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I agree, it's far less effective. People will say that remote work lets them focus / write code or whatever, but that's not where the real work happens (or at

I agree, it's far less effective. People will say that remote work lets them focus / write code or whatever, but that's not where the real work happens (or at least, it's only a tiny part of the real work). The real important work happens when you can play the politics games, identify key players, uncover closely held secret institutional knowledge, and reach across silos to make projects succeed. You need to bypass the red tape and figure out how to get other people to complete the things that are blocking you. You need a way to back-channel delegate things when there is no official chain to do it properly. Trying to deal with organizational dysfunction is always a challenge, but it's a skillset that any truly productive employee needs. It's hard enough in person - remotely is almost impossible. You won't organically find the right people in a zoom meeting and you definitely won't convince them to help you that way (and vice-versa). You might think "well my organization isn't dysfunctional!" - well you'd be wrong. All organizations are dysfunctional, it's a matter of degrees and how well the dysfunction can be worked around.

shp0ngle 3y ago
Exactly. Only very little part of doing work is the coding. Yes you need that, but it's not _all_. And when working remotely, what I see is that even good coders disappear "in the zone" for far too long... endlessly optimizing some unimportant part of code that doesn't ultimately matter, sometimes creating even worse code that was there at the first place. And then you feel bad that you say "hey but this new version is horrible" when you know the guy worked on it for a week. Okay it's doable remote, but it's harder. That's why I say "it's more effective to be not remote". As a worker, I get it, I hate commute too and I hate not being with my family. But, when the company fails because the competition is just faster and can build things better faster, you won't get a job anymore. So, yeah, I am not for full remote.
- smallkitten 3y ago
  > Only very little part of doing work is the coding. I'm glad that I can get away with doing the very little part of work which is coding. I have zero interest in "reaching across silos", "identifying key players" or "uncovering hidden organizational knowledge". This is the type of thing that a certain personality type might be interested in and it's not me. I know that this puts me at a certain peg with regard to promotion possibilities. I don't care. I am not going to force myself into doing things I don't like in order to climb the corporate ladder.
  - JeremyNT 3y ago
    There are definitely places where you can fit into such a role, but you need other people you're working with to do the grunt work and make sure you're aligned with what matters to the org. If you don't have somebody doing that, you risk being stuck on dead-end projects or working on code that doesn't align with business needs, which can put you at risk when it's layoff time (fairly or not). So even if it's not you doing that part, somebody has to, and if that "somebody" is also fully remote they'll probably have a tougher time navigating everything themselves, which means they're less likely to keep you focused on high visibility, valuable, and successful projects.

shp0ngle 3y ago

Exactly. Only very little part of doing work is the coding. Yes you need that, but it's not _all_. And when working remotely, what I see is that even good coders disappear "in the zone" for far too long... endlessly optimizing some unimportant part of code that doesn't ultimately matter, sometimes creating even worse code that was there at the first place. And then you feel bad that you say "hey but this new version is horrible" when you know the guy worked on it for a week. Okay it's doable remote, but it's harder. That's why I say "it's more effective to be not remote". As a worker, I get it, I hate commute too and I hate not being with my family. But, when the company fails because the competition is just faster and can build things better faster, you won't get a job anymore. So, yeah, I am not for full remote.

smallkitten 3y ago
> Only very little part of doing work is the coding. I'm glad that I can get away with doing the very little part of work which is coding. I have zero interest in "reaching across silos", "identifying key players" or "uncovering hidden organizational knowledge". This is the type of thing that a certain personality type might be interested in and it's not me. I know that this puts me at a certain peg with regard to promotion possibilities. I don't care. I am not going to force myself into doing things I don't like in order to climb the corporate ladder.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  There are definitely places where you can fit into such a role, but you need other people you're working with to do the grunt work and make sure you're aligned with what matters to the org. If you don't have somebody doing that, you risk being stuck on dead-end projects or working on code that doesn't align with business needs, which can put you at risk when it's layoff time (fairly or not). So even if it's not you doing that part, somebody has to, and if that "somebody" is also fully remote they'll probably have a tougher time navigating everything themselves, which means they're less likely to keep you focused on high visibility, valuable, and successful projects.