Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

mlthoughts2018

Why do you feel confident you can easily find other remote jobs with the same pay / benefits / work responsibilities / career opportunities / etc., if your current role goes bad?

I don’t see any reason to think that.. across most job sites, Hacker News Who Is Hiring, Stack Overflow, etc., it seems quite hard to locate viable remote jobs period — let alone something that could work out quickly in a pinch and has high quality pay/benefits/etc.

Maybe if you’re willing to compromise on everything else, then you can quickly switch to another remote job in an emergency. But it seems very suspect to set your life up with that risk and the possible requirement of that severe sort of compromise if you’re very desperate for a single specific perk.

View on HN

There's risk in everything.

Own a place? Even if you find another local job, there's no guarantee that you'll like the new commute.

But you live in the Bay area you say and can get a new job on your lunch hour? Maybe. Maybe not. And you're paying a huge housing premium. Nothing against the Bay Area if that's your preference but spending a huge chunk of take-home pay on housing carries its own risks.

And maybe an opportunity comes along that's so compelling that you'll be willing to relocate. Lots of people move around for work. Just because you work remotely doesn't require you to do so forever.

I don’t understand your comment. Saying “there’s risk in everything” is vacuous. Which scenario generally has less risk?

Obviously, remote jobs are less plentiful than on-site jobs. Jobs in small municipalities are less plentiful than jobs in dense urban areas, for software work and most other types of work. Jobs tied to one single, small municipality are pretty idiosyncratic and don’t change that much (with employers uprooting and leaving being the most common type of change).

There are many reasons why living in smaller towns or rural America can be a great thing. Diversification of employment risk factors is absolutely not one of them, and this is an aspect of working remotely while based in a rural location that carries huge risks.

I'm simply saying that you seem to be characterizing remote work as some unique existential risk, which I don't think it is, though certainly the density of local jobs is one factor I would consider if moving to take a new opportunity or on my own volition when working remotely.

Also, as I wrote in another comment, escaping to the country doesn't need to be the back of beyond. The Bay Area is somewhat different because of geography but there are many cities with a reasonable number of tech jobs where you can drive 45 minutes and be in a relatively rural environment.

Personally that's what I do. I'm mostly remote and live in a fairly rural town but I'm within an hour of a major metro and I even commuted into the city for a while.

We might be talking past one another, because I was talking about the OP's main topic, which was remote jobs specifically in rural areas. I understood this to implicitly be talking about locations where it was specifically not possible to drive a reasonable or even semi-long commute distance and find yourself in a high-density urban center.

Taking a remote job when you already live in a city or when you live within a reasonable drive of some other job center would mitigate a lot of the risk I am describing. I am only talking about specifically using a remote job as license to move to a highly isolated, rural area not within commutable distance to a big job center.

The OP and other comments seem to describe this as a wholly positive ideal, and in many ways I can agree. But I felt an important part of the discussion is that if you use a single specific remote job as license to move to e.g. rural Wyoming and live on a ranch with DSL internet, you're setting yourself up for trouble, because it's actually not easy to find a new job in a pinch like that.

The OP asked about moving to the countryside in general. Which you can do with reduced (though not minimized) costs without moving to rural Wyoming. I actually agree that, while moving to a mountaintop somewhere may still be a reasonable option for some people, you can mitigate risk considerably by moving to the outskirts of a general metro area that also has local options.

> Why do you feel confident you can easily find other remote jobs with the same pay / benefits / work responsibilities / career opportunities / etc., if your current role goes bad?

By constantly being invited to interviews for similar remote jobs with similar pay.

> I don’t see any reason to think that.. across most job sites, Hacker News Who Is Hiring, Stack Overflow, etc., it seems quite hard to locate viable remote jobs period

Wrong. Lots of companies that do not advertise remote jobs are willing to accept because they struggle to find people.

One advertised a full-time local role in Belgium. I sent an e-mail telling that if they accept remote work I'm game. I've been in several interviews in the past doing this.

They flew me there just for the interview... which I failed.

I currently work for a startup in Silicon Valley, half of the company is remote and we are shipping features consistently.

> Maybe if you’re willing to compromise on everything else, then you can quickly switch to another remote job in an emergency.

In my opinion this should be everyone mindset. I've seen my share of people married to big tech companies being fired on the first crisis and struggling to find jobs, because they only knew what the company asked them to do.

And on the worst case scenario I can rent my house and move back to the capital.

There is no such thing as job security in the tech scene today. Control you cost of living, save money, invest money and try to keep yourself reasonably updated with the latest technologies.

Your experience with finding these types of positions and interviews seems drastically different than the average case. Other people would unfortunately have to ignore your advice because the circumstances of finding viable remote positions would be so different for them that if they followed your approach, they’d really be putting themselves in extremely risky job situations and likely could end up unemployed for months on end unable to locate the next viable remote position.

I’m glad it has worked for you personally, but it would be a bad form of selection bias for anyone else to assume your way of thinking about it has any applicability for them; it almost surely does not.

I'd just point out that taking a number of months to find a new job is pretty much absolutely the norm for most people in many types of professional roles.

Last couple of times I changed jobs, I had interested high-level people who I already knew from Day 1 and it still took a few months to get on interview calendars, get through internal processes, etc. I have no doubt there are some people who can pick up the phone and have a new job the next week but it's absolutely not the norm just about anywhere--remote or otherwise.

I think you overestimate the duration of modern software job searches in urban areas. People sometimes take months to search when they are being picky, but it's not for lack of choices. Being in a very rural area and looking exclusively for the right sort of remote job though, then yes, you would be lacking choices and it would take at least several months and probably much longer, while at the same time forcing you to compromise more for lack of options.

> I’m glad it has worked for you personally

Thanks.

> Other people would unfortunately have to ignore your advice because the circumstances of finding viable remote positions would be so different for them that if they followed your approach

You are basically criticizing me for answering the question made by the OP. Look at the question:

Ask HN: Are you a remote worker that escaped to the countryside?

I answered yes, the benefits I see in doing it and that I feel confident that I (me, not anyone else) can find another similar job.

What are we discussing here?

You replied to my original comment in an itemized way, as if to refute or counter my points about the precarious riskiness of working remotely in a rural area or an area that otherwise has few nearby on-site jobs.

I was just pointing out that your comment doesn’t refute any of that. Those risks would still be material for most people, to such a degree that it would usually make the cost savings of working remotely in a rural area totally not worth it based on potential hardships of finding a new, similarly satisfying remote job in a pinch. Your ability to quickly find a new remote job while living rurally is dramatically atypical.

Since you originally replied to my comment like a point by point refutation of something, I was just trying to point out that you didn’t refute anything, because the experience you described is too atypical to matter broadly in most cases.

I’m not trying to criticize you. Only highlight that what you said is idiosyncratic for you because otherwise it’s extremely easy for someone to read your experience in the thread and mistakenly feel it would be just as simple and easy for them. It’s very worthwhile to take the chance to discuss the fact that that isn’t generally true.

> Why do you feel confident you can easily find other remote jobs with the same pay / benefits / work responsibilities / career opportunities / etc., if your current role goes bad?

I'm not the parent poster, but having moved to a rural area in January I've already experienced this. I spent a couple of days identifying target companies, and another couple getting my resume together and writing decent cover letters. After three weeks I was well into the interview process with five companies, and had an acceptable offer in hand after six.

> Maybe if you’re willing to compromise on everything else, then you can quickly switch to another remote job in an emergency.

That's part of the "trick" here - you have to be proactive in making sure you don't encounter an "emergency" like that. My goal is to have six months' of expenses in accessible cash, so if I did have to find other employment I'd not be desperate.

My recent layoff came at the worst possible time for me; I'd just drained my savings to come up with a down payment on a house and move. Because of this, I had to use a bit of credit to keep from having a major disruption for my wife and kids - but it was a "worst case situation" for which I had explicitly planned. It sucked but it was doable, and we went into it knowing exactly how long we could hold out and what actions we'd have to take if things didn't go the way we wanted.

Expenses living in a rural area a much lower than a city. For instance - my two-bedroom apartment in Charlottesville, VA was $1,860/month. My five-bedroom home on a half acre in Harrison, AR is $850/month on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. My utilities are less than half of what they were. The only exception is Internet access, which was included in my rent in Charlottesville and for which I now pay $180/month.

Food... A gallon of milk here is $1.85. Our groceries are less than half what they were.

> But it seems very suspect to set your life up with that risk and the possible requirement of that severe sort of compromise if you’re very desperate for a single specific perk.

There is risk in anything.

I wouldn't consider remote working a "perk" for me. It's merely a job requirement. Does it limit my options? Sure! So does my not wanting to work certain technologies, or on certain types of teams, or for companies in certain industries. I find that requiring remote work is less limiting than many of the other requirements I have for a job.

Finally, I'll say that it has been my experience that getting a remote job is much easier when you already have a remote job. I've found that it mirrors my experience with getting a job as a developer at all - I tried for a couple of years to get my first "development" job and failed. What I did manage to get was a position as "Intranet Administrator" that was mostly just managing policy changes and updating a static website. After working there for a while and sharing some utilities I'd written for my own use, suddenly other departments wanted to hire me for other jobs where they needed a "tech person". Eventually I ended up writing an "enterprise reporting platform" (which was really just a simple Django website with AD integration that generated some simple charts from SQL queries), which in turn finally gave me a title that sounded sufficiently like a developer ("Sr. Analyst, Systems & Performance Support") that it was accepted implicitly by my next employer.

At the end of the day - yeah, plan for the risk, but it's a risk that's both smaller and easier to offset through planning than you might think.

> Finally, I'll say that it has been my experience that getting a remote job is much easier when you already have a remote job.

Yep. After I had proven experience working remotely with a known company the offers started to come more frequently.

Having an active Github and writing on Medium / Linkedin also helps a lot.

Once again, this experience really doesn't generalize. I worked in one fully remote job and the company did not care whether employees had prior experience working remotely and did not generally believe that people who worked remotely before would be any better at it than people who had not. There's not really a "skill set" for working remotely, mostly because so many companies require remote coordination between different office locations that even if you work in an office these days, it absolutely requires all the same remote-specific skills that a fully remote worker would have to utilize.

I've also generally experienced developers being hostile to candidates we wanted to hire when they had active projects on GitHub or they had high-reputation Stack Overflow accounts. It's very idiosyncratic whether developers try to cut people down and emphasize only dimensions of achievement that they personally excelled in, or if they take a humbler approach and have a more open mind about a variety of ways that a developer can demonstrate skills. But by no means is it common for people to look positively on GitHub activity. Most often, interviewers just ignore it and believe it's not relevant to their job and prefer you to complete silly programming trivia. But occasionally they go further and even actively hold it against you in petty ways.

Overall, I'd say it's no easier to get remote jobs by already having a remote job.

Once again you are wrong, dismissing the the experience of everyone else and set your experiences as irrefutable facts.

Even though nobody is putting their opinions as a rule that applies to all.

Seem like the fact that people succeeded in what you dind't really bothers you.

Hang in there buddy :)

You said,

“Yep. After I had proven experience working remotely with a known company the offers started to come more frequently.”

I’m just trying to point out that this isn’t useful for most people: it wouldn’t work that way.

It seems like you unrealistically need to assert that there can be no downsides, even for others, about the particular remote working experiences you have had. Even so far as to make some sweeping, judgmental comment about me based on the very wrong presumption about my prior remote work.

I hope your insecurities about your choices will subside so you can admit that the risks implied by your advice are too severe for most people to consider abd negate most of the upsides you talked about.

> "I'm not the parent poster, but having moved to a rural area in January I've already experienced this. I spent a couple of days identifying target companies, and another couple getting my resume together and writing decent cover letters. After three weeks I was well into the interview process with five companies, and had an acceptable offer in hand after six."

For remote positions, that experience just seems too atypical for anyone to hear your story and conclude that taking a remote job and moving to such a rural place would be safe, job-wise. Your experience sounds really atypical. That's bordering on the kind of turn-around you'd have in a super dense urban area like SF with a hotly demanded skill set. Definitely not typical for remote work.

I am not sure why you brought up the topic of expenses. No doubt they are much cheaper in rural areas... but if you lose a job it doesn't matter. Savings only lasts so long, and for something like a mortgage, especially in places where property values won't grow very much and often go down, it's a big risk to literally bet the farm that you would be able to find another remote job quickly in an emergency.

You also mention a lot about planning ahead, and of course that is great advice. But I'm specifically only talking about the sort of sudden job loss and extended spell of unemployment that you couldn't plan for. Think of someone just starting out in a new remote job without the chance to build savings yet.

It's way less of a risk if you have years of living expenses saved up and can float yourself, but that's usually not the position someone is in when they have to weigh up the relative risks of living in a rural area on a remote job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com