Comment by dschiptsov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dschiptsov | Hacker News Reader

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Remote is still rare, it seems, because usual sweatshops are traditional habitat for pointy haired bosses and other parasitic "management".

For remote, the way Linux kernel or BSDs are being developed, one needs nothing but git, emacs and browser (well, in case of Linux also a working mail) and no management at all. How could, say, Amazon, even hypothetically switch to remote?

More seriously, there is no market for code - otherwise people would just pay per commit (passed all the tests) nice and easy. The problem is people with money doesn't need a mere good code, they need their positions, their bonuses, their status. They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy which supports them, not for your good code.

This is why, perhaps, remote works fine for "nonprofits", like FreeBSD, but for corporations it is still a heresy.

Again, there, it seems, is no demand for mere good quality code.

This, by the way, is connected with hiring. Almost no one hire for abilities, everyone is hiring for good school diplomas. (Which diploma Mike Pall has? Igor Sysoev was a college dropout).

If I am wrong, and there is a market for code - solved problem, pushed a commit, all tests passed, money transferred - please tell me, I would participate gladly.

Much (most?) code is trivial to write, the work is figuring out what code to write -- posing the problem correctly is half the job.

Then inevitably as you work on solving the problem you will (if, and only if, you know the business domain well enough) discover that the problem description needs refining as the code is refined.

If there was a market for code I would not participate since it takes me less time to just write the code than to write a spec you could use to deliver something good. Non-programmers cannot do that, but if they are in the people you wanted to avoid, they would likely make a spec that would create a mess, regardless of how good the code driving the mess is.

I don't see how remote vs not has anything to do with managers or not...how would you get the "orders for code" written in the pure-code marketplace?

The trick about open source is mainly that the programmers ARE the end-users too and very well able to understand the problem domain and also are often scratching their own itch. So the problem of making good problem descriptions and make the code match it disappears. That is much more important than remote vs non-remote.

Companies do not pay for code, they pay for problems solved, risks mitigated or value delivered.

> They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy which supports them, not for your good code.

This is absolutely true but remote workers can still be FTEs that extend a manager's umbrella of influence. So really, working remotely is orthogonal to managerial pyramids of power.

If anything, hiring remote workers may allow managers to get more employees working for them because they can get more bodies for the same amount of budget.

Not always. A friend of mine works remotely for a financial institution. His manager wanted to revoke his work from home agreement because he wanted to hit a target metric of number of man-days worked in a physical office to justify a corner office with upper management. Sad but true.

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