Side note to the remote founders/employers out there:
Have you been plagued by applicant fraud? We've found for all of our remote engineering roles, we get 100's of amazing applicants who are all fake (clearly not actually in the US) once you get them on a screening call. They're often reading from a script, broken english, and say strange things like they're born and raised in Texas, yet can't speak fluent English or have a heavy accent.
My best guess is it's dev shops overseas who are using an English-speaking "front" person who then delegates the work to other people with the "front" person being the one who joins company meetings, etc.
Really frustrating because it's making us have to do silly things like require photo ID verification over video on the first screening call (which I would rather not inconvenience applicants with, but there are just SO many candidates lying about residing in the US).
With our most recent role, about 60-70% of applicants were fake ("fake" = candidates who lie about living/residing in the US)
Yes! We catch them in the screening stage, but it's scarily common. I thought we were being targeted at first until I talked to other people with the same problem.
I've also heard of situations where one person is hired to do the job, but then after a while their work changes for the worse. They start "forgetting" things you've talked about recently, or they'll "forget" how the code they submitted an hour ago works.
They're either a front person for a dev shop, or they're trying to outsource their work. They don't care about doing a great job because they know most companies will take a long time to fire people. If the company PIPs them, they might suddenly become a great performer again until the heat dies down, then it's back to the same game.
Before the "if they're getting their work done, why does it matter?" comments: Having someone take our codebase and send it to random contractors is a huge security breach. Even ignoring that, these people aren't selecting world-class developers to outsource their work. They're outsourcing as cheaply as possible so they can pay as little as possible. It's never an okay deal for the company.
(Original commenter here) our company has been victim of overemployment with 2 employees (the worst offender found us via Who's Hiring on HN - he had 3 full-time W-2 jobs).
Having been fooled by 2 "overemployed" people (on a team of 20), these fake candidates are distinct in that they're almost always have an unexplained heavy accent yet they say they're born and raised in the US. They also often have Zoom backgrounds that are just... odd (the room will often look like it has shelving and boxes or whatever that don't look like something you would see in the US).
It's difficult because no single data point is enough to prove they're fake, but when you add all the warning signs together, it's pretty obvious.
In my experience, /r/overemployed people are a lot better at blending in with regular candidates.
Re: overemployment, the best counter-offense I've found is to require LinkedIn profiles and to require background checks that include employment verification. Most "overemployed" people are smart enough to not have a LinkedIn profile. This has a side effect of excluding applicants without a LinkedIn, but it's a tradeoff.
I have been on the other side, people wanting to hire me to be the front-door either take interviews or the front-door with customers, the last time I was offered $xx/h + 20% from each project's revenue.
It's a real problem which makes it harder for people like me that are legitimately working remotely. This has existed for a long time but it wasn't as popular because remote working was unpopular before the pandemic.
> Really frustrating because it's making us have to do silly things like require photo ID verification over video on the first screening call
Unfortunately, this wouldn't solve it, a person can join the calls and get someone else to do the work.
Same here - I was recently offered an "interview support" job by one of these body shops in a far away Asian country, which I immediately rejected. The role would've been to help candidates pass interviews using tricks (cheats, really) like the ones that've been brought up in other discussions before.
If you're good enough to pass a senior dev interview, you're probably also capable enough to create some kind of SaaS tool/plugin for applicant tracking systems (or directly in Zoom?) to help employers identify fake/real candidates.
You have potential to make a lot more money catching these bad actors rather than enabling them.
Someone wrote about this in a previous discussion. The grift is to bilk you until you realize the charade. Even one American paycheck is golden in the developing world.
Think logically about it, of course this will happen. The labor market for office jobs is completely broken to the point that many or most companies have no control of whether their employees are doing anything productive. Corporate work is mostly a charade and a wealth distribution scheme, also when it comes to software engineering - as evident by the many single individuals shipping software with better quality than huge corps employing thousands.
The hope of these fake candidates is that they can sneak in and get a few good paychecks from a corrupt and disorderly employer. And it costs then almost nothing to try.
i did some contracting for a place that i think hired one of these guys.
in his case i think he more or less knew what he was doing, and showed up on calls, but delegated the work to some other people.
we’d hear people in the background of his audio discussing things really oddly similar to tasks he’d been assigned and had outstanding. he was putting in (bad) PRs at all hours of day and night, and never had any recollection of any email, slack conversation, or his own PRs.
At the same time it makes it shitty for regular folks working remote and like a normal person having bad periods from time to time. There will be way less understanding towards... You are trying to do the right thing, but the dial if turned too tight might blend wrong people.
Accent aside (if they can't be understood at all they're obviously not qualified):
What's the difference between a foreigner with an accent in your onsite team VS a foreigner that's remote in US timezones (LatAm)? Why just open the job for US-remote?
Compliance? Deel/Remote can help you with that.
Security? It applies if you're working on defense software, but other than that...?
> What's the difference between a foreigner with an accent in your onsite team VS a foreigner that's remote in US timezones (LatAm)?
If I give someone in the US access to my code, systems, and, inevitably, customer data then I have a lot of legal recourse against that person if they do something bad. They have a lot of incentive to be careful and follow the rules. Their desire to maintain their reputation and avoid legal liability aligns our interests.
If I hire someone in the US and they hand everything over to a random person in a foreign country who doesn't care in the slightest about US laws, then they don't care about anything other than keeping those paychecks coming for a while. They don't care about anything, especially once those paychecks stop coming. It's even more complicated because the company isn't the one sending the paychecks, it's the person you hired. If that person has a falling out with their outsourced counterpart and the outsourced counterpart decides to take revenge on the company as leverage over their front-person, it gets bad.
> Security? It applies if you're working on defense software, but other than that...?
Are you suggesting that security only matters to defense software? You've never worked on a project that involves customer data? You've never worked on proprietary software that your competitors would love to have?
Do you not get annoyed when companies leak your personal data?
> they don't care about anything other than keeping those paychecks coming for a while
Don't forget this is all employment really is. Any employee-employer relationship boils down to this regardless of what you have deluded yourself into believing.
Yes, I do my work for money, and would not do it if they don't pay me, but it's definitely not just money. I like my team, have personal friends among them, and find pleasure and realization in doing a good job.
Hi. Question: I'm an engineer living outside the US. If I were to establish a consultancy company in the US and offer my services through it, would that fulfill the legal and security concerns?
Run a background check, sign confidentiality and DP agreements and hire someone who sells you trust. Again, something you would do in any given modality of work.
this sounds good on paper but how effective - really - are background checks outside the developed world? Even inside the developed world, language becomes a big stumbling block.
That's not inevitable (for programmers, at least). Post-GDPR European developers generally keep well away from customer data, and it isn't a big impediment.
If you can imagine the difference between hiring one single developer to work on your application vs. hiring dozens of different developers each to handle some small part of it...and it's still worse than that.
Typically the person "hired" is the senior and the person doing the work is _extremely_ green.
Oh yeah, if you're talking about dev shops, don't hire dev shops (the "hired" VS extremely green person phenomenon you're talking about happens in these kinds of companies because their incentive is to sell hours/men, instead of actual value).
Do your diligence, and your technical/communication/leadership interviews to make sure you're hiring the right person.
And if it doesn't work out after 2-3 months, fire the person. It happens in all formats of work whether it's remote, hybrid, or onsite.
> It happens in all formats of work whether it's remote, hybrid, or onsite.
You're not wrong, but it's missing the point.
It's so much harder and riskier to do this onsite that it's not very common. Why anyone would try to do this onsite instead of getting a remote job to do it is beyond me.
With remote, a group of people can defraud multiple companies at the same time this way. They can do it all remotely, which means they can do it without stepping into the legal jurisdiction of the company.
Remote opens the doors to so much more fraud. There is almost no comparison between someone doing this on-site and someone from a foreign country scamming companies as their job.
Your objection is valid, and I'm sure someone at these international payroll companies would be able to answer it much better than I can. Regardless, the benefits are much larger.
The happy path between local vs foreign often looks the same. That's not the problem for anybody.
The edge cases are common and often legally ambiguous. When things go wrong, it can be extremely hard for a company to resolve the situation when it crosses boarders. Heck, even just operating in a different state can open a company up to legal issues.
Once you start opening up to different legal jurisdictions, you basically have to run company policy in a way that accounts for the worst situations across all jurisdictions.
Some things that I'm aware of:
* Import/Export law for software. It may seem mundane, but having any encryption can cause significant scrutiny.
* Import/Export law for hardware (like getting a company laptop to an employee)
* Ability to track/down or recover lost/stolen hardware
* Variations in labor laws.
* Variations in copyright/IP protection laws.
* Variations in digital hacking/data integrity laws.
* Government level data monitoring/tracking
* Local data protection laws that you might not be subject to without a local employee.
* Scrutiny from your customers about foreign workers.
* Accidental sanctions violations.
* Potential for customer data to leave legal boundaries via a foreign employee.
- IP protection - some countries make it super hard if someone breaks the NDA and steals their employer's IP. At least in the US, the employer can go after the IP thieves as a last recourse.
- Secure devices - lot of companies give laptops which come with all sorts of tracking software (eg. to force security updates). It is hard to ship laptops all over the world due to customs requirements.
You do not want the Treasury Department knocking on your door to ask you why you're sending money to a North Korean front company in exchange for slave labor.
Work with one of the 20 countries that the USA has a FTA with. From what I understand (I'm not a lawyer), these agreements have a chapter dedicated to cross border trade in services which includes dispute resolution.
curious, so if you see some devs from those countries applying for your jobs, are you relating them to the news and automatically rejects them based on those countires?
As a non US citizen this has always confused me. Does this mean that to get the job I need to be authorised to work in the US? Or that I will need to be authorised once I get the job?
Can I apply in hopes of moving to the US? Or in which situation would a non citizen be authorised to work?
> An employer has no legal obligation to commence an immigration case. ... The employer may lawfully reject the job applicant because, if hired, that individual will ask the employer to take steps before the federal government to obtain authorization to employ him (an employment-based immigration case).
In other words, if you are not currently legally authorized to work in the US, the employer has no obligation to sponsor you for work authorization, and can simply reject you.
> This situation differs from one in which a job applicant has temporary work authorization that is independent of the employer and the applicant does not ask the employer to take on the legal obligation of an immigration case in order to employ him. The employer should not reject the job applicant simply because he has temporary work authorization.
On the other hand, a non-citizen with a green card, EAD, etc. is protected, and refusing to hire because of those documents is illegal.
Y'all always forget Canada exists :) I worked with a US company in Houston for 11 years, and we had other people located outside the US on the dev teams as well. Cultural match is more important than strict geo imho.
Bit of a tangent but Canadians should be ticking "Yes" for "are you authorized to work in the US?" because acquiring TN status does not require sponsorship from the employer; the TN is explicitly non-immigrant intent. If a company prefers to hire an American over a Canadian, that's discrimination on the basis of citizenship, which is illegal.
I don't know about residency, but we get tons of applicants that know nothing about what's on their resume. If you get them into an interview they try to talk around your questions in generalities. There are also a few "job parking" companies that we've identified. I'm convinced that these companies aren't real (their websites are generic fluff and the applicants that we've talked to don't know anything.) If anyone has those companies listed on their resume it's straight to trash with them. Hiring is not easy.
BlueWillow.ai - the developer claims to have been a full time employee since 2021, but the company doesn't appear in marketing databases until March 2023, and the LinkedIn page has posts but nothing earlier than March.
On the phone with the candidate, his ID "was at his brother's house". He also joined the call with the name "Senior Dev" rather than a real name. I asked him why he used a pseudonym, and he mumbled something I couldn't understand.
I politely said thanks for your time, but it's not a good fit.
Again it’s a trade off. The same risks with remote existed in offshoring also. Nothing new. You got to have a solid contract and good project management and work with reputed companies. But sometimes it will just make more sense to not do remote remote hiring. One size do not fit all.
And yet I get flat out rejected without a phone screen after 300 applications. What is even going on?
I was under the impression that every job posting right now is instantly buried with a glut of top quality candidates, and that you simply pick your favorite, lowball them and you're done.
We ran into the same thing with our new recruiting tool, discovered hundreds of fake applicants for the first remote engineering job we posted. We initially noticed that a large number of job applicants were using ChatGPT responses with our virtual recruiter, and showing drastically different scoring from non-fake candidates.
We started scheduling video chats with the candidates clearly using ChatGPT with our virtual recruiter, and they all got on the call and began reading scripts, and could not answer more unique phone screen questions like: What engineering principle is important to you?
It’s the most frustrating thing, taking up so much of our time and taking time away from strong engineers who deserve our time.
We’re testing a solution for this to keep our own product operating fast and delivering amazing candidates.
We’re also keeping a list of red flags:
- LinkedIn profile was created in the last year
- GitHub link has a generic identity, 0-2 followers, very little activity
- Candidate will say yes to a phone screen immediately, literally right now
- Or candidate will ask if the meeting is a technical screen
- Candidate will go quiet if you ask them if they are available to fly to HQ to meet the team for their final interview
- Job history includes large, non-tech enterprises where employment would be hard to confirm; think CVS, The Home Depot, Best Buy, etc
- LinkedIn About Statement is written in the third person
- LinkedIn profile uses generic language like “cutting edge technologies”
- Profile photos may be avatars, or look like stock photos
None of these things individually can indicate a fake applicant, but taken all together with language used with our virtual recruiter we’ve gotten good at identifying the fakes. We’re still doing a lot of tests to prevent discrimination on our part.
If anyone wants to chat, my CoFounder and I have become obsessed with solving this.
It also seems like you have to be wary of the tax consequences here. Who do you pay on the payroll? If it's a US Citizen in America it's one thing, but if it's anything else, then you may tax issues.
These people have a US-based front person, or at least a stolen identity. The stolen identify is particularly bad because the tax consequences are attached to the stolen identity.
If someone tried to claim they were from the US but didn't have any tax ID and we needed to send their paychecks to an obscure address in Europe for reasons, that wouldn't work at all.
Hey,
what do you think - how can we "repair" this process? I mean, what would be a perfect solution to not require photo ID verification video and get rid of scammers?
I'm pretty sure it's an EEO violation to request ID or a photo before hiring.
"Similarly, employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant. If needed for identification purposes, a photograph may be obtained after an offer of employment is made and accepted."
This does not seem relevant when you're already on a video call. The prohibition on requesting photographs is to prevent otherwise unknown information about their race/gender/etc.
You need to win a judgement in civil court first and try to collect on it before you can attach a lien to someone’s house in almost any jurisdiction in the US.
Not hard? Not easy to prove fraud. Is it fraud to have multiple jobs? Did your employment contract specifically restrict moonlighting? Is it even legal to restrict moonlighting in that state? Plus, even if all the moons align and you go through all that effort and money and possibly win. They declare bankruptcy and protect their homestead from your claim. You lose even more money and most importantly your time. Far from easy.
I was wondering the same thing as an infrastructure engineer making Canadian peanuts compared to my friends who moved to the US.
I guess it’s mostly my own fault for being nervous about switching jobs, but hearing them accidentally hiring obvious frauds makes me think it’s not as daunting as I feel.
Idk if this is an actual signal of anything, at least with mexican-american people I noticed they still have a unique accent. First gen americans can live in ethnic bubbles, and not speak english primarily, especially if their parents didnt put in any effort to speak english.
For me, it's the way I say "house". I watched the show House three times all the way through before I realized I say it differently than they say it in the show.
The most important subtext. There are engineer friends of mine laid off from remote companies that, almost 5 months later, cannot get work. These aren't braindead seatwarmers either. The software engineer market has shifted under our feet DRAMATICALLY. Any software engineer with a position should try to keep it for as long as they possible can.
Yeah, this is all anecdotal, but I'll add my 2c - been in the business for something like 15 years and was looking for work in May. It has never felt deader, remote or onsite. Usually recruiters are beating down your door. This time not even friends could get me any interviews.
The way I got a job was by writing some technical articles and establishing a relationship with a very energetic VC person. I asked him if he could introduce me to his portfolio companies and day later I had a few conversations lined up. I think I found what is probably the most interesting job I have ever had. I am usually nobody to hustle or advocate for it, but it sure paid back.
Got a decent position after ~4 months of looking. ~120 applications, ~10 interviews.
It was nuts, my resume and skillset have never been stronger but this was my hardest search by a huge margin. Referrals were not working, bulk applications were getting no response. What finally worked was just persistence and trying to add a lot of character to my cover letter. I had way more replies when I:
A. complimented what they were doing
B. Included a few little quips/jokes.
The huge number of fake applicants and AI generated cover letters/resumes is making recruiters jobs a nightmare, I think a few jokes and compliments can make it clear you are an actual person. One recruiter told me he had ~3000 applications for a pretty low paying remote position.
I've been in the business for almost 20 years. I've been hired for positions where I don't even code in the required language, and the employer depends on me to learn it on the go. Until recently I've never had trouble securing a job. But I've been on the market now for about 2 years. I often can't even score an interview, even for jobs that exactly match my qualifications.
I'm over 40, so I must assume ageism is a factor, but even in light of that, this tech job market feels like a desert.
I was about to consider an interview coach or just somebody to look at who I am, my resume, online presence and all that and give me very honest feedback. I thought that what I am lacking is a good idea of who I am and I how I present myself. Have you tried anything like that?
I have not yet employed an interview coach, but I suspect it would be helpful to have a frank evaluation. I have a pretty large online presence, perhaps it is negatively affecting my opportunities in ways that I do not see. Hmm.
I was worried about the same actually. I have an old crappy website that I have not updated in years and I was wondering if it's acting as my business card, which wouldn't be good. My doxed online presence is minimal otherwise.
Participate in local user groups. In every single group I attend, people are looking to hire.
However, these people are local. They almost certainly want you in-person at least some amount of the time.
And, while I can't say that ageism isn't a factor, I can tell you that the users groups tend to be weighted toward the greybeards.
I do think that the "remote work" thing is a bit of disadvantage for we greybeards. The value of having someone around who is experienced is having a colleague that you can interact with in casual context.
Same. Although, I have also noticed there is nothing 100% remote. Many of the messages even highlight "100% on-site." Best I've seen recently is a 3 day hybrid.
How do I get myself out there to make these connections? I can make connections with coworkers, but I don’t know how to expand beyond my circle (like meeting VC folk)
I cannot give much advice on this, because my experience is minimal. I would say pick a domain and learn to stand out in it. I stood out just a little by doing technical research and writing about it, then posting it in chats/social media. Actually, having twitter was essential. We pretty much met over twitter. On twitter every person is equally accessible to you, be they a celebrity or your cousin Bob.
I've heard of ghost jobs so I'm starting to actually really doubt some of this, I've literally seen the same job on the market for over a year now with a new chain of recruits contacting me about it every 3 months. I understand there aren't a lot of perhaps qualified people for that role but come on a year with it open? The repeat open positions are disappointing to say the least. At least change the description! I think a lot of employers are just stacking up resumes and waiting to use them in the future.
This is what crash of 2000 was like for me. Multiple calls a day from recruiters.
Sometime around June or so, the calls Stopped. Just stopped. Six months later I was working at RadioShack.
Along with a number of engineers with 10-20 years experience.
I was an idiot and held out for too long. I’ve been out of work for a very long time, much longer than six months. I never experienced a market like this, even when I was trying to enter the market as a teenager with no real experience it took me three months. Now I have six years of experience apparently worth nothing. I should have taken a on site role a long time ago, but I was trying to avoid moving. I figured my luck would turn around for the better at some point. Idiotic optimism.
Now my lease is up and I’m fucked. My savings have been beaten from month and months of attrition and emergency expenses, including somehow owing money on my taxes this year. The rental market is so bad where I am, with people asking more money for fucking rooms than some of the apartments out here, I assume because most of the apartments have 6+ month waiting lists.
I support remote work, but moving out to a rural area is putting yourself at risk if you expect to get high software engineer pay.
There’s a lot more competition for remote jobs and you’re also competing with highly qualified candidates in lower cost of living places outside the US.
Flipside: Staying in an expensive metro area puts you at risk to maintain your quality of life and pay mortgage/taxes/insurance on everything, when a lot of hybrid jobs don't pay enough to cover those expenses, and are also at risk of layoffs, which can be catastrophic when you have a high cost of living. If you're remote/rural, you don't need to make nearly as much just to skate by if something goes south. I moved out of the Bay Area, and I cannot imagine ever going back. Too much risk. I don't care if the pool of jobs is smaller and the pay is lower.
When it comes to your quality of life, there are a lot of factors besides the cost of living - social circle, weather, job opportunities, hobbies, cultural compatibility etc. For a lot of people, expensive metro areas can also be the only places where they have friends & family or where they can pursue their hobbies. As an immigrant of color, I simply cannot see myself living happily in rural Ohio even if that could be a wonderful place for someone else.
I agree. But there are a lot of places in the US that check 90% of those boxes at a fraction of the cost of the Bay Area. There are a lot of great second-tier cities that are very welcoming to people of color.
I think the key part of moving elsewhere is that you have much less access to the in-person segment, assuming moving represents a significant hurdle to you.
One big problem with blind is that it trends very junior. Much of what’s on there is of little used to people who are older. I actually find most of the comments to be less informed than, say, fuckedcompany.com was back in the day.
Im not sure why this is even getting downvoted. Top pay of market has significantly shifted to hybrid. Even once a week in office means you can't live anywhere in the country you'd like. Though i'm not sure if the original article counts hybrid as remote in this case
There are plenty of fully remote openings for senior software engineers looking for $100k TC right now. Every person can make their own calculation
Honestly, I'd take 100k TC for a position to keep remote. One caveat, I will be working at 20% of my actual mental capacity. Frequent vacations, using sick time as often as possible, etc. I would not take on anything resembling pagerduty and I wouldn't try to lead anything. Then I'll leave for any job with higher TC. Malicious compliance is the best kind of compliance and is the only way to respond to a lop-sided negotiation.
Companies are exploiting the rift in labor due to inflation, COVID, etc right now. For 2 years the power was in the hands of employees. This left a very bad taste in the mouths of management. What companies want is top-tier labor for bottom-tier pricing. It won't happen. If it does, you'll have a bunch of people with 1.5 feet out the door coasting at work.
you can do this in office / hybrid too. It wasn't uncommon when FAANG hiring was ebbing and flowing or people would leave to come back at those places (some FAANGs have weird policies on promoting internally vs externally. It was sometimes easier to leave and comeback)
I worked somewhere where we always had a dozen boomerang FAANG engineers, the practice stopped when everyone realized they were coasting often and getting way to close to deadlines, had poorer than expected engineering output etc.
For me personally, the question is how long I hold out for a job that will pay the bills. E.g., without my kids needing to take out big college loans.
For one thing, I don't want to screw over an employer by taking a job that I know I'll leave as soon as something better-paying becomes available. Hopefully I'll find a decent job before I get that desparate.
Salaries with Canadian companies pale in comparison to U.S. salaries, with perhaps a few exceptions.
When the market was piping hot in early 2022 I was fielding a few offers and the highest a Canadian company got me (as someone with 8-9 YoE at the time) was 95K (USD). U.S. companies were offering in the range of 120K-150K.
Although I made a huge mistake and took a counteroffer at a lower salary from the company I already worked with, which came with a significant retention bonus (and verbal promise of stock + additional bonuses which never materialized). Now I'm making about 70K USD as a lead.
Which is probably more than I'd get from a Canada-based company right now to be fair.
To be clear, I'm not complaining about FAANG/finance comp rates. Anyone taking a bigger paycheck instead of that money going to capital is doing god's work (plus, building a foundation for future capital innovation, if you want the pro-capitalism slant on it—more people with investable capital and more people with cushion to try to build a business is very good). You should absolutely take every dollar you can wring out. They wanna spend stupid-money, see if they'll give you "stupid + $1". All day long.
Just putting things in perspective. "Bad" developer pay is still really good.
(of course, there's a worse tier of pay for developers and sysadmins under that one, but I don't think there's a lot of remote work in that tier that isn't also offshored work—in-person, though, yes)
> it isnt “easier” to get an offer at lower ranges, those companies think they are taking a risk with their comp ranges too
The trick is not to job-shop in bad markets. "Expensive" and "risky" to a startup in, I dunno, Billings, is "holy shit, what a bargain!" in a lot of cities—and not even the top markets, but tier two and three cities. Or to established, larger companies.
Be wary of small companies scraping by in cheap cities. If the pay's non-shit, they'll expect you to be a literal wizard, performing actual supernatural feats, for pay that's still probably on the low side.
It is significantly easier to get a $100k offer than a $600k one as a senior software engineer. Companies who offer lower pay fully understand they aren't poaching anyone from Meta or Netflix any time soon, and lower their bar in terms of how hard the interview is
In other words getting an offer for "tech in a non-tech company" is pretty easy. Getting the Meta offer in 1-shot of 6 back to back interviews, not so much
~200K, inflation adjusted, is historically the salary of a competent senior software developer in the US. Give or take depending on location, so you can expect around this for remote (which doesn't suffer the same labor shortage pressure of some regions).
A friend of mine told me he joined Microsoft right out of college in 1998 for 35K/year + 10% bonus. This is around 70K-80K today. As a Senior II Software Engineer at Microsoft in 2014, I made around 180K total comp, which is around 230K today.
In the past 3-5 years we've seen incredibly distorted job markets. 500K is a salary you often see for CEOs and Directors of "normal companies". It's an incredible salary that puts you in the top 1% income in many states.
I'm not saying software engineers don't deserve a lot of money, and by all means, let's try to get as much as we can, but I'm just saying that the past few years have been abnormal and we're seeing the correction now.
i mean the low paying jobs he refers to only pay like 100k, if your paying sr engineers and leads 100-150k you are being cheap when you consider how much value we provide.
if you think engineers only provide maybe 200k dollars of value then sure pay 100k but i find that hard to believe
Also have in mind that there are "Seniors" and "Seniors". 200K is a normal salary for a true Senior in a company that is either tech-focused or very reliant on tech.
Companies outside the tech hubs, or companies where custom tech only provides incremental value to their business, will certainly pay less, and salaries closer to 100K are actually not that uncommon. They often don't even have the ability to accurately evaluate the skill set of a Senior Software Engineer. So what you call Senior and what they call Senior isn't the same thing.
I'm not saying that you should accept 100K, simply that the market is very diverse and we are past the excesses of the past.
Yes, wages are high relative to other industries but the large tech companies are immensely profitable. Wages can be even higher without market manipulation.
So yes, it's a market but a really really bad one in ways we value markets to be good.
> The hiring market is a market. Prices in a market are set by supply and demand.
Demand for software engineers is partially explained by the value software engineers generate.
The value a job creates is obviously a factor. Imagine a job that creates absolutely no value but has a limited supply of qualified people. It wont even exist let alone pay anything.
> Compensation isn't proportional to the value you produce.
Contrast that with product/service pricing where the business advice is to capture as big a slice of the end value produced as possible.
Compensation is proportional to the value produced, and is also constrained by factors like, how close the position is to the income stream, if the dept you're working for is considered a cost or profit center. But basically different companies, industries, and situations have different typical proportional factors.
What kills me is seeing ads for boot camps talking about “tech jobs are booming in [your area]”. Yet I’ve had the fewest number of recruiter contact in my career ever, including when I was trying to break into the industry.
Not that I don’t expect the industry to be full of liars at this point, but it still losses me off when I see them.
yeah sure its a market, the money is there though to get. that doesn't change companies are being cheap. nothing wrong trying to extract as much as you can. companies that pay low are signaling they don't value their workers.
Edit: it's not good to stealth-edit your comments after the fact, especially when doing so deprives replies of their original meaning. If you're going to make an edit that affects conversation in this way, please do it append-only (as I've done here) with an "Edit:" prefix or similar.
Development is global as opposed to, say, cab driving. So, tech companies from other parts of the world will applaud your decision. Keep pushing new regulations, we'll reap the benefits.
Cool, so you can be worked into the ground by abusive landlords who add no value. We'll pool our skills and create organizations of engineers who want better for themselves and the world.
This needs to happen as soon as possible. Not only to protect ourselves against the destructive race to the bottom and offshoring, but to put guard rails in place against these people who want to use technology to extract value at the expense of everything else. They're nothing without the engineers and product designers that actually create the value.
To any immigrants reading, remember that unions were instrumental in foreigners finding it hard to move to the US. Here are some opinions on you from HN users:
> Given that it is much more expensive to gain skill when you are a native, the government somewhat pulled the rug from underneath the locals who spend a lot of money to go to uni etc and were hoping to have a decent return on their investment in education.
"Getting rid" of you will be considered a good idea
Lots of libertarians support unions, not sure where you get your info. The libertarian argument has the most subtlety about how and why to support or oppose certain unions. So yes, they do oppose some unions.
> Salary has never been about the value you provide. It's about the cost to replace you. Companies will never pay you more than you cost to replace.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. To some extent, the value you bring is whats behind the cost to replace you.
And I dont mean in some proportional relationship to revenue or profit or something. I just mean software engineers create more value than someone who can juggle chairs, who is incredibly hard to replace.
Of course if there were 4 billion software engineers tomorrow, wages would go down. We agree on that. But business value is a factor.
Cost of labor bounded above by the value of the activity. Businesses that are not FAANG scale cannot afford FAANG-level talent even if it would be necessary for something they want to do. They just can't do the thing. Or try to do the closest analogue they can with the people they can afford. Maybe hire heavy-hitting consultants for a short time to put them on the right track.
people don't send me an offer after remote interviews
people do send me an offer after in person interviews
I have no problem getting callbacks and multiple rounds of interviews and busy work take home challenges
just in case anyone else is having a similar experience, also interview at hybrid roles or offer to do an in person one
I never hear anything back about remote roles after the first round. In many cases a recruiter even has perfect roles that they say they submit me for but I never hear from them again.
On-site stuff tends to progress further, but usually they want one to move to a more expensive location, which I was desperately trying to avoid.
What are you talking about without data? We know most of the big tech companies laid off tens of thousands of software engineers in the past year. The biggest market players went from net positive on jobs to net negative.
> You don't need a double-blind placebo study to observe the shifting market.
Is your data based on just a few of your friends? How is that considered a "shifting market"? My friends and I do not experience what you are arguing. In fact, we experience the opposite of what you are saying.
Considering that literally hundreds of thousands of qualified people have been laid off this year alone, many of them devs, and plenty of anecdotes on this and other tech forums/chat groups about how the job market has shifted to favor employers, I think it isn't wildly irrational to believe the person you're responding to.
Sure, "the plural of anecdote isn't data" and all that, but talk to recruiters and you'll hear much the same. Yes, even in this market it's possible to get outstanding offers but I'm fairly confident in asserting that that's much rarer right now than it was, say, a year or two ago.
> Considering that literally hundreds of thousands of qualified people have been laid off this year alone
Those layoffs were to appease shareholders. Did you forget that the market already needed a massive amount of programmer talent? That hasn't changed, my experience hasn't changed. I can get a high paying ($300k) job at literally any point anywhere.
> Considering that literally hundreds of thousands of qualified people have been laid off this year alone, many of them devs, and plenty of anecdotes on this and other tech forums/chat groups about how the job market has shifted to favor employers, I think it isn't wildly irrational to believe the person you're responding to.
"In 2023, the software engineering industry faces a record-breaking shortage of professionals. This skills crisis has resulted in an astonishing 1 million tech job vacancies that still need to be fulfilled. Reports suggest that the number of US job vacancies, due to a lack of talent, will reach 85.2 million by 2030."
> Sure, "the plural of anecdote isn't data" and all that, but talk to recruiters and you'll hear much the same. Yes, even in this market it's possible to get outstanding offers but I'm fairly confident in asserting that that's much rarer right now than it was, say, a year or two ago.
All of these are anecdotes and nothing more. If you have data that would support that I would like to see it and then I can agree with you.
> In 2023, the software engineering industry faces a record-breaking shortage of professionals. This skills crisis has resulted in an astonishing 1 million tech job vacancies that still need to be fulfilled. Reports suggest that the number of US job vacancies, due to a lack of talent, will reach 85.2 million by 2030.
This doesn't disprove any of what's been shared earlier in this thread. Because of the layoffs and uncertainty around the future effects of interest rates on the wider economy, many companies have laid off thousands and are being much pickier about their hiring.
So even though there's vacancies, that doesn't mean the experience of seeking a job is as easy as it used to be - just the opposite, in fact. This is what many mean by "the market has shifted".
I don't know if there's studies out there conclusively proving that it's gotten harder to find a job (longer to land an offer, lower salaries on offer on average, # of remote jobs available, # of applicants applying to them etc), but I think we might never find such to begin with because these specific metrics might not be as keenly tracked.
Are you a junior developer or support IT tech? I would agree that for these kind of jobs market is probably oversaturated. But for real senior software engineers (by real i mean not someone that worked on some easy CRUD app for 10 years straight doing exactly the same thing and doesn't know how to do anything else) market is very good. As for me and my friends, I'm constantly rejecting offers that have higher payout than before.
I've been working remotely for nearly seven years now. I've been able to enjoy all of the typical "firsts" for my youngest two, saved immense amounts of time with no commute, and have been able to pitch in more regarding domestic tasks.
I understand and empathize with those that value face-to-face conversations in the office, but for those that don't, remote work is an incredible boon.
There's arguments from both sides of the coin but, though I'm biased having worked remote for almost 5 years now, I think the remote-side usually wins the argument by simply being more reasonable. I see far fewer remote workers claiming that "everyone should work remote" and more in-office workers making sweeping claims that remote reduces creativity, reduces, productivity, or makes people lazy. The anti-remote folks even go as far as dismissing having the time to be around your kids or saving money by not commuting as being trivial benefits. Like, wtf mate? Nobody's telling you not to drive to an office every day.
Don't get me wrong, there are some remote fanatics that do the same thing, but they seem far fewer.
That's very interesting. My experience has been the opposite, that people who are pro-remote are intense about it, that they often deny there being any benefits to working in an office and get angry and dismissive toward anyone who says they want to work in-person.
I would argue that the reason "remote wins" is that to get the full benefit of working in person you really need 100% of your team to work in the same building on the same hours. As soon as one person goes remote, the in-person experience is significantly degraded for everyone else.
Thus, as soon as company allows "hybrid", the people who prefer remote go remote and the in-person experience quickly degrades. This starts a spiral where people on the margin -- who still prefer 100% in person! -- decide it's no-longer worth coming in, which in turn degrades the experience further and pushes more people to give up on the office, until there are very few people left coming in.
It doesn't take very many people to set off this spiral: in my anecdotal experience, once a team goes 10-20% remote, the office is pretty useless.
So what I see is there's a "tyranny of the minority" effect. I think the long-term response is going to be more sorting of companies into all-remote or all in-person, with fewer companies in the "hybrid" space that's so common today.
> That's very interesting. My experience has been the opposite, that people who are pro-remote are intense about it, that they often deny there being any benefits to working in an office and get angry and dismissive toward anyone who says they want to work in-person.
There is a difference between arguing that remote work is better and insisting everyone work remotely. I've seen lots of people say remote work should be an option. I have yet to see a single person, on Hacker News or elsewhere, insist that everyone be required to work remotely. On the opposite side of the argument, I've seen plenty of people argue that in-person work should be required for everyone on the other hand.
At a minimum, it should be illegal for companies to say you can work from home! and then back track. Employees that already WFH full time should at least be able to do so without RTO considerations.
Honestly, I'm not one for laws about these sorts of things, but given the state of climate change, there should be legal requirements that if a job can be done in a WFH setting, it should be an option for employees to choose. By quantifying what roles don't require in person by defining eligibility, as opposed to allowing businesses to set the eligibility.
I think the details could be worked out reasonably.
> As soon as one person goes remote, the in-person experience is significantly degraded for everyone else.
Does the office fall apart when someone goes on vacation or is sick? If not, why then would one or two days away from the office have such a big impact?
If someone is sick or on PTO some things are assigned to another person and some things just wait for them to get back. And yes if the whole team has, for example, Mondays and Fridays remote, then some things just wait for Tuesday -> Thursday to happen.
The degradation I'm referencing is if you have one or more people permanently remote on your team. Then, just picking a few trivial examples, you can't take a notepad with you and make a team decision over lunch, or huddle around a whiteboard, etc., because those things don't work for the remote teammate. Even when you're in a conference room with a good video setup, it's still very common to have a lot of repeating things for the remote person, or having the remote person struggle to chime in etc., that make it a worse experience for both sides compared to the lowest common denominator of "everyone is on Zoom."
Would it be fair to say that you skew towards preferring in-person work? I think a possible takeaway here is that we notice people making arguments that we disagree with more than we notice people making arguments that we agree with.
All I can say is true for me, but as an introvert in a creative role (is it fair to call programming a creative role? I think so) being in an office around other people, especially open floorplan offices where we're all able to glare at each other from across our desks, stymies my ability to be creative. I just feel the pressure of being watched all day, and sometimes it clams me up. And then after work I go home feeling exhausted, mentally, and defeated for not getting what I wanted to get done. And when I need help on something in a remote role, I'm able to articulate the problem statement very easily over text, which my coworkers (one or two in particular) are very helpful at pointing me to a solution asynchronously while I hack away at it. So to your argument about the reason that "remote wins", I'd argue there are more reasons that it wins. But that's just for me, and I imagine many other people that also prefer remote.
I don't think in-person work is going anywhere though. I do agree with your perspective that hybrid work seems likely to not be ideal for people that prefer in-person. In fact, I'd argue that hybrid work is not ideal for people that prefer remote either. In my experience you usually have managers questioning your motives for going remote in those hybrid environments, making you feel like you're an inconvenience to the team, and pressuring you to come in some days on a commute that may not be convenient. And then one day some upper management changes, and the new person just decides they prefer an all in-person workforce and tells all the remote people to come back in or be let go. For your sake, I hope you find an opportunity that is 100% in-person. And I also hope those hybrid environments become fewer and farther between.
> I think the long-term response is going to be more sorting of companies into all-remote or all in-person, with fewer companies in the "hybrid" space that's so common today.
I think the long-term is going to be a small percentage of fully-remote (mostly new co's), a small percentage of full office (mostly legacy co's) and a big plurality of hybrid companies where everyone is mandated to come to office on the same days of the week. I am seeing more and more SV companies taking that approach.
> As soon as one person goes remote, the in-person experience is significantly degraded for everyone else
"Remote work" didn't start with "work from home" it started with offshoring and satellite offices.
Why is it acceptable to "significantly degrade the in office experience" when it benefits the company but not acceptable when it benefits the employees?
I call BS. I'm not commuting to an office just to be on calls with people in other timezones for a majority of my time there.
Completely agree. I've long believed that society is just "wrong" with the work/life balance these days. Socially i think we could drop to 6h days and life would improve dramatically (just looking at home time, that is) for most people.
For me, just giving up commutes and being able to do some basic chores on breaks or lunch alone brings a ton of this balance back into check. I work 8h but i gained so much "me" time back that it's like working 6h with a commute.
I would give up WFH if needed, but i'd be pushing for 6h days as a trade off. I now feel the added time in my life by not commuting is a massive boon. One that i can't give up. Do i prefer WFH? Yes, i'm on ~8years of it now. But the life that i clawed back by simply not commuting is by far the most valuable thing. One i am never giving up in i have options.
I think the idea of measuring productivity by hours spent is absurd.
I manage my teams by tasks accomplished. I really don't care if they were able to complete it in 2 hours and take the rest of the day off.
I simply acknowledge formally what happens in practice anyway. The average "8 hour workday" only contains about three productive hours [1].
For me, it varies wildly. Some days, I'll get in "the zone" and 12 hours / and thousands of lines of code will fly by. Then I'll spend the next day or two in a brain funk waiting to recharge.
I've learned to embrace my "bursty" productivity patterns and to structure my delivery expectations around them. If I get trapped into a X number of hours per day butt-in-seat situation, my overall productivity declines sharply.
It all depends on need. The idea that everything needs to work the same way is unsound. Arguably, the company I work for doesn't need to bring everyone into the office every day; we seem to be doing quite well. Another firm that believes it sees better creativity when people are in the same physical room may be better off not having their workers be remote.
And like you say, not every company necessarily gets a benefit from having an 8 hour day. Depending on the nature of the job, the remaining hours of the day can be a diminished return, in which case one might as well give up on the game of charades and just allow their employees to go home.
> Another firm that believes it sees better creativity when people are in the same physical room…
“Believes” suggests faith-based decision making. Not sure if you meant to say that, but your weird choice aligns with the credibility of the justifications I see of in-office-only types.
> Nobody's telling you not to drive to an office every day.
reminds me of this meme that was going around Facebook during the last US election. It was an image of a line at a store like Target. The caption was something like "you stand in line at the store, you can stand in line to vote." You know, one of those absolutely stupid republican anti-mail-in-voting things. They apparently forgot that Amazon, one of the largest corporations in the world, exists. So no, I and the entire world do not stand in line at the store. And if you want to go stand in line all day to vote, you still can asshole. But I'll be dropping my ballot off at my mailbox.
As a hothouse flower of first world privilege erected atop an underclass who does everything for me, grocery delivery has been the best thing ever for me as well. ;D
> I see far fewer remote workers claiming that "everyone should work remote"
The presence of a remote worker on a team means everyone is working remotely, in that all meetings have to be video conferences in order to include them. It's just that some might be working remotely from an office.
You know what might make an incredible industry "remote Work Pods"
Recall all the "phone-closets" we installed in many large corp tech environs (I wasa designer on many large scale offices (FB, Goog, Salesforce, NAMCO, Lucas - to name a few - aside from hospitals, I have millions of SqFt under my belt)...
If a company wanted to focus a remote workforce, while reducing realEstate facilities costs, maybe a deliverable cubicle (returnable cubicle) - that was a sound box with all the tech req'd for job, might be a thing - think of it like the "ON AIR" red-light sign... (IF PERSON IS IN THIS CUBE, THEY ARE FOCUSED ON WORKING - DO NOT TOUCH, FEED, OR OTHERWISE ENGAGE WITH SAID PERSON IN THIS BOX)
> Nobody's telling you not to drive to an office every day.
This argument doesn't work because it's not about being in aspecific physical location, it's about being in the same physical location as all the other workers.
When half the people you need to interact with are remote, there's no point going to the office.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. If half the people you're interacting with are in the office, isn't there something to still be gained by interacting with them in the same physical space? There might be a detraction by having the other half work remotely, but why would that outweigh the positives of working in-office? All you'd have to do is get the remote workers on a call or Zoom, which you'd do at home anyway, except you could also meet in-person with other coworkers. I guess I don't see how there's "no point." Apparently, in your example, the positives of just working at home outweigh the advantages of working in-office when both are proportionally 50/50.
One could easily argue the side that is saying we should stick to the working conditions we had all this while under which most people were hired, and only moved away from as an exception for a global pandemic, now that the pandemic is over.
Reasonableness has a pretty subjective definition in this context.
And even if we could all agree how reasonableness should be defined then it’s still a terrible metric to make a decision by.
I'm in a similar boat, working remotely since 2017. I don't even have kids, and just enjoy my local parks with my dogs, my wife, etc. My social interaction tends to not involve work, which I actually think is healthy, and gets me away from the echo chambers I've experienced in major tech hubs.
My biggest wish, or obstacle, is finding a team that truly values writing. So many times I've sat in meetings where the discussion largely focuses on
everyone just clarifying their own ideas. Or status meetings. It's led me to believe that a lot of "in office is better" folks just value the instant gratification of face-to-face conversations.
I suspect HN's a community of early adopters, but I'd be curious how that actually plays out over time.
My team values writing . We killed our meetings for 2 weeks to see which ones were too painful to live without and retros are the only ones we took back.
We've shifted our work discussions almost entirely to async threads on our ticketing system, we frequently hand tickets over between timezones and our manager types can find out what's going on to the nearest couple of hours in a few minutes any time they like. If we need sync conversations (which does happen of course) we record the outcome for async consumption.
We do frequent pairing, it can be quite pleasant to spend quite a while on the phone doing work when you don't need to sit in 15 hours of meetings a week!
Honestly I'm not sure I could go back. Standups for sure would be a huge turnoff for me at any new job.
Any tricks or issues you've had to figure out while pairing? My thought was just "assign a couple of people to a non-trivial ticket and see what happens". But I'm curious if that's really naive.
Biggest trick is taking breaks, it is so easy to push past when you'd really have liked to stop for lunch because you think you're almost there or skip your usual break for a coffee. Set timers if you need to. I tend to rely on my partners to remember to ask for breaks or suggest breaks when they seem distracted or like they are flagging.
We update assignees to reflect when more than one person is working on something but we never assign work to individuals or pairs. We use an aggressive WIP limit of engineers/2+1 to prevent a ton of in flight tickets but other than that we're quite free to move around as long as we're moving the stuff on the board right-wards.
I think that's a thing that contributes to our success at pairing actually. Since we all value schedule flexibility quite highly we get on well with pairing a bit when we happen to have synchronized working time and working on independent subtasks when that is more convenient for us.
https://tuple.app/ - this tooling helped a ton, it's expensive but worth it to reduce the friction to start a pairing call to 0. Pairing on zoom, slack, meets, etc. is all much more painful. VS Code LiveShare esque things are free and can probably work as well with some discipline.
I've been remote for a similar amount of time. Likewise, I've enjoyed the time saved on commutes.
Since COVID I've felt like the dynamic of my remote work experience has changed. I've worked with two remote companies since then and both were struggling with a lot of inexperienced or absent remote workers. Dealing with them on a case-by-case basis is the right call, of course, but it takes a toll on management's trust of remote workers in general.
Fortunately I haven't had to install any overly intrusive monitoring software, but I did learn that my company now dedicates a significant amount of business analyst time to analyzing activity of remote employees now. Apparently they had so many problems with remote employees (and their managers!) barely getting any work done that management has soured on remote work in general, so new hires have to be on site unless someone can vouch for them being excellent remote workers.
The competition for remote work has also gone way up. Every remote job opening we posted would get literally thousands of applications.
The combination of increasing competition for remote jobs and declining sentiment toward remote work (see: Amazon and other big companies) does not bode well for those of us who were successfully working remote for many years, IMO.
> Apparently they had so many problems with remote employees (and their managers!) barely getting any work done
This was most likely also happening in the office, it was just masked with the appearance of work in the form of in-person meetings and people zoning out at their desks. When you have a bunch of people in a room together progress grinds to a halt because it becomes completely about performance.
> This was most likely also happening in the office
Not in this case. They even had a chart showing the sharp decline in several different metrics when they let people go remote.
If you subtracted out the outliers, most of the company was fine going remote. About 20% of people dropped their productivity to a fraction of before, though.
Some people can't handle remote work. I think it's time we stopped pretending like everyone handles remote work just fine. That lie is making it harder to get companies to admit that they need to differentiate between employees who can and cannot successfully work remote.
Unfortunately, rapidly falling metrics for a minority of remote employees is immediately obvious. The reduction in burnout of top performers due to working remote is much harder to measure since it is in an entirely different frequency domain.
Why would in-office work lead to more burnout, as opposed to remote work? I’m thinking that remote work would be much more conducive to burnout - nothing to stop you working too long, no segregation between work environment and home…
How were they measuring productivity per employee? I see that bandied about for a lot of RTO arguments, but it's extremely hard if not impossible to do, so it's important to talk about the methodology driving the decision making.
> How were they measuring productivity per employee?
Productivity was ultimately measured by talking to the people and asking what they've been working on, what the challenges were, and why it was taking so long. When we'd talk to some of these people, they could barely come up with a story for what they had been doing all week.
The metrics were used as an indicator of where to investigate, not as an ultimate measure of productivity. The key metrics were actually entirely in control of the teams themselves: We would estimate our own story points and could even close our own tickets as completed if we wanted.
When some employees go from doing 20-25 story points per week down to 3-5 and the only change was that they started working remotely, something is wrong.
Remember, these were people rating their own story points!
IMO, they could have gamed the system if they wanted to by inflating story points and churning tickets (though this would only delay their managers catching on, not avoid it). These people weren't even doing that. They just... stopped working more than a couple hours per week and assumed nobody would notice.
I know this cuts against the Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News narrative that everyone is more productive remote, but I watched it happen in real time. It wasn't just a few people, it was a significant number of people who couldn't handle it.
Not everyone can handle remote and the number of people in this category is a lot higher than the internet suggests. I don't know why that's controversial for some people.
"Story points" are exactly the kind of theater that is enabled when working in-person. Every in-person office I've worked at has been addicted to planning and estimating, because being in a meeting looks like work and is less stressful than pretending to work at your desk. It's an environment not conducive to actually shipping things that impact business success.
Was your profit negatively impacted? Because if it wasn't and people shipped less story points, it should tell you that metric has no value.
Managing Jira and tasking out stories and estimating story points drives me insane and I swear sometimes it's like 75% of my day. Everyone loves to brag about how "agile" we are but we'll spend like an hour discussing how we're going to do a task that will be 2 minutes of work.
And then non-developers are shocked/confused when things don't pan out as exactly how they were written on Jira because we were spending all our time trying to guess our way through how to task things out and how long they'll take instead of just doing the work to figure out what needs to be done. And then we have to go back and fix up the Jira board later, causing even more work. It's insane.
>because being in a meeting looks like work and is less stressful than pretending to work at your desk
Right, and who knows if their metrics were actually measuring meaningful work? If they are measuring in-office rituals like this that changed during the remote transition but they ultimately didn't lead to more tangible work being completed, then their metrics are worthless.
Story points must be calibrated by the team for themselves which seems to be the case based on statements from the original poster. If the velocity goes down, the team is getting less work done.
Using profit to measure developer productivity on the other hand is utter nonsense; not even the most clueless manager would come up with such an idea.
I found my current employer prior to COVID, and they had been almost exclusively remote since their inception in the early aughts. Companies with remote-first culture that predate COVID are far better equipped for the cons regarding remote work (IMO), of which there are plenty.
> Remote work was far less common pre Covid though.
That was my point: Remote work was a unique benefit given to those who could handle it.
During COVID everyone started pretending that remote work was for everyone. Companies shifted a lot of people remote and then learned the hard way that many people can't be productive remote.
Now the pendulum swings back, with companies pretending that nobody can work remote because they let the bad apples spoil the whole batch.
Your experience almost exactly mirrors my own. I moved from Boston to the Midwest USA in 2016 and kept working remotely until a RIF in 2019. I found a local job that did require a commute but a few months later, we all became remote. In between, I started a family and had 2 kids who have always interacted with me at home. And I am very thankful for that opportunity that many do not have. Our company has since mandated hybrid work now but my team has been categorized as a remote-first distributed group. Now if I go into the office, I would be the only one there. Having said that, I do long for a physical whiteboard where my movements can help me convey my points or understand others better. The current technology is not so adequate in this area yet.. We use google workspaces/chat and meet. I curse it every week..
> The current technology is not so adequate in this area yet.. We use google workspaces/chat and meet. I curse it every week..
I think this is the one place AR/VR is almost ready to really help out. "Teleport" your chair to someone else's space while they "draw" on the "whiteboard" to show you things—with their actual body and hands.
Rigs anywhere near good enough to make this non-terrible are gonna be expensive for some time, and maybe don't quite exist yet (but are the one valuable use-case within striking distance of current hardware, I think), sure—but isn't the claim that this kind of interaction is incredibly valuable? Four-figure cost per six-figure worker should be a no brainer, then (unless companies/managers are just bullshitting about that...). And meeting rooms ain't cheap.
I'd much rather have Google's Project Starline than traditional AR/VR. It seems perfect to replace in person meetings (no goggles). Unfortunately, that is the only value, whereas AR provides virtual workspaces and is likely cheaper in mass production and space requirments (don't need large screens).
Given Google's history, my guess is that Starline is on the chopping block even if showcased at I/O with a scaled back price tag. I hope I'm wrong.
> saved immense amounts of time with no commute, and have been able to pitch in more regarding domestic tasks
Same with my kid. Another big win of remote for me is that I can go where I'm treated best. I can pick a country (anyone could pick my country and I had to welcome them with open hands, so it's only fair game that in exchange I'm allowed to go wherever I feel like going) which welcomes me and my family and where the taxes are reasonable and where the people are nice.
I'm at my fourth country in seven years and this time I think the family shall stay for quite a while.
Remote work has benefits, but it also has significant drawbacks. I say this as someone who as worked exclusively remotely for 15+ years.
1. The quality of remote workers seems to have dropped significantly post pandemic. I think this is because, in the past to work remote at an in-office company you need to be pretty valuable. Now people who can't work well without the structure of an office are able to get remote work and coast. This means the good people are carrying a lot more dead weight.
2. Juniors simply don't learn as much or as quickly in a remote environment. Many of them just go dark when they can't figure something out.
3. Perhaps you save money by not commuting, but my wife and I both work remote. That means our companies have basically colonized 200 square feet of our house rent free. We could be using these rooms for something else. It almost feels like a 3rd amendment violation sometimes.
I started a remote job last September but it hasn’t been as good as Covid work at my previous company. The difference is the company structure. The new company is organized regionally with silos and duplicates roles by city/region. This means there’s less natural remote-like communication outside of a given office.
Further, my new boss is an extrovert and has found that she can’t stand working from home and prefers the office. I was hired fully remote, but there’s more and more in-office meetings held, where I might be the only person on a giant 96” conference room screen. This really makes remote feel like being an outsider and I feel less involved with the team. My role was supposed to be managing and strategy but it’s more of a taskmaster at this point. I can have one-on-one discussions with leaders, but the decisions are not made in a video call, they’re being made in an office face-to-face.
I think if I were a remote contractor this would be fine and I wouldn’t care so much about the dynamic. However, trying to be a genuine employee in a non-remote first and locally focused company is proving difficult.
I have been working full time remote since Sept 2021 (correction, 2020, just before pandemic).
It's not even that I don't value the face-to-face conversations and human interaction, I absolutely do. It just doesn't come close to the immense value I gain by WFH.
A side benefit: I was able to move closer to my church community, so my "human interaction" need is being fulfilled richer than ever now.
(One of the most frustrating things in all the WFH vs RTO discourse is that there is this false dichotomy being presented. It's either extroverted people who are energized by others, or introverts who'd rather be in the dark closet by themselves. I am as extroverted as they come, and I thrived in the office environment. Still wouldn't trade WFH for the world.)
> I was able to move closer to my church community, so my "human interaction" need is being fulfilled richer than ever now.
This is what the "but you need human interaction" return-to-office crowd doesn't understand.
WFH !== Being alone
WFH means surrounding yourself with the people you choose to be around.
Whether that's your church community, fellow hobbyists, intramural sports teams, the local co-working space, etc.
Plus, that can include "my coworkers" for anyone that wants to make work a bigger part of their life, like those working in startups. However, this should be the exception, not the rule like it has been.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the return-to-office crowd, like myself, wants. Work relationships and personal relationships serve entirely different purposes for me.
I don't want to be working longer hours, or make work a larger part of my life. I don't particularly care if I have "real" friendships with my colleagues outside of work. I have plenty of friends and family that I already have trouble juggling.
What I want is the camaraderie, greater trust, mentorship, professional networks, etc. that comes from working with people during the day in a shared space.
I'm not sitting with a church community or sports team during my 9-5. I've had a couple co-working memberships during the last couple years - most people just go there to sit and work quietly. Maybe you make some small talk here and there. Except for the people working with their colleagues who are also in the co-working space.
Are we in a transition period where the previous methods of developing camaraderie, etc simply have not been widely learned?
I've worked remotely for 7 years and haven't missed anything you've listed as a benefit of in-person work. In fact, compared to prior in-person experiences, I have more personal interaction with colleagues than before (largely because my startup is quite conscious about it).
Agreed. I am very close with my remote teammates, and when we meet for our yearly onsite, it feels like we've all been working side by side in the trenches...just like in an office.
We also miss the fact that you can be traveling to an office for years and not actually know anybody. This is especially true of this big large tech campuses.
The previous methods of developing camaraderie all involve being in the same room as other people. Yes you can do it if your company works hard to make it happen, but tons(most?) of companies either can't or won't do that.
Thank you for writing this out so clearly. I've attempted to make this point in the past, but am too tired to these days.
Of all the animosity in the discussions regarding Remote vs Office, this is the one that genuinely bothers me. Saying that I prefer the human interactions of working in office does not imply that I struggle to find or make friends outside of work. You've put it brilliantly.
There’s also a risk management side to this. If my social life is built around my office and then I get laid off, that’s a massive impact on my social life. Decoupling reduces that risk significantly.
Yeah but it's not a choice to work 40ish hours a week talking and communicating for introverts that's pretty taxing. At least in office we had a few laughs and good times and some face to face. Now it's all the soul sucking without any of the benefits like grabbing lunch together or skivving off a meeting and smoking cigarettes behind the dumpster. After 40hr/s having to go out and do even more socializing is hard because i used my socializing juice up at work
I think most of the "but you need human interaction" crowd isn't talking about their social life. It's much harder to collaborate with coworkers when you have no relationship with them. It's not impossible to have a relationship with coworkers when remote, but you have to put a lot more effort in than you would in person. Some companies are facilitating that, but some aren't.
Plus it's just easier than ever to meet people outside of work. If there's no existing group for your interest, be the change you want to see and create one. I'm not saying a person will suddenly have a ton of friends, but even in the antisocial world of LA, my Meetup group gets at least a small handful to show up most of the time.
I totally get being social with your coworkers as a bonus, but it's a little sad to me that people need to rely on that one source. I can count on one hand the percentage of coworkers whom I've actually kept in contact with after either one left the company. Most coworker relationships are a matter of convenience. If that's what people prefer, then cool, but don't act like there's no such thing as human interaction outside the office.
> One of the most frustrating things in all the WFH vs RTO discourse is that there is this false dichotomy being presented. It's either extroverted people who are energized by others, or introverts who'd rather be in the dark closet by themselves.
Perfectly stated. I can be quite outgoing when I want to be, and in many of my previous jobs I enjoyed many of my colleagues, but now I can devote my energy to the relationships I value most.
I have four kids, time is undoubtedly my most valuable commodity. I don't think I'd be able to foster as many friendships if I was working in an office. I'm sure I'd have friendships with a few colleagues, but WFH enables me to devote myself to friendships as I see fit.
I have a question for people here. I absolutely value the time with my daughter and I actually enjoy working for home, I had been for the last couple of years, but it's becoming increasingly unbearable to do that with a nagging and micromanaging partner by my side who's life is COMPLETELY unstructured.
So I find myself longing for office time, not because I like office time, but rather because I feel like it might bring back some sanity to the relationship.
Am I the only one in that situation? What do you do? It's not like I can structure another individual, it would only work if they themselves recognize that they need structure, which they don't.
> Am I the only one in that situation? What do you do?
What I did (decades ago) was realize that when I was working from home, I needed to treat it the same as working in an office. What that meant was: I need a room that is exclusively "the office". When I'm in there, I'm working. When I'm not working, I'm not in there. And everyone else in the household has to adhere to one rule -- if my office door is closed, they cannot disturb me for any reason other than an actual emergency, just like if I were in an office outside of out home.
Aye, just gotta rip off the bandaid and make sure you're firm with the rules. My eldest boy has terrible separation anxiety and acted as though I had died for the first week or so, but adjustments were made and it's been relatively smooth sailing since.
I did acquiesce and allow interruptions when the door is open, for times I'm checking email or other administrative tasks. That same son has high-functioning autism so I do find myself bringing him in to calm him down on occasion.
I've found my wife is the one who refuses to follow these guidelines most often, lol.
I should try the soundproofing. 10 years in and the kids still don't leave me alone, and the rebukes were taking a real toll on the relationship. I work part time in a coworking space which has helped a bit, but it's a real struggle.
Yeah that would be great! Is there much you can do without covering all the walls with foam? Even that might be a possibility, although I don't know if my wife would permit it
My rule is if the door is open or not. If it's open, come on in. If it isn't, only emergencies please!
We have 3 kids (5, 5, 8) and they can actually manage themselves for hours at a time. And I don't mean youtube, TV, or tablets. Just regular playing. My wife works part time so in the summer they don't have constant supervision in the morning.
This is where having more kids can be easier. 1 kid can be lonely, or be unable to get help if they hurt themselves. 2 can be a problem if a fight breaks out. With 3 you have someone who can come get you if there's a problem.
It's really frustrating that the discussion is often "just shut yourself in your home office", as if an extra room doesn't rent out for $1000/month in many cities.
I went a step further and installed a keypad lock on my office door. I mean, I’ll admit that there are simpler ways to keep the kids out, but it looks cool…
I did put a keyed locking door knob on in a previous house but for some reason haven't done it to the new house/office.
Did you have a hard time finding one that would fit an interior door? I had to hunt for awhile to find a keyed lock that would fit since they're all designed for exterior doors.
Checked my order history, the one I got was a “SCHLAGE FE575 PLY 626 ELA Plymouth Keypad Entry”. I don’t remember having any trouble installing this on an interior door (and I’m not very “handy” at all). That said, I don’t know much about doors, so can’t say for sure if it works everywhere. Maybe some interior doors are thinner or something.
Definitely sympathize, you are not alone. I have a wife and two young kids. I love her but for a long time my wife just did not consider me as "at work" when I was working remotely. She had zero qualms about coming into our home office to chat or see if I could change a diaper or whatever. I'm happy to help out if I'm between tasks (hell that's one of the perks of WFH, and everyone takes breaks wherever you're working. I'm taking one to write this post!) but it was all day every day and driving me up the wall. Plus toddlers don't care about work hours, if they want to see daddy they're going to come see daddy. We had plenty of conversations about how disruptive it is to have someone tap you on the shoulder while coding to ask if you can run to the grocery store for milk. But it never went anywhere. To her, if I was physically in the house, I was available to do stuff at any time.
To be honest we never "solved" it. Eventually the younger reached kindergarten age and my wife returned to full time work. I wish I had better advice. The suggestion to have a dedicated office space with a door is a good one, but if your partner does not respect boundaries that won't be enough. If finances allow, you could look at leasing a part time desk in a coworking space or even a dedicated office. I know it feels silly to pay for office space when you can do the job from home, but if it's damaging your relationship, it may be worthwhile. Some employers might even offer a stipend for remote workers to help offset costs. The fact that you refer to your partner as a nagging micromanager tells me something has to change.
I hope this post doesn't make me sound like a dick. I have immense respect for my wife for choosing to pause her career to care for our children. Raising kids is HARD, harder than the work I get paid for to be honest. We're partners in life and parenthood. But my role in the partnership at that time was to hold down a job and that's a lot harder to do when you're being interrupted 10 times a day. Hope you are able to work something out.
Not possible in places with bad zoning or condos, but I converted a shed into a really nice office. It has a fence and a couple other features that create friction to get to it (even though only a few feet from the house). Helps a lot without being overtly distancing to the relationship.
My kids and wife know there is a rule during work hours:
When my office door is closed, I am not home (except for emergency, say broken limb or something). It takes some training, but they become accustomed to it.
You need to stress to your partner the importance of focus during work. This took an exceptional amount of effort for us because my wife is bipolar and when things are bad, her contributions become a trickle. Summer is always a trying time, because all the kids are home and she gets overwhelmed easily. Thankfully my employer is incredibly accommodating, so if I need to step away and resolve anything at home, they have faith that I'll see to my obligations.
There's certainly value in having a dedicated work area if possible. Your brain really likes having demarcation lines between work and home, so emulating that can help immensely.
It is important to note that WFH is NOT a silver bullet. It is not a solution for every employer/employee. It works incredibly well in many technological scenarios because of remote access and whatnot, but there are limiting factors. Both in bureaucratic requirements, "culture" fits, and domestic situations. What works for me in the Great Plains due to cheap(er) housing may not work in metro areas where some families are living in small apartments.
Don't feel obligated to make WFH succeed in your situation if you don't want to simply because its en vogue. I have dear friends that tried WFH and _hated_ it. Another option is co-working space or otherwise getting out of the house to focus on work. I find myself going to a local hiking trail area during spring/autumn to work outdoors, and it is refreshing.
Also, what’s your workspace? It helps if you work in a separate room with a door. Working in a central open spot like the kitchen table invites more interruption. Of course this is hard to do if you’re in a small apartment.
Some people who we love deeply, just cannot do this. If we're physically there, a reason to interrupt will always be found. IMHO it's not worth damaging the relationship.
I don’t want to read too deeply into your comments, but it may be worth exploring why expressing this need feels like it would damage your relationship. It could be that you both need to adjust your communication patterns to better express yourselves and hear each other.
Tough one. Sounds like you need to communicate your needs to each other better, and agree some mutual boundaries.
While returning to the office as an escape may alleviate some symptoms, I would still recommend that you work on your relationship.
Edit: your partner may also have needs too, this isn't just about you getting what you want. It's about communicating better and respecting each others needs.
I'm in a similiar boat, and I finally got a co-working space. Do it for your mental and relatinship health. If we want to be incredibly over-reductionist, $300 per month is a lot cheaper than a divorce :-D
Do you mean Sept 2020? I believe everything shutdown (in most US states and European countries) in March 2020.
Only wondering because ~3 years versus a little less than 2 years seems like a potentially big difference, so wondering if that feeling of fulfillment has is still going strong that long
>(One of the most frustrating things in all the WFH vs RTO discourse is that there is this false dichotomy being presented. It's either extroverted people who are energized by others, or introverts who'd rather be in the dark closet by themselves. I am as extroverted as they come, and I thrived in the office environment. Still wouldn't trade WFH for the world.)
I believe the extrovert vs. introvert division is a false dichotomy in the first place.
Commute time, environment at home, career seniority - these are the most important factors in this discussion
> I understand and empathize with those that value face-to-face conversations in the office, but for those that don't, remote work is an incredible boon.
I value face-to-face time in the office but still prefer remote work and its not even close.
It would be nice to have an office very close by and be able to go when I want. But there is nothing good nearby and im not moving.
I work remote, and we talk about this topic among the team from time to time. One thing I always add to the conversation is the importance of simulating a work day. I wake up 30 minutes before work and get ready. I raise my desk and work standing the first 4.5 hours every day. I greet the team in work chat on the dot, and begin working on tasks for the day.
Being successful at remote work as a developer and creative is using the right tools when it comes to collaboration. This means having a good A/V setup that doesn't need regular futzing with to work. Know your OS's sound and camera settings. Know your team tools inside and out. Another thing that I work on daily is better written communication skills, specifically, better commit message, taking that extra 5 minutes to write up a concise PR.
Screen capture is another tool I regularly use, and have refined my skills in. I often screenshot things and add drawn and text annotations to highlight important information and supplement with a chat message. That can often help solve problems much faster. I have us all using more digital whiteboarding tools. We're learning what too much or too little Kanban board granularity is. Adjusting workflows both in project management and remote communication is super important. Finding the inefficiencies and efficiencies requires a lot of open-mindedness and humility.
We had an employee who wasn't finding success in remote work and I realized a lot of his struggles were with not knowing how to use core desktop publishing and digital communication tools. He was from the save it on your hard drive and email-it-to-me generation. He missed standing at the coffee machine and chatting. He didn't care to learn advanced features of the Google Suite, or get OBS up and running. Those factors combined didn't help him succeed in remote work. It was unfortunate to see.
One thing that can be done to positively influence opponents of remote work, in your organization or in the industry in general is emphasizing the importance of core modern computer literacy. I think that being a highly productive remote employee requires one to develop and maintain a high degree of core computer literacy (using office productivity tools, communication software, and managing A/V hardware).
The no commute part is so powerful man. At times I get bored (I now know 70% of my area in a 5km radius) but god the added bedtime and road / train free life is really a damn luxury.
Yea, I really don't mind the office. It's the "going to" part that I'm unwilling to do ever again. It's kind of nice to get a little in-person time with colleagues. The open-office system kind of sucks, but nearly every company has that now. If I could snap my fingers and teleport myself there, I'd do it often: at least any time I had a bunch of meetings and didn't have to concentrate or have work that needed silence. But it's a 3 hour drive (each way) away, so nope.
> Turns out to my surprise I like going into the office, but definitely not every day.
You're not alone.
The internet likes to talk about remote work as the only acceptable arrangement, but that's mostly because it's biased toward people who like socializing via internet comment sections.
The number of people who actually like going to the office (either part or full time) is far higher than you'd expect from reading Reddit and Hacker News.
> The number of people who actually like going to the office (either part or full time) is far higher than you'd expect from reading Reddit and Hacker News.
I think most people like an office setting. Even remote work proponents like myself enjoy the office every now and then.
The problem is really two things.
1.) The commute is brutal. If you live in any decent sized city and have a family, it's likely that you are far enough away from the office that you have to drive 30+ minutes in pretty horrendous traffic. That's not only lost time that you could be spending with your family, or even doing work, but it's mentally exhausting. No one is refreshed in the office after a shitty commute.
2.) Often offices turn political. The dynamics of in person work can cause many issues that just don't happen when you work remote. Remote work, when done correctly, is mostly about contribution and output. In an office, low performers can outshine high performers simply by being present and seeming busy. Remote work mostly fixes this.
> 1.) The commute is brutal. If you live in any decent sized city and have a family, it's likely that you are far enough away from the office that you have to drive 30+ minutes in pretty horrendous traffic.
This is fundamentally a problem with urban design, not with in-office work.
Not really. Any large city has this problems, even cities that excel in public transport like Tokyo. The commute might still be upwards of 40-50 minutes unless you live near tech hub of the city which typically is super expensive and also risky as often there are several hubs in one large cities and now you have to move places to regain comfort.
> Turns out to my surprise I like going into the office, but definitely not every day.
Bingo. There is relationship building and other interactions that are simply not possible in any other way that I have found. I go in 3 days most weeks, and that makes a huge difference in lifestyle and flexibility. Since I work in robotics, 100% remote is never going to be a thing for me. Zoom meeting and software days, remote. Wrench days, in the lab. Works for me.
I can't imagine going into an office again. I've been remote for 2/3 of my career (long before COVID). I would be happy to go to a meet up or something once a week after hours. I never want to have an open office arrangement where I am bothered CONSTANTLY again. Remote has been such a boon to my life and my productivity you'd have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Same, I work much better from home. I have a tendency to talk out loud to myself when working on something and I feel like people would think I'm a bit annoying/crazy doing that in an open office environment.
Meta: I want us to appreciate that total number of job postings on HN have been steadily falling since 2018 [1] with what appears to be an outlier jump in 2021 (post-pandemic bubble). That seems pretty important...
Am I missing some big piece of context here that would make my analysis wrong?
Anecdotally, I've heard from HR professionals that posting on Hacker News isn't a particularly effective method for attracting candidates. Perhaps this could be the reason.
Not quite sure quite what you're asking. But I think, yes it affects it, we can't hire people outside of the US and given we got no candidates we could feasibly employ, it doesn't make sense to continue posting.
He’s suggesting that when posting the same job listing in places such as LinkedIn, you still get the same people from SEA applying anyway.
The few times I’ve had LinkedIn Premium and had a look at where other applicants were from, I’d notice the majority was from SEA or Africa, even though the posting clearly required EU residency/work permit.
Yeah I mentioned it to our hiring department. They said they had tried it in the past for about 3 months, got plenty of applicants but none of them actually met the requirements. A lot of people who couldn't speak English or with only internship experience applying for a senior dev position.
I did some experimenting in the past with posting jobs on the HN who's hiring threads, and I found that I got about 10x more candidates when I included a salary with the post then without.
It's weird. I feel like you can get more done at an office at times... but then there's also a lot of downtime. Also the commute is always killer.
I honestly believe people work better when they get dressed and have some routine. No idea how people can work in their PJs, I'd feel so lazy, lol.
However. The commute is killer. Even if you get it down to just 15 min. (which is hard unless you live right next to work) that's 30 min. a day. Prob adds up to well over 100 hrs a year just commuting. I know some ppl do public transport with an audio book or something but for me, that's still 100 hours commuting.
If I could teleport to the office, I'd say in person 60/40 split. Since I have to commute, remote all the way except for important kick offs or brainstorming sessions.
I think there's a big difference between a walking commute and a driving commute. I'd welcome a 15 minute walking commute each day - even while WFH I like to take a 15 minute walk up and down my road before starting my day because it helps my brain and body wake up.
That's fair. I guess it comes down to routines. I love being able to wake up, walk to the gym (like 2 min away) do my exercise and be home, shower and sitting ready to work all in under an hour. 15 min walk would be 30 min of decent exercise, not bad at all.
If I could walk to the office in 15 minutes, I genuinely don't think I'd mind going in at least a few days a week. Unfortunately my actual commute would be 30-45 minutes in traffic so no thank you. I'm quite happy WFH. My apartment is kitted out better than any executive office, and best of all it's quiet.
Exactly. I don't know why people seem to sleep on hybrid. Some days going into the office works better, other days WFH is better.
If we just finished scoping out a project and I have dozens of programming hours, I'm def going to lock myself in my office with headphones and type away.
If things are slow and I need some motivation, I think going to the office would help.
My commute has always been an hour each way. If the job is going well this isn't bad (podcasts and Audible), but it's a time sink.
One day I realized I was falling asleep on the hour-long, 12-mile route home. (Los Angeles traffic is no joke.) I sold my car and now use metro/bus to commute, or do remote work.
ps: I also can't work from home in my PJs, I "dress up" by putting on jeans :-D
> Even if you get it down to just 15 min. (which is hard unless you live right next to work) that's 30 min. a day. Prob adds up to well over 100 hrs a year just commuting.
I need my morning commute. It's a kind of forced meditation that I can't get at home with three young children.
It would stress me out if I couldn't work a flexible schedule or if I had to deal with rush-hour, so I'm thankful that these stars aligned for me.
That's fair, honestly gives you an advantage that you enjoy it.
For me, anytime I'm commuting I feel is time I could be doing almost literally _anything_ else. My secret to getting away (its not forced though, lol) is a mini sauna. I don't really sit in there sometimes but if I say I'm going to it's everyone's clue to leave me alone haha.
>How mini are we talking? I've seen some tiny ones!
Size of a bucket haha. It just does steam. There's also an option to have a tent-like thing you sit in but I find it works better if I just pipe it into the shower and I can get a plastic chair and an ipad and just relax.
I think it comes down to the person and their discipline.
Ultimately, I do get more coding done at home. However, being surrounded by colleges and a "business" atmosphere motivates me to actually do the coding, its hard to explain lol.
Also distractions. If you get distracted at home it can get pretty bad. At work you at least have to try.
Lots of work advertised as 'remote' ends up as several days in the office anyway. Also note that companies that are not 'full remote' may well revert their stance on this and go back to a butts-in-seats arrangement whenever they feel like. Some do this as a way to do lay-offs without announcing them as such. Companies that have a full-remote culture are usually much less likely to do this. A good way to gauge this is if the person that is hiring you is themselves remote during the hiring process.
I left the bay area to a fairly rural location thanks to being able to work remotely. I actually prefer the office or hybrid, but in the grand scheme of things, living here makes me the happiest. So I am very happy that remote is (hopefully) going to stick around.
I can relate to that. I moved out of a big city to the suburbs of a smaller one. Monthly expenses are roughly flat, but I own a house instead of pinching pennies in a small filthy apartment. I'd much rather work in person, but it doesn't feel possible to maintain a decent standard of living without scoring at least an average tech hub salary while working remotely from somewhere cheaper, at least not solo.
I don't mind working from home, but I find WFH-accommodating calls exhausting; it feels they take far longer than the equivalent in person discussion, in addition to losing the ad-hoc nature of office conversations. The context switch feels heavier on calls than it does in person. Also, the way daily calls tend to be scheduled (everyone at once, let's hash out everything for everyone so we can then get on with things) means I have to sit in on conversations that are irrelevant to me and for some reason having noise coming out of my headphones means I can't focus on anything else. On the opposite end, I'm now sat in the office while colleagues are having a meeting right next to me and I am able to focus on writing this reply (or maybe coding, if I wasn't procrastinating on HN).
Maybe it's my audio setup, but I've tried multiple types of headphones to no avail. I feel the quality of my work (and life) would improve if I could cope better with calls, but despite my efforts, I can't do it. I've removed myself from calls with an adjacent team that mostly don't concern me, and asked them to ping me only if they need me. That saved 30m to 2 hours of my life and saved me from becoming exhausted before the day has properly begun.
There's also a problem in that _some_ people prefer WFH because they can slack off more (or have multiple jobs); that means they're not always available and not fully committed, with whatever implications for the people who rely on them and the company/product.
Maybe it's down to the pace of the work. Startups, I feel, benefit from in office huddling. Corporations with ample time on their hands could be better suited to WFH.
It sounds to me like you're WFH in a culture that doesn't do async coordination well. I don't know how large an org you're in, but some targeted team process refresh goals/training for better async coord would seem like it could improve your working environment. (edit: this could be a suggestion put to your team leads/managers with the objective of improving culture & efficiency)
Some of that is explicitly writing up short coordinating docs/memos instead of real-time hashing it out, and comes with some of the attendant advantages of writing and thinking often discussed in HN posts.
It's a hybrid 20-ish person team and I work from the office 4 days a week (my choice), but yeah, you're right that we fail at async coordination and fall back onto calls. I've suggested alternatives (meet in the office a couple of days a week) but it has failed to materialise and the only workable solution I found has been to remove myself from noisy/unproductive calls.
I hear what you're saying about docs but knowing everyone I don't feel we could do it. Pre-covid everyone-in-the-office worked well, but you need to drag people into the office these days so it seems we're stuck with an ineffective hodgepodge of calls and in person fractional team chats.
I feel like in a hybrid work situation it's unfortunate that it can fall into the worst-of-both-worlds type situations.
Shifting coordinating doc habits are hard, but a lot of times they're being generated in pieces in an uncoordinated way already. Or it could be a matter of team leadership pointing back to the right contexts - issue discussion etc.
I enjoy working remotely. It allows me to live somewhere with a reasonable cost of living, and gives me an extra two hours back of my day. It also allows me to take the trash out if I forget and hear the truck, or throw a load of clothes in the laundry.
I wouldn't mind working in a office again, but my stipulations would be a pay increase to account for having to live closer to work, and having to pay people to clean up the house a couple times a week
> I prefer in office but I don’t see how that’s possible with a family.
I don't see how WFH is possible with a family. My children (9, 6, and 4) spend nearly the whole day trying to guilt me into playing with them when I telework.
> How would you afford a large enough house in a city center?
Work in an industry which exists largely outside of the cities. Defense, for instance.
> And otherwise how do you justify two hours of your day to commuting?
1 hour in total for me: 30 minutes there and back.
I do work in an office. My wife is a stay-at-home mom.
The contract I'm working on at the moment has optional telework which is where my experience with WFH comes from.
With that being said, there's no effective way to communicate to a four year old that "Daddy is home, but you have to restrict communication with him to only when it's absolutely necessary".
I also find that WFH is made even more challenging if your home has many pending repairs. The temptation to just take a minute to make some progress on e.g., a drywall patch, is hard to overcome when it's right there in front of you.
From my job searching experience in the last two months, that can not be possibly true, there are some remote positions but they're definitely not 60%, I would say it's about 15% at the best for software and engineering roles.
just do a 'software developer' search on linkedin, it has 156000 jobs, then filter it via 'remote' it drops down to 24400, that's 15%.
> that can not be possibly true, there are some remote positions but they're definitely not 60%
Have you based your job search exclusively on HN's "Who is hiring"? If not, I'm not sure how you can make such strong assertions about the distribution of remote jobs on that specific job board. The article doesn't make any claims about the job market outside that data set.
> I would say it's about 15% at the best for software and engineering roles.
I think it's likely that remote jobs get filled much quicker since they by definition have a larger candidate pool. At any one moment in time there may be 4x non-remote jobs posted, but if they take much longer to fill and the ratio stays the same, then 69% remote is very believable.
I upvoted you to help balance a bit. But I think you're being downvoted because that isn't what's being discussed here. The title and article are specifically about HN.
Thanks I was reading too fast indeed and since I am in the market now and I know the number does not match up so I wrote it fast, did not realize it's HN specific. Still a larger sample pool like linkedin might be helpful than HN's data.
> Based on the analysis of the data provided, it is evident that remote work has gained significant popularity within the HackerNews community, particularly in the field of computer science and entrepreneurship.
I'm hoping to continue working remote essentially eternally, and I'm glad to see the shift in this direction generally.
There is a fair amount of vitriol towards companies requiring some in office time, assuming anything from BS to evil intent.
While I personally like being able to work from home I have seen many cases when bringing the team into the office, at least once or twice a week, removes blockers and helps people sketch out and try prototypes in a way that remote work does not. It is painful, when you are working with hardware in some restricted access lab and something breaks, to hear that the person who can fix it is remote and will come in next Monday. Maybe.
So I am not surprised that some employers are pushing RTO from purely business reasons; no chicanery. And as this often carries various costs for employees, this will eventually, in a business cycle or two, get negotiated to a sane state, where both sides are slightly unhappy, but realize that they got a decent deal. My 2c.
I pitched this to a recruiter recently after they told me the max pay for a sr eng job was pretty low. She got pretty excited about the idea. No bites yet though on any company i brought it up with.
I've been remote since 2005. Organizations that pioneered that kind of work didn't do it because they were forced to, so there is a whole different vibe in such companies. It's not seen as a "perk", and there's never anxiety about "RTO".
It's never been exactly easy to find the opportunities, but I always managed to. I'm glad now that the baseline of available remote work seems to be permanently higher.
You simply get so much of your life back not having to think about clothing or commuting and being able to throw in the laundry at lunch and get 5o work with a much broader selection of people.
It’s been pretty hard here in the U.K. to find a new fully remote role with an established company. Most big players seem to have moved back to in office.
Obviously this can only count jobs that say they are remote, I've seen many complaints about remote jobs that turn out to require significant time in an office location.
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Personally I'd prefer not to WFH mostly. While it is very useful to be able to (I have for a day or two here & there for years, and over the last year for a few days at a time while looking after ill parents and a terminal pet) but I hate it full time. Partly it is because I don't have room for a dedicated office and I don't like my work and personal space to mix to readily, and partly it is the contact thing (I'm uncomfortable on phones and video calls, always have been, and some people don't seem to be willing to mail or IM me instead when that would be most efficient by far), and partly I find myself getting more and more distractable the longer I'm working away (this may be largely due to the matter of having no space for a dedicated office space).
I'd rather leave tech than work full time remote, so you might find me stacking shelves in a few years!
We are officially hybrid, but for two or three days of any given week there are only a few people in the office, often not people I'm working directly with, so I'm effectively remote just in an office not at home, so some of the bad parts of both options. I'm not sure if this is any better, and I'm seriously contemplating what my future options may be – those shelves that need stacking are looking oddly attractive, or more practically perhaps retraining as an accountant or something.
Or maybe this is just the midlife crisis rambling!
Or maybe, as I've been accused of a few times, I'm a corporate shill here to extol the virtues of office space.
> Obviously this can only count jobs that say they are remote, I've seen many complaints about remote jobs that turn out to require significant time in an office location.
This happened to me.
The company wanted to fly people to offices any time something important or urgent came up. It led to ridiculous situations where something urgent broke, and instead of sitting at our computers and working on it we'd be scrambling through airports and sitting on airplanes for a day, getting rental cars, checking in to hotels, and then driving to an office the next morning for a meeting.
Then we'd end up working the problem in transit anyway. Solving problems from a cramped airplane seat from spotty in-cabin WiFi instead of home with my big monitor, reliable internet, and camera for video conferencing.
The company also had a mix of empty-nesters and young single people in charge of company events. They wanted to put together quarterly on-site meetups where everyone was supposed to travel and stay in hotels and do team-building exercises. I pointed out that having to travel 4 weeks out of the year was equivalent to a job with an 8% travel requirement, which they scoffed at because it was for "fun" activities.
That job was "remote" but ended up having 20% travel time.
> travel requirement, which they scoffed at because it was for "fun" activities
I'm lucky enough to live close to where I work, so the commute isn't a massive problem, which may colour my view of remote work a bit.
I'm a sort of middle-aged empty-nester (though this nest was never full unless you count cats and the occasional lodger), but I've got a set of hobbies and some social life, so doing “fun” things because work tells me to is still work - I'm not going to count it as free time. Any “fun” outside my normal working time is time you can bet I'm going to claw back elsewhere.
I like many of the people I work with. Well, some of them at least. A couple of them I even mix with outside the office. But being told to do something fun often feels more like work than, well, work! I can see it being even extra effort to smile through when significant travel is involved.
I think it's pretty cool that there's more alignment here between what many people wanted and what's available. I think especially for places with long commutes this is a huge efficiency. Personally, I live a short bike ride in SF from work and we're all in-office and I prefer that.
And it's really helped with democratization, too. With Turing and Deel and so on, you can hire internationally once you're ready to work with remote folk. It has been interesting to me that I've heard more about Eastern Europe, Africa, and India for this rather than South America.
South America has a massive timezone advantage, but why so few remote workers from there?
I personally hope that remote work won't die out due to it being a good work environment for me personally (office building value be damned), but that split seems reasonable. Hopefully with the hybrid setups being accommodating enough to allow for someone to be fully remote, or fully in-person, depending on life circumstances and preferences.
For smaller companies, it is a no brainer. Why spend so much renting multiple geographical offices when you can have just 1 HQ and workers available in all timezones.
Not only do I despise remote working, I'm leaving the industry entirely as a direct result of working remotely, in favor of getting a law degree.
I'm just beyond sick and tired of my default mode being, "Stare at screen to solve problems."
I want to work with people, solve problems with people, help people. None of that is what most engineers in software prefer, and I'm tired of trying to force it on them for the apparently insignificant reason that it's highly effective.
I'm sure this depends on your specialization; but much of the legal industry has become remote heavy as well. My partner is a lawyer in commercial litigation; the vast majority of her client meetings and court hearings are done remotely.
Does anyone else think that WeWork, as a concept, still has potential? WFH has a lot of benefits for the employee, but it's clear that many employers still desire some face-to-face contact. WeWork was already going downhill pre-pandemic, but had it survived I wonder if it may have been the primary service for small/hybrid companies.
I am aware that WW had it's own business issues to deal with, but it's still salvageable, right?
If, by the concept, you mean coworking spaces, then yes, that concept can and does work.
If you mean coworking spaces administered by people in SF making tech salaries and needing the growth and scale that VC demands, then it seems unlikely. In my hometown, the coworking space costs $140/mo right in downtown (220 with a dedicated desk). Anything that can operate locally is probably going to beat the dumb money that We Work represents.
I think providing employees with office hubs to work at within 10-20 minutes of their house will be available as a perk or benefit - instead of paying for an office.
At the start of the pandemic I looked at a new co-working space and it was like $200/mo membership fee for the open space or $500/mo for a tiny private office/closet.
Meanwhile, my apartment (paid for), a large library (free), and several cafes (~$3 daily contract) are a block away. It just doesn't make economic sense at those rates.
Co-working spaces are useful when an extra bedroom would cost you $500/mo (or much more) anyway.
Libraries where I live have limited seating. Cafes can be really hit or miss in terms of power outlets, large enough desk space, and noise. Both don't have 24/7 access, nor do they allow you to set up a workstation with monitors.
They are not worthwhile if you have ample space in your home and only desire to get out a few hours a week to a cafe.
I also feel like finding a place to work remotely requires luck, patience, and due diligence.
The first hurdle is figuring out if you like remote work or not. Covid was a great way for me to try out remote work and realize I love it. I'm not sure what to do outside of that. I imagine it must be awful to prepare for an interview and get a remote job only to realize that working remotely just isn't for you and now you have to do the whole process over again.
After that, it's finding a good place to work out of. I'm fortunate enough to have a home office that is set up the exact way I want it to be. I can control the height of my desk, my lighting, and my temperature. I don't think there's any office I'd prefer over my home office, but I also know that not everyone is able to have that same experience.
Finally, there's the company, it's culture, and the team you are on. Is your company remote first? Is your team remote first? How do you work together? How do you have "water cooler" chats? I think the place you work for can really make or break your remote working experience.
I've been interviewing for a two dev positions, and from the employer side here is what I'm seeing:
1. 31% of applicants are dev shop / staffing co lead generation / fraudulent applications. This is pretty normal. I'm sure the that this works enough to make it work for the people selling contract developers.
2. 17% of applicants cannot work in the US. We disclose you must be legal to work in the US and what visas are acceptable.
3. 19% can pass code test on senior developer on the first try, 28% pass if given a re-do. Code test is part q&a and part write a function from requirements.
4. 22% of junior devs can pass code test on the first try and just 23% pass if given a a re-do. Code test is part q&a and part write a function from requirements.
5. 87% junior devs are willing to relocate to work in the office. 95% of senior devs want remote.
6. Of the developers who pass the test, 76.4% end up passing the tech interview, which means the decision is really about what additional skills, experiences and abilities they bring with them.
Takeways: about 50% fraud/non employable. 20% can actually pass a very simple code test.
The Sr vs Jr makes sense. To me, the entire discussion can be distilled down to people with families that want remote, and younger single people that don’t realize that they’ll eventually want remote and will regret it.
I've been working remotely from Ohio for most of the last 15 years. (I did one year on site in the Bay area in the middle - I'm glad I did it, but I was also happy to move back home.)
For a little while, after my daughter was born, I rented a private office and biked to it most days. That was absolutely fantastic. But, we've since moved into a bigger house and I'm back to working from a home office. Some occasional interruptions from family, but overall it's pretty good.
For a long time, wanting to stay remote just meant that I couldn't apply to the vast majority of jobs. Not so much any more.
Fortunately I don't see myself looking for a new job anytime soon - I'm now at a company that was aiming for "remote equal" even before the pandemic, and my current team is fully remote - but it makes me happy that if I did need to find a new role today, there would be a lot a lot more options than any other job search I've ever done in the past.
I am not a SV-based or US-based employee, and unfortunately I have to consider myself pretty lucky to be working remotely, and am therefore more stuck in an otherwise terrible job simply because I can't give up remote work.
Outside SV or some US hubs, a lot of average workplaces seem to try hard to get people to come back into the office, regardless of the requirements of the job itself. It might have started with banks and governments, but recent incentives and pushes from cities and the real-estate market can sometimes push people to go back into offices "to save businesses".
The pandemic might have offered some profound shifts, but not fundamental ones unfortunately. So I stay at my workplace for the time being, trading away some mental health for the benefit of remote work - and I suspect that not only I am not alone in this, I am probably more privileged than many (most?) who didn't even have a choice.
I'm at my best at writing (code, text, everything) when I'm working remotely. The option to sit down and focus in the apartment all to myself has done wonders to my code and ability to solve problems.
However I'm still a bit unsure how this affects my career. I feel like conventional corporate success depends more on your relationships and politics than the quality of your code and writing. It's really hard to build quality relationships and see the politics and status games people are playing in my company by being a remote worker. I met most of my current network by sitting in the same office with them.
I wonder if this is everyone else's experience too, or maybe I'm just missing something obvious, like scheduling more face-to-face meetings with people.
> I feel like conventional corporate success depends more on your relationships and politics than the quality of your code and writing. It's really hard to build quality relationships and see the politics and status games people are playing in my company by being a remote worker.
Organizations and organizational decisions like promotions or project investments are made by people. People have biases. Those biases include familiarity and recency. One of the easiest way to be familiar with the people who make decisions is to be in their physical presence. This activates senses and experiences that virtual interactions lack. This includes body language, unstructured conversations about non-work topics, and shared non-work experiences.
When LLMs can write code — and when you are using LLMs to help write code — how will you differentiate yourself from others?
Remote has been fantastic, to extend our pool of potential customers/employers. Not working in an open space, not being disturbed by pointless red-tapers and middle managers is a productivity boost. Not losing time and energy in commutes as well.
I can see one serious drawback with pure remote: it's a cumbersome way to mentor junior developpers. In big companies which maintain a balance of junior/senior staff, and try to make the former grow, it's a legitimate issue. In start-ups, which expect you to hit the ground running, and don't have an army of managers to keep busy, remote should be the norm.
People love to cite ad-hoc conversations and overhearing conversations to build context as in office advantages. These are true but they also include downsides. Constant distractions and interruptions.
Nice! I recently interviewed for a job which was a 45 minute commute - after driving out for the interview I just felt sad about potentially driving for 6+ hours a week after working remote for 4 years.
This statistic makes a lot of sense, and can only expect it will keep going up. Pre-pandemic companies suffered a lot from the lack of talent/talent war in their geography. Now they can hire the best person in the world for a given role, or at least in their timezone (I believe in the power of synchronous work to a certain extent).
If this is happening in the middle of a VC downturn, imagine how it's going to be once we're back to good times.
Reads like it was aided by AI (LLM) in the writing.
No description of how the analysis was done. So I have to imagine that jobs are extremely simply counted, not deduped. So a job listed in-office or in-city, but also listed as remote, would be 2 jobs and this would result in 50% remote jobs available. Whereas this is actually 100% remote. So I imagine the 69% is an undercount, if going by my assumption of simplistic counting.
I was working remote from 2007 till 2021 for an US company as an independent international contractor. Now I'm in EU and I'm trying to find a remote US job during 2022 and this year. No luck. It looks like a dead end. Looks like nobody in US needs an experienced remote developer. Something is really changed a lot. It's so sad.
I've been working remotely since 2012. I even travelled around Asia for a year in 2013. This is all contracting/consulting work. I never told my client at the time that I was in Asia and had to work until 3am most nights.
Back then, less than 1% of the jobs I found were remote. This is why I got into contracting in the first place.
My ideal remote work would be:
Be available for meetings that may impact your work, if not work when ever you want but must meet project goals. For example, I'm most productive 10am - 3pm and 9pm - 2am. But I make do with "office hours" that have no bearing on my project dead lines.
Engineers need to stand up for it. The commute is part of your work day, so leave at an appropriate time. Tacking on an extra hour to your work day is ridiculous, leave earlier and get in later.
In a way I found they do, the highest pay companies tend to require in office for most of their employees (FAANG for instance). Some get full remote, but its largely pushed that they come into the office at least a few days a week.
I'm fine with my co-workers going back. I'm not going back, as long as I can avoid it. I'm certainly not doing so for their well being at the expense of my own.
I wish the editor (or team) did a better job in proofreading their article. The multiple spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes makes me question the credibility of their ability to report.
I don't understand the smugness of Software Engineers' belief that pure remote is the only option. It seems short-sighted.
If everything is remote then companies don't care where they hire from. Whats the difference between you and an engineer from South America? Maybe you're a better engineer and maybe you are a better communicator in English. How much better? When do the scales tip? Why hire an engineer for over 200k who's remote in Wisconsin when you can hire one who's remote in Peru for $75k?
It might be better for you right now, but what about in 3 years or 10 years?
This is always been a threat, even before WFH was common. How many jobs were offshored in the early - mid 2000s before the trend started to reverse? (and it never reversed completely, mind you)
Or so-called "in-sourcing" practices by abusing the H1B system to higher engineers at a lower rate.
this is a tired argument and is easily dismissed - quality and local info. As you stack requirements, your chances of finding someone outside the country drop dramatically. Does your person in Peru have experience with US labour law? US Taxes? You see where this is going.
> Does your person in Peru have experience with US labour law? US Taxes?
Why would, say, a Ruby developer need to know any of these things? I don't think most US developers are familiar with them, other than during tax season.
Ironically it's technology that's shortening the gaps between offshore / onshore resources.
Have you been plagued by applicant fraud? We've found for all of our remote engineering roles, we get 100's of amazing applicants who are all fake (clearly not actually in the US) once you get them on a screening call. They're often reading from a script, broken english, and say strange things like they're born and raised in Texas, yet can't speak fluent English or have a heavy accent.
My best guess is it's dev shops overseas who are using an English-speaking "front" person who then delegates the work to other people with the "front" person being the one who joins company meetings, etc.
Really frustrating because it's making us have to do silly things like require photo ID verification over video on the first screening call (which I would rather not inconvenience applicants with, but there are just SO many candidates lying about residing in the US).
With our most recent role, about 60-70% of applicants were fake ("fake" = candidates who lie about living/residing in the US)