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It would be very hard (probably impossible) to tempt me to take a non-remote job. The two main arguments I've heard for forcing tech roles into offices: 1) Off

It would be very hard (probably impossible) to tempt me to take a non-remote job. The two main arguments I've heard for forcing tech roles into offices: 1) Offices are better for collaboration 2) WFH is lonely and anti-social. All of the best collaborative experiences in my career have been with people who have not even been in the same country as me, so #1 is anecdotally 100% false in my case. As for the social aspect, I do not need an office to socialize and I am not interested in being forced into an office so other people would have somebody to socialize with.

rrmdp 4y ago
I am with you in all of your reply, I can relate so much!
kwanbix 4y ago
So, what you are saying is that those "best collaborative experiences" where the best because they were remote? Or do you think they could have been even better if they were on site?
- sunaurus 4y ago
  I don't think they were the best because they were remote, they were actually amazing because they were with really amazing people, and it's very hard to find a lot of amazing people that also work well together in a single geographic location. That's why I'm also a huge proponent of geographically distributed teams - the likelihood of finding the best candidate for a team becomes much larger if you don't require the candidate to be in the same city as the rest of the team. As for whether those experiences would have been even better on-site: I don't think so at all. In general I think remote collaboration requires a set of skills. Those skills are becoming more and more prevalent as a result of many factors (the recent pandemic, younger employees having grown up with social tools like Ventrilo/TeamSpeak/Discord, etc). If you're working with somebody that sucks at remote collaboration, then sure, it will probably be much better to meet them in person. But if you're working with somebody who is skilled at remote collaboration, then I have not found any downside to working with them over the internet. You can deal with people who are bad at remote collaboration in many ways. Forcing everybody into offices is certainly an option, but I think it's quite a terrible one. Training people on how to be effective remotely would be a much more preferable option for myself.

rrmdp 4y ago

I am with you in all of your reply, I can relate so much!

kwanbix 4y ago

So, what you are saying is that those "best collaborative experiences" where the best because they were remote? Or do you think they could have been even better if they were on site?

sunaurus 4y ago
I don't think they were the best because they were remote, they were actually amazing because they were with really amazing people, and it's very hard to find a lot of amazing people that also work well together in a single geographic location. That's why I'm also a huge proponent of geographically distributed teams - the likelihood of finding the best candidate for a team becomes much larger if you don't require the candidate to be in the same city as the rest of the team. As for whether those experiences would have been even better on-site: I don't think so at all. In general I think remote collaboration requires a set of skills. Those skills are becoming more and more prevalent as a result of many factors (the recent pandemic, younger employees having grown up with social tools like Ventrilo/TeamSpeak/Discord, etc). If you're working with somebody that sucks at remote collaboration, then sure, it will probably be much better to meet them in person. But if you're working with somebody who is skilled at remote collaboration, then I have not found any downside to working with them over the internet. You can deal with people who are bad at remote collaboration in many ways. Forcing everybody into offices is certainly an option, but I think it's quite a terrible one. Training people on how to be effective remotely would be a much more preferable option for myself.