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Comment by jimmywanger | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, remote work is like a work tax you have to pay, and you have to weigh the tradeoffs.

If you have a completely remote team, you're paying at least something in productivity, because training people to be open to hop on a VC or chat at a moment's notice and documenting everything through email or a shared document is not trivial, especially when you're not used to doing things that way, and the costs are not zero.

Or you could do everything asynchronously to deal with time zones, but then you're introducing an inevitable lag based on overlap of working hours.

For a healthy, functioning organization, it might be worth it. However, if your team is already dysfunctional, having remote workers exacerbates the problem. (I have first hand experience)

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On the other hand, working in an office is a sort of work tax too - commuting to and from the office is wasted time that could have been spent sleeping or with family. It has a financial cost attached for the employee too.

Many office environments are noisy too, which doesn't always make them the best place for productivity.

In an ideal world, employers would allow employees to choose themselves, and for commuting-distance, remote employees to 'hot desk' when they want.

Organizations are generally well acquainted with that sort of "work tax", and the results are fairly well characterized and understood and can be worked around. (Move closer to employees, open a branch office, promote off-peak working hours, transit subsidies).

Remote work is a very recent phenomenon and as such, runs into a completely different set of problems that haven't been as thoroughly solved as a co-located working environment.

It's like picking PostGres/Mysql over Cassandra/Mongo. Sure, both have problems, but the traditional SQL solutions are stable and the problems have known workarounds. With NoSQL solutions, you might be one of the first people who are doing that particular use case, and you'll have to pioneer your own solution, at the expense of the company's business plan/profit.

> In an ideal world, employers would allow employees to choose themselves

But it's not that simple, because the "remote tax" is paid by everyone, not just by those who decide to work remotely.

I think it works for some companies, not so much for others.

At the company I work for, we're spread around a few countries and are well used to working this way. But despite the benefits, not everyone chooses to work from home - not everyone has a home environment conducive to remote work, and some simply don't like it. We've got decent comms tools, and honestly, the 'remote work tax' is very seldom an issue.

It's not even a tax. It's an alternative (and likely better) work flow. Online and remote-first processes should be the default. Why? Because you can record them, distribute them, play them back and use them as a reference. Even if you don't allow remote and have any level of team colocation this should be the default.

Even meetings make more sense at your computer. Who wants to squint at an overhead in a room full of people? I'd rather get a close-up view of the presentation (screenshare) and be able to hear everyone clearly. I can capture screenshots, take notes, schedule follow ups etc.

You make some good points, but I still think there's a cost.

There are frequent times throughout my working day when I ping the dev who sits next to me (or they png me) to ask if I'm free to chat "IRL" for 2 minutes, and if so we'll do a _very_ quick pairing session on a bug, or get input from the other on a design problem. These things are big enough that they are worth getting a quick check on from someone else, but likely small enough that typing out a more complete explanation, or even having to loop someone else into the full context, is prohibitively expensive. I don't think we'd lose out much from not having that ability - when the other one of us is busy we can't do it anyway - but I think the lack of it does cost something.

> Even meetings make more sense at your computer.

I think I'd also disagree with this to some extent. I think it's easier to get distracted at a computer, distracts others who work next to people who are talking into a mic on their computer, and can add overhead with connection issues (I find adding a remote employee adds ~3-5 minutes an hour of overhead, and they are involved less in the meeting). That said, we don't have computers in meetings other than the one that is running the screen, so people aren't getting distracted by (or working on) other things, and we have a tendency to (politely) walk out of meetings that we feel we aren't adding value to.

>On the other hand, working in an office is a sort of work tax too

On yet another hand working in an office and having to deal with remote workers is also a tax on the local workers productivity.

Lost count of the number of times I've had to take time out of my work schedule to VC with remotes to solve misunderstandings that would never have happened if they were working in the same room.

Company I work at also has several people who have remote worked from the very early days and don't seem to understand the entire culture of the place and workflow has changed which throws spanners in the works at times.

It's almost as if remote work and in-office work both have their plusses and minuses, the choice to do one vs. the other involves trade-offs, and one size does not fit all. Crazy, I know!

> On the other hand, working in an office is a sort of work tax too - commuting to and from the office is wasted time that could have been spent sleeping or with family. It has a financial cost attached for the employee too.

The difference here is who ends up paying the tax. For remote work, the employer pays the lion's share of the "tax". In a traditional setup, the employee pays the brunt of the "tax".

And the difference here is that the 'tax' the employer pays lessens or disappears as employees get used to working remotely; whereas for the employee, there will always be a cost in time and money to commute.

With employees working remotely, the employer can also make big cost savings by needing a much smaller office space.

The employer is paying for it, it just isn't clear what ledger column the cost appears in.

If an employer isn't paying me enough to cover travel costs and another offers work from home, it is a reason to switch jobs.

I suspect that and a dozen other tiny reasons are why work in office jobs tend to pay more than work from home jobs.

Assuming that employers don't pay for commuting is a bit much. More stressed / sleep-deprived / commuting-fatigued employees are less effective at their jobs and, crucially, for the cases in which someone commutes while still spending all their desired time on leisure and sleep, then the commute time is clearly one-for-one substituted for work time.

There's plenty of research as to the negative effects of commuting (e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/urban-survival/201501/c...)

Regarding commuting, it depends on how you look at it.

For example, commuting has been instrumental in helping me lose 35 kg in 10 months, from size 46 to size 36.

I made the decision to always commute walking (30 minutes commute which I do 4 times a day because I also wanted to have lunch at home with my family). Once you factor in that your commute is 30 minutes instead of 10 minutes (or 0 minutes if you work at home), things are rather easy.

So I end up spending 2 hours a day walking, which turns out to be an activity that I happen to like a lot (its been a bit of an evolution, possibly inspired by the "Love what you do" approach to things as opposed to "Do what you love") and therefore I do not see it as a time waste at all.

"Chemotherapy is actually kind of nice considering the money you save on haircuts"

You know you could have a shorter commute, go to the gym for ~30-45 minutes of real exercise, and have more free time in the day, right?

Don't long walks qualify as "real exercise"? The op's weight loss seems to indicate so. Even without the results, you can't discount the fact that they might get far more enjoyment out of long walks than being crammed in a smelly Gym each day. It's not always about being efficient with your time. Often the most enjoyable things in life are the least time efficient.

There's a bit of irony in describing walking as "not real" exercise.

In my case, I'm not sure. I had a long history of being a member of gyms to where I did not go because I always found something better to do. In fact, in the past I even was paying for two gyms and I did not go to any of them. I suspect I'm not alone here, if all members of a gym decided to go, they would not fit in the gym. I always hear that the lion's share of revenue for a gym comes from people who never go.

I think that what worked for me (goal: increase activity) was to build the activity as a part of routine that was too inconvenient to skip, and then ending up liking that routine. I do not see anymore commuting as busy time, for me it is part of my free time, an activity that I do want to do. In other words, on weekends I now usually go hiking and I do not consider as busy time.

Glad that worked out for you! Highly dependent on circumstances, though. I have a 30 minute _drive_ to get to my office, and it's supposed to be 117 degrees next Monday. Walking is pretty impractical in Phoenix in general, and the public transportation is awful. So yes my exercise happens in a dedicated gym.

You have to factor the fact that offices are very distracting and full of interruptions. I personally feel that i get close to double the work done when I work from home.

Homes can be distracting, too! Working alone isn't "natural" for a lot of people, I feel.

Some people start a family and working from home dramatically lowers the hassle, they still get things done yet get to see their kids.

It just depends on the situation and the person. For some people it's great, for some okay, for some horrible. Luckily, there are a wide range of employment options so you can chose employment that fits your needs/desires.

> I personally feel that i get close to double the work done when I work from home.

Well, it doesn't matter if you get twice the work done, if it doesn't advance the team twice as much.

If you're working completely independently, sure, work from home. Contractors have far more leeway than salaried employees in that regard.

If you're working remotely but as an integral part of the team, it doesn't matter as much that you're individually getting twice the amount of work done, if it doesn't dovetail with team objectives. Without constant communication, which is facilitated by in-person interactions and communication, the team might actually be working forwards more slowly.

It doesn't matter if you're coding two features instead of one in the same amount of time, if the two features never hit production and the one feature does.

- ...training people to be open to hop on a VC or chat at a moment's notice and documenting everything through email or a shared document is not trivial, especially when you're not used to doing things that way, and the costs are not zero.

How is that any different that in office? In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document. Remote communication often happens via email, or text, and can naturally document in an informal way. Technical documents are no harder, or easier, to 'train' employees to create when working remotely or in office.

- Or you could do everything asynchronously to deal with time zones, but then you're introducing an inevitable lag based on overlap of working hours.

This is really more a problem with dispersing your team, than it is with remote working. You can have a remote work company with everyone in the same time zone.

Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be.

> In my experience, in office communication is often MORE difficult to document.

Exactly, because if everybody is colocated, you can pick up on subtle social cues and figure out what's important and what people are working on just based on what people are talking about. If you spend that much face time with people, unless you're completely socially stunted, you don't have to document things because people "just get it".

> Remote work carries with it a certain number of risks to be sure. But it's not nearly as risky as I feel like people make it out to be.

There are tradeoffs to everything, and I think on this board, things have swung too far to the other side. Remote work is not an absolute panacea, and carries with it costs. Just like NoSQL is not the end-all be-all of datastores, remote work isn't the right solution for many teams.

> you don't have to document things because people "just get it".

and then a year later when you have to figure out why something was done a certain way what do you do? or when some of the people that "were there" have left and nobody else remembers?

If all the discussions are written, there is no risk of forgetting anything: even working in an office I always send an email after a meeting or random chat to the person involved to document what we talked about, what was decided and why. I might also cc other people that should be kept in the loop, which is also something you cannot do if you just talk.

> If all the discussions are written, there is no risk of forgetting anything

Remote working enforces discipline, which is good in the long run, but is not very rewarding in the short run and requires the pre-loading of effort.

Humans are really bad at making those sort of trade-offs. That's why many of us still eat fast food, smoke, and don't exercise.

Even though you're "doing the right thing", there are immediate up front costs for theoretical (but very real) benefits down the road. Even though you're doing the right thing, maybe an organization isn't quite prepared to pay the costs to do things that way. Hence, "work tax".

Also, my assertion that remote work is mainly for healthy organizations holds sway. It really magnified and focuses a light on an organization's details and flaws, and many people don't like that.

That's a very lopsided view. Offices also come with their own hangups. It's a matter of weighing the pros and cons and then deciding. Also, to be fair, sometimes there are a lot of imaginary cons that people think will happen when they go remote, but in reality, they don't happen. So it's also worth for companies to try both and see(though this might be a stretch, I admit).

Out of curiosity, was that remote workers while having an onsite presence? Or fully remote?

I ask because from what I've seen, the partially remote situations have generally been more dysfunctional than fully remote. When it's one person who missed the conversation, it just makes their life miserable; when it's everyone else, it makes -your- (the person with the info's) life miserable, and that leads to better communication processes and documentation.

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