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Ask HN: Is remote work killing your network?

• eatonphil 5y ago
  I spend more time these days building up the online network on Twitter, a Discord I started, an online meetup I started, and one good Slack group. My network has grown much faster and I've met more interesting people than the old days of in office work and in person meetup, even in NYC.
• barrenko 5y ago
  My advice to you or anyone in high pressure industries such as IT (or NBA for that matter) - get a phychologist or some kind of coach, someone you'll pay to talk to on a weekly basis (ideally has a degree in medicine, like a psychiatrist).
• shetill 5y ago
  Feel like it's common for really big cities to be difficult to befriend anyone. I've been in London for over 6 years and my only sort-of friends I made was from office before. It's a struggle meeting people any other way. If you want to meet people otherwise you have to get out of your way to travel 1h+ in busy public transport (which already ruins my social mood) to some meetup full of randoms of any background. Most of them desperate guys looking for hookup and that's the case with most socials of this kind. You could join some fitness classes but then you get an extra bill of £100+ just for the potential to meet people. I've heard of people making friends through hobbies but I really struggle to find 'social' hobbies. That leaves you with office being the most convenient way of making friends even though it's far from perfect and once you leave the job you rarely meet them.
• ethics13 5y ago
  As a fellow New Yorker. If you want to waste hours on a steel shit hole (really many times) of a subway, to get to work, spend too much money on overpriced shitty food, just to sit in meetings all day long, by all means. Keep on mind that your perception of what the office life will be is not what it will be. MOST people in IT are enjoying WFH and they will NOT want to be back there in the office with you. As others mentioned, go to meetup and find a group you can socialize with off-hours. Best thing you can do for yourself as those days are over for many, and there's never going back to full time.
• rafiki6 5y ago
  I think there are certain points/periods in one's career where remote work is incredibly beneficial, whereas there are some other points where remote work is not. IMO, when you've reached a point in your career where you are happy to not further advance (role wise), and you care a lot more about managing your time to take care of your family, or maybe you just want to be a mercenary and jump from contract to contract, remote is great. I think younger people who want to progress and learn a ton through osmosis, and develop their professional networks should be in person. I think the future needs to be all about flexibility, with well understood trade-offs. The companies which offer this flexibility will attract the best talent.
• elasticventures 5y ago
  Hi 71a54xd! I've struggled with this too. I was on study career-sabbatical travelling in Europe with my then-girlfriend/partner. She was banned from US entry by Trump exec. order and we came to her home of Australia (I'm from the USA) in March 2020 -- we stayed because it was obvious Trump & fam were treating the pandemic as a way to further profit from dubious science, dividing people & pandering. Down under (Melbourne) we've had some of the most strict quarantine lockdowns of any place in the world -- I like it here and now I can't imagine returning to the USA -- but accepting my network in US is mostly toast. Making new friend during a pandemic is really hard. The timing for the rapid transition to remote work globally wasn't great. I don't think it will be like this forever (but it might take a decade to sort out). Companies weren't ready, and grey-haired CEO, peter-principal IT leaders & HR departments weren't technically equipped for the transition. Most companies (globally) still relied heavily on email & jira + meetings instead of chat, IT was an expense but not seen as "the core of the business" pre-pandemic. Few companies had transitioned to 'remote-first' & 'async culture' pre-pandemic (mostly only bay area startups do this imho). Async culture(s) suggest remote employees get together 'virtually' for coffee or beer and gives them discussion points - did any of your employers do that? I know most didn't. Other people have told me you shouldn't go to work to make friends, be mentored, get free sushi lunches, you should go there to work blabla. Also making friends @work is NOT the responsibility of your employer (and imho it is certainly not a priority at a startup who should be product focused!!!) -- unless the company highlights & promises that vibe during the recruiting. Covid/remote work came during a global period of divisive social misery & wealth inequality creating a lot of cognitive dissonance for anybody paying attention. When you think of "digital social network" which company more than any other 'owns' that space? Facebook. And while I won't put all the blame on Zuck - because I know Russia FSB has a legion of trolls & bot-nets manipulating the platform too. The fact society can't use our Internet's "social network" really failed spectacularly. Facebook and it's related platforms are mentally toxic. FB/meta is algorithmically optimized to make you angry, isolated, pissed off & alienated (just like Fox News) because it suits Zucks & Putin's long term power narrative(s)! Zuck is in my view a fool -- not dumb, but incredibly foolish to have squandered such a responsibility & good-will entrusted to him. So for this pandemic - as long as meta/facebook is the defacto global "social network", i.e. zuckerberg et. al is the primary party responsible for connecting us 'digitally' with friends, family & peers blabla. yeah we're all sort of isolated & socially fcked mate. We know now* that Zuck isn't interested in (y)our mental health or making us better. Zuck isn't interested in bringing families together, preventing teen suicide, or even disseminating the truth. Zuck is a horrible person and I would happily kick him in the groin on behalf of humanity if given the opportunity so he could (if only for a moment) share humanities collective pain and perhaps even "feel something" akin to desiring compassion. The pandemic would have been a lot easier (socially) if there was a critical mass alternative to Facebook. I heard Trump launched his own platform today -- maybe there is an opportunity for another alternative which focused on mental health & positive news, and living your best life during the pandemic. Nah, just kidding .. I don't really wonder how Trump's new social media platform will do that. Trying to finding people online when the primary company which runs the social networks is facebook - consider perhaps it's better to be isolated during the pandemic. How I cope: Study & learn whatever you want unfettered, humanity has been writing stuff for ~5,000 years now, there's a lot to read (and it's all online woot!!) We live in such a cool age for geeks. You sound technically competent -- it's a shame you don't realize what a hidden blessing this is. I've found a lot of the technical chat rooms on Matrix.org to be 'my people' (it's more like IRC) .. you might look there for whatever online social interaction with people smarter than you. mentoring, etc. Cheers!
• midasuni 5y ago
  Work to live, don’t live to work. Remote enables the former - you can live in NY and have a 3am Pokemon club meeting less than a mile away, you can live in a cabin in the woods and spend your time fishing, it’s upto you. It sounds like you want others to live near you and spend their time doing things for you. That’s fine, but you might not find many people who are willing to do that, especially if they are working to live. Personally I think the future of work is looking great.
  • 71a54xd 5y ago
    In simple terms, I strongly believe that a larger network / more meaningful relationships (above the noise floor) mean more opportunities and room for learning. Generally, I see this as a 1:1 exchange in time / effort. Being remote just seems to make finding connections way harder, since talking to someone is obviously more meaningful than a LinkedIn cold message or an email. But you're right in that part of my dilemma here is figuring out what I want to do with my time while also optimizing for decent options going forward. Frankly, I'm leaning toward the being away from hoards of people in the woods ;) .
  • VoodooJuJu 5y ago
    >Personally I think the future of work is looking great. For the remote work class, sure it is. Some of us still have clean your shit at the wastewater treatment plant, run pipe and fiber to you so we can deliver you water and internet and so you can deliver us your excrement.
    • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      Not if they are on septic.
      • MaknMoreGtnLess 5y ago
        In a city where space is at a premium? Which space efficient septic tank do you have in mind?
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  A lot of it probably depends on your personality. I don't form organic relationships all that easily. I am not at all relatable to most people and find interfacing with them to be a very mentally costly process, so I am happy that remote significantly cuts down on all that. I also like the need to schedule things far in advance as then I can plan my work around when I also plan to be mentally exhausted. So remote has improved my network by dramatically reducing the expected cost of maintaining it. A few scheduled meetings/planned weeks in advance lunches over spontaneously running it them and them wanting to have lunch when I have deep work scheduled for that afternoon. It is also why I focus my network on other cities. The distance makes in person meetings be the kind of thing planned months in advance. It manages itself in an orderly way. I need not try and impose order on it.
  • 71a54xd 5y ago
    Interesting, I guess for me it's hard to tell how strong "remote" relationships really are. Fortunately, I'm more articulate / interesting in my writing than when people talk to me. But "being accountable" over slack for me is at least 2-3x as taxing as just having to hop into a meeting with someone or just some brief in person back and forth. Sometimes it feels like my team performance is being gauged how much I talk through slack, in ways you'd usually just be expected to do so in person or more traditionally. When in reality, I just forget sometimes or suck at knowing how my writing comes off. Since I have an odd sense of humor / sometimes talk like a robot to make sure I'm being clear.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      I view a remote relationship as strong enough if I would willingly refer someone for a job and they would refer in return or I would trust them enough to do a small contract project with them. As for how I am perceived on Slack, I view my team as a single point of failure and make sure that I am always in a position to get other similar offers. Makes how I am perceived not really matter as I am not the kind to go for an internal promotion anyway as it is more complicated, and again, a single point of failure.
• rakejake 5y ago
  I agree. I'm in the same boat and I don't like remote work at all. It feeds into my weaknesses and reduces my strengths. I'm tired of all the talk about "You should not rely on office for socializing". Forget socializing, I feel remote work is dissipating even the camaraderie that used to exist within teams at work. It is making mercenaries out of us.
  • 71a54xd 5y ago
    Yeah, the most depressing part of this is that I'm even jealous of the social camaraderie my finance roommate talks about having with the other analysts he spends late office nights with. At least he has the option of an office and people actually go. I'm even saying this as someone who'd admittedly sort of weird, not super social. If everything is remote, I'm tempted to give up on work socializing and just live with some friends of mine in the mountains in CO. After a certain age, you realize you can only form certain kinds of friendships by spending a lot of time with people struggling on similar problems. Granted, last year I attempted to start a company full remote and I was able to build sort of similar bonds, but it's way too hard to gauge people. Those efforts sort of faded after one of our founders turned out to be too emotionally unstable. But yeah. edit - but maybe at 27 this is really just me realizing I'm not that social, don't really like people and should maybe just move on from some kind of idealized social life...
    • rakejake 5y ago
      It is simply much too hard to build connections when you are not face-to-face with someone. I have read countless articles and HN threads on introverts, extroverts, friendships, relationships, meetups etc, countless hours wasted on this topic and that is my pithy conclusion.
      • 71a54xd 5y ago
        Agree. Thank you for not using this as an opportunity to shill the metaverse :)
        • 5y ago
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  I left the field entirely a few months into lockdowns. I pretty much went in the opposite direction, I now spend my time on explicitly social things. I agree that it doesn't look like it's coming back - in fact I'm not sure if my city is coming back (London). The growth thing doesn't bother me, it's just that the job is now pointless to me. I don't care about shuffling pixels about, I care about actual people in the real world. Card games over lunch, pub at the end of the day, chatting shit, that was the point, the work was just a vehicle to give us the excuse and fund it. We are social animals, there is nothing more. Something sticks in my mind though, which is that most software developers have a strong preference for just sitting inside. I was one, then I made money and I realised there was a world out there. But some of them just want that forever, and that's fine, it just means I can't work with them any more, that chapter of my life has closed, we part ways and so it goes. It's like a partner or old friend that you just outgrew. Eventually I'll give up on HN too I guess.
  • rakejake 5y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, what do you do now?
    • throwaway22032 5y ago
      Nothing adjacent to what most people consider "work". I found that almost all "professional" structures immediately turned into some sort of schizophrenic "cus covid" nightmare and as far as I can tell they're still doing it. I had no interest in that stuff so I just did my own thing. Self study, social meetup groups, travel, etc. I was almost ten years in to my career in early 2020 so I can afford to not maximise income. I feel sorry for the new graduates that now just have yet another thing to hate the older generations for. Even just small things. The university interview. Putting on a suit and tie and meeting _their people_ in a big hall for the first time. Life-defining.
      • deeviant 5y ago
        In contrast, I work fulltime, mostly remote (for now), and absolutely love what I do. Technology that I worked on will make the world a better, more sustainable place and I think that's rad. I go out camping and jeeping with a group from work and have a network of friends outside of work too. So it is certainly not given that remote working has to be some forlorn place. It is, as most areas of life, what you make of it.
• poisonarena 5y ago
  A little different, but I work remote, and make a very little amount.. been living in Colombia, Serbia, Brazil, Israel, Russia, Romania, Korea.. the list goes on.. Not fancy places.. I have been doing this for about 6 years, since I left my job teaching 'business english' in mexico city where I did have a large group of friends.. With the pandemic I started drinking a lot more because I was lonely.. The frequent moves, mostly due to visas, the pandemic lockdowns, contributed to the small networks I made in each country shutting down, losing old friends.. I am talking friends, not even business colleagues... Often I go weeks, without talking to another human besides "No thanks I have my own bag" to the lady at the grocery store.. I am somewhere between outgoing and solitary but needing a group of friends is important. I am 36 years old and I wouldnt choose a different path but if you want to work remote, and live in other countries( there is no way I can afford to live in USA), you should figure out how to stay in just one country you like for a long time(legally). And develop that network. I always manage to date cool girls, fall in love, almost got married last year(also ruined from pandemic lockdowns), but I think having a group of bros/comraderie is detrimental to mental soundness
  • sidpatil 5y ago
    > but I think having a group of bros/comraderie is detrimental to mental soundness This contradicts the rest of your post, unless I'm misunderstanding.
    • oliv__ 5y ago
      Yeah sounds like he meant "necessary"
    • poisonarena 5y ago
      I mean that it is a good experience, but without a solid circle or group of friends things can get very lonely and it can effect your life.. sorry I am not the best writer, but hopefully you get me
• lovich 5y ago
  > After two years of being beaten into this new way of working I honestly feel more at a loss for what my career is than any other time in my life. You have a longer post and I want to make clear I’m only discussing one section here, but your emphasis on new is rubbing me the wrong way. I’ve been doing software for about 2.5 years as long as you and looked for remote jobs, found a few, but couldn’t land them and was forced into in office roles they would take me. It seems like you are having more of a problem of the default job changing from in office to remote, and how the default isn’t your preferred option. Remote first has been a thing for years now and has worked out as a viable way to run a business
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• foobarbed 5y ago
  I've worked at Amazon for 5 years as an SDE. I'm pretty sure I'm getting PIPed this month. Can't really complain, I've barely been pushing code, most days I mindlessly browse slack all day and do no work. I 100 percent blame it on the pandemic, and WFH. I was thinking of going into finance or defence where you're still forced to go into an office every day.
  • Aromasin 5y ago
    I'm in the same boat. I've worked at a big silicon company for the past year and a bit. Make a hell of lot more, work from home, and have hated every minute when I know, if it weren't for WFH, I'd love it. I was in the military in my younger years and the people I worked with there are still my closest now. I worked in finance for a few after that and the nights spent working on difficult problems till the early hours of the morning were some of the most fulfilling one's I've had. Perhaps it's different in software land where everyone seems a bit more unsociable but as an EE I loved going into the lab and seeing what everyone is up to for the day. Even when we were just working at our computer desks, we were able to ask each other for help, advice, or just shoot the breeze. The office was never this political battleground where everyone turned up to work miserable that I've heard so much about. It was a place of camaraderie over joint hardships. Now all I've got are these 4 walls to keep me company, while I try my hardest to keep attention for a mere 20 minutes of productivity before disappearing off to make a tea for the 12th time that day, or glaze over after the 5th teams meeting of the morning. I read these other HN posts and constantly think maybe I'm much more socially charged than I think, or everyone else is much less so than they think. All WFH has done is made me think I'm either depressed, suffering from ADHD, or both - when I felt like a normal, happy member of society before.
  • gaws 5y ago
    > I'm getting PIPed In English, please?
    • Tenemo 5y ago
      Put on a Performance Improvement Plan, a prerequisitive before getting fired. Also known as Paid Interview Prep, because that's what it ends up being for many people.
• 999900000999 5y ago
  Up until ( if) I get married, I'll always be in a city. Just easier to meet people and do stuff. I haven't used an app in years ( had a very bad experience and I don't feel safe using them ), and aside from that I love going to concerts. Much easier to do if you can ride the train to one vs having to drive 2 hours Remote work is amazing, for me I have to filter myself very heavily at work. I don't really care for workplace socializing. We have bars for that. Remote work is amazing for people who have mobility issues, as well as an array of other disabilities. What if I want to socialize on my own terms. Forcing me back into the office so you can make small talk isn't fair. Have you considered Chicago ? It's the perfect city I'm terms of quality public transit and affordability. I lived on the Northside and never had any problems with crime. Met my first long term girlfriend too !
  • whateveracct 5y ago
    > Have you considered Chicago ? > > It's the perfect city I'm terms of quality public transit and affordability. I lived on the Northside and never had any problems with crime. And how about them BULLS!
• downrightmike 5y ago
  Nope, no issue, but that is up to you to maintain. Work friends won't be there, you need social circles outside of it.
• escapedmoose 5y ago
  I have moderate social anxiety that flares up a lot in an office and causes all sorts of embarrassing physical reactions. I’m so so so happy that I can now collaborate with people without having to constantly worry about breaking out in a sudden sweat, blushing, etc. Plus, I’m really enjoying the extra free time I get without the commute, meal prep, daily makeup, etc. For the record, my non-work social life doesn’t usually cause those problems.
• throwawaynay 5y ago
  I'm curious, were you actually making true friends at work? or was it just people who were nice enough to make it easier to spend the whole day working? I've never met someone I could remotely call a friend as an employee. I made a few friends when I was in college, but absolutely none at work.
• ravenstine 5y ago
  Not in any way I can't mentally handle, because I'm pretty "ambiverted" to start with. I like my solitude; solitary confinement probably wouldn't be a good punishment for me because I'd just stare off into space and architect my own universe. I've already been working remote for the last ~5 years, and it hasn't killed my network because work wasn't really my primary means of networking, professionally or personally. I networked by attending meetups and conventions. Admittedly, it was more or less easier to get to know people IRL when I worked in corporate offices. What really put a damper on my networking was COVID. Every social activity I was interested remained closed for a long period of time, and even though I was (am?) a tech meetup host, I couldn't get enough people to show up so I stopped hosting them. Many groups in my area haven't come back or were already in decline a few years before COVID. I do miss the ability to physically hang with other programmers. This idea that Zoom/Discord/Metaverse can replace physicality is bullshit. Certainly not yet, anyway. The Future of Work as it currently appears isn't really bleak because of remote work itself. Many of us have not only been forced into remote work, but we've had flexibility in our lives removed. Every other discussion at work for the last 2 years has had to be tied to COVID in some way shape or form. Remote work had clear benefits when it represented freedom. Now the political situation across the world has made remote work out to feel more like solitary confinement.
• throw742809 5y ago
  Humans used to socialise with family and neighbours. Because we worked with them. Now these are three different groups, and we are not able to socially connect with any of them.
  • throw742809 5y ago
    So, we are told to look for people with similar problems in 'Drinking Establishments'. Atleast, it keeps the economy running.
• gorgoiler 5y ago
  The hardest thing about remote work is code review. What used to be a collaborative effort where we both take responsibility for making things better now feels confrontational because online code review is now often the only interaction we have with others. It’s crucial to build trust and alignment with your colleagues. Otherwise you end up blaming all your problems — which, in fields like software engineering and site reliability, shower down upon us with the misty subtlety of a firehose — on the people who you only know by their Unix name / commit email / cat themed github avatar. The die hard “work to live not live to work!” responses, here, don’t seem to be addressing that. It’s a much deeper problem than whether you should make friends in a bar versus by the water cooler. Working in a team is social and you have to form social bonds. No one is saying they are the only social bonds you should form in your life. If you refuse to form any social bonds at work then you will not be as effective as someone who does.
  • Areading314 5y ago
    Code review has been done "remotely" via Github or other online tool at every place I have worked, I have _never_ seen it done in-person. I also find that doing this in person would be incredibly time consuming and frustrating. The confrontational nature of code review is a good thing because people are able to focus and independently analyze how your code works. Its important to be nice but its also important to not take feedback about your code personally.
    • gorgoiler 5y ago
      Thanks for your comment. I amended my second paragraph to try to make my point clearer. I am in no way advocating for in-person code review. I’m saying that it’s much harder to do code review with someone you haven’t shared lunch with, chatted with in the pub, or had a non-work related phone call with for 9 months. Your point about public GitHub is pretty much on point. Some of the least productive and most barbed back-and-forth you see on code reviews is the public FOSS ones where people don’t really know or trust each other that much. Some of the best are where the reviewers clearly want to work together on something and not be confrontational. (By the way: I don’t see this behaviour as openly confrontational in terms of deliberate aggression — more commonly it’s a reviewer subconsciously expressing their self-perceived lack of standing by criticising other’s work.)
• bluedays 5y ago
  You're gonna get a lot of kickback for this post. Don't listen to of the naysayers, these are real issues. Just remember this... as bad as it is for your it's worse on people who work on the business side. Their entire job revolves around networking. Since they run the show this means that everyone is going to transition to the office as soon as possible.
  • csomar 5y ago
    > Their entire job revolves around networking. Since they run the show this means that everyone is going to transition to the office as soon as possible. Yep. Only hope is that the pandemic at least forced some change that will hopefully remain. I understand the OP grievances (okay, maybe I don't) but for some other people remote+zoom/email is just perfect.
• ghiculescu 5y ago
  Have you tried applying for non-remote jobs? They exist, they are fun, they are full of people who feel the same as you and think all this new normal stuff is odd. You’ll learn more and stress less doing that than you will trying to make “future of work” jobs work for you. (I’m hiring in person in Chicago if you feel like moving. Rails / Hotwire / React / beers on Fridays.)
• shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  From the anti-WFH perspective, shouldn't the future be looking bright? The Omicron wave is over, and back-to-the-office plans are commencing. No?
  • fundad 5y ago
    They better hire us back in before the next variant
• thejackgoode 5y ago
  What is dead may never die
• twoquestions 5y ago
  What I've done to combat this is helped lead a local historical organization, that way I get human interaction every week at least. What might work for you is to set up a meetup/casual thing where someone gives a presentation on a technology people are mildly interested in, like Tailwind or somesuch. If there's demand for that kind of casual interaction (and I don't doubt there is), people will be falling over themselves to help you. Personally I really like the work/casual divide in my socialization, where my social interaction and work aren't welded together, where work issues can't pollute your friendships and vice versa. This is especially good if you work at a place that appreciates your work but is very different culturally than you. I worked at an oil/gas company for several years, and while I liked some of the formal processes they had, I'm of a profoundly different culture than they are, despite looking like them. With your social network and work network split off like this, you'll be much more flexible in both. Good luck!
• Graffur 5y ago
  I like WFH and remote working but unfortunately a lot of companies did not really embrace remote working properly. They didn't embrace async communication methods. They deployed tools that required constant attention and showed status availability. They stuck to regular working hours and morning status report meetings. They overused immediate video calls of text. Badly implemented remote working is bad... (but still better than the office!)
• elamje 5y ago
  Totally understand the sentiment. If you are in Austin and want to meet and try to get plugged in, email me! (email in bio)