
Are there some disadvantages to working remote? - yalogin
I always wanted to find answers to this. I would like to hear from remote employees and may he even managers. Are there any disadvantages to working remote? I am thinking about big ticket ticket times like promotions and salary reviews and also small intangibles like bonding with your teammates and even bosses. What would you give up working remote if any?
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TickMark
No spontaneity. In my last company, we all worked remotely and we had very
functional calls during the week. However over time things got tense really
often, cause we did not really know each other.

Then we introduced a Friday call where we had a casual overview of the week,
but mostly talked about what we did or are doing outside work. It helped a
lot, people understood each other more. And most importantly got sense of each
other's sense of humor and work ethic.

Point being there's a lot more incidental interaction that goes on at an on-
site job that helps you get to know people you work with.

As remote work manager, you have to engineer non-work related social
interactions if you want to have a cohesive team of people.

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actionowl
The biggest issue I have found is that you miss out on conversations. For
example, with the company I work for, only a handful of developers are remote,
the rest work together in an "open office". I might miss out on a discussion
between two developers working through an issue that I would have liked to
know about or some background info on why something was developed in a
specific way.

There's also the issue of cabin fever, there's a co-working space a few blocks
from me and I'll get a day pass if I need to get out of the house for a day.

I've been remote for ~3 years now and honestly I can not imagine having to
commute into an office everyday again.

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kaushikt
I've worked remote for 2 years.

Cons -

1\. I spent a lot of time alone at home working or at cafes. Not a lot of
hanging out with friends while i was working.

2\. I dedicated a part of my house and called it my office. 6 months later, i
was bored of the setup and spent a lot more money purchasing things for the
"DREAM DESK"

Pros -

1\. Great flexibility, loved that part though. 2\. Made me better at
communication. This is important.

I wish i would've actually taken a co-working space so that change would have
been great i think.

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colund
Cons: From what I've read it seems that some people isolate themselves from
others and just work in isolation and become depressed and lose care in
personal hygiene and interests.

Pros: I'm interested in remote work since it appears to offer flexibility,
control, possibility to choose to work with fun ambitious people and hopefully
no open office disturbances.

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punchclockhero
It can be hell on earth if you're junior with impostor syndrome. Never quite
sure if you're doing enough. I ended up taking a long break and then working
in an office. It's still too early to tell if it's an improvement.

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dlphn___xyz
i feel like you are trading any sort of career advancement with the ability to
work from home. the only remote jobs i see are for temps or people who’ve hit
the ‘glass ceiling’

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colund
Glass ceiling?

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dlphn___xyz
its an expression in the US meaning someone has hit the peak or full potential
of their career and there is no room for advancement

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soneca
Interesting. In Brazil, it is used for a completely different expression: _"
Don't throw rocks on other people when you have a glass ceiling"_.

Like, don't accuse other people when you are committing the same or similar
sin.

~~~
ColinWright
The usual expression in native English is:

 _People who live in glass houses shouldn 't throw stones._

The expression "glass ceiling" refers to a barrier to advancement, often by
particular classes of individuals. This barrier is often invisible, denied, or
simply not recognised by some people.

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observer3
TL;DR: there are disadvantages, technically, but they're irrelevant compared
to the advantages. It's true that human contact is a physical need [and that
is physically perceptible, if you're the perceptive kind], but work,
unfortunately, is definitely not the kind of place for physical contact.
Instead of socializing at work, now I see my family on a daily basis by having
more time to go out and visit them daily. (Being a grad student, I also enjoy
a little physical contact with people at the university on a weekly basis.)

I've been working remote 100% of my time for about 3 years, spanning two
different companies. The first year was with a company in my city, people I
never knew before. I was hired by them to do some easy work and they proposed
me some harder work one week after watching me solving the initial problems. I
solved that too and little by little impressed them with competence. So,
professionally, things were in perfect shape, but, on a personal level, things
were going from bad to worse. So after delivering one last promise, I told
them I was starting my own company and I could continue delivering them more
services --- for instance, in my own office.

So I got to work remote. Initially I saw them once a week, then a few months
later, once every two weeks and then once a month. After they got one hard
project completely done, they didn't have anything they didn't know how to do,
so they didn't ask me for anything else and I had to find a new deal.

Despite my very polite and elegant way of dealing with them (as I do with
everyone), despite getting lots of compliments from these people due to the
quality of work and so on, no one would ever convince me these people were not
crazy to see me away. They only tolerated me while they had to.

So I called a company I worked with for many years. I closed a deal on that
very call because I made them an irresistible proposal. I'm very far away from
them, so the work must be 100% remote. So it's been like this for 2 years now.

Despite being remote, we meet through cameras every day. (They do all the
SCRUM nonsense, JIRA and so on, though I'm the only programmer they have. What
they see in these tools is a fancy post-it that gives them a feel they're
doing some management. So, yes, I've no respect for these tools. I'm
definitely the more organized person in the team and all I use is GNU EMACS
and org-mode. I'm definitely not suggesting they should use such tools.
They're not programmers. I'm just explaining what is the environment of such
offices that I'd have to deal with if I were there in person.)

I clearly respect their ways of working and fully collaborate. I'm probably
the easiest person. Everything they ask me, no matter how nonsensical it is, I
always agree and proceed to get it done. This is very easy for me to do
precisely because I'm remote. All the lies and superficiality that goes in an
office is dealt with even with humor if you're remote. When I see someone
acting totally out of harmony, I can even joke around aloud so as to not feel
too downhearted about it. Nonsense on the screen is much less frustrating than
when you're on the spot. You can watch a bad film on TV and turn it off. The
same happens working remotely. The nonsense goes on, you respect people's ways
and as soon as it's over, you close the camera and back to your coding, to
your work, which you do with excellence, not because of talent, but because
you carefully check your calculations, you know how to add two and two and
you're never a fool to think you don't have to check the basics. _That_ is
admirable, _that_ makes the day worth it. So, working remote you live in your
environment which is made up of the things you do. The inner is the outer:
when you're alone, the things you have inner are the things that fill up the
outer.

If by being alone you get down, don't eat well, don't catch sun, then that is
the fact, that is your life and you should not panic, but carefully watch the
problem and let it tell its story to you --- which is the story of your life.
I do not think intellectuality is what is needed to live a good life, but
there is not much difference between learning to live well and learning
technical things. Watch it, watch the problem, let it tell its story, be
humble, check the basics, learn with those which factually know more than you.

I've known people who had remote jobs and due to the difficulties of being
alone decided to go back to punching cards in standard offices. That is fixing
a bug by causing another. Do not do that. Look in the eye of the storm. Do not
pretend to solve problems. I wouldn't mind spending my whole life trying to
only understand the Pythagorean theorem: it is not higher mathematics that
matters; it is the learning.

Work is central to life. You should own your work. After you've invested
decades in a company, that company is yours, and as such it should be
impossible for people to take you away from your work, which is absolutely one
of the major parts of your life. So work should be the place where you feel
great, where you can be so free and be able to watch your development as a
complete person, not as a machine with a function and a schedule.

You might think this might all apply to me because I'm a highly unusual
person. But that would be a total miscalculation. I'm convinced everything I
say applies to everyone else. I consider the most typical person there is out
there and how they could never work alone in their own workplace because
they'd get down, be lonely, nervous and so on. So such person feels working in
an office or in a factory is a marvelous thing for them. But the fact is that
they only think that because they're deeply afraid of facing their real
problems, which is buried in themselves. Nowadays every one is working on a
computer terminal, so there is little reason to cruise the city to punch cards
in an office.

Get to the heart of things.

