
Ask HN: What still sucks about remote work? - krel
Hey HN. Working from home a fews days per month can be pretty great. Less distractions, more time to think deeply about stuff, more natural to take breaks and, let&#x27;s not forget, better coffee.<p>But what about working remotely still sucks? Be it from home, from a beach on Bali, or from a WeWork in Amsterdam.<p>(Im trying to get my company to be more remote-friendly and would like a nuanced view before I make my case.)
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mattcdrake
I've noticed that it's hard to build rapport with coworkers when working
remotely (especially if they are in an office and you're remote). In my
experience, remote communication is mostly transactional and doesn't
facilitate building relationships with people.

I'm not saying I need my coworkers to be my best friends or anything, but I
think that you are more likely to have a well functioning work relationship
with people that you're comfortable around. In my experience, those
relationships are usually built through informal conversations.

If any of you have this figured out, I'd love to hear tips. Most of the other
aspects of remote work are fantastic.

~~~
masukomi
> If any of you have this figured out, I'd love to hear tips. Most of the
> other aspects of remote work are fantastic.

overcommunicate. Share like you do IRL. Kvetch. Cheer. Share interesting
finds. Say good morning. Ask team-mates how they're doing.

I find I build pretty good rapport with my team mates because I _don't_ limit
communications to required transactions.

You build relationships by communicating about life and sharing feelings. So,
communicate about life and share feelings.

~~~
krel
This is fantastic advice, thanks mattcdrake and masukomi!

Personally I think much of the benefits of remote work comes from the ability
to close out the noise of the office, which includes thing like someone
tapping me on the shoulder or grabbing my attention when Im deep in some
mental exercise.

So what I wonder is how you couple the great things about (actively chosen)
isolation with the need for social interaction and banter over time?

Perhaps it's a non-issue and remote work will never reach the level of
distraction you face in an office. Still would be interested to hear your
thoughts.

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postcynical
Video Conferencing (we're using zoom). The "time to conversation" routinely
take minutes of idle time or raging about the miserable state of technology.

Simple annoyances such as opening the laptop when using with an external
monitor (1 out of 10 times making macos unresponsive for half a minute), to
changing your bluetooth noise cancelling headphones for music to airpods,
reconfiguring airpods tethered to your iPhone to macos. Making sure the wrong
input/output audio is selected in macos...

People working from coworking space or a regular office, usually want to
switch to a phone booth/meeting room, that takes them 2-3 minutes to walk to
the next phone booth and get set-up.

Once you're up&running too often audio/video is unreliable, or simply airpods
running out of battery.

I'm experimenting now with a tablet (with its own headset) dedicated to
voice&video calls. While the audio/video setup now works seamlessly, there's
still some usability issues that need workarounds.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
People using bluetooth headsets in vc is irritating.

~~~
mft_
Can I ask why? What do you prefer? Genuinely interested.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
It's irritating because they so often have trouble switching from their phones
or whatever. Wired headsets even like a headphone with a microphone just work.

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croh
1\. Technology is still not good enough for conferencing.

2\. Some family members/friend thinks your work is easy and not that
important. So you should run their errands or take extra responsibilities.

3\. As someone already mentioned, it is difficult to build team rapport. This
affects badly in situations like sudden change in deadlines.

4\. If you don't have active social life outside job, it becomes very
difficult to build new one.

~~~
kochikame
Re number 2, my wife just doesn't get that when I'm working from home, I
actually need to work

~~~
ElKrist
Same. Some people suggested having a separate office in the house. I think
it's the best idea but we can't (we live in a small house). I ended up having
a more firm discussion with her to explain how important it is for me to not
get interrupted. Since then things improved but it's still a work in progress

~~~
krel
My gf is very extrovert and in need of social interactions to not get
depressed. Having an "office room" helps, but not really solving the issue.
Now she just feels ignored instead.

She gets it from an intelligent perspective that I need to work, but
emotionally its a struggle.

~~~
pavel_lishin
What would she do if you worked in an office?

~~~
krel
I do work from an office most of the time so I can compare; it works way
better since the "Im working/not working"-line is less fuzzy (I think).

~~~
beatgammit
I think this is the issue my wife has. She sees me at home and seems to think,
well, maybe I can interrupt him just this once, and it happens a few times a
day. I feel like I get more done in less time, but I also get less time, what
with taking care of random errands.

When I worked on the office, she kept complaining that I came home too late (8
hours + ~1 hour commute). Now she complains when I work too late, but I work
late because of the interruptions.

I've considered renting an office in my city, which would mean a ~5 minute
commute by bicycle. This should help solve most of the issues we have, since I
can be physically away, but not that far away. When I talk to her, things get
better for a little while, but it's not really a permanent solution. I could
probably make it work with 2-3 days in the office and work at home the other
days.

~~~
felipebrnd
Exactly (including the office situation) here.

Some days I would just do obligations like meetings and urgent stuff at the
normal hours and leave the deep work to do when she and the baby were asleep.

This was definitely the hardest thing to balance...

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leetbulb
I've been working from home for about 10 years. The only thing that's ever
been a problem is maintaining a healthy work-life balance. It took years to
realize and resolve all of the various underlying issues before I started
feeling comfortable without being complacent with things.

My advice for people new to remote work: reserve an hour each morning for
exercise, start reading fiction, try out the keto diet, avoid alcohol as much
as possible, try to limit your caffeine intake, open your windows to prevent
co2 buildup, keep eye drops within reach for long hauls, try to get all of
your chores done in the morning.

~~~
et_tu_brewte
Do you mind elaborating on why you mention keto? I’m 4 months into keto and
down 18lbs and I love it, but just wondering why you mentioned it with remote
work.

~~~
leetbulb
In my experience, it's a little too easy to snack being home all day every
day, especially when work slows down or during burnouts. Keto has played a
huge role in managing snacking, or at least, unhealthy snacking.

Plus it compliments nicely with your morning cardio and provides a decent
energy boost throughout the day without the need of caffeine.

~~~
meiraleal
For the snacks, intermittent fasting also helps a lot.

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anonymouswacker
Working at home, the existential dread and feeling of meaninglessness in my
tasks increased with remote work for a time, given my separation from the
distractions of workplace politics, drama, etc. that pervaded office life.

It is hard to make connections with coworkers, and it is so important to build
a social life outside of work if you do not have one.

I find I work less hours in front of the computer, accomplish more, and have
to spend more time "screwing off" to fill in that void of losing office
banter, work lunches with coworkers, etc.

~~~
krel
Very interesting. Would you rather solve this by having a larger network of
local friends, or by having better ways of doing office banter and informal
interactions with your co-workers?

~~~
anonymouswacker
I think it got solved on its own for me. Filling that void of social
interaction can be taken as part of the time to adjust.

I cannot imagine how the informal interactions with co-workers would happen
remotely, but I work in an unimaginative bureaucracy where my co-workers are
about twice my age.

One idea that has been floated is meeting together for training with my
teammates, but I have yet to meet anyone in six years -- even my boss.

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trykondev
I've been working 100% remotely for the past three years. I guess the specific
challenges depend a bit on the nature of your work -- I used to struggle a lot
with feeling isolated when I was doing more pure development work, but my job
now (technical interviewing) requires a lot of video chat so I'm getting lots
of face-to-face communication with teammates and candidates, and I rarely feel
isolated or lonely.

The downside to having lots of video chat is that I'm really constrained to
working from somewhere with good internet, and somewhere without a lot of
ambient noise -- which somewhat ruins the "work from anywhere" appeal. It's
definitely a trade-off I can live with, though.

Aside from those things, I'm honestly struggling to really come up with
something that sucks about remote work. My experience with being fully remote
has been fantastic and has brought so much more joy to my career.

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gotrythis
From a remote management perspective, when your presence is felt in an office,
it reminds people to do the small things that keep the ship sailing smoothly -
things that are outside of the scope of the current project, so they're on
another to-do list, but still need to get done.

When you're a remote manager competing for staff time to get these things done
with on-site managers it gets even trickier, as people want to please the
people they have to face every day, even if they see them just in passing. You
need to take extra steps (more reminders) to keep secondary projects moving.

~~~
krel
For the sake of argument; are you sure getting those secondary projects done
is really a net benefit for the company? Compared to, let's say, doing more
uninterrupted work on the primary project?

Im uncertain myself so further reflections on this would be interesting to
hear.

~~~
gotrythis
Yes, of course. The primary work is client work. The secondary projects are
things needed to assist the marketing team to increase conversions, increase
hourly billing rates, etc.

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ragebol
Conferencing, still. You'd think that we had gotten that covered now, but
nope.

Not just image and audio quality, but Google Hangouts on my phone (so I can
carry it around the house and get tea etc during a meeting) slurps up oodles
of battery and the phone (OnePlus 5T) gets really really hot too.

No such problem with eg. Netflix and Youtube, guess those video codecs have
some HW acceleration while Google Hangouts doesn't?

Further: I only work some 500km from the office, so I travel there (mostly by
train) roughly once a month for a few days. Good mix of remote and on-site for
me.

~~~
buboard
Audio quality is obv important, but is hd video quality needed, beyond screen
sharing? I think a lot of tools use too much cpu time (and thus hang) for hd
video, where a simple 320x240 from the 90s would do

~~~
krel
I don't know, I think resolution is very important to get as many facial
expressions as possible over via video. Those things that make in-person
conversations smooth, but makes video feel stilted.

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quaquaqua1
I will give you the issues I have encountered during the brief times I've
worked remote. I absolutely loved being remote and found work arounds for most
of the issues. I would be eager to have another remote contract but my very
large employer definitely isn't coughing one up anytime soon.

1) Stable, fast internet for endless video-chats

2) Visa/bank account issues.

3) Company politics.

These 3 things can make working remote a challenge. Video chats are needed to
simulate "in person conversations" which company executives believe improves
efficiency and morale. Companies are also worried about "how do we legally pay
our employees if they claim to be in the USA but are really on a tourist visa
somewhere". And third, companies will often has gossip and politics and power
struggles where those who are in office have more face time and promotion
potential than those who are remote.

All of these things can be easily fixed but it requires the employee and the
employer to not be incompetent.

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gshdg
For some reason, interacting with someone you see through a video camera just
doesn’t feel the same as interacting with someone you’re in the same room as.

This is magnified x100 in group settings, especially group settings where more
than half the participants are physically present and only a minority remote.

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bashwizard
Having to go to the yearly meet ups and pretend to enjoy it.

~~~
krel
I get ya, I truly do. But, are you at the wrong company, or are you a person
that would never enjoy a company retreat no matter what?

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viraptor
It would be great to have conferencing software which doesn't spin all fans on
max speed on the latest mbp. Also one which can detect difference between a
camera view and desktop sharing. Tiny fragments of text changing don't need
same type of encoding as hd video.

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jayyeh
Developer roles are so much better setup to work well in an remote
environment. The built in task list organization helps people not only stay on
track but demonstrate their output regardless if they're on site or remote.

The problem is many non-engineering related roles follow similar organization
around sprints and backlogs/task lists. Because of that I think there's a
natural suspicion around productivity for people you don't get a chance to see
everyday.

In other words work organization still sucks for non-engineering related
remote work (sales excluded actually).

And then internal relationship building i think is also a challenge which
impacts collaboration 100% - that still sucks.

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askafriend
Human connection.

A major predictor of workplace happiness is if people feel like they have at
least 1 other friend or confidant at work.

It's incredibly hard to build meaningful relationships over a conferencing
system and makes the job feel more robotic.

Also I think I'd get incredibly lonely and depressed if I did remote work.

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cryptozeus
I have 3 days wfh And 2 days wfo situation. Commute is 1 hr away so wfh works
out great but man do I miss socializing at tge office. People definitely are
the reason wfh sucks for me. This year I plan to move close to the office to
work in the office all 5 days.

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alltakendamned
The isolation when working remotely full time, especially when most people are
in an office.

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this2shallPass
See this recent thread for some insight:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776655](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776655)

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benbristow
The better coffee argument is moot if your office is in a city center ;)

~~~
krel
Is it though? :D I prefer my own coffee over bought coffee 9 times out of 10.
Not to mention the money saved.

