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Comment by pzh | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal. At first glance, a good indicator would be the salaries that remote companies pay, and most remote companies tend to pay peanuts, using 'remote' as an excuse to underpay, and thus also signaling that they don't care to pay a premium for software engineers because their projects don't really need top talent or a lot of experience. From all this, it also follows that career development is quite stagnant at remote companies. I wish things were different, but until the Big Five start allowing and encouraging remote-only distributed work, things won't change a lot...

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Remote work can be about enjoying your work (and work environment) as well as the lifestyle it provides (flexible work hours, no commute, live in the mountains/at the beach/etc). That is worth something and most remote workers who value those things gladly give up some pay and project 'quality' to have them.

I wouldn't trade my daily lunch with my wife and kids for twice the salary.

The problem is that we are talking about something like one fifth of the salary with no vacation and no benefits for remote. Also, projects boring as heck.

> I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal.

I've managed to find many good remote contracts but from local companies (which sounds funny). It's either just assumed you will work in your own space or they're happy for you to work remotely after a couple of face-to-face meetings.

Wouldn't generalize as much but point taken. Frankly,my project pays well enough and it is remote too but what really makes the pay great in my case is a no income tax state for me. Otherwise the pay would be meh if I had to shell that out.

I don't think most state income taxes are that burdensome. My state's is 3%, so on a $100,000 salary not considering any deductions, the difference would only be $3,000 between my state and a non-income tax state. If you were making $200,000, it would still only be $6,000. Neither amount is peanuts, I realize, but it's not the difference between good and meh either.

Here in NYC state income tax is ~6.65% and city is an additional ~3.648%. So about 10k on 100k or 20k on 200k.

Yep, Linux is really abysmal, isn't it? ;)

There are some outliers like Digital Ocean and Github, but these are not the common case...

Then maybe you should provide sources for these remote companies that are awful and provide proof that them being remote was the cause of that failure, not them being terrible companies in general?

Here are just some successful companies that are heavily remote-based:

Automattic (WordPress) AgileBits (1Password) Basecamp Chef Gitlab Olark Percona Plex Zapier

WordPress powers over 25% of the web, remember. They have been remote since the beginning and have hundreds of employees.

I've worked remotely for many years. There are good companies and bad, but I've never seen evidence a company failed because it was remote and you've provided no data or examples. Companies fail for a multitude of reasons, but you're essentially saying that successful remote companies are a fluke. Nonsense.

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