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Comment by pionar | Hacker News Reader

> I think working from home is superior (for tech/programming work).

I disagree with you, specifically one point.

>The office does offer some perks, but they are not related to work itself, they are all about socializing / banter / feeling of being part of a team.

That "banter" or "socializing" is work related. I've found that working from home (been doing it 2 years now) has one very big disadvantage - unless the whole team is remote.

You will be excluded from meetings, decisions and conversations. You will always have a feeling that you're missing something. You will miss important hallway conversations that can impact the work you do.

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I'm the only one at our small company that works remotely. I miss so much of what is going on decision wise.

Any talk of new clients, potential new business, larger future projects are all communicated to me once they are mostly already hashed out. This keeps me from playing a bigger part in the company and thus the work they throw my way is more on the grunt/boring side.

I love working remotely though and I'm not working in the tiny open office they have. I would be interested in seeing what the dynamic is like with a full remote team.

I've mostly worked at home since my son was born (he's 26 now). I used to go in one day a week, I worked for startups for years and would start full time, drop off to 4->3->2 days a week. These days I never go in (I live 10,000km away at the moment, it's no longer a 1 hour drive in the Valley).

I think there's a few things you have to realise about working at home: - you get to avoid almost all office politics - you will eventually lose at office politics

Essentially you need to have a manager who will step up and root for you, and you guys need to talk so he/she knows where your head is at

> you will eventually lose at office politics

Yup. We are small enough that we all report directly to the CEO. Though anywhere I've worked remotely or not it is always me looking out for me. Never had a manager help with that.

I've found that having that explicit discussion with every new manager helps a lot, eventually you get a crap one and lose, but then that's probably time to move on

That's a very real pain when only one or two people are remote. I spent the last five years in that environment and definitely missed out on a lot of relevant discussions.

I'm now leading a team which is about 50% remote, with the remaining people working from home a few days a week, and it makes a huge difference. Discussions naturally occur on Slack, often spinning out into a few people jumping into a Hangouts call. For people in the office we've got the meeting room set up for video conferencing which makes it practical to have mixed local/remote meetings without the half hour of trying to get things set up.

Overall I'm a big fan, and hopeful that we can make people working remote even smoother as time goes on.

Would V8 have been written in an open office environment?

https://www.ft.com/content/03775904-177c-11de-8c9d-0000779fd...

Paywall link. What's the summary?

You can use google cache:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AUQIVz...

>You will be excluded from meetings

Oh, the bliss.

I understand that, but I believe if more than a few work remotely, the culture of the company would shift to moving important stuff and meetings online.

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