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I hope remote with asynchronous interactions is the future, because big cities are increasingly unlivable, and corporate culture is often a culture of distracti

I hope remote with asynchronous interactions is the future, because big cities are increasingly unlivable, and corporate culture is often a culture of distraction. Remote is hard to do right, but it's worth striving for. Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. It helps the environment. It's the antidote to urbanization. It potentially brings money to underdeveloped areas, which helps democracy.

presentation 5y ago
Idk I live in a city that honestly is great to live in (Tokyo), run a distributed team comprised of others who all live in big cities around the world, and nobody has expressed that they feel like cities suck to live in. Different strokes I guess. Or maybe it’s not that cities suck, but that the cities you’ve been to (cough USA cough) suck.
- mping 5y ago
  If you have the budget it's great to live in a nice big city, you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered, put your kids in fancy but expensive kindergarten, and buy a nice large house right near that park the kids love. Bonus points if the city is walkable or has decent public transportation. If you are starting as an average,non FAANG engineer in an expensive city it probably sucks a bit more.
  - esrauch 5y ago
    I think your costs baseline is underestimating: even starting as a FAANG engineer in NYC or SF or you already can't buy a "large house next to the park"
    - wrycoder 5y ago
      Nor should you be able to do that.
      - wrycoder 5y ago
        Maybe I'm misreading something here, but why should someone who is an entry level software developer at a FAANG be able to afford one of the best houses in the city?
  - Larrikin 5y ago
    I'd argue that it's not really a big city if there's a constant need to Lyft to your destinations. Extensive subway system has always been one of the main differences of how enjoyable city life actually is in the various cities I've lived in. Thinking about a car as just a time saving activity versus a necessity (even if it's a ride share) is extremely freeing.
    - filoleg 5y ago
      > I'd argue that it's not really a big city if there's a constant need to Lyft to your destinations. If that is your metric, then there isn't a single big city in the US aside from NYC (and, maaaaybe, Chicago). With all other big cities in the US, you can technically get away by using public transport exclusively, but with a really giant caveat - your place of living, your place of work, and all the other places you would want to visit are all, by sheer luck, located near public transport routes. There is a non-zero number of people in this situation, but it requires a great deal of luck and specific choices to be made for that to happen. To be more specific, I will use Seattle as an example. We have a solid lightrail and bus system, and the expansion of lightrail has been going great. Public transport covers a lot of places and areas one might need or want to go to. But it doesn't cover an even larger amount of places/areas. I personally know plenty of people here who live without cars, and even the most pro-public-transport of them resort to Uber/Lyft fairly often. Not as a time-saving activity, but out of necessity.
  - jjav 5y ago
    > you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, So you need a car, just paying for one as a service instead of direct ownership.
  - actionablefiber 5y ago
    > If you have the budget it's great to live in a nice big city, you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered, put your kids in fancy but expensive kindergarten, and buy a nice large house right near that park the kids love. Bonus points if the city is walkable or has decent public transportation. It's kind of distressing to hear someone express "Just Uber everywhere" as the ideal template for a car-free lifestyle, with walkability and public transportation relegated to "bonus points." I live car-free in the metro area outside of D.C. and primarily get around by bus and bicycle. I suspect that it requires a much lower budget than Ubering everywhere and you can live a lot more healthily by doing so too. edit: I'd also like to point out that when you impose such a high price tag on all of your spatial displacements, you discourage yourself from doing it more. With walking, cycling and public transit, you open yourself up to a lot more serendipitous and impulsive trips. Today I cycled a few minutes to the park and did some work on a picnic table because I just felt like I wanted a change of scenery. Then I came back an hour later. Doing that with Uber would have felt absurd.
  - pards 5y ago
    > you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered Umm ... Those all require a car, it just might not be _your_ car. It doesn't help make cities accessible and walkable.
wrycoder 5y ago
> big cities are increasingly unlivable There's no inherent reason why this should be so. Big cities can and do provide a marvelous life experience. But almost all big cities in the US suffer from total mismanagement. IMHO, the greatest immediate goal for the US should be to work out how to correct that.
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  This is the case outside the US as well. Short term, greed-focused strategies cause this mismanagement somewhere down the line. Over the top prices, noise pollution, etc. None of these need to exist at the rates they do today. Similar issues form outside cities when mismanagement occurs, it's just harder to notice with fewer people involved.
chaostheory 5y ago
You forgot to mention the huge environmental impact that remote first has. Even EVs still pollute the air from tires along with micro plastic fragments. Nothing shows that corporate support for the environment is mostly lip service when it comes to lack of support for remote work despite the major environmental benefits that it brings.
dangus 5y ago
I greatly disagree with the idea that big cities are becoming "increasingly unlivable." American cities, especially downtowns, are in the middle of doing the exact opposite of becoming unlivable. I'm not talking opinions here, I'm talking about factual changes in the context of American history. American city downtowns started as, essentially, the entire city, with a diverse mix of residents, commerce, and industry. As the industrialization progressed, those downtowns morphed into commercial-only zones as most other uses migrated outward. [1] Residential living was very rare in city centers in America, with only slum living left. Since then, however, American cities are re-introducing residential life to city centers and redesigning them around mixed use and essentially revitalizing them. [1] So this idea that big cities are "increasingly unlivable" is more of a cynical opinion rather than a matter of historical fact. Also, in terms of sustainability, cities still win out. Suburban and rural development fragments animal habitats and uses more land per person. More time and miles are needed in your car burning oil to get around. City dwellers who walk and take transit are more carbon efficient than suburban and rural drivers. Counter-intuitively, water quality is better in cities where more people are connected to a treated municipal water source. Sewage is also better managed in cities. [2] Now, on to what's my actual opinion...regarding asynchronous work: it's awesome if you're already at a senior level of skill, but to me it seems absolutely horrendous for new graduates and junior level employees. It's difficult to do "apprenticeship" asynchronously. The idea of a future of asynchronous work is also incredibly software-biased. For example, when Apple wants their employees back in the office there's good reason: they design hardware. [1] https://placesjournal.org/article/downtown-a-short-history-of-american-urban-exceptionalism/ https://placesjournal.org/article/downtown-a-short-history-o... [2] https://www.treehugger.com/environmentally-responsible-urban-or-rural-living-1203972 https://www.treehugger.com/environmentally-responsible-urban...
- Comevius 5y ago
  Obviously not all jobs are remote-compatible, and obviously you would not do apprenticeship entirely asynchronously. Liveable is a subjective term, but water or air quality, or environmental footprint varies a great deal between countries. Cities consume most of the energy and produce most of the greenhouse gases for obvious reasons. Historically big cities became increasingly liveable, however my opinion is that we are at a turning point, in average big cities will become unliveable, some will improve slightly, and many will falter greatly. However urbanization will go on, people will continue to fill cities looking for opportunities, ironically climate change will even hasten this, eventually turning big cities into death traps.
civilized 5y ago
> corporate culture is often a culture of distraction My job is to somehow be productive despite the best efforts of management to interfere. Being remote has greatly helped that.
swiftcoder 5y ago
> It's the antidote to urbanization Unclear that's a particularly worthy goal. I enjoy the rural life as much as anyone, but it's hard to argue that a "liveable city" (dense, planned, walkable/bikeable, work near to where you live, etc) isn't a more efficient use of society's resources than the automobile-centric suburban sprawl that much of the US is subjected to.
- cudgy 5y ago
  But remote work cuts down the amount of driving especially during the same times of the day when everyone is rushing to their 9 to 5 offices.
- Comevius 5y ago
  The middle and lower class is quickly outpriced of that liveable city or state experience. It would be better to spread our resources to more areas, instead of concentrating it to a few. We already know what wealth concentration, inequality looks like. When you give all opportunities to a few, they don't tend to use it to everyone's benefit. People who are robbed of the consequences of their actions tend to lose sight of reality.
  - actionablefiber 5y ago
    > The middle and lower class is quickly outpriced of that liveable city or state experience. It would be better to spread our resources to more areas, instead of concentrating it to a few. We already know what wealth concentration, inequality looks like. That's not because livable places with amenities located within walking distance are expensive to build or maintain. It's because there aren't enough of them, primarily because in very large tracts of every metropolitan area they are illegal to build under current zoning ordinances. That's how you get cute prewar streetcar suburbs that are ludicrously unaffordable - the neighborhoods were cheap to build at the time and could be cheap to build today, the prices are all because people love living there and we made it illegal to build more. Postwar suburban sprawl is monstrously expensive to build and maintain. You need to build and maintain an incredible amount more infrastructure per person, and because the properties themselves are less livable and car-dependent, fewer people want to and can afford to live there, which makes them "cheaper." The answer is not to force people to live in car dependent sprawl. It's to build more walkable places so that the cost comes down.
kredd 5y ago
> big cities are increasingly unlivable Almost everyone in my circles are loving big city life while working remotely. It depends on your life circumstances, and what you enjoy, but let’s not generalize that urban lifestyle is bad. Meeting new people, enjoying indoor activities, walking around and etc. are not dying anytime soon, and rent prices show how people are still willing to join in.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- teh_klev 5y ago
  I think it kinda depends on your age. When I was in my twenties and thirties, and despite being a country lad, living in cities was highly desirable and I had a lot of good times and made some great long lasting friendships during that period. In my forties I became less enamoured by city life and in my fifties, now living in a rural location and working remotely, if I never see the inside of a city again then that's fine by me.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    It’s interesting that in general everyone on HN loves big city living, but then you have a post about city noise and it’s a thousand posts complaining about urban noise and how you can’t get away from it. Of course, the key is that you can have both with the right transportation options.
    - ceras 5y ago
      I think you're making a mistaken observation there. It's a skewed data set: of course people who like living in cities will talk about policies they'd like to see to make their cities better, and not complain about ways that a suburb or rural community could be better. I don't live in a suburb so it would be very odd for me to complain about a hypothetical suburb I don't live in, even though I'd have more complaints if I did live in a suburb. Just how HN as a whole talks about making tech jobs better (e.g. this remote work thread, which isn't relevant to most jobs) far more than it does about other jobs: it's just more relevant to the people here, and even if they overall like their tech job, they want it to be better.
Crabber 5y ago
>Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. Neither of these things are good for an employee. A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you or where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  It's double edges all the way around. "shared background" has certainly been the cause of a lot of harm. It's one of those things that people want, but which is bad, like "Everything be more efficient if everyone would stop wasting time on their own different ideas and just did what I want.". There are no single simple correct answers.
  - Crabber 5y ago
    >"shared background" has certainly been the cause of a lot of harm Do you have an example?
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
      Shared background can be a good thing and can apply to good things, but it is also the basis of all discrimination, tribalism, prejudice, or even at it's most benign, inconsideration or ignorance. The examples are the rule and it's instead hard to think of any exceptions.
- imiric 5y ago
  > A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you So you're against diversity? Differing backgrounds and points of view can only be a good thing. For coworkers, for the product, for the company. I know it's en vogue now, but it really is important. > where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away Hiring is not zero-sum. With the current and likely future dev market, there's enough jobs for everyone. Companies should consider applicants regardless of location of residence, and offer the same compensation as well.

presentation 5y ago

Idk I live in a city that honestly is great to live in (Tokyo), run a distributed team comprised of others who all live in big cities around the world, and nobody has expressed that they feel like cities suck to live in. Different strokes I guess. Or maybe it’s not that cities suck, but that the cities you’ve been to (cough USA cough) suck.

mping 5y ago
If you have the budget it's great to live in a nice big city, you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered, put your kids in fancy but expensive kindergarten, and buy a nice large house right near that park the kids love. Bonus points if the city is walkable or has decent public transportation. If you are starting as an average,non FAANG engineer in an expensive city it probably sucks a bit more.
- esrauch 5y ago
  I think your costs baseline is underestimating: even starting as a FAANG engineer in NYC or SF or you already can't buy a "large house next to the park"
  - wrycoder 5y ago
    Nor should you be able to do that.
    - wrycoder 5y ago
      Maybe I'm misreading something here, but why should someone who is an entry level software developer at a FAANG be able to afford one of the best houses in the city?
- Larrikin 5y ago
  I'd argue that it's not really a big city if there's a constant need to Lyft to your destinations. Extensive subway system has always been one of the main differences of how enjoyable city life actually is in the various cities I've lived in. Thinking about a car as just a time saving activity versus a necessity (even if it's a ride share) is extremely freeing.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    > I'd argue that it's not really a big city if there's a constant need to Lyft to your destinations. If that is your metric, then there isn't a single big city in the US aside from NYC (and, maaaaybe, Chicago). With all other big cities in the US, you can technically get away by using public transport exclusively, but with a really giant caveat - your place of living, your place of work, and all the other places you would want to visit are all, by sheer luck, located near public transport routes. There is a non-zero number of people in this situation, but it requires a great deal of luck and specific choices to be made for that to happen. To be more specific, I will use Seattle as an example. We have a solid lightrail and bus system, and the expansion of lightrail has been going great. Public transport covers a lot of places and areas one might need or want to go to. But it doesn't cover an even larger amount of places/areas. I personally know plenty of people here who live without cars, and even the most pro-public-transport of them resort to Uber/Lyft fairly often. Not as a time-saving activity, but out of necessity.
- jjav 5y ago
  > you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, So you need a car, just paying for one as a service instead of direct ownership.
- actionablefiber 5y ago
  > If you have the budget it's great to live in a nice big city, you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered, put your kids in fancy but expensive kindergarten, and buy a nice large house right near that park the kids love. Bonus points if the city is walkable or has decent public transportation. It's kind of distressing to hear someone express "Just Uber everywhere" as the ideal template for a car-free lifestyle, with walkability and public transportation relegated to "bonus points." I live car-free in the metro area outside of D.C. and primarily get around by bus and bicycle. I suspect that it requires a much lower budget than Ubering everywhere and you can live a lot more healthily by doing so too. edit: I'd also like to point out that when you impose such a high price tag on all of your spatial displacements, you discourage yourself from doing it more. With walking, cycling and public transit, you open yourself up to a lot more serendipitous and impulsive trips. Today I cycled a few minutes to the park and did some work on a picnic table because I just felt like I wanted a change of scenery. Then I came back an hour later. Doing that with Uber would have felt absurd.
- pards 5y ago
  > you don't even need a car. Just Uber everywhere, get some groceries delivered Umm ... Those all require a car, it just might not be _your_ car. It doesn't help make cities accessible and walkable.

wrycoder 5y ago

> big cities are increasingly unlivable There's no inherent reason why this should be so. Big cities can and do provide a marvelous life experience. But almost all big cities in the US suffer from total mismanagement. IMHO, the greatest immediate goal for the US should be to work out how to correct that.

BlargMcLarg 5y ago
This is the case outside the US as well. Short term, greed-focused strategies cause this mismanagement somewhere down the line. Over the top prices, noise pollution, etc. None of these need to exist at the rates they do today. Similar issues form outside cities when mismanagement occurs, it's just harder to notice with fewer people involved.

chaostheory 5y ago

You forgot to mention the huge environmental impact that remote first has. Even EVs still pollute the air from tires along with micro plastic fragments. Nothing shows that corporate support for the environment is mostly lip service when it comes to lack of support for remote work despite the major environmental benefits that it brings.

dangus 5y ago

I greatly disagree with the idea that big cities are becoming "increasingly unlivable." American cities, especially downtowns, are in the middle of doing the exact opposite of becoming unlivable. I'm not talking opinions here, I'm talking about factual changes in the context of American history. American city downtowns started as, essentially, the entire city, with a diverse mix of residents, commerce, and industry. As the industrialization progressed, those downtowns morphed into commercial-only zones as most other uses migrated outward. [1] Residential living was very rare in city centers in America, with only slum living left. Since then, however, American cities are re-introducing residential life to city centers and redesigning them around mixed use and essentially revitalizing them. [1] So this idea that big cities are "increasingly unlivable" is more of a cynical opinion rather than a matter of historical fact. Also, in terms of sustainability, cities still win out. Suburban and rural development fragments animal habitats and uses more land per person. More time and miles are needed in your car burning oil to get around. City dwellers who walk and take transit are more carbon efficient than suburban and rural drivers. Counter-intuitively, water quality is better in cities where more people are connected to a treated municipal water source. Sewage is also better managed in cities. [2] Now, on to what's my actual opinion...regarding asynchronous work: it's awesome if you're already at a senior level of skill, but to me it seems absolutely horrendous for new graduates and junior level employees. It's difficult to do "apprenticeship" asynchronously. The idea of a future of asynchronous work is also incredibly software-biased. For example, when Apple wants their employees back in the office there's good reason: they design hardware. [1] https://placesjournal.org/article/downtown-a-short-history-of-american-urban-exceptionalism/ https://placesjournal.org/article/downtown-a-short-history-o... [2] https://www.treehugger.com/environmentally-responsible-urban-or-rural-living-1203972 https://www.treehugger.com/environmentally-responsible-urban...

Comevius 5y ago
Obviously not all jobs are remote-compatible, and obviously you would not do apprenticeship entirely asynchronously. Liveable is a subjective term, but water or air quality, or environmental footprint varies a great deal between countries. Cities consume most of the energy and produce most of the greenhouse gases for obvious reasons. Historically big cities became increasingly liveable, however my opinion is that we are at a turning point, in average big cities will become unliveable, some will improve slightly, and many will falter greatly. However urbanization will go on, people will continue to fill cities looking for opportunities, ironically climate change will even hasten this, eventually turning big cities into death traps.

civilized 5y ago

> corporate culture is often a culture of distraction My job is to somehow be productive despite the best efforts of management to interfere. Being remote has greatly helped that.

swiftcoder 5y ago

> It's the antidote to urbanization Unclear that's a particularly worthy goal. I enjoy the rural life as much as anyone, but it's hard to argue that a "liveable city" (dense, planned, walkable/bikeable, work near to where you live, etc) isn't a more efficient use of society's resources than the automobile-centric suburban sprawl that much of the US is subjected to.

cudgy 5y ago
But remote work cuts down the amount of driving especially during the same times of the day when everyone is rushing to their 9 to 5 offices.
Comevius 5y ago
The middle and lower class is quickly outpriced of that liveable city or state experience. It would be better to spread our resources to more areas, instead of concentrating it to a few. We already know what wealth concentration, inequality looks like. When you give all opportunities to a few, they don't tend to use it to everyone's benefit. People who are robbed of the consequences of their actions tend to lose sight of reality.
- actionablefiber 5y ago
  > The middle and lower class is quickly outpriced of that liveable city or state experience. It would be better to spread our resources to more areas, instead of concentrating it to a few. We already know what wealth concentration, inequality looks like. That's not because livable places with amenities located within walking distance are expensive to build or maintain. It's because there aren't enough of them, primarily because in very large tracts of every metropolitan area they are illegal to build under current zoning ordinances. That's how you get cute prewar streetcar suburbs that are ludicrously unaffordable - the neighborhoods were cheap to build at the time and could be cheap to build today, the prices are all because people love living there and we made it illegal to build more. Postwar suburban sprawl is monstrously expensive to build and maintain. You need to build and maintain an incredible amount more infrastructure per person, and because the properties themselves are less livable and car-dependent, fewer people want to and can afford to live there, which makes them "cheaper." The answer is not to force people to live in car dependent sprawl. It's to build more walkable places so that the cost comes down.

kredd 5y ago

> big cities are increasingly unlivable Almost everyone in my circles are loving big city life while working remotely. It depends on your life circumstances, and what you enjoy, but let’s not generalize that urban lifestyle is bad. Meeting new people, enjoying indoor activities, walking around and etc. are not dying anytime soon, and rent prices show how people are still willing to join in.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
teh_klev 5y ago
I think it kinda depends on your age. When I was in my twenties and thirties, and despite being a country lad, living in cities was highly desirable and I had a lot of good times and made some great long lasting friendships during that period. In my forties I became less enamoured by city life and in my fifties, now living in a rural location and working remotely, if I never see the inside of a city again then that's fine by me.
- bombcar 5y ago
  It’s interesting that in general everyone on HN loves big city living, but then you have a post about city noise and it’s a thousand posts complaining about urban noise and how you can’t get away from it. Of course, the key is that you can have both with the right transportation options.
  - ceras 5y ago
    I think you're making a mistaken observation there. It's a skewed data set: of course people who like living in cities will talk about policies they'd like to see to make their cities better, and not complain about ways that a suburb or rural community could be better. I don't live in a suburb so it would be very odd for me to complain about a hypothetical suburb I don't live in, even though I'd have more complaints if I did live in a suburb. Just how HN as a whole talks about making tech jobs better (e.g. this remote work thread, which isn't relevant to most jobs) far more than it does about other jobs: it's just more relevant to the people here, and even if they overall like their tech job, they want it to be better.

Crabber 5y ago

>Remote also greatly enhances the talent pool available for employers. It reduces cost too. Neither of these things are good for an employee. A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you or where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away sounds like hell.

Brian_K_White 5y ago
It's double edges all the way around. "shared background" has certainly been the cause of a lot of harm. It's one of those things that people want, but which is bad, like "Everything be more efficient if everyone would stop wasting time on their own different ideas and just did what I want.". There are no single simple correct answers.
- Crabber 5y ago
  >"shared background" has certainly been the cause of a lot of harm Do you have an example?
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    Shared background can be a good thing and can apply to good things, but it is also the basis of all discrimination, tribalism, prejudice, or even at it's most benign, inconsideration or ignorance. The examples are the rule and it's instead hard to think of any exceptions.
imiric 5y ago
> A world where none of your coworkers have any shared background with you So you're against diversity? Differing backgrounds and points of view can only be a good thing. For coworkers, for the product, for the company. I know it's en vogue now, but it really is important. > where you can lose an interview at a local company to someone 700 miles away Hiring is not zero-sum. With the current and likely future dev market, there's enough jobs for everyone. Companies should consider applicants regardless of location of residence, and offer the same compensation as well.