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I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remot

I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab's is a good start) to start grasping it. But it will happen and the companies/startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).

lobstrosity420 3y ago
> Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand) Why do the people living in those cities feel so strongly that this isn't the case[1]? How does the city administration deal with skyrocketing rents? [1] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-are-digital-nomads-ruining-portugal https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- losteric 3y ago
  Skyrocketing rent demonstrates the strong demand for such environments. Prices would fall if there were more competitive cities.
  - lghh 3y ago
    Or low supply.
- kpw94 3y ago
  The solution is a local inflation: You have to raise everyone's wages, prices, etc until there's an equilibrium (finally too expensive for digital nomads? no more rising rent prices). But it's not something that can be done easily/overnight. This is how these places would have "a lot to gain". If it's just rent prices going up, the nomads & the local landlords are the only one benefiting and everyone else is upset.
alistairSH 3y ago
Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.
- voisin 3y ago
  > Most did so successfully. There’s a lot of nuance being glossed over here and I don’t think this is clear cut. Successfully for who? All stakeholders? Every department? Customers and suppliers too? Does this success translate to a non-pandemic environment with lower expectations by everyone given the circumstances?
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    Wife works for a retail bank. Front-line employees didn't go remote - they need to be in retail bank locations serving customers. Back-office employees were 98% in-office prior to COVID. In several weeks, the company pivoted to remote work, including procurement of laptops (most non-managers had desktops). During the 2.5-3 years of COVID-induced WFH, their engagement numbers and measured productivity went up. I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces. While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative. All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      My company went permanent full remote. We are much less productive, velocity per engineer is about half what it was. I'll freely admit it's because the company is poorly managed, but in my experience tons of companies have leadership that isn't able to quickly pivot in the way needed for WFH to be successful. It requires a lot of effort to get remote engineers to communicate well and at least here it basically just doesn't happen anymore.
bee_rider 3y ago
The combination of a bigger remote talent pool and enhanced productivity with AI tools is going to make it pretty rough for mediocre programmers in the medium term, I think.
Aerroon 3y ago
>Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco). Won't this be a large obstacle for remote work? More expensive places are going to hold on to people tooth and nail. There are plenty of ways to do this, eg explicit regulation or tax complications. When Bulgarian truck drivers started outcompeting French truck drivers the EU pushed through new regulations that required the drivers and the trucks (!!) to visit their home country at least every 2 months.[0] >The most controversial measure is an obligation for trucks to return to their country of establishment at least every eight weeks I think political entities will fight a lot with dirty tricks like this to keep the tax revenue and employment in their jurisdiction. [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/trucker-rules-europe-logistics-monility-european-commission/ https://www.politico.eu/article/trucker-rules-europe-logisti...
- fbrncci 3y ago
  There will be countries like Bulgaria, and there will be countries which will welcome it with open arms (and anything in between). I am here in Thailand as an expat, with my own business, working remotely for European clients. I am taxed at the Thai rate, and have a work permit, because there is no large Thai talent pool competing for the same business and opportunities I am. So far I am not seeing any dirty tricks, there are other countries competing for this exact type of expat too. "Dirty tricks" would drive them away to other countries.
  - Elora 3y ago
    > There will be countries like Bulgaria, and there will be countries which will welcome it with open arms Bulgaria (and Romania, per linked article) were on the receiving end of said dirty tricks. The problem is Western EU trucking companies did not want the much cheaper to operate Eastern EU truckers eating their lunch. The "dirty tricks" did not come from Bulgaria/Romania in this case.
- slategruen 3y ago
  Similar thing is happening here in Philippines. The government basically gave tax breaks to companies who will utilize their office spaces in city centers. To no one's surprise, most of the local companies are now forcing return-to-office. The government justification is: people spend more when they regularly go the the office thus, stimulating the economy.
Uehreka 3y ago
…what? Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” and call workers’ bluffs and cement their control, so I don’t think there’s a clean dichotomy here. As for walkable cities, I agree that they would be awesome, but they do not just naturally flow from a remote work culture. And having lived in Thailand for two years I hard disagree about it being a walkable place with good internet (it is cheap, which is nice, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).
- hosh 3y ago
  Agreed. People have all sorts of reasons to work remote, and it is not always because of walkability: - proximity to family and community support - quality of schools for kids - some people want to live out in the boonies, with a hobby farm or a real homestead - shared cultural or political values - some folks want to be nomadic, couch surfing or living out of a souped up van or rv - some folks want to be able to stay with extended family for longer - some folks want to cowork locally - I know one guy who lives in a low cost of living area and reinvest the arbitrage back into his local community while still living comfortably In my family’s case, I have been regularly going to the local indoor play gym so that my toddler can wear himself out. It’s too hot to play outside. Also, flexibility != remote There are remote work places which installs invasive software to monitor “butt-in-seat”, and you don’t really get flex time.
- stakhanov 3y ago
  > At this point remote work is nothing new[...] I couldn't agree more. In fact, historically, the norm has been for the work to come to where people lived with their families, rather than for people to leave their family homes to "go to work". This was at a time when the prevalent type of work was farming and craftsmanship in relation to goods that were easily transported. A craftsman's workshop was usually in the same building as their family home in towns and cities, and rural areas operated a "putting out system" [1] where travelling tradespeople brought supplies and collected finished wares. With industrialization, the factory became a thing, and it somehow got into our heads that factories are the success model that everything else should be modeled after. Offices that don't do factory work started looking like factories. Schools started looking like factories. Public administration started looking like factories. Everything became a factory. ...this trend is hostile to human nature and relatively recent when looking at it on historical timescales. Recent advances in telecommunications have made what little advantage there was to factory-like offices obsolete, and it's time to "return to normal". And by that I mean remote work, because remote work is "historical normal". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system
RestlessMind 3y ago
> Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain Unfortunately, they will have a lot to lose by not being cheap anymore. At least for the locals. See Lisbon or Boise, for example.
soligern 3y ago
What do you mean by “crack” remote? It’s been “cracked” and has been pretty run of the mill for years now. You have a point about big companies with overhead being slow to turn but there are already very well established ways for remote companies to work.
midoridensha 3y ago
>And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco). This is somewhat wishful thinking: most companies cannot have employees that live outside their country. These workers instead need to become consultants, and contract to the client companies. Employing someone overseas is not easy at all, and most companies just aren't set up to do it. There is a new industry of companies that specialize in "employing" digital nomads, and then contracting their services to their employers back in the other country, but of course this adds extra cost to the client. For US-based remote jobs, they usually plainly say "US residents only" to avoid these hassles.
jalapenos 3y ago
The change is already done. The radical change would be changing back.
mrtksn 3y ago
Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown in boats, stay in detention centres, leave the EU to keep the Poles out of the job market etc. exist primarily to protect local working markets. IMHO a people doing the same job in SF and Bangalore must be compensated the same but the fact that they aren't is exactly why it's much better to live in USA. That's also why you have H-2B visa quota. I'm still puzzled about this, don't you think that this could have the same effect on your industry as the manufacturing moving to China? Especially for coders, don't you think that people in poor countries can code just fine? Technology is not only making the distance a non issue - recent developments are also removing the language barriers. The money that even the junior US tech workers are making is at life changing level for most of the world. This will be tapped.
- ornornor 3y ago
  > Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison. Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway. I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    I agree, it wasn't a mainstream success so far but there are teams who cracked it. There are some companies who are proudly WFH-only and global. The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results. I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.
Solvency 3y ago
Virtually the entire VFX industry has shifted to remote. Let that sync in. The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now. They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.
- mh- 3y ago
  I'm curious (and not really familiar with modern VFX workflows). Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.
  - jhugo 3y ago
    My wife works from home in a related industry, and she is quite frequently transmitting work files (up to 100s of GiB) over our residential connection. We have multi-gigabit symmetric FTTH though.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    I think it depends on what they're doing. If they're doing animation (which includes moving elements in live-action footage) and mostly checking the quality of motion, they might get away with proxy renders. But anyone doing critical color or compositing I would think need to do local renders on a calibrated system, and then commit the work to a remote render farm for consistency and accessibility by other team members.
theshrike79 3y ago
Source: Worked at a ~2k employee multinational when covid hit, it got bought by a bigger corp and got turned into an ~11k employee company later on. Large companies were already multinational, people from India didn't fly to San Fransisco or Berlin for a meeting, they did it remotely. Some bigwigs and specific consultants did it, but the regular people just used Slack and maybe Zoom to communicate over time zones. COVID just forced everyone to up their game with this, all meeting rooms got big displays, 4k cameras and Zoom integration after RTO was an option. People going home got allowances to buy better gear for their home office (Mine was already good, so I upgraded my home theater setup). I had multiple work friends who moved hundreds of kilometers away from the city where our office was. Even now most people are still 99-100% remote. They only come to the office when there are company-wide parties or team events. Now I work for a smaller startup-ish company and we're mostly remote, it's recommended to drop by the office once a week, but it's not enforced. Some are there every day, some only come for the parties. I personally know multiple highly experienced people (20+ years in the field) who 100% refuse any offers that aren't fully remote.

lobstrosity420 3y ago

> Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand) Why do the people living in those cities feel so strongly that this isn't the case[1]? How does the city administration deal with skyrocketing rents? [1] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-are-digital-nomads-ruining-portugal https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
losteric 3y ago
Skyrocketing rent demonstrates the strong demand for such environments. Prices would fall if there were more competitive cities.
- lghh 3y ago
  Or low supply.
kpw94 3y ago
The solution is a local inflation: You have to raise everyone's wages, prices, etc until there's an equilibrium (finally too expensive for digital nomads? no more rising rent prices). But it's not something that can be done easily/overnight. This is how these places would have "a lot to gain". If it's just rent prices going up, the nomads & the local landlords are the only one benefiting and everyone else is upset.

alistairSH 3y ago

Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.

voisin 3y ago
> Most did so successfully. There’s a lot of nuance being glossed over here and I don’t think this is clear cut. Successfully for who? All stakeholders? Every department? Customers and suppliers too? Does this success translate to a non-pandemic environment with lower expectations by everyone given the circumstances?
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Wife works for a retail bank. Front-line employees didn't go remote - they need to be in retail bank locations serving customers. Back-office employees were 98% in-office prior to COVID. In several weeks, the company pivoted to remote work, including procurement of laptops (most non-managers had desktops). During the 2.5-3 years of COVID-induced WFH, their engagement numbers and measured productivity went up. I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces. While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative. All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    My company went permanent full remote. We are much less productive, velocity per engineer is about half what it was. I'll freely admit it's because the company is poorly managed, but in my experience tons of companies have leadership that isn't able to quickly pivot in the way needed for WFH to be successful. It requires a lot of effort to get remote engineers to communicate well and at least here it basically just doesn't happen anymore.

bee_rider 3y ago

The combination of a bigger remote talent pool and enhanced productivity with AI tools is going to make it pretty rough for mediocre programmers in the medium term, I think.

Aerroon 3y ago

>Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco). Won't this be a large obstacle for remote work? More expensive places are going to hold on to people tooth and nail. There are plenty of ways to do this, eg explicit regulation or tax complications. When Bulgarian truck drivers started outcompeting French truck drivers the EU pushed through new regulations that required the drivers and the trucks (!!) to visit their home country at least every 2 months.[0] >The most controversial measure is an obligation for trucks to return to their country of establishment at least every eight weeks I think political entities will fight a lot with dirty tricks like this to keep the tax revenue and employment in their jurisdiction. [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/trucker-rules-europe-logistics-monility-european-commission/ https://www.politico.eu/article/trucker-rules-europe-logisti...

fbrncci 3y ago
There will be countries like Bulgaria, and there will be countries which will welcome it with open arms (and anything in between). I am here in Thailand as an expat, with my own business, working remotely for European clients. I am taxed at the Thai rate, and have a work permit, because there is no large Thai talent pool competing for the same business and opportunities I am. So far I am not seeing any dirty tricks, there are other countries competing for this exact type of expat too. "Dirty tricks" would drive them away to other countries.
- Elora 3y ago
  > There will be countries like Bulgaria, and there will be countries which will welcome it with open arms Bulgaria (and Romania, per linked article) were on the receiving end of said dirty tricks. The problem is Western EU trucking companies did not want the much cheaper to operate Eastern EU truckers eating their lunch. The "dirty tricks" did not come from Bulgaria/Romania in this case.
slategruen 3y ago
Similar thing is happening here in Philippines. The government basically gave tax breaks to companies who will utilize their office spaces in city centers. To no one's surprise, most of the local companies are now forcing return-to-office. The government justification is: people spend more when they regularly go the the office thus, stimulating the economy.

Uehreka 3y ago

…what? Sorry to harsh the vibe, but that second paragraph reads like something out of 2014 when people were first reading REMOTE. At this point remote work is nothing new, and while many large companies don’t like it, many large companies are going along with it (and developing the culture, documentation, etc.) because it works well as a way to attract talent. And some startup founders are trying to go “full Musk” and call workers’ bluffs and cement their control, so I don’t think there’s a clean dichotomy here. As for walkable cities, I agree that they would be awesome, but they do not just naturally flow from a remote work culture. And having lived in Thailand for two years I hard disagree about it being a walkable place with good internet (it is cheap, which is nice, but you don’t get what you don’t pay for).

hosh 3y ago
Agreed. People have all sorts of reasons to work remote, and it is not always because of walkability: - proximity to family and community support - quality of schools for kids - some people want to live out in the boonies, with a hobby farm or a real homestead - shared cultural or political values - some folks want to be nomadic, couch surfing or living out of a souped up van or rv - some folks want to be able to stay with extended family for longer - some folks want to cowork locally - I know one guy who lives in a low cost of living area and reinvest the arbitrage back into his local community while still living comfortably In my family’s case, I have been regularly going to the local indoor play gym so that my toddler can wear himself out. It’s too hot to play outside. Also, flexibility != remote There are remote work places which installs invasive software to monitor “butt-in-seat”, and you don’t really get flex time.
stakhanov 3y ago
> At this point remote work is nothing new[...] I couldn't agree more. In fact, historically, the norm has been for the work to come to where people lived with their families, rather than for people to leave their family homes to "go to work". This was at a time when the prevalent type of work was farming and craftsmanship in relation to goods that were easily transported. A craftsman's workshop was usually in the same building as their family home in towns and cities, and rural areas operated a "putting out system" [1] where travelling tradespeople brought supplies and collected finished wares. With industrialization, the factory became a thing, and it somehow got into our heads that factories are the success model that everything else should be modeled after. Offices that don't do factory work started looking like factories. Schools started looking like factories. Public administration started looking like factories. Everything became a factory. ...this trend is hostile to human nature and relatively recent when looking at it on historical timescales. Recent advances in telecommunications have made what little advantage there was to factory-like offices obsolete, and it's time to "return to normal". And by that I mean remote work, because remote work is "historical normal". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system

RestlessMind 3y ago

> Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain Unfortunately, they will have a lot to lose by not being cheap anymore. At least for the locals. See Lisbon or Boise, for example.

soligern 3y ago

What do you mean by “crack” remote? It’s been “cracked” and has been pretty run of the mill for years now. You have a point about big companies with overhead being slow to turn but there are already very well established ways for remote companies to work.

midoridensha 3y ago

>And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco). This is somewhat wishful thinking: most companies cannot have employees that live outside their country. These workers instead need to become consultants, and contract to the client companies. Employing someone overseas is not easy at all, and most companies just aren't set up to do it. There is a new industry of companies that specialize in "employing" digital nomads, and then contracting their services to their employers back in the other country, but of course this adds extra cost to the client. For US-based remote jobs, they usually plainly say "US residents only" to avoid these hassles.

jalapenos 3y ago

The change is already done. The radical change would be changing back.

mrtksn 3y ago

Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown in boats, stay in detention centres, leave the EU to keep the Poles out of the job market etc. exist primarily to protect local working markets. IMHO a people doing the same job in SF and Bangalore must be compensated the same but the fact that they aren't is exactly why it's much better to live in USA. That's also why you have H-2B visa quota. I'm still puzzled about this, don't you think that this could have the same effect on your industry as the manufacturing moving to China? Especially for coders, don't you think that people in poor countries can code just fine? Technology is not only making the distance a non issue - recent developments are also removing the language barriers. The money that even the junior US tech workers are making is at life changing level for most of the world. This will be tapped.

ornornor 3y ago
> Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. Offshoring hasn’t been an amazing success story so far, what you save in cost you spend in fixing low quality, bridging cultural gaps, and herding workers with no skin in the game who can’t afford to gaf because they’re paid so little in comparison. Companies will always offshore but I think it’s the jobs at the crappier companies that are offshored and these aren’t the places we typically want to work at anyway. I’m talking about large body shops whose value proposition is “we’re cheaper and we work harder”, not about individuals around the world who are hired by 100% remote companies. The latter are typically pretty good.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  I agree, it wasn't a mainstream success so far but there are teams who cracked it. There are some companies who are proudly WFH-only and global. The sweatshop model surely doesn't lead to quality but there are other models where companies open a local branch where they actually can have the company culture and yield just as good results. I wouldn't trust too much on the "secret sauce that makes us special" theory, the secret might have been the culture which forms when working from the office.

Solvency 3y ago

Virtually the entire VFX industry has shifted to remote. Let that sync in. The most hardware/GPU intensive industry of creatives dealing with ungodly complex technical pipelines, terabytes of 32bit EXR frames of rendered data, Houdini fluid simulations, compositing, color grading, the whole works... is almost entirely distributed now. They've done it. Everyone can do it. And are doing it.

mh- 3y ago
I'm curious (and not really familiar with modern VFX workflows). Do they work with a mostly thin client approach now? I'm assuming it's impractical for them to regularly transmit terabytes of data back and forth over residential connections.
- jhugo 3y ago
  My wife works from home in a related industry, and she is quite frequently transmitting work files (up to 100s of GiB) over our residential connection. We have multi-gigabit symmetric FTTH though.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  I think it depends on what they're doing. If they're doing animation (which includes moving elements in live-action footage) and mostly checking the quality of motion, they might get away with proxy renders. But anyone doing critical color or compositing I would think need to do local renders on a calibrated system, and then commit the work to a remote render farm for consistency and accessibility by other team members.

theshrike79 3y ago

Source: Worked at a ~2k employee multinational when covid hit, it got bought by a bigger corp and got turned into an ~11k employee company later on. Large companies were already multinational, people from India didn't fly to San Fransisco or Berlin for a meeting, they did it remotely. Some bigwigs and specific consultants did it, but the regular people just used Slack and maybe Zoom to communicate over time zones. COVID just forced everyone to up their game with this, all meeting rooms got big displays, 4k cameras and Zoom integration after RTO was an option. People going home got allowances to buy better gear for their home office (Mine was already good, so I upgraded my home theater setup). I had multiple work friends who moved hundreds of kilometers away from the city where our office was. Even now most people are still 99-100% remote. They only come to the office when there are company-wide parties or team events. Now I work for a smaller startup-ish company and we're mostly remote, it's recommended to drop by the office once a week, but it's not enforced. Some are there every day, some only come for the parties. I personally know multiple highly experienced people (20+ years in the field) who 100% refuse any offers that aren't fully remote.