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It's funny that no one wants to admit that Covid-19 was the forcing function for shifting to remote wholesale. I have many peers who have been fighting for inte

It's funny that no one wants to admit that Covid-19 was the forcing function for shifting to remote wholesale. I have many peers who have been fighting for internal accessibility of working remotely, most of whom gave up and jumped ship. I even know a few people who left Stripe in 2019 due to their inflexible remote work policies. So to now come out and say "look at all the remote hiring we're doing" sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, because you have no choice! The talent has realized they have all the cards and bargaining power in terms of remote work right now. Anyone who is fighting to return to the office is missing the point. We should all be striving to unlock permanent mobility within our professions.

ironmagma 5y ago
This is the cynical view. Remember, the reason anyone is looking for work is because they have to work, too. One could go so far as to say the entire human enterprise is carried out by force.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > the entire human enterprise is carried out by force This is true not because we are human, but because we are living things.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    Only according to the pessimist. It’s arguably less true for humans than for other living things. I can end my life at any point. “The whole world is made of people who didn’t kill themselves today. Life can get very difficult, very sad, very upsetting… but you don’t have to do it. You really don’t have to do it… because you can kill yourself.” Louis CK Any bad thing I have to do, I am putting myself through. Agency is freeing.
jdreaver 5y ago
Interesting, I know folks at Stripe that have been remote since around or before 2019, and one of the reasons I joined Stripe was because of the fantastic remote policies (hint: they are awesome). I wonder if 2019 was a tipping point for remote work at Stripe? The other large companies I've interviewed at for the past couple years definitely felt like they tacked on remote work because of COVID, and I wasn't confident it would last once the pandemic calmed down.
almost_usual 5y ago
Sometimes you need a forcing function for change.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> It's funny that no one wants to admit that Covid-19 was the forcing function for shifting to remote wholesale. On the contrary, I feel like HN has a hard time admitting that remote work didn’t conquer the workplace like we were told it would at the beginning of the pandemic. Finding remote jobs is definitely a little bit easier now, but actually getting those jobs seems to be even harder than ever now that everybody is competing for them. Some companies are embracing remote, but it seems many more are eager to get back to in-office work as soon as reasonable.
- ecshafer 5y ago
  The standard corporate fortune 500 types are pushing very very heavily to go back to the office. In my experience, this seems to be driven majorly by the executives and managers. I believe this is because in so many of these large companies the managers and executives spend so much of their time in constant meetings, which is better in person. In person you sit around in a nice office, you talk with people, and do your power points. Remote you stare at a zoom call with no cameras on and talk and people occasionally talk back. These companies also seem very set in their ways and don't try and change to figure out how to work remotely better. I recently left one of these companies not long ago and these seem to be ring true from similar corps. I am seeing a lot more smaller tech companies and smaller firms that are embracing remote. The small companies where there aren't multiple layers of management, where cancelling an office lease is a big improvement to the owner. They are going remote. I also took a remote tech job, and it seems more innovative companies are embracing remote. My prediction, which may be wrong, is that traditional companies that go back into the office are going to face strong attrition to remote companies. And companies that go remote are also going to get a huge benefit in talent. I know a lot of really great engineers that do not want to move to SF/Seattle/NYC/Boston. There are great engineers in small towns and cities that like to live near friends and family, and get good salaries for the area (that are lower than big companies). These people are going to go to the remote first companies, leave their old stodgy companies. This is a huge boon for companies that are willing to take it.
  - RestlessMind 5y ago
    > My prediction is that traditional companies that go back into the office are going to face strong attrition to remote companies. And companies that go remote are also going to get a huge benefit in talent. Your prediction is right that remote work might benefit small companies, but there is a big risk. As soon as those companies grow to a decent size, then they middle management layers which is typically imported from outside. In a remote-only setup with no opportunity to form strong connections, small innovative companies may find it hard to transition to big established giants. > it seems more innovative companies are embracing remote maybe because early stage companies, who do not have communication overhead find it easy to embrace remote and such companies are more innovative by their nature? If that is true, then a real test will come when these companies need to scale.
_fat_santa 5y ago
> permanent mobility within our professions. This is one of the most understated things about remote work. I hate when the arguments for the benefits of remote work all seem to end with "well you don't have to sit in traffic". It's way way more than that. * I just moved across the country. I didn't hate where I lived but it was meh, moved to Colorado where I'm now going skiing every weekend and a general 180 for my lifestyle. * I'm planning far more trips. If my office is now my laptop so who says I can't do it from anywhere. I just came back from a few weeks in Hawaii and planning another trip to the Keys in a month or so. I work my regular hours in all of these places. How I look at work has completely and diametrically shifted in the last 2 years, and it's made me a much more active and healthier person. It's honestly hard to believe how one change in my career (going remote) has been in service of all of this.
- toyg 5y ago
  This is realistic only in your 20s-early 30s. Once you start a family, relocation is hard, more of a chore than a perk.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    It only works in your 20es because everyone else in your age group is also relocating. When you move you tear up your friends network and have to make new friends. Sounds easy, but people only have room for so many close friends in their life, they will be friendly to you but most won't have room to add another friend so making close friends is hard.
    - celim307 5y ago
      I’m at the age where most of m friends are flung across the country. Close relationships take tons of time and mental investment so at this point I like living in lcol and flying out for a week to visit or them visiting me
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      WFH has obviously lots of advantages for those with kids too. No more paying half a salary for childcare so they can be looked after because you are cooped up in an office. Also in terms of living somewhere kid friendly.
jimbob45 5y ago
>So to now come out and say "look at all the remote hiring we're doing" sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, because you have no choice! What you're saying isn't as ubiquitous as you might think. I left my last company because remote work was "just temporary" for more than a year and I was unable to plan my life around "just temporary" remote work. What you perceive as choiceless is still a choice (being badly made) by many companies.
no_butterscotch 5y ago
On the other hand, the company I work for that IPO'd the year before COVID is now hiring a ton of remote...in Mexico City, the Philippines, and in Poland. So I'd correct your phrasing: "The talent in the US have all the cards and bargaining power". So the "smart" thing companies are doing is find talent outside the US. And also before anyone mentions lower quality devs (for which I have an eye roll and a "get over yourself"), I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.
- bluGill 5y ago
  > I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality. There is. The best devs are equal as developers, but local developers have an intuitive understanding of the market and so will make good decisions for the future without needing to be told, while remote ones won't have that feel and so will write code that doesn't scale. Note that remote and local is relative to your target market. If you want to sell to Poland then developers in Poland have the advantage, if you want to tell to the world you need developers from all over the world to capture as many different cultures as you can. I don't know about Poland, but I know in India there are a lot of bad developers who wouldn't even try to be a developer in the US. This is nothing about their best developers who are just as good as anyone else but you have to shift through more bad ones. (There are a lot of bad ones in the US as well, just not as many)
  - Draiken 5y ago
    What? Sorry but that makes no sense to me. There are good developers and bad developers. Doesn't matter where they're from. If you're talking about "understanding of the market" that has nothing to do with development. Might make a difference if you want the 1 man startup kind of person, but still, that has nothing to do with actual development. I sincerely don't understand how you can equate lack of knowledge of a local market with writing code that doesn't scale. Hiring developers for their understanding of the market sounds to me like you're not in need of a developer. Even then, once a good developer gets into a specific market he'll learn it just like a local developer would. For some anecdotal evidence, I've never set foot outside of my country (Brazil) and worked with very few US developers that are in the same ballpark as me. I've met people from the Philippines, Greece, Sweden and many other countries that are better. Country is a non-factor. IMO being a good developer has nothing to do with the zip code you were born in. People become good developers if they're invested in it and work on it. Maybe you're a tad better if you were born with the right genes, but 99% of it is self-improvement.
ravenstine 5y ago
Not that I disagree, but I would like to add that I think another contributing factor is the livability of the Bay Area. Back in 2013 I might have wanted to live in the Bay Area despite how already costly it was. Today, I make far more than I did back then and there's no way in hell I'm living in the Bay Area both for financial and cultural reasons.
bluGill 5y ago
The real question is in 5 years - after it is safe to be 100% in person with no mitigation measures will companies go back to full in office. Right now my company is saying anyone who wants to can be full remote for forever. I've been around long enough to know that once a certain number of people are in the office, the people around the water cooler get promoted first so I'll be going back to the office at least one day a week once it is possible. (I live within a long bike ride of the office so this isn't a big deal for me so long as the weather is okay) Which is to say i don't trust full remote to last.
uvdn7 5y ago
“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
jstx1 5y ago
> Anyone who is fighting to return to the office is missing the point. We should all be striving to unlock permanent mobility within our professions. It's not mobility if you're being forced to work in a way that doesn't suit you. If everyone is remote, then the x% of developers that don't want to be remote are left without an alternative.

ironmagma 5y ago

This is the cynical view. Remember, the reason anyone is looking for work is because they have to work, too. One could go so far as to say the entire human enterprise is carried out by force.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> the entire human enterprise is carried out by force This is true not because we are human, but because we are living things.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Only according to the pessimist. It’s arguably less true for humans than for other living things. I can end my life at any point. “The whole world is made of people who didn’t kill themselves today. Life can get very difficult, very sad, very upsetting… but you don’t have to do it. You really don’t have to do it… because you can kill yourself.” Louis CK Any bad thing I have to do, I am putting myself through. Agency is freeing.

jdreaver 5y ago

Interesting, I know folks at Stripe that have been remote since around or before 2019, and one of the reasons I joined Stripe was because of the fantastic remote policies (hint: they are awesome). I wonder if 2019 was a tipping point for remote work at Stripe? The other large companies I've interviewed at for the past couple years definitely felt like they tacked on remote work because of COVID, and I wasn't confident it would last once the pandemic calmed down.

almost_usual 5y ago

Sometimes you need a forcing function for change.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> It's funny that no one wants to admit that Covid-19 was the forcing function for shifting to remote wholesale. On the contrary, I feel like HN has a hard time admitting that remote work didn’t conquer the workplace like we were told it would at the beginning of the pandemic. Finding remote jobs is definitely a little bit easier now, but actually getting those jobs seems to be even harder than ever now that everybody is competing for them. Some companies are embracing remote, but it seems many more are eager to get back to in-office work as soon as reasonable.

ecshafer 5y ago
The standard corporate fortune 500 types are pushing very very heavily to go back to the office. In my experience, this seems to be driven majorly by the executives and managers. I believe this is because in so many of these large companies the managers and executives spend so much of their time in constant meetings, which is better in person. In person you sit around in a nice office, you talk with people, and do your power points. Remote you stare at a zoom call with no cameras on and talk and people occasionally talk back. These companies also seem very set in their ways and don't try and change to figure out how to work remotely better. I recently left one of these companies not long ago and these seem to be ring true from similar corps. I am seeing a lot more smaller tech companies and smaller firms that are embracing remote. The small companies where there aren't multiple layers of management, where cancelling an office lease is a big improvement to the owner. They are going remote. I also took a remote tech job, and it seems more innovative companies are embracing remote. My prediction, which may be wrong, is that traditional companies that go back into the office are going to face strong attrition to remote companies. And companies that go remote are also going to get a huge benefit in talent. I know a lot of really great engineers that do not want to move to SF/Seattle/NYC/Boston. There are great engineers in small towns and cities that like to live near friends and family, and get good salaries for the area (that are lower than big companies). These people are going to go to the remote first companies, leave their old stodgy companies. This is a huge boon for companies that are willing to take it.
- RestlessMind 5y ago
  > My prediction is that traditional companies that go back into the office are going to face strong attrition to remote companies. And companies that go remote are also going to get a huge benefit in talent. Your prediction is right that remote work might benefit small companies, but there is a big risk. As soon as those companies grow to a decent size, then they middle management layers which is typically imported from outside. In a remote-only setup with no opportunity to form strong connections, small innovative companies may find it hard to transition to big established giants. > it seems more innovative companies are embracing remote maybe because early stage companies, who do not have communication overhead find it easy to embrace remote and such companies are more innovative by their nature? If that is true, then a real test will come when these companies need to scale.

_fat_santa 5y ago

> permanent mobility within our professions. This is one of the most understated things about remote work. I hate when the arguments for the benefits of remote work all seem to end with "well you don't have to sit in traffic". It's way way more than that. * I just moved across the country. I didn't hate where I lived but it was meh, moved to Colorado where I'm now going skiing every weekend and a general 180 for my lifestyle. * I'm planning far more trips. If my office is now my laptop so who says I can't do it from anywhere. I just came back from a few weeks in Hawaii and planning another trip to the Keys in a month or so. I work my regular hours in all of these places. How I look at work has completely and diametrically shifted in the last 2 years, and it's made me a much more active and healthier person. It's honestly hard to believe how one change in my career (going remote) has been in service of all of this.

toyg 5y ago
This is realistic only in your 20s-early 30s. Once you start a family, relocation is hard, more of a chore than a perk.
- bluGill 5y ago
  It only works in your 20es because everyone else in your age group is also relocating. When you move you tear up your friends network and have to make new friends. Sounds easy, but people only have room for so many close friends in their life, they will be friendly to you but most won't have room to add another friend so making close friends is hard.
  - celim307 5y ago
    I’m at the age where most of m friends are flung across the country. Close relationships take tons of time and mental investment so at this point I like living in lcol and flying out for a week to visit or them visiting me
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    WFH has obviously lots of advantages for those with kids too. No more paying half a salary for childcare so they can be looked after because you are cooped up in an office. Also in terms of living somewhere kid friendly.

jimbob45 5y ago

>So to now come out and say "look at all the remote hiring we're doing" sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, because you have no choice! What you're saying isn't as ubiquitous as you might think. I left my last company because remote work was "just temporary" for more than a year and I was unable to plan my life around "just temporary" remote work. What you perceive as choiceless is still a choice (being badly made) by many companies.

no_butterscotch 5y ago

On the other hand, the company I work for that IPO'd the year before COVID is now hiring a ton of remote...in Mexico City, the Philippines, and in Poland. So I'd correct your phrasing: "The talent in the US have all the cards and bargaining power". So the "smart" thing companies are doing is find talent outside the US. And also before anyone mentions lower quality devs (for which I have an eye roll and a "get over yourself"), I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.

bluGill 5y ago
> I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality. There is. The best devs are equal as developers, but local developers have an intuitive understanding of the market and so will make good decisions for the future without needing to be told, while remote ones won't have that feel and so will write code that doesn't scale. Note that remote and local is relative to your target market. If you want to sell to Poland then developers in Poland have the advantage, if you want to tell to the world you need developers from all over the world to capture as many different cultures as you can. I don't know about Poland, but I know in India there are a lot of bad developers who wouldn't even try to be a developer in the US. This is nothing about their best developers who are just as good as anyone else but you have to shift through more bad ones. (There are a lot of bad ones in the US as well, just not as many)
- Draiken 5y ago
  What? Sorry but that makes no sense to me. There are good developers and bad developers. Doesn't matter where they're from. If you're talking about "understanding of the market" that has nothing to do with development. Might make a difference if you want the 1 man startup kind of person, but still, that has nothing to do with actual development. I sincerely don't understand how you can equate lack of knowledge of a local market with writing code that doesn't scale. Hiring developers for their understanding of the market sounds to me like you're not in need of a developer. Even then, once a good developer gets into a specific market he'll learn it just like a local developer would. For some anecdotal evidence, I've never set foot outside of my country (Brazil) and worked with very few US developers that are in the same ballpark as me. I've met people from the Philippines, Greece, Sweden and many other countries that are better. Country is a non-factor. IMO being a good developer has nothing to do with the zip code you were born in. People become good developers if they're invested in it and work on it. Maybe you're a tad better if you were born with the right genes, but 99% of it is self-improvement.

ravenstine 5y ago

Not that I disagree, but I would like to add that I think another contributing factor is the livability of the Bay Area. Back in 2013 I might have wanted to live in the Bay Area despite how already costly it was. Today, I make far more than I did back then and there's no way in hell I'm living in the Bay Area both for financial and cultural reasons.

bluGill 5y ago

The real question is in 5 years - after it is safe to be 100% in person with no mitigation measures will companies go back to full in office. Right now my company is saying anyone who wants to can be full remote for forever. I've been around long enough to know that once a certain number of people are in the office, the people around the water cooler get promoted first so I'll be going back to the office at least one day a week once it is possible. (I live within a long bike ride of the office so this isn't a big deal for me so long as the weather is okay) Which is to say i don't trust full remote to last.

uvdn7 5y ago

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

jstx1 5y ago

> Anyone who is fighting to return to the office is missing the point. We should all be striving to unlock permanent mobility within our professions. It's not mobility if you're being forced to work in a way that doesn't suit you. If everyone is remote, then the x% of developers that don't want to be remote are left without an alternative.