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Comment by jimejim | Hacker News Reader

I've worked mostly remote for over 20 years, both as an engineer and a business owner. I wouldn't give it up for the world.

However, simple fact: not all people are cut out for it. Some perfectly fine engineers are better in an office environment with other people. Sometimes an office environment is LESS distracting for those people, not more.

It also depends on where they are in life: A person with toddlers is going to have a better work life if they can get away occasionally. I had my own struggles with this and had to work through the new environment.

So, both are good and can work depending on when and where your life is at, and neither is perfect.

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+1. I'm the exact opposite. I've been offered remote jobs a couple of times, but there's just something about going to an office, talking with people in real life, even getting interrupted during work is something i tend to like. Working from home, or even from a co-working space doesn't make me happy.

A lot of the things mentioned in this manifesto are perfectly valid for non-remote work as well. Making sure knowledge is written down, shorter and fewer meetings, 'results of work over the hours put in' seem useful in any work setting.

I tend to lean more towards the classic introvert where too much interaction will tire me out after a while, but I make sure to spend time with people I care about on the weekends to balance things out and that's usually the right balance. My week is devoted to work and taking care of the kids, which I love too.

I still go through peaks and valleys of how much outside interaction I'm craving though.

I completely agree with this. Probably due to being much earlier in my career, I haven't yet learnt how to separate my personal life from my work life well. I use the office and my commute to form a boundary, which works very well so I have a good work life balance, but as soon as I work from home I either get much less done, or I get much more done and have no free time. I hope to improve at this, in 10 years time (when I hope to own a house/have a family/etc) I'd hope that I'm working from home 1-2 days a week _every week_, but I'm not there yet.

I've been working remotely for the past half year (same job and same place, I just started doing it remotely) and I was a little afraid of that: mixing my personal and professional time.

For me at least it turns out that the fear was completely unfounded, before I always got in at roughly the same time and always left at the same time, leaving the laptop and phone on the office. Now while technically the laptop and phone are always accessible I've found that I've no problem in keeping my working time within a very strict schedule, normally I start at ~8.00 and usually at 16.00 almost exactly I'm logging out, plus the phone goes automatically into do not disturb mode until the following morning, effectively recreating my office working routine. Your mileage may vary of course but I was surprised at how easy it was to completely separate my activities and preventing them blending together.

The struggle never really goes away and you have to accept that. You will have peaks where you're excited about something and super productive working late and then valleys where you go weeks feeling way less productive.

Life will find ways to make you have to change your strategy over and over, but I think that's more about being human than anything to do with where you decide to work.

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