
The rise of remote working will continue - keiferski
https://www.fastcompany.com/90318974/the-rise-of-remote-working-will-continue
======
jasode
_> REMOTE EMPLOYEES ARE SIMPLY MORE PRODUCTIVE

>remote employees simply produce better results than their traditional
counterparts.

>employees who spend a bulk of their working hours outside of the office are
vastly happier and more productive._

As a remote worker, articles like these only preach to the choir (people like
me) instead of actually convincing business people and decision makers.

Having a journalist repeatedly say _" remote is more productive"_ isn't going
to radically change the industry.

What the business world needs is a high-profile example of a company beating
all the competition specifically _because_ of their remote workforce. E.g. a
Google/Facebook/Apple type of multi-billion dollar success that shows the
remote workers at Company X beating the onsite office workers at Company Y.

If that happened, there would be endless writeups and case studies in Harvard
Business Review and WSJ with CEOs and middle managers copying the "remote work
is our killer competitive advantage". The evidence of "more productivity"
would be so compelling that incubators like YC and VCs would _refuse to fund
you_ if you didn't have a 100% remote work force because it would be business
suicide to stuff everybody on site in a office.

Which company is closest to providing that compelling evidence? I don't see
the remote work culture at Automattic & Basecamp really changing that
narrative yet.

~~~
wolfgke
Just a consideration: I don't believe that remote is _so_ much more
productive. The central advantage that I see is that in other regions than the
Bay Area, the costs of living are much cheaper. Since for the employee, the
central metric of revenue is "salary - costs of living" you get:

\- "better programmers/employees for the same money",

\- "cheaper programmers with the same quality",

\- you have it easier to find good employers (less skill shortage) since you
can also include potential employees who live somewhere else and are not
willing to relocate.

~~~
PostOnce
Cost of living is cheaper, so you'll just accept less money and let the
company keep it?

You shouldn't determine how much you charge by how much you need to survive,
but charge instead by how much the company can afford to pay, or how much
they're going to make (harder to determine the latter).

After all, the company doesn't price its products by how much it needs to stay
solvent, it prices them by how much they can get people to pay.

~~~
wolfgke
> Cost of living is cheaper, so you'll just accept less money and let the
> company keep it?

Let's rather put it this way: the company saves money; if they give some
amount of the savings back to the employee (via salary), both sides should be
satisfied.

------
ecmascript
I work remotely, and I will never go back to an office again if I have any say
in it. It is simply so much more enjoyable and is great for my life and soul.

I go for a longer walk with my dogs after lunch, listening to a podcast or
audiobook and just enjoy. I don't really enjoy the concrete that cities
provide to you and working remotely allows me to live in a cheaper, bigger and
I believe more healthy place.

If you have the possibility, work remotely at least a couple of days a week. I
think you will enjoy it. One big downside is obviously the lack of social
interaction which can be frustrating at times but it's basically the only big
downside for me at least.

A minor downside is it feels like the days goes by faster, I believe this is
due to each day being so similar so the brain does not simply register the day
in the same way it does when you travel away from your home.

Just as being on vacation in a different country makes the vacation feel much
longer than it would if you spend that at home. It sounds like something that
is nice, but in reality, you don't really want to feel like your life is just
flashing by. But it also gives you perspective to work on stuff you feel is
important and provide value.

~~~
realbarack
I currently work remotely and enjoy it for a lot of the reasons you say.
However I've had a pretty tough time with loneliness. I moved to a new city
(relationship reasons) which is always challenging, but I think remote work
has made those challenges particularly acute.

I think of myself as a fairly social person (at least relative to software
engineers) but I've struggled a bit with this one.

~~~
ryanSrich
Coming up on 6 years of remote work and I’ve found that if it weren’t for my
wife (who works locally), I’d have zero friends within a 2,000 mile radius.
She has basically built our entire social fabric from the various jobs she’s
had locally. I could see how being single and being remote could run a toll.

------
oftenwrong
I work remotely 2-3 days per week, and in the future I only want to increase
that number. Recently, I turned down an opportunity because it would have
required me to commute to an office every day, without exception. For me, that
is now a deal-breaker.

Some personal benefits to working remotely:

\- I save an hour a day by not commuting

\- I can work in whatever position I want

\- I can wear whatever is most comfortable

\- I can work outside, in the park or in my garden (I suppose I could do this
near the office, but the park is not as nice)

\- I can tend to my household duties or exercise during my short breaks
instead of just milling about the office

\- I can take a nap

\- I can prepare a fresh meal

\- Privacy / personal space

\- No undesired socialising

~~~
lighthazard
My biggest reason to work from home has been my son's school schedule. He gets
out at 3:00. There's no way I can reliably come from work, pick him up, bring
him home, and then get back to work without wasting a lot of time. Now, I
moved my lunch hour to that time, I spend the entire hour driving, pickup/drop
off, and a little bit of play before I head into my office for the rest of the
day.

On a side note - I feel like taking a nap is a bit too extreme for a work at
home setup. Maybe you don't need to be available all the time during your work
hours, but unplanned naps means your team will be unable to reach you at a
time they assumed you'd be available.

~~~
oftenwrong
My work schedule is shifted early, so I leave the office by 3pm. I think all
offices should permit this to accommodate school pickups. A side benefit is
that I never have to commute during peak times.

I do not need to be available at all times. There is an insignificant time-
away-from-desk difference between going out for a coffee and having a short
nap. A nap helps me stay unstressed, energetic, focused. I feel a headache
coming on, a short nap nips that in the bud. Working continuously with no
breaks is only a fine strategy for robots.

~~~
meowface
I'm with you. Plenty of people (across all job industries, tech included) go
out for long lunches and/or coffee and often aren't checking their
notifications for most or all of that time. A nap is no different, and is just
as, or more, important to productivity and health as food or coffee.

For certain kinds of "emergency response" jobs in tech, that may not be an
option, but for everything else odds are your teammates can survive if you
aren't available right that minute. And even emergency responders need shifts
and breaks during shifts. If you're a developer, unless you're very actively
training a new team member or something, I can't think of many scenarios where
an immediate response is truly needed. This is HN and everyone has a
counterexample for everything, so I'd be curious about other takes on this,
but that's been my experience.

Remote-first companies seem to be very asynchronous (or at least try to be),
out of necessity to accommodate people across all timezones, but also to
encourage this kind of flexibility.

------
Mediterraneo10
It is interesting to ponder if more remote working in the United States will
lead to a rebirth of community institutions, the clubs and volunteer
organizations whose decline over past decades Robert Putnam charted in his
book _Bowling Alone_. Americans have increasingly made their interaction with
their coworkers the core of their social lives. If people switch to working
remotely and there are no coworkers to interact with IRL anymore, then maybe
they will more active in their local communities? On the other hand, it could
simply lead to spending even more time on social media to fill the gap.

~~~
klipt
Why would anyone employ a remote worker who demands a US salary when the same
remote work can be done in any country with cheaper cost of living and
consequently lower salaries?

If you have to be on-site, you're only competing with locals. If you're
remote, you're competing with the world.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
A strikingly large amount of remote-work offers require the person to be in a
particular time zone. Managers want you to be able to communicate with the
team at times that are normal working hours for everyone. Even if there are
Eastern Europeans or whatever who are comfortable working nights, they still
wouldn’t get hired in spite of the opportunity to pay them less.

------
atwebb
Having worked entirely remote for a decade, I side with remote with a bit of
regular in office. In office can be helpful and there is some serendipity
which cannot be accounted for remotely. People will also just ask someone else
rather than send you an email/IM.

However, meetings are terrible onsite. Most meetings do not require strict
attention or presence of mind (for my role at least) for the entirety of the
meeting. You can gauge when to lean in and when you can work on something
else. It can be a great time to handle installs, catch up on small tasks, or
follow up on other conversations. I'd attribute a lot of my productivity boost
to being able to leverage meeting times as productive minutes. Folks in the
room tend to zone out as well, they just can't be as obvious with their lack
of focus.

~~~
wayoutthere
I think you’re describing the type of meetings that should be e-mails :)

For creative activities like design sessions where engagement is high, being
co-located in the same room is essential. Virtual product design often ends up
as design-by-committee after the team grows beyond the size of close personal
relationships.

~~~
atwebb
I half-agree, I love online meetings for visualizations (not strict color
design) because everyone is seeing the same thing on their screen and not a
whiteboard or presentation. There's more engagement and most tools allow for
easy sharing and markup as well as video recording and transcribing.

Some sessions are easier in person absolutely but there are not plentiful
enough to consider requiring butts in seats everyday.

------
lordnacho
I run a fully remote team of devs.

If you need to travel into a major city, that can easily be 45 mins each way.
5 days a week, it pretty much adds up to an extra day each week.

Then there's the benefits to hiring. You now have a global pool of talent to
tap, and you can offer for them to live wherever they want. Plus a lot of
people appreciate being able to see the kids to/from school.

And just general flexibility is useful. Why shouldn't you run to the shops for
a few minutes while things are quiet? Or pay bills, do your taxes, etc?

~~~
viraptor
> You now have a global pool of talent to tap

I wish more places adopted that. Lots of "remote" positions are actually "same
city / state / timezone". Which makes sense in many cases and makes things
easy for HR... But finding a global remote job is pretty hard if you're not in
Europe/US.

I actually wish there was a better naming convention. WFH vs remote? Remote vs
global? Majority of the time looking for remote job ads seems to be filtering
out things like "remote (but you need to be within 20min of our Boston HQ)"
and "remote (US only)"

~~~
reallydontask
I've seen variations of this. I think this is to get around the problem of
lack of core hours.

If you are in the UK and you have somebody in your team from NZ, then there is
never going to be any overlap in working hours, which might work, e.g.
somebody likes to work late/early or might not (people like to stick to
business hours)

edit:

The ones saying (US only) probably don't want the headache of dealing with
people in a different tax jurisdiction

~~~
jinglebells
Anecdata: I'm in the UK and have worked with someone from NZ, it worked really
well. He was a designer and tester so when we came in the morning, he'd tested
everything and left new designs to be built up, then handed over to him
overnight.

~~~
reallydontask
It's more of a problem if half the team is UK and the other half is NZ.

I think a project on my company was run along the same lines as you mentioned
but reversed: Testers in UK, Devs in NZ

Worked well but occasionally Test manager would stay late for a call, I
presume that it was early for NZ guys.

------
fj39dkf
Interesting to see all the pro-100%-remote comments here. I worked for a
company for about two years. One year in, they decided to go fully remote. The
goal was to save money (the business was bootstrapped at the time) and to
allow one of the founders to move to where his wife was attending graduate
school. I don't feel like our productivity changed much. I enjoyed the
flexibility but found myself feeling horribly lonely without the normal day to
day interaction. So, they offered to get me a dedicated spot in a co-working
space. That helped some, but not as much as being part of an in-person team.

So I ultimately left, although for other reasons. Now I work at a place with a
generous WFH policy but a central office. I WFH maybe one or two days a week
and this is way better.

I think it depends on the job itself sometimes as well. I work on a data
science team, and I've never found a good replacement for doing math on the
whiteboard with someone. The communication barrier introduced with a network
connection is just painful in that case.

However, I also live in Boston, one of the few American cities with (mostly)
functional public transit. My commute is a 10 minute train ride where I can
read email/slack and think about what I'm doing that day. Or if the weather is
nice, it's a 30-45 minute walk. It's no pain at all to make it into the
office.

~~~
TheHegemon
Seriously, I've been doing remote for the past three years and I despise it.
Maybe I'm just a weird for working together as a team instead of lone wolfing
everything but it gets incredibly lonely.

Being unable to easily bounce ideas or ask Joe why something works a
particular way is incredibly frustrating.

------
sime2009
The problem I have with this kind of happy rainbows and unicorns kind of
reporting is that focuses on the companies and people where remote work is a
success and completely ignores those who tried and failed. There is very
little investigation into which situations can support remote work/teams and
which ones don't.

~~~
ttoinou
Agreed. Feels like it's giving a lot of power to employees, employer less
being able to know what's going on. I have a developer friend who's working
two jobs at the same time for example. The distinction between independent
freelancer and employee becomes very thin

~~~
endisukaj
If the work is being done, why does the employer need to know more than what
is absolutely necessary?

~~~
fkdo
What if both companies have a production outage at the same time? The employee
would have an obligation to give 100% focus to both of his employers.

On top of that the employee is probably providing microfriction in day to day
life: asking to reschedule meetings when double booked, having a longer than
necessary delay in email/Slack responses.

If the person is a contractor it's a valid thing to do, but going to work for
a w2 implies that job will be your primary commitment outside of family.

~~~
beginpanic
A lot of the issues people see with remote work or in this case multiple jobs,
I've already seen solved at IBM. IBM is something like 70% remote work for its
350,000 employees. Every problem anyone has seen with remote work, IBM has
probably already seen it and solved it.

In this case, my group at IBM is a consulting group and we work with multiple
clients at the same time. I've had two (sometimes three) clients with
production down issues at the same time. It's a solved problem, and we solved
it by eliminating single points of failure. Every project we have a lead and a
backup, and some bigger projects we have multiple backups. We also keep good
documentation for projects in a standard template, so even if the person knows
nothing about the project, they can step in, spend five minutes reading the
docs, and then jump straight in.

Same thing with scheduling. We have to do a scheduling dance when we're
putting out meetings because clients can't see our calendars and we can't see
theirs, but it works. Is it perfect? No. But it's not a show-stopper either.
Business still gets done. Work gets done. The only friction is the mindset of
"that job will be your primary commitment". That is the only thing that's
holding it back.

But like you said, it can be easily overcome by just saying you're a contract
employee instead of a full time employee.

------
pojzon
Im curious whether the "evidence" takes into consideration that the people who
switch to remote working have naturaly high level of self-organization and
often value their own time a lot more simply because they are "better" than an
"Average Joe" from the Corp Co.

Evidence that sound like "A group of experts that are alot better than an
Average Corp Joe, produce a lot better results even when working remotely" is
not as impactful, dont you think ?

Tho if the best candidates value remote working so much, mby corporations have
not much of a choice but to change hiring policies.

~~~
Mordisquitos
Also, higher-performing workers may have a stronger hand to negotiate remote
working into their contracts than average ones.

------
patrickdavey
I've been working remotely for 3 years now. This year with a new daughter we
took off to Europe for 3 months to visit family (live in NZ). It's so amazing
to be able to continue to work but spend time with the grandparents.
Incredibly lucky and privileged position to be in.

I too don't want to go back to office life full time if I can avoid it.
Unfortunately getting this position was sheer luck, and, I'm not expecting to
find it easy to find another full time remote position when this ends. Still,
that's a problem for another day ;)

------
pwm
Over the years I developed my own spin on this topic. For me it’s not about
working remotely but the ability to choose day by day whether i want to work
remotely or on-site. My current balance, evolved organically, is 4 days remote
1 day on-site. The constraint of course is that you have to live close enough
to an office of your company to commute. The upside is that you can have it
all :)

~~~
ido
Close enough to commute, but as close as when you commute every day.

I would tolerate a 1 hour commute each way if I only had to do it once a week
but never if I had to do it every day - the short time I did made me
miserable.

~~~
ecmascript
This is actually what I do now. I have just about an hour of commute time by
car when I go into the office, which I do about 1 day per week.

It isn't bad then and I actually enjoy the commute most of the time.

~~~
jdironman
I am in the red on this one. I travel one hour both ways for a sysadmin job.
But, hoping to relocate or start doing remote 2-3x a week.

------
wastedhours
Going to echo the main point I do on all remote threads - it needs to be
inherent to the culture. Things can't be decided by the water-cooler if you
have people who are working remotely - you need, ideally, to be "remote first"
even if you have a physical space.

We have offices, but every employee can work remotely (realistically, 2/3 days
a week at least), and with the spread of offices and team members, working
collaboratively is a native thing.

If it was only a few people though, you start forgetting to put a Skype link
in a meeting here, not having resources to share ahead of calls there, and
making decisions in the corridors all over the place.

Have an office, sure, but behaviours need to be the same whether you're
sitting next to someone, or hundreds of miles away.

------
bit_logic
The discussion so far is about work/life balance, productivity, etc. And those
are very important and should be discussed.

However, I think the climate change impact is underappreciated. An example
with some numbers I picked to keep the math simple:

Assume a 40 mile round trip daily commute. And also a 40mpg car. Here's the
effective mpg of that car with days per week WFH (when WFH, the car trip that
didn't happen can be considered virtual miles traveled with no gas used):

0 days WFH for the week: 40mpg

1 days WFH for the week: 200 miles / 4 gallons = 50mpg

2 days WFH for the week: 200 miles / 3 gallons = 66mpg

3 days WFH for the week: 200 miles / 2 gallons = 100mpg

4 days WFH for the week: 200 miles / 1 gallons = 200mpg

The debate is too much about extremes (full remote vs full in office). A
partial solution of just letting everyone have 2-3 days of WFH could allow
employees, employers, and society to get a lot of the benefits of both remote
and in office.

~~~
palimpsests
Yes, when you drive a carbon-dioxide emitting vehicle less, the impact on the
climate is lessened.

When working from home, you don't drive anywhere. That's a distance of zero
miles traveled, whether they are virtual or real. I think the calculation
you've shown doesn't really add to the point you're trying to make.

~~~
bit_logic
It's clear if you're aware of environmental policy in the US. There's a big
fight right now between the federal government and CA just to keep a modest
target of 50 mpg average for cars by 2025. Climate change discussion here
involving cars is often expressed with mpg as the main metric, they even
created mpge for EV to try to link the two.

------
mr_tristan
There's just some kind of cognitive dissonance with a lot of middle management
and remote work. Event with a lot of remote employees, they never seem to
fully take the time to learn it, and take advantage of it.

Anecdotally, my company, which has about ~50% remote employees, has stopped
advertising remote positions as it tries to fill up large office sites it's
invested in.

It kills me, because I've witnessed several, very experienced remote employees
leave, which then are not really replaced. We tend to get little teams or
clusters of people from companies nearby the new office sites. Those new "in
office" teams often come in with a built-in culture, which of course rarely
wants to learn or extend what's there: instead, they seek to make their
fingerprint with something new. Almost every senior remote employee that's
been hired solo has _never_ tried to rebuild the universe around them; but
these new teams seem to start with that kind of mandate.

------
mastratton3
I actually think we'll end up somewhere in the middle, where people work
remote most of the time but companies may have more smaller offices for people
to go into.

My wife works remote a lot of the time (But has the option to go to an office)
and when she goes weeks w/o going to the office, the lack of interaction can
get to her.

~~~
bproven
I agree - small satellite offices instead of huge massive HQs and have
employees work remote most of the time with option to hit a local office

~~~
mastratton3
Exactly, would allow companies to hire from pretty much any major city and
would allow people to relocate back to where they are from and maintain a
great lifestyle and still have some level of camaraderie at work.

------
deedubaya
As someone who hires software developers, opening positions up to remote
employees allows us to get the best bang for our buck.

We can hire top talent for our given price range without geographic
restriction, save on costs (no desk, office, etc), and retain the employee
longer.

There are downsides, but they're 95% managerial issues.

~~~
b_t_s
+1 on retention. Once we had a second office, the benefits of retention
started out weighting any down sides of having one more person on the other
side of the video screen.

------
zarkov99
Does anyone here have some perspective from the employer side? While the
benefits for the employee are pretty clear, I am skeptical about the higher
productivity claims.

~~~
b_t_s
Employee retention, continuity, and fewer disruptions. I'm not management but
I am on the interview team, and I can tell you that hiring senior and
architect level positions isn't easy in this job market. Loose one of those
folks and an entire scrum team is crippled for maybe 3 to 9 months. Say 10
people for 6 months at 2/3 productivity, and you're looking at 20 developer
months wasted, and user facing projects delayed or tabled. Even if you happen
to find someone quick, you're loosing years worth of company specific
history/experience.

As a remote engineer at a good but little known medium sized company, I could
get an offer from a FAANG company(no interview, automatic hire, big raise) and
realistically I'd probably tell them no. They don't have offices where I want
to live, so if they won't do remote, then they just don't have a compelling
offer. My quality of life would suffer too much. The most important and
overlooked part of the hiring pipeline is employee retention, and my employer
has already retained the $%^&* out of me by letting me work remote.

~~~
zarkov99
Right, I understand your point completely, my wife is fully remote, and we are
both pretty burrowed in where we live, so it would take some doing to get us
to move. It seems to me though that all this talk about greater productivity
is self-serving nonsense. Remote work is a loss for the employer, all else
being equal, though it might very well be worth it at least in this market.

~~~
thirdsun
I disagree about the self-serving nonsense part. Sure, it requires a certain
degree of discipline and self organization, but whenever I work at home on
side projects, even if they aren't particularly enjoyable, I'm freuqently
surprised by how much faster I seem to work if I'm not interrupted by chatty
co-workers, ringing telephones and other minor annoyances that are quite
significant in their sum. Don't get me wrong, all these things have their time
and place, but asynchronious communication allows me to deal with them when I
feel like it, which is a major advantage for me.

~~~
b_t_s
I think this depends a lot on the company and your personal ability to tune
out noise. Also whether your company uses slack heavily. Office or remote I
find 99% of my interruptions are from slack, but they're semi-async and mostly
ignorable if I'm heads down on something.

~~~
thirdsun
The difference is that I can ignore or mute Slack for a while, which doesn't
work as well with people physically visiting your desk.

------
deanalevitt
Hiring remote gave my startups access to amazingly talented people where they
were, not where we were. It allowed the team to work in a space they felt was
productive and comfy and our employee turnover was non-existent.

I'm a big proponent of distributed teams.

------
growlist
Fully remote for 4+ years now. I consider it worth £5-10k on top of my salary
due to cost of commuting (cash + time). I think it can definitely negatively
impact career if the company is not properly set up for it, and can also act
as a discouragement to seek out better opportunities - before I'd consider
even applying I'd need to know I'd get that £5-10k commuting cost plus a
decent increment on top. Most companies are going to baulk at that as a pay
rise unfortunately.

Hey ho. Golden handcuffs of a sort.

------
time0ut
I go in to the office to get away from my family. It is hard to focus with
them around. The commute sucks. Once my kids are older, I'll probably switch
to a remote gig if I find a good opportunity.

------
ubermonkey
I've worked remotely for almost all the last 18 years. My last true office job
ended when the company failed in October of 2001.

I started out working independently doing web development work and project
management, then joined a startup. The startup had office space in an
incubator near my house, so we did use an office there for about 6 months.
Then one of the founders bailed, and it was just me locally, so we gave up the
office and I went back to working at home.

I joined my current company in 2007. For the first 3-4 years, I traveled a
LOT, but then telepresence took root and now I almost NEVER go to customer
sites. I haven't been to one in a nearly 3 years.

We have a small, very solid team. We communicate by chat, email, or phone
constantly. The only downside is that we can't really hire baby devs, because
there's no watercooler. A fresh graduate would be pretty adrift, especially
since our market is kind of esoteric.

But that's a small thing.

------
exallium
Decentralizing the office lets us decentralize where we live. You can live
outside a city or in the middle of nowhere as long as you have a good internet
connection. Makes cost of living go down, and puts less pressure on the real
estate industry for high density areas.

Imo a huge win in the long run.

------
jamesmadison66
what isn't discussed though is companies offloading many of the operating
costs onto employees, and whether that is covered. It's a great tradeoff, but
worth being aware of it and asking for coverage:

\- increased electricity costs

\- increased wear-and-tear of your home

\- increased housing expenses (requirement for a 'office' space in your house)

\- infosec vulnerabilities: home networked and physical environments now
become vectors into a company, are you being compensated and covered for the
risk

\- business DR planning: a DR plan becomes much more complex, although perhaps
better-hedged, with remote work.

etc.

This already became a bit of a thing when personal phones became a requirement
for work, and companies to be fair did adjust fire w/ provide work smart
phones.

~~~
lm28469
> many of the operating costs onto employees, and whether that is covered.

Asking your company to pay your electricity cost and house wear and tear would
be like a commuter asking them to pay for your shoes and clothes due to "wear
and tear".

The last 2 points are valid though.

~~~
jamesmadison66
Disagree, shoes/clothes costs are not at all compatible with the costs
associated with physical location of work costs.

Accounting departments spend a great deal of focus on fixed asset depreciation
for tax purposes, and general office planning. Eventually, work places move to
new buildings- office buildings get old and in disrepair from use.

These costs that a company accepts as part of doing business get offloaded to
the remote employee. It's most certainly a planning factor doing business-
check out a SEC form for instance.

With remote work, that cost gets offloaded to an employee. You won't see the
impact on your house for a long time, but unless companies are subsidizing you
to afford a bigger home to account for additional office space needed, that
wear and tear from use, that asset deprecation as a result of work use, comes
into your actual home.

So the question should be along the lines of:

\- where is your fixed asset depreciation as a part of doing business for your
taxes? Are you filing it? Your company certainly is.

or

\- are the remote work benefits enough for having to accept this cost without
financial augmentation

or

-are you getting paid enough extra to cover this.

Odds are most workers who work remote won't/don't consider this, but your
company certainly is for its own workplace, why not you? You've leased out
part of your home for your company's workspace essentially, but done so free
of charge.

------
ghaff
I work remotely and like it but this is a pretty low content article. It’s
mostly about how remote working is nice together with some very basic advice
like have the right software installed. Certainly nothing objective about why
it will continue.

------
RickJWagner
I've been working remote for 9 years now, after having worked on-site for 20
years prior to that.

Remote work is _great_ , perhaps the greatest perk of all. No driving, no time
wasted, less office politics. It's the way to go.

~~~
0xfeba
Myself, 6 months remote after 8 years in an office. I like it a lot. But I
figure it depends on the person. My friend who thought he was fine as a loner
hates it. He has no nearby friends or family.

I love it. I never liked water cooler talk or the people at the office but I
saw value in it since being antisocial wasn't good for my career.

Now that I'm remote, there's much less politics/drama. I imagine in other
companies it could be a problem that there was politics you don't get to keep
abreast of, but I suppose I am lucky. I am measured more by my output than by
my smile and/or on-the-spot responses.

I have more time for my family, I get all the household chores done during the
work week and free up my nights and weekends. I don't think I'll go back to an
office if I can help it.

------
sqs
Sourcegraph CEO here. One data point: we’ve always been remote-friendly at
Sourcegraph, and we’ve become remote-first. The vast majority of our recent
hires on engineering and sales have been remote, and we even had 2 SF
teammates decide to move away (and become remote Sourcegraphers).

I personally understand the value of remote work for productivity and
happiness. I have a dog who I love to walk in the middle of the day, and I
know that for certain types of work, being at home can get me in the zone
better than being in any office.

------
mark_l_watson
I worked remotely for twenty years and then decided I wanted to work in an
office so I worked as a contractor at Google in 2013 and managed a deep
learning team at Capital One 2018-2019. I am back home now living in the
mountains of Central Arizona and now I volunteer at the local food bank for
social interactions. I would like to find a part time remote job, but between
volunteering and outdoor activities with friends during the day, I would have
to find a job that let me work early in the morning and in the evening.

~~~
bitL
Get a remote job in EU or Australia ;-)

------
emilecantin
I really don't get the article's point about IoT. I'm all for remote work
(I've been 100% remote the last 4 years), but this is a pretty poor article,
honestly.

------
brlewis
The biggest obstacle to reducing greenhouse gases isn't a political party.
It's commuting.

~~~
lm28469
My feeling is that most jobs can't be done remotely and the vast majority are
done more efficiently in person. We're in our small tech bubble in which
people sit down all day in front of a screen and mostly interact through text,
the vast majority of jobs aren't like that.

Look at the top US employers worlwide (or the largest sectors of employment
[0]), there is no way UPS, walmart, fedex, starbucks, &c. can work with remote
employees. [1]

[0] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/200143/employment-in-
sel...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/200143/employment-in-selected-us-
industries/)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_United_States-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_United_States-
based_employers_globally)

~~~
brlewis
There is some truth to what you're saying -- medical professionals need to
examine in person, retail employees need to be at the store, package delivery
can't yet be completely automated.

If you had said there was no way those employers can work with _all_ their
employees being remote, that would be true.

However, all office work could potentially be remote with little or no
technical advancement from where we are now. When I look around the city I'm
in (Boston) I see a lot of office buildings. I think the potential reduction
in commuting is huge.

You mention your feeling that the vast majority of jobs are done more
efficiently in person. Do you still feel the same way when you factor in the
unproductive hours spent behind a steering wheel daily?

------
unignorant
Our company is remote first (no physical office, co-founders spread across the
world), and one frequent point of feedback we get from new hires is that
working for a company with a 100% remote culture is quite different than
working remotely for a company with existing physical offices. When you are
working from a distance with an otherwise co-located team, it is easy to miss
out on important information, and interacting socially with coworkers (a
challenge for any remote position) becomes even harder.

Btw, we are hiring. Stack is Elixir, Rust, Typescript, React, GraphQL, and we
have many challenging/interesting problems!
[https://jobs.lever.co/nash.io](https://jobs.lever.co/nash.io)

~~~
ryanSrich
You’re describing a distributed organization, not remote. Distributed assumes
no home base, no HQ, nothing. Everyone works from home or a co-working space.

SV is staunchly apposed to remote, I can’t even imagine their opinion on
distributed.

~~~
unignorant
I live in SV, and while I wouldn't say hiring remote employees is common, it
is becoming much more so. Staunchly opposed doesn't sound correct given the
other founders I interact with.

And "remote first" is a common term so far as I know:
[https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/02/08/means-remote-first-
com...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/02/08/means-remote-first-company/)
Though I do also like "distributed" as a description.

------
pnathan
Seattle job search in 2018 revealed almost zero companies who did remote work.
Butts in seats appeared mandatory. Kinda weird.

I personally think it reveals a generally weak management culture, along with
issues with employee development and training inculcating self-starting
thought.

~~~
ryanSrich
Outside of the HN echo chamber you’ll find that distributed and remote work is
deeply frowned upon. The worst perpetrators are often big tech cos and
startups funded by SV VCs. It’s incredible how resistant tech is to remote
work.

------
markbnj
Remote for over ten years and like other commenters, not going back to an
office anytime soon if I can avoid it. Obviously there are professions this
sort of arrangement doesn't work as well for, but I think over time there is
reason to be optimistic that the increase of remote work will have a lot of
positive impacts: less commuters on the road and spreading the economic
benefits of highly skilled jobs out to areas that haven't traditionally
enjoyed them.

------
scarejunba
I know at least three startups personally who have a working product with a
remote team. The key, though is that if you're the CEO driving the product,
you don't need to use expensive Bay Area engineers. There are lots of good
Pakistanis living in Pakistan who'll do as good a job.

Once you go remote as a founder, there's no reason to search only in America.
It's going to be a revolution in product development, I think.

------
ThomPete
Our venture studio is built on this premise.

As more and more people need to work together but a part, that creates the
need for some underlying infrastructure that works behind the scenes to glue
things together as if people were sitting next to each other.

It also interesting enough touches on the field of non-desktop work which is
80% of all jobs but only have 1% of Silicon Valleys investments.

If this is a space you are into I would love to hear from you.

------
IloveHN84
Remote working is the real game changer: less commute means less pollution
which means greener and better environment and less usage of fossil fuels.

I still don't understand why companies work against this (including mine),
moving as argument the fact that workers might work less or do something else
than working for the company

~~~
odiroot
As usual, paranoid managers fearing they're losing control over their
"minions".

------
hhjinks
I am happy I have the option to work from home if I need to, but I will never
ever want to do so for extended periods of time. I might not consider my
coworkers friends, but I really enjoy their company. My work days are _fun_
because of the great people I get to hang out with.

------
didip
Articles about remote work often focus too much on life and not enough about
work.

I’d like to read more about HOW these companies solve remote problems such as:
communication, responsiveness, measuring productivity or architectural
discussions.

I am especially curious about managing abuse done by remote people.

------
newsreview1
I'm curious to know how Gallop measured their results noting that remote
workers are "substantially more engaged in their jobs than traditional
counterparts who are stuck behind desks all day." Though I understand the
logic, how did they measure this

~~~
keithnz
I wonder if there is bias in that companies offering remote working tend to
fall into a category of companies that tend to have more highly engaged
employees on average. ie, there is much more soul sucking onsite companies
mixed with soul enhancing onsite companies and the remote/onsite isn't the
critical factor?

------
bryanrasmussen
Unfortunately I have an awful home situation so if I were to work home the
only way to be at all productive would be for me to go somewhere else and
work; the local library is ok but the bandwidth is disappointing and certain
ports are blocked.

------
duxup
I like the "option".

I work from home 2 to 3 days a week, but man for some meetings and such I
really want to be there.

~~~
ryanSrich
Eliminate the “there” and you’ll find that it works. The only two reliable
work models are “everyone is in the same room” or “no one is in the same
room”. Trouble arises when there’s a mix.

