% of the base salary and most likely less than that. In my case, considering cost of living, it would certainly be most advantageous to work remotely. I would save more money and live in a much nicer place.
- rytis 5y ago
  It's not about the actual numbers. It's the WHY. How come the company was ok to pay X when the employee was coming to the office, but now that the same employee is WFH (and thus may be saving some dosh) they are only entitled to 0.85*X? Presumably the said employee was producing a value of Y (where Y may have been > X). Has Y changed? If yes, then it's fair to do the reduction, but I doubt that is the case. It might be ok to lower the salaries of the new hires, but why punish the current employees?
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    Playing the devil's advocate here, why is it OK to pay a developer in India $3000/year when they could command $300,000/year in Silicon Valley? Also, unless they joined within the last year, the current employees signed contracts obliging them to come to work 5 days a week. If they wish to permanently move to working from home in their pajamas for 5 days a week instead, the company is basically saying "Sure, but that will be a 15% paycut because we feel that makes you less valuable to us". You're welcome to disagree with the company's view, but it's not particularly "unfair" to me.
    - truffdog 5y ago
      It isn't OK and has always been wrong.
    - VRay 5y ago
      IMO, it's perfectly fair and fine if they want to take that approach Likewise, if I'm looking at an offer for $350k total compensation from Company X, and $300k from Company Y because they think my time is less valuable when it's remote, I'll probably go with the higher pay Indian engineers who could do a $300k job in the SF Bay Area aren't going to just hang out in India making $3k a year for long.. sooner or later they'll get a lot more of that value they're generating. "This lazy fucking American who fixes the bugs my tests find is making 100x as much money as me??"
globular-toast 5y ago
For me it always was the norm, and it's been great to return to that. I learnt programming in my room on my own. I went to uni, and that was great, but all the cementing of that knowledge was done alone. No distractions. No commute. No special clothes. When I started working I remember being told I was now entering the "real world". Well, after several years of being in the "real world" I now know that it's crap. Returning to work from home reminded me what it's like to actually be productive. Concentration is so important. Not even just for programming. I was speaking to a guy who runs a mobile clutch repair business. He does one clutch a day on people's driveways. He works about 5-6 hours a day, including travel time (so really only 3-4 hours on the job). If you go to a regular garage they'll tell you how big of a job a clutch is and they'll sometimes take multiple days to complete the work. It's because they aren't concentrating. They are chatting with each other, being pulled this way and that into helping with other tasks etc. This is exactly what being in the office was like. For years I was never able to get into the zone.
jimsimmons 5y ago
What bothers me more is that these tech companies aren’t even trying to have a conversation with their employees. If they did a survey and collected opinions from their employees the decision would be pretty trivial. But the managerial gang knows that and they want to side step it. The companies want to pretend they care about the employees. They claim to be giving them perks. In reality, these perks are just gamification to make the employee spend more time in the office. The managerial gang gamified CS careers with silly interviews and performance reviews. They gamified apps and information dispersal. Entire democracies were at stake and nothing changed. WFH won’t ever happen. These managers have to maintain appearances, name drop names and pretend to be “in the know”. Every engineer knows that 90% of these people are like language models regurgitating what they’ve heard. They can’t do that effectively via video. To me this is the most blatant admission of their inability to measure developer productivity.
- digbert 5y ago
  > If they did a survey and collected opinions from their employees the decision would be pretty trivial. I'm not so sure about that. My company recently announced that our offices wouldn't be reopening until at least November, and there was a lot of quite angry pushback from people who are desperate to get back.
  - jimsimmons 5y ago
    I’d be more comfortable with a mandate in such cases, either way. It’s at least evidence based. And like I said, I’d feel part of the conversation. Right now I’m like “I/We need to be back because <blanks out> … “
  - caskstrength 5y ago
    The survey should include "team decides how to work" option, which would probably get majority of votes.
    - smorgusofborg 5y ago
      I'm not sure I would want to manage that. I mean imagine your 2 year search finds the Typescript and Rust DevOps engineer with six sigma black belt who uses Vue is familiar OracleDB and Azure and disagrees with your team's consensus on where one should work? Do they accept the job and get to cause a revote? Are key members of the team now paying more attention to how they might vote than anything else?
throwaway8689 5y ago
I spend quite a lot of time discussing requirements and changes with end users. Because we work across multiple sites it used to take time to organise a meeting needed people could attend. Now we can have shorter, more focussed and timely meetings over video. People who don't need or want to be at a site can join from home. The org already had video conferencing between larger meeting rooms but few people could use it efficiently and there were no support staff on hand.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
There are advantages to having people on site; particularly with juniors. So, I expect a lot of companies will go back to defaulting to mostly on site engineering teams. However, nearly two years of everybody defaulting to remote work has taught companies a few valuable lessons that are changing the industry: - Remote work is not the end of the world. Most software teams found a way to function during the pandemic. That's a lesson both companies and developers learned. - The relevance of on site, in person meetings is still important but not required 100% of the time. Being flexible here enables casting a wider net when hiring. Especially with specialist skills, this is important as convincing people to move to where your office is is hard. People now regard on site, in person meetings as quality time. It's something you put in your calendar because it doesn't happen every day and needs coordinating. - Freelancers can work remotely or on site. However, you pay more for on site as it involves travel and inconveniencing them. The flip side is that if you go with remote freelancers, you are not restricted to your local area and you can engage specialists wherever they are. This was already a thing before covid. All my projects in the last five years we had at least some remote workers and I've been remote myself most of the last eight years. - Having remote people in daily standups (in so far people still bother with those) on a video call has been the default for quite a while in all the places I've worked on site. This being awkward and annoying has made standups less popular over the last five years. We do weekly company wide video calls and lots of video only meetings (1 on 1, or small groups). It's rare for any of that to involve meeting rooms, projection screens, etc. The only proper standups I've attended were while doing the occasional onsite freelancing project. The last of those was a few years ago. - Development processes are adapting. Post-its are no longer part of meetings because remote participants can't read those. All that stuff has long transitioned to issue trackers. Either it's tracked there or it didn't happen. With standups gone as well, that's two nails into the waterfall masquerading as agile style of Scrum that was the sad reality across our industry until Covid. Likewise bull shit bingo with Fibbonacci cards (aka estimation meetings) is no longer a thing. Nor are retrospectives with rooms full of upset people screaming at each other (we've all been there). Scrum was heavily dependent on on-site meetings and juggling lots of bits of paper. The remote/digital forms of all this exists of course but was always a bit awkward. Remotely doing these meetings just leads to remote people muting themselves, turning off their video, and reading HN or doing whatever while people go through the moves of doing everything "by the book". Scrum is just not optimal with remote people involved. What is increasingly replacing scrum is more Kanban like in nature and decouples planning and release (i.e. continuous deployments) heart beats. We plan in sprints but develop and release every day and use asynchronous tools to coordinate. Remote optimized forms of Agile processes look very different than Scrum and a lot more like what big OSS projects have been practicing for decades where scrum was never a thing. - Having remote people is convenient for both companies in highly competitive markets (e.g. the Valley) where talent is scarce and charging very premium rates and companies in remote/rural areas where talent is locally non existent and convincing people to move to you is nearly impossible. These companies now have access to a global pool of workers willing to work remotely. Better still, you pay for the skills and not their on site presence. They might prefer on site but it's simply not an option for many companies. Now that companies have learned they can work with remote people, many of them grudgingly do.
w_t_payne 5y ago
Everyone is different. I've spent three or four years working remotely, and I'd say I do better in an office. I like the routine that it gives me, and I like the human face-to-face contact. I especially like the energetic creative discussions clustered around whiteboards that you never seem to get so much when working from home. Having said that, without endless meetings and distractions, working from home can definitely be a lot more productive ... it's just that after a while (a year or so) I start to feel hollowed out without human company.
vimy 5y ago
When we have VR/AR tech that will make it possible for realistic avatars of people, body language and all, to “appear” in your living room, that’s when WFH will really take off.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Off-topic, but I have a dilemma: I worked in defense until recently so I've never worked from home. How do I not look like a fool in video interviews when everyone else has had time to build a WFH setup?
- adingus 5y ago
  You wont look like a fool. I'm pretty sure most of my coworkers WFH setup consists of their laptop and a mouse.
- magneticnorth 5y ago
  I've just been using the video camera and mic on my Macbook Pro laptop the whole pandemic and I think a lot of my coworkers are the same way. I've certainly interviewed plenty of people on not-high-quality gear and it's no problem, so long as they can clearly hear the questions I ask. Make sure the background of your space is neat, neutral, and not distracting, or use a zoom background. Do you have any friends who can run a mock interview over Zoom for you and provide feedback?
wyclif 5y ago
I have been working remote for five years. I'm an American but I'm living in SE Asia with my wife and two kids, plus extended family. I work for a publishing company that is transitioning to online and I take care of all that for them. Most of the time I deal with PHP/Perl and maintaining news sites. Also, AWS EC2, NGINX, Jenkins, and other issues.
ihatetech 5y ago
This thread proves the cast system on HN. Only rich people can comment on their survivorship bias and any poor person who comments gets treated with disrespect. There is going to be a time when great violence occurs because of this behavior. I look forward to it.
throwaway14356 5y ago
4 years my manager never shows himself, never calls and never sends messages to anyone. I cant tell if he aced it or simply doesnt care to do work. He might be dead for all i know.
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
  Sounds like the perfect job. I've always wanted a job that requires no effort or time.

Hacker News in the News! https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/08/11/for-programmers-remote-working-is-becoming-the-norm https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/08/11/for-prog...

the_cramer 5y ago
I think that some of HN people don't like this. The more popular it gets the less quality (or more mod work) will HN comments have. But since the article is paywalled... maybe it's protecting HN :)
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Indeed I don't want to sound like a 'get out of my lawn' kind of person but I am increasingly noticing an overlap between submissions on HN and posts on r/worldnews. Again I think for the most part the moderators are doing an amazing work but there is definitely a risk of just becoming another frontpage of the internet instead of sticking to the original ethos of submissions about 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity'.
  - dang 5y ago
    Comment about this from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28122734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28122734 From my perspective the baseline is pretty stable but the fluctuation around it has a fairly large amplitude. That makes for phases when certain types of story are more or less represented than others. If there were significantly more worldnews stories now than in years past, I'd be surprised. That's certainly not our intention.
    - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      Indeed I have no real hard data on this, could very well be just a sort of Baader-Meinhof situation where the headlines that are common in both here and r/worldnews end up jumping at me more immediately.

jimbob45 5y ago

I don’t think this is going to last forever but I am trying to take advantage of this remote Pax Romana as long as possible by cramming my big life events in now while my stress and job time commitments are low. I’m certain that either wages will be depressed for remote workers, the jobs will be sent offshore, or companies will recall everyone but there’s a window to be taken advantage of right now. I’ll certainly point my kid toward a less volatile industry at any rate.

adrianN 5y ago
What are less volatile industries with well paying jobs?
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  Dentist. The Medical people seem to pay their blood up front and have the rest of their life set. Am I wrong about this? We seem to not have to pay anything up front, but at the cost of a life long rat race. If you want to talk flexibility, some of these doctors show up to the office like three times a week in the long run.
  - bluebit 5y ago
    That's the last thing I'd direct my kids towards. To spend a third of your waking life digging in people's dirty mouths because of the stable income is how dreams die.
    - hiddencache 5y ago
      Thanks for making me laugh out loud, appreciated.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    That's a good one, but I wonder whether improved dental hygiene practices will severely reduce dentists' incomes in the next decades. At least in my parent's generation all the expensive procedures were caused by poor nutrition and poor dental hygiene during their youth. There is also the possibility that one of those caries vaccines will finally make it to market.

flexie 5y ago

Perhaps jobs posted on HN are not representative of IT jobs in general, but the tendency is clear.

rualca 5y ago
It may not be about representing IT jobs in general, but representing how new IT job openings in general are being presented to prospective applicants to entice them. Those who are stuck in their old job don't tend to have a lot of flexibility to negotiate these changes other than quitting and finding a new job, which nowadays is predominantly remote because that's what IT pros want.
jbigelow76 5y ago
I'd say the more removed your job as a programmer is from those "posted on HN" or in the FAANGM realm and is more solid enterprisey "Line of Business" type work the GREATER leverage you have in telling an employer to go pound sand if they want to get back to a butts in seats world. We've been full remote for 18 months with only tentative plans to go to a 3/2 office/remote sitch by next year (with team options to go even less in office) and have still had multiple devs leave for 100% guaranteed full time remote roles.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I don't share your optimism. From what I see in France, there's a ton of competition in "consulting". Not freelance, mind, but body shops renting out developers. The end clients have a tendency to think of those devs as completely interchangeable (that's the main reason they give when asked why they don't hire directly). I have a hard time seeing how telling them to pound sand can have a serious effect, especially since your employer (entity signing your paycheck) is not the same as the entity for whom you actually work. So aggravating a few too many clients might start having adverse effects with your actual employer.
  - jbigelow76 5y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree with anything you say but we are coming from different perspectives of FTE vs "staff aug". My company uses contractors as an FTE pipeline or funnel and by nature they have far less leverage (if they are good they will eventually be offered FTE spots and get more of the "leverage" I mentioned). There's also probably some nuance between the US job market and French job market of which I have no business speaking to. My overall point is, that in the US at least, for middle of the bell curve type talent to solve middle of the bell curve type problems, there is far less talent than there is problems.

chrismorgan 5y ago

> Share of Hacker News job postings mentioning “remote” and “onsite” I’d be interested in another chart considering all postings, not just ones that mention “remote” or “onsite”. I expect the trend would still be visible, but not quite so significant.

BrissyCoder 5y ago
Tend to agree. I'm not looking to move but for what it's worth whenever a recruiter HR messages me on LinkedIn I make it very clear that I won't consider jobs that aren't fully remote - just putting that energy out into the universe.

ram_rar 5y ago

Right now companies havent figured out how to handle this situation and are playing along. I'm sure, sooner or later tides will turn and either you'll be roped into coming to office or take a pay cut for working remotely. So enjoy while it last!!

BrissyCoder 5y ago
I don't get your reasoning on why you expect that people will have to take a pay cut for working remotely. Would have thought it would be the opposite. Office space, hardware and energy cost a bit.
- willio58 5y ago
  This will only happen at companies that required people to live in extremely expensive areas like silicone valley. I’m not in that situation, but I’d quit immediately and go somewhere else. For example Google is doing this, there is no reason Google needs to save money on these developers. None at all.
- hiddencache 5y ago
  Managers cite efficiency losses in terms of communication, team building, training new staff, and idea generation in general. Not my arguments, just what I've seen written...
  - Spare_account 5y ago
    The reasons you've cited ought to be reasons for an employer to require office attendance. If employees are less efficient when working from home, then they shouldn't be offered full-time wfh. As I understand it, the rationale behind offering pay-cuts to full time wfh employees is that the pay cut is relative to the employee's lower cost of living. The employer sees an opportunity to avoid including the cost-of-living salary-uplift that is required to attract people to San Francisco etc.
- code_duck 5y ago
  It sounded unfair and summer opportunistic to me at first too, since like you say, employers could be saving a lot of money by having you use your house as an office. The rationale that Google is citing is that they pay based on location. They say remote workers will make the same as office workers in the same city, which sounds reasonable.

hiddencache 5y ago

This article probably originated as someone from The Economist looking for a way out of journalism and stumbling across a story...

LAC-Tech 5y ago

I'd hate to go back to working in an office. I live in the countryside now and it's great. However I realise it may not always be so easy. So: - I'm self employed. Foreign companies aren't going to set up a branch office just to employ me. Purchasing my services however is easy. - I've niched down to a business vertical, and I'm starting to niche down more technically as well. No more "I'm a full stack developer with a track record of delivering results across multiple industries". - I write software for the agricultural sector. It's not an industry that tends to cluster as much in big cities. A lot of companies are based in regional areas, and it's not realistic for them to source all the talent they need locally. People are open to networking online. It's not a raging success yet but it's a lot better than working in an office everyday in the city was for me. YMMV if you live in a US tech hub.

DoingIsLearning 5y ago
> write software for the agricultural sector. Could you go into more detail? Enterprise software, embedded software, industrial PLC's? Agro is one industry that I would expect quite difficult to work remotely since there is usually some form of physical system that you deploy on a farm. I would be really curious to know more about your gig?
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  Web Apps mostly. There's a lot of IOT systems that capture data from farms & food. Fruit ripeness, water levels, livestock location, livestock weights. So plenty of frontend work required.
brtkdotse 5y ago
Point 1 and 2 are right on the money. Being self employed makes it easier for companies abroad to hire you - international invoicing is orders of magnitude easier than international hiring and usually comes from a different budget post. Choosing a business vertical and running with it is the secret sauce to getting ahead. I’ve focused on insurance and pensions and being able to speak the same lingo as the business people on day one has been a game changer.
5y ago

robertwt7 5y ago

How long will it last though after the pandemic is open? Would be good to have a company where we can still socialise with colleague like half a week, then I would just travel around while working. Flexibility all the way!

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

Regardless of jobs containing "onsite" or "remote", the metric that really matters is - how many people are actually applying... Companies can advertise "onsite" all they want, but from all the stories I've heard about how hard it is to find good developers, and how developers are leaving their work-from-home jobs as soon as they're told to come into the office, you have to draw the conclusion that it's a buyer's market and employers are either going to have to fold to devs, or have their vacant roles stay open for longer than usual.

lordnacho 5y ago
This is exactly right. It's not just that the firms can choose among all the world's remote devs, the reverse is also true. I've been turned down when offering remote jobs to devs who found something more attractive, it happens and the market is a two way negotiation.
- mech422 5y ago
  Yeah - I've stopped in the middle of the interview process when I found out the 'remote' position required 25% (or more travel). Now I just pick up the phone "not interested unless it's 100% WFH"...Doesn't seem to have slowed down the recruiting calls.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Also take into account the network effect... Every recruiter that calls me, I'll only pass onto friends if it's remote because I know nobody will even consider onsite. There's a hidden filter effect happening right now that's not being considered.

arwhatever 5y ago

I found plenty of remote opportunities for several years prior to the pandemic just by sticking to my guns, passing and passing and passing on all non-remote opportunities.

mech422 5y ago
Ditto - I've been 100% remote/WFH for 20 years now... It just gets easier and easier. Especially if you work with tech that's in high demand.

phil-martin 5y ago

This is unfortunately not the experience I have had in Australia. I looked into a few jobs earlier in the year, and spoke with a few recruiters. Despite the initial remote-friendly job description, it ended up being full time or more, with 1 day work from home a week. I look forward to when remote working is common, with internal processes and culture adapted to suit multiple modes of working.

InvertedRhodium 5y ago
That's interesting - I've always found Australia to be more welcoming to remote work than other countries like the US. Both my wife and I have lived in Christchurch, NZ, for the past 6 years now and worked 100% remotely for multiple companies based out of Sydney.
MrGilbert 5y ago
ah yeah... Here in Germany, I got offered one day per month.

iblaine 5y ago

Here's a related graph [1] supporting this conclusion, that remote work has recently increased. This graph shows the frequency of "remote" in HN Who's Hiring posts over time. [1] https://iblaine.github.io/assets/images/projects/graph-remote-by-month.png https://iblaine.github.io/assets/images/projects/graph-remot...

dan-robertson 5y ago
But: - the count of any word probably increases over time. Need proportion instead. But maybe I misunderstood your graph - “the job is currently remote but you will be expected to work from our office in X in the near future”
- iblaine 5y ago
  Valid point, that was some hand wavy analysis on my part. Here's a new graph [1] showing the frequency with a denominator. "remote" seems to show up in every post these days, could be something like "no remote" throws this off... [1] https://github.com/iblaine/hn-whoshiring-analysis/blob/main/charts/graph-remote-by-num-posts-by-month.png https://github.com/iblaine/hn-whoshiring-analysis/blob/main/...

phreeza 5y ago

The arguments in this comment section have been rehashed so many times on HN now it is becoming hilarious. Who would have thought that office vs remote is the emacs vs vim of the 2020s.

adouzzy 5y ago
We need a evil mode
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  Work from the office but closed off in a meeting room/private office and never talk to anyone in person? Or work remotely but you have to do it from a noisy coffee shop and the company provides a card to buy snacks?
jacksonkmarley 5y ago
The ideas may have been covered before, but at least this thread (so far) seems more constructive than some others on this topic that are just alternating chains of 'I like remote', 'but I like the office, so you're wrong', 'but I like remote, so YOU'RE wrong'.
jstx1 5y ago
I had my own little but-I-like-the-office rant cached and ready to go as soon as I read the title. Had to stop myself from posting because it really feels like treading water at this point.
Accacin 5y ago
Well it's new for a lot of people. I always wanted to work remotely, and overall I do like it but there are certain things I miss that I didn't think I'd miss. People have been given a taste of remote working, and now certain companies are trying to get us back into the office. I can see how that'd spark discussion.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
5y ago

mojuba 5y ago

Didn't read the article - no access, just some thoughts: the downward pressure on wages will probably become a norm for WFH. Google has already set a precedent. However, unless it takes another unexpected turn, WFH is win-win-win: companies can save on office space and a bit on reduced salaries too; employees will have a healthier life and the freedom to live in cheaper locations; and finally WFH is good for the environment! Potentially yet another "win" for the companies: some of the unnecessary engineering manager jobs will be eliminated. My impression is that in fully remote companies the opportunities to prove your importance when there's little to none, are limited. The occasional video call situation as opposed to always-in-the-office one means everyone becomes more efficient in communicating things.

jmfldn 5y ago
Agree on most counts apart from the efficient communication angle. Purely anecdotal but I find that the number of meetings has grown significantly since constant WFH became the norm. In the past, most meetings required a meeting room whereas now, as long as the meeting organiser can see that most people have an open space in their calendar, a meeting can be arranged. Not an insurmountable problem but I find myself protesting about this regularly.
- mojuba 5y ago
  I know what you mean, but we can hope it's temporary. Remote work requires some adjustment in work culture. I just thought there's another interesting upside for workers: you are now more flexible in changing jobs since obviously you are no longer tied to the location. So eventually you might find an employer who is more WFH friendly and manages the communication better. And that should put pressure on your existing employer too!
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  Even in an office, if you want to get work done, you block out your own time.
- Accacin 5y ago
  We also noticed this. We have added a rule saying that almost all meetings are optional and there's no pressure to go to them (scrum meetings are not optional i.e. daily, refinement and retro). It's helped a lot and helped managers see which meetings weren't found to be helpful.

Cookingboy 5y ago

As preferable as WFH is for many and as productive as many people can be while working remote, at the end of the day, you can't change human nature. There is a reason why companies like Google are doubling down in Silicon Valley real estate. They believe that the best, most innovative type of work are the results of organic discussions and unscheduled, unplanned, casual human interactions. So many cool ideas and new projects were the results of a casual lunch discussion even just random hallway chats. You can't duplicate that with Slack messages or scheduled Zoom meetings. The reason for that isn't because of process or infrastructure deficiency with remote working, it has to do with simple human nature. Even as recently as this summer I've personally seen entire teams get sidelined for important projects because their engineering leadership didn't bother to physically attend an optionally in-person offsite. Guess what, all the most important conversations took place after the Zoom camera was shut off. An entire major initiative came into idea during a casual walk to grab coffee. As long as companies are run by human there will be politics, off the record discussions, darkroom decisions, favoritism, subjective impressions, subconscious biases, and "out of sight, out of mind" selective memories. Again, that's just human nature. A C suite executive at a top tier tech company is driven by the same human nature as a caveman. You can't engineer human nature away with process and you sure as hell can't undo them with technology. Obviously you don't have to care about any of that and there is nothing wrong to focus on other things in life other than work (and many people should), but the inevitable end result will be there will be two categories of workers, even within the same company, if they allow optional remote work. All the best, shiniest projects will be local right under exec’s noses. The "A-team" will be kept close, or just as likely, the ones who stay close/in office will be recognized as the "A-team". I believe there will be a lot of jobs that will be fully remote at first, then companies will lower comp for those jobs and start giving them less sexy/boring/keep the lights on type of work, and then eventually they will be outsourced out or automated away, yes, even for highly paid FAANG software engineers. Edit: Some people have brought up the unique benefits of Slack messages like them being async, and by definition clearer and with better record keeping, etc. By people going back to the office 1 or 2 days a week we aren't going to be dumping Slack or Zoom. They will still serve as nice complements. Edit: Haha I really ruffed some feathers here. I get it, many on HN believe anyone who derive value from in-person interaction are sub-par employees who aren't actually productive. I also do believe that you can have life-long relationships with people without ever hearing their voices or seeing their faces. But I'd just like to remind people that HN is a relative unique group of individuals (even among engineers) that probably prefers dealing with code than dealing with fellow human beings. But the very fact that all of our communication based technology has been progressing to mimic in-person meetings as much as possible (text -> voice -> video -> telepresence -> VR?) says a lot on this subject.

grawprog 5y ago

I dunno, for a group of people who seem to believe you're worth a ridiculous amount of money per hour, think of what your time is worth. You folks that make a living programming off exceedingly decent wages. You don't break your bodies every day, you're not forced to spend all day moving wood and metal, filling bags full of garbage, hauling shit that weighs 50+ lbs all day every day. You just gotta sit and think and come up with solutions to problems. Having done both, I'd fucking far rather receive large amounts of money to sit in front of a computer all day than break myself for $20-$30 an hour. If there's one thing I have to say about computer programmers and their entitlement. Suck it up, take a pay cut and take your free time, you're already overpaid for shit that's not going to kill you and now you get the option to sit at home and work for slightly less money, still more than someone who kills themself every day for a pay cheque.

arcturus17 5y ago
> you're already overpaid Assuming that: a) A market such as the dev labor market is fairly efficient, and increasingly so b) Agents on both the supply and demand sides transact freely and uncoerced c) Individual feelings regarding the value of the work being carried out are meaningless There is no thing such as "overpaid".
- phreeza 5y ago
  I would say over and underpaid both do exist in scenarios where one party has undue/extortive power over the other. They don't exist in a well-functioning labor market.
  - arcturus17 5y ago
    What is extortive power?
    - phreeza 5y ago
      On the employers side it could be something like monopsony where the employee can only chose to work at any wage or starve because no other jobs are available. On the employees side it could be something like a politicians relatives getting high paying job because otherwise the politician will cause problems for the company. Edit: I don't know if I misread your comment or you edited it, but it I think these coercions are covered by it.

can16358p 5y ago

I don't understand why it is NOT the norm already and we still need to have a global crisis like a pandemic to "force" this.

makach 5y ago

Different problems require different solutions. Working from home is here to stay and will probably be much more accepted moving into the future. If it is going to eliminate working in the office, I don't think so. If it will, it will be gradually over many years - and if it does disappear (working in the office) I hope that new devs will find new ways to collaborate that has equal or better benefits. Future is bright!

quanticle 5y ago

The entire article is based off scrapes of HN "Who is Hiring" threads. Why do we think that they're a sufficiently representative sample of the overall software job market?

higeorge13 5y ago

Most HN posts always compare with FAANG jobs and salaries, while there is a whole different world out there. For instance, in Europe and especially low-paid countries in the south or eastern Europe, i foresee zero chance that top talent will stay in their countries to be given low salaries for jobs with local/low impact. These people are already working or looking to work remotely to companies in richer countries (e.g. UK, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland) and are already profiting for this. I personally switched to a remote-only job and got the biggest raise of my career, with a salary that no local company can match unless we are talking C-level manager position.

ca01an 5y ago
I'm curious, what sort of salary range would there be for engineers in your country?
- _wolfie_ 5y ago
  For Czech republic, based on seniority and skill level I would say between ~$2.5k and ~$7k salary per month before tax. But you lose like a half to the various taxes.
  - SynasterBeiter 5y ago
    That's why you're supposed to be a contractor at that pay level.
    - _wolfie_ 5y ago
      In lot of cases that is illegal. Of course does not mean people do not do it.
      - ornornor 5y ago
        It’s illegal if the employer has a local entity and could hire you as an employee and they’re your only gig, but if it’s a foreign company with no way to employ you in your country, what else are you supposed to do? Decline the job because of that? I don’t think that situation would be illegal because there is no legal alternative.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago

I can't wait to get back to the office. I don't have dedicated remote work space and that really eats into my productivity. Also being home and having no external pressure to keep working I can already see any breaks people tend to take are way longer than what they would take at the office. (Now someone is going to tell me that this just shows that people need more breaks, but I don't believe that) It also helps with my physical fitness. Now it is super hard to go to the gym in the morning just to come back home. When I commuted to work the gym was just on the way and it was easy to get out of the bed and go work out. Food is also big draw. Now I have to worry about what I eat every day and make my food. That's extra stress and cognitive pressure that is completely avoided when I get to just eat lunch from office's cafeteria. And of course other social aspects i.e. since I am already outside it is easier to do other stuff, but when I'm still in my underpants at home after work it is way harder to dress up and go do stuff.

ceilingcorner 5y ago
Just rent an office space or coworking desk. Problem solved.
- dagw 5y ago
  Using a significant chunk of my own salary each month to pay for something I used to get for free (and that my employer should provide) hardly seems like the ideal solution.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    I would rather pay a few hundred dollars for a private space and have control over my time/work hours, than be forced to physically commute to an office. Time > money. In my experience, most decent employers have a stipend for co-working anyway.
    - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
      But I already have control over my work hours. I don't have to work 9-5 as long as I work 37.5 hours a week. My commute is at worst 25 minutes with car (at best 15 minutes if no traffic). I can easily get up at 6 go workout for 1-1.5h then drive to work when the morning rush is gone.

peterkelly 5y ago

https://archive.is/qK9Mk https://archive.is/qK9Mk

stepbeek 5y ago

I've worked remotely for four years now and I think the primary advantage for me was being able to have my own - quiet - office. I found working in an open office to be incredibly distracting and the productivity uplift in working in a private home office was significant. I would be more willing to work in an office again if I could be given either a personal office or one shared only with a small number of colleagues.

cwp 5y ago

Once all the furor has subsided and the pandemic ebbs, I think it's safe to say that many companies will got back to in-person collaboration and others will remain remote. It's clear that remote work is feasible, but not everyone enjoys it. Rather than argue the pros and cons, I'm more interested in seeing how distributed organizations will evolve. Slack and Zoom are getting the job done, but they are wearying. Organizations that aren't deliberate in designing their collaboration process will probably spin their wheels a lot. Software development does have more focussed tools for collaboration, like GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Basecamp, Trello, StackOverflow, Figma and so on. So what are remote-first companies doing to improve productivity and minimize coordination overhead? Is it about finding the right modes of communication? Is it about distributing work differently? Is it building shared context to make communication more efficient? I'm aware of (at least some of) the things that companies like GitLab and Automattic have written about their practices. Who else is thinking and writing about this?

ProZsolt 5y ago
Zapier wrote an entire book on the subject: https://cdn.zapier.com/storage/learn_ebooks/e4fbeb81f76c0c13b589cd390cb6420b.pdf https://cdn.zapier.com/storage/learn_ebooks/e4fbeb81f76c0c13...
- cwp 5y ago
  This is great, thanks. I've only read a bit of it, but what leaps out at me is that it's clearly written prepandemic. It assumes its audience only knows in-person work, and remote work is this weird radical thing that only a few companies do. Understandable, as that was true 18 months ago, but wow have things changed! Oddly, I bet it'll be hard or impossible for Zapier to write an updated edition, as they don't know what the pandemic has been like for the rest of us. Heck, I bet the experience of pandemic remote work varies widely.

blazespin 5y ago

WFH works OK, but the majority of staff needs to be WFH. When it's the other way around, I find it just becomes a political nightmare. Office workers band together and it's rather trivial for them to sideline WFH. (eg, lunch / hallway / watercool, etc) Also, it takes awhile for the DNA of company to become WFH. Just sending office drones home rarely works. Ideally it would start out WFH. Likely these big time ceos that talk about going back to the office understand all this and would prefer not to kill their company by completely changing how work is done. No doubt the pandemic was largely a set back in terms of innovation and real (ie, money making) productivity. That said, starting up new teams as purely WFH with new hires and WFH culture is a good way to stick their toes in the water. Don't expect immediate success, however, unless you have some senior / veteran WFH managers with a track record of excellence. It's really a different biz. Even trickier, the products you build will likely reflect the organization and therefore seem alien compared to what you're used to. But it's all good! Everyone is remote (one way or another) these days, so why not have a workforce that reflects that? And, after all, the probability of finding the smartest people in your timezone(+/-) within X miles of your office isn't that great, even in SV / Seattle.

rightbyte 5y ago
> Office workers band together and it's rather trivial for them to sideline WFH. (eg, lunch / hallway / watercool, etc) What? I mean it is way easier to sideline in a WFH environment. Just send a mail, DM or do a call. WFH does not solve sidelining if that is a problem.
- blazespin 5y ago
  Well, majority rules. But also working from an office has definite benefits. Whiteboards, people can generally talk / use body language to communicate much faster than chat. Where WFH is superior is a much broader labor pool to pull upon as well as reducing the astronomical amounts of time wastage than can occur in commuting. Also, WFH really benefits companies building distributed projects. I always find it hilarious how people who do this in office don't actually use their own products.

SjorsVG 5y ago

I don't live alone. Having multiple people in the house all joining calls for different jobs around the same time is really impractical. Also I don't have an ergonomic workspace at home. I miss my coworkers and actually leaving the house.

rajeshmr 5y ago

I am pro remote working as i do not see a need for physical presence in office for software professionals. The commute kills my soul, and the pointless dressing up for office chores do not excite me at all. And i have observed that am far more effective / productive working from home than i am working from office and the commute time which got freed up, i can spend with family which is great for me. But i can understand if some would like to work out of office. I guess it is individual preference and i hope in the near future both choices are available to employees with no disparities in pay between remote and office workers since value shouldn’t be determined by location.

DrBazza 5y ago

In London, at least, there's probably two categories of programmers, those with families and modest-to-large houses in the suburbs or further out in the home counties, with long commutes, and those that are without families, living in flats (apartments) in London. The former want to stay remote, the latter, want to go into the office. I'm sure it's an xkcd/meme Venn diagram, but in broad strokes, that's my impression of how the cards have fallen in the UK from speaking to friends and colleagues. There's further overlap with age, too. As home ownership increases with age. So it's the 20-30s want to be back in the office, and the 30+ don't. Again, broad strokes, but that's what I understand from friends, family, even sites like this.

antisol 5y ago

I really wish people would stop posting links to paywalls on HN. You should at least have to mark it as a paywall in the subject so that I don't waste my time accidentally clicking on it.

woutr_be 5y ago

My company (a large multinational bank) (about 100K employees) introduce their "future way of working" back in April. This came after most of our offices in different regions working from home due to covid. Much to my surprise, this was actually pretty well thought out. This new way, would give people the flexibility to choose wether they work from the office or work from home, or even combine both. (They also offered the flexibility to pick your own schedule) Obviously this is all based on the team that you're in. I opted to work from home 5 days per week (since it really made no difference to me anyway), instantly got approved, and received a US$750 one-time payment to buy some home equipment. I feel like this was a great way to handle it, give people the choice what they want to do. Some jobs require being in the office, so those people only got 1 or 2 days working from home. Also everyone who was approved for working from home (even just one day), received that one-time payment of US$750.

fuzzylama 5y ago
What is that 750 USD supposed to cover? - Monitor - PC/ laptop - desk - chair ... either one of those things can cost as much as that
- nickjj 5y ago
  > What is that 750 USD supposed to cover? - Monitor - PC/ laptop - desk - chair ... either one of those things can cost as much as that If I were to guess it's maybe all of those things except the PC / laptop because chances are the company would issue that separately with a $750 budget. My sample size is only 3 based on people I know who have similar deals: - One of them got $2,000 to buy whatever work supplies they wanted but no company computer was included. - Another got $1,000 to buy whatever work supplies they wanted but the company issued a laptop separately (~$2k). - The last one can request any computer related items within reason as long as it's not abused. For the last one that translated to 2 laptops and a few monitors over 7 years but things like a desk and chair aren't included. I'd be curious to see what others have gotten for home office supplies. There's other ancillary things too like internet and phone bills. Companies that go all-in with remote workers often partially help pay those bills too.

legerdemain 5y ago

I used to walk to the office. Now, I need to buy office furniture and use up space in my own apartment, which my partner and I used for something else before. Either that, or rent a desk at a co-working space that I will need to drive to. (I don't own a car yet, but probably will need to buy one soon anyway to pick up groceries and restaurant meals.) I used to eat almost all my meals at work. Meals were subsidized by my company, and they were a lot healthier than restaurant food or takeout. That's several thousand dollars per year of compensation that I'm not getting anymore, not to mention time I didn't use to spend on cooking. Not to mention compensation for gym membership and fitness classes that I'm not getting anymore. The work gym has closed, and I don't have space to set up a decent home gym. After all, I now have to use up space on a home office! Working from home for me has meant losing space in my home, losing free healthy meals daily, and losing my shape. I admire y'all who can stay buff with one left kettlebell and practice breast stroke on the carpet, but I can't, and even if I could, this is a lot worse than what I used to enjoy.

option_greek 5y ago
Not directed at you and not a popular opinion but in a way this is good. Companies like FAANG wants to run adult daycares where all the employee needs are taken care of. At some point in life, employees will have to face these issues when they no longer have a job/retired/have kids. This forced WHF has shown people there is life outside of work and work is a way to earn money to keep life flourishing with things that people want to do not the goal in it self. Its like removing VR goggles from someone after long play - a different perspective is forced on everyone.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  Being forced to lose income and benefits is good...? And up is down, no doubt.

brainless 5y ago

Remote work is not for everyone. I am saying this as a remote software engineer for a decade. I don't like offices, I don't like those little gossip corners, I don't like commute. I love to travel, have a small corner at a cafe where no one knows me, put on headphones and work. In the last 14 years I have moved 12 times. It says something about me I had not realized for a while. I build my own small routines, like walking, cleaning the house, cooking, daily grocery. Currently I live in a small Himalayan village and I am starting to build engineering for a super early stage US based startup. Met the founder through On Deck. I love my routine, and I love staying outside socially busy places. I have anxiety issues. Living in a village, people assume I must be a less productive person. My US founder worked with me for a couple weeks and decided it is in best interest if I lead all engineering. She/he is ex Uber, really high caliber person. There are people like me, I have met them, I know them. They all want to live away from busy places and do not like offices.

genezeta 5y ago

I'm doing interviews now and, naturally, the question comes up. Am I looking for a remote position? Would I mind that the position is only partially so? Or that it is fully on-site? Obviously it's just anecdotal data, and I'm in Europe. So take this with a grain of salt, but I'd say: * There has undoubtedly been a big rise in remote positions, but not a huge one. Many of these seem to come from companies willing to hire people living in other cities/countries, given how they write the ads. * A lot do mention that they are most certainly going back to the office soon or soon-ish, or that they have already started going back at least partially. * Many have taken the option of partial remote. Most of these have stricter "2 days per week" or "Mondays on-site, rest of the week at home" rules, but some are still experimenting and are more flexible. * Very few offer the option for the employee to choose, whatever their decision is.

higeorge13 5y ago
I am from Europe as well, and did similar searching a few months back. These are not remote jobs. If you are looking for such, you should change your job filter or check websites offering strictly such jobs. Then there is another obstacle: timezone. There are a few remote-only jobs which require you to be on the same country or a couple timezones away (e.g. US-only). Then you need to adapt your scope to your preferred region.
- genezeta 5y ago
  > These are not remote jobs. If you are looking for such, you should change your job filter or check websites offering strictly such jobs. The point was how jobs in general are becoming or not becoming remote. If I limit my search to remote jobs, then sure, all I will see is remote jobs everywhere.
littlecranky67 5y ago
I can confirm the anecdotal observation, companies are becoming more open to work from home, but most still have a "at least X/days week in the office" rule, which kind of defeats the main benefit for me as I still have to live close to the office (instead of moving to cheaper parts of the country or event world).

whitepaint 5y ago

Power naps, workouts, travelling / working from different places almost whenever I want. For me, it's just really really much better working remotely. I don't think I'll ever come back from this. And I hope my circumstances will allow me to continue having this luxury.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/qK9Mk https://archive.is/qK9Mk

aussieguy1234 5y ago

Since working remotely, I've been able to take on more challenging projects because the energy saved from the commutes and dealing with office distractions can be put to productive use elsewhere. I moved to Tasmania to work remotely. Weekends are alot more interesting compared to Sydney and that helps with recharging. I've been able to afford a 3 bedroom house for the same as I was paying for a 2 bedroom apartment back in Sydney, with its own dedicated office.

yodsanklai 5y ago

I'm surprised so many people are so angry about the pay cut. Using my company's simulator, the pay cut seems to be at most 15% of the base salary and most likely less than that. In my case, considering cost of living, it would certainly be most advantageous to work remotely. I would save more money and live in a much nicer place.

rytis 5y ago
It's not about the actual numbers. It's the WHY. How come the company was ok to pay X when the employee was coming to the office, but now that the same employee is WFH (and thus may be saving some dosh) they are only entitled to 0.85*X? Presumably the said employee was producing a value of Y (where Y may have been > X). Has Y changed? If yes, then it's fair to do the reduction, but I doubt that is the case. It might be ok to lower the salaries of the new hires, but why punish the current employees?
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Playing the devil's advocate here, why is it OK to pay a developer in India $3000/year when they could command $300,000/year in Silicon Valley? Also, unless they joined within the last year, the current employees signed contracts obliging them to come to work 5 days a week. If they wish to permanently move to working from home in their pajamas for 5 days a week instead, the company is basically saying "Sure, but that will be a 15% paycut because we feel that makes you less valuable to us". You're welcome to disagree with the company's view, but it's not particularly "unfair" to me.
  - truffdog 5y ago
    It isn't OK and has always been wrong.
  - VRay 5y ago
    IMO, it's perfectly fair and fine if they want to take that approach Likewise, if I'm looking at an offer for $350k total compensation from Company X, and $300k from Company Y because they think my time is less valuable when it's remote, I'll probably go with the higher pay Indian engineers who could do a $300k job in the SF Bay Area aren't going to just hang out in India making $3k a year for long.. sooner or later they'll get a lot more of that value they're generating. "This lazy fucking American who fixes the bugs my tests find is making 100x as much money as me??"

globular-toast 5y ago

For me it always was the norm, and it's been great to return to that. I learnt programming in my room on my own. I went to uni, and that was great, but all the cementing of that knowledge was done alone. No distractions. No commute. No special clothes. When I started working I remember being told I was now entering the "real world". Well, after several years of being in the "real world" I now know that it's crap. Returning to work from home reminded me what it's like to actually be productive. Concentration is so important. Not even just for programming. I was speaking to a guy who runs a mobile clutch repair business. He does one clutch a day on people's driveways. He works about 5-6 hours a day, including travel time (so really only 3-4 hours on the job). If you go to a regular garage they'll tell you how big of a job a clutch is and they'll sometimes take multiple days to complete the work. It's because they aren't concentrating. They are chatting with each other, being pulled this way and that into helping with other tasks etc. This is exactly what being in the office was like. For years I was never able to get into the zone.

jimsimmons 5y ago

What bothers me more is that these tech companies aren’t even trying to have a conversation with their employees. If they did a survey and collected opinions from their employees the decision would be pretty trivial. But the managerial gang knows that and they want to side step it. The companies want to pretend they care about the employees. They claim to be giving them perks. In reality, these perks are just gamification to make the employee spend more time in the office. The managerial gang gamified CS careers with silly interviews and performance reviews. They gamified apps and information dispersal. Entire democracies were at stake and nothing changed. WFH won’t ever happen. These managers have to maintain appearances, name drop names and pretend to be “in the know”. Every engineer knows that 90% of these people are like language models regurgitating what they’ve heard. They can’t do that effectively via video. To me this is the most blatant admission of their inability to measure developer productivity.

digbert 5y ago
> If they did a survey and collected opinions from their employees the decision would be pretty trivial. I'm not so sure about that. My company recently announced that our offices wouldn't be reopening until at least November, and there was a lot of quite angry pushback from people who are desperate to get back.
- jimsimmons 5y ago
  I’d be more comfortable with a mandate in such cases, either way. It’s at least evidence based. And like I said, I’d feel part of the conversation. Right now I’m like “I/We need to be back because <blanks out> … “
- caskstrength 5y ago
  The survey should include "team decides how to work" option, which would probably get majority of votes.
  - smorgusofborg 5y ago
    I'm not sure I would want to manage that. I mean imagine your 2 year search finds the Typescript and Rust DevOps engineer with six sigma black belt who uses Vue is familiar OracleDB and Azure and disagrees with your team's consensus on where one should work? Do they accept the job and get to cause a revote? Are key members of the team now paying more attention to how they might vote than anything else?

throwaway8689 5y ago

I spend quite a lot of time discussing requirements and changes with end users. Because we work across multiple sites it used to take time to organise a meeting needed people could attend. Now we can have shorter, more focussed and timely meetings over video. People who don't need or want to be at a site can join from home. The org already had video conferencing between larger meeting rooms but few people could use it efficiently and there were no support staff on hand.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

There are advantages to having people on site; particularly with juniors. So, I expect a lot of companies will go back to defaulting to mostly on site engineering teams. However, nearly two years of everybody defaulting to remote work has taught companies a few valuable lessons that are changing the industry: - Remote work is not the end of the world. Most software teams found a way to function during the pandemic. That's a lesson both companies and developers learned. - The relevance of on site, in person meetings is still important but not required 100% of the time. Being flexible here enables casting a wider net when hiring. Especially with specialist skills, this is important as convincing people to move to where your office is is hard. People now regard on site, in person meetings as quality time. It's something you put in your calendar because it doesn't happen every day and needs coordinating. - Freelancers can work remotely or on site. However, you pay more for on site as it involves travel and inconveniencing them. The flip side is that if you go with remote freelancers, you are not restricted to your local area and you can engage specialists wherever they are. This was already a thing before covid. All my projects in the last five years we had at least some remote workers and I've been remote myself most of the last eight years. - Having remote people in daily standups (in so far people still bother with those) on a video call has been the default for quite a while in all the places I've worked on site. This being awkward and annoying has made standups less popular over the last five years. We do weekly company wide video calls and lots of video only meetings (1 on 1, or small groups). It's rare for any of that to involve meeting rooms, projection screens, etc. The only proper standups I've attended were while doing the occasional onsite freelancing project. The last of those was a few years ago. - Development processes are adapting. Post-its are no longer part of meetings because remote participants can't read those. All that stuff has long transitioned to issue trackers. Either it's tracked there or it didn't happen. With standups gone as well, that's two nails into the waterfall masquerading as agile style of Scrum that was the sad reality across our industry until Covid. Likewise bull shit bingo with Fibbonacci cards (aka estimation meetings) is no longer a thing. Nor are retrospectives with rooms full of upset people screaming at each other (we've all been there). Scrum was heavily dependent on on-site meetings and juggling lots of bits of paper. The remote/digital forms of all this exists of course but was always a bit awkward. Remotely doing these meetings just leads to remote people muting themselves, turning off their video, and reading HN or doing whatever while people go through the moves of doing everything "by the book". Scrum is just not optimal with remote people involved. What is increasingly replacing scrum is more Kanban like in nature and decouples planning and release (i.e. continuous deployments) heart beats. We plan in sprints but develop and release every day and use asynchronous tools to coordinate. Remote optimized forms of Agile processes look very different than Scrum and a lot more like what big OSS projects have been practicing for decades where scrum was never a thing. - Having remote people is convenient for both companies in highly competitive markets (e.g. the Valley) where talent is scarce and charging very premium rates and companies in remote/rural areas where talent is locally non existent and convincing people to move to you is nearly impossible. These companies now have access to a global pool of workers willing to work remotely. Better still, you pay for the skills and not their on site presence. They might prefer on site but it's simply not an option for many companies. Now that companies have learned they can work with remote people, many of them grudgingly do.

w_t_payne 5y ago

Everyone is different. I've spent three or four years working remotely, and I'd say I do better in an office. I like the routine that it gives me, and I like the human face-to-face contact. I especially like the energetic creative discussions clustered around whiteboards that you never seem to get so much when working from home. Having said that, without endless meetings and distractions, working from home can definitely be a lot more productive ... it's just that after a while (a year or so) I start to feel hollowed out without human company.

vimy 5y ago

When we have VR/AR tech that will make it possible for realistic avatars of people, body language and all, to “appear” in your living room, that’s when WFH will really take off.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Off-topic, but I have a dilemma: I worked in defense until recently so I've never worked from home. How do I not look like a fool in video interviews when everyone else has had time to build a WFH setup?

adingus 5y ago
You wont look like a fool. I'm pretty sure most of my coworkers WFH setup consists of their laptop and a mouse.
magneticnorth 5y ago
I've just been using the video camera and mic on my Macbook Pro laptop the whole pandemic and I think a lot of my coworkers are the same way. I've certainly interviewed plenty of people on not-high-quality gear and it's no problem, so long as they can clearly hear the questions I ask. Make sure the background of your space is neat, neutral, and not distracting, or use a zoom background. Do you have any friends who can run a mock interview over Zoom for you and provide feedback?

wyclif 5y ago

I have been working remote for five years. I'm an American but I'm living in SE Asia with my wife and two kids, plus extended family. I work for a publishing company that is transitioning to online and I take care of all that for them. Most of the time I deal with PHP/Perl and maintaining news sites. Also, AWS EC2, NGINX, Jenkins, and other issues.

ihatetech 5y ago

This thread proves the cast system on HN. Only rich people can comment on their survivorship bias and any poor person who comments gets treated with disrespect. There is going to be a time when great violence occurs because of this behavior. I look forward to it.

throwaway14356 5y ago

4 years my manager never shows himself, never calls and never sends messages to anyone. I cant tell if he aced it or simply doesnt care to do work. He might be dead for all i know.

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
Sounds like the perfect job. I've always wanted a job that requires no effort or time.