Comment by raprp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raprp | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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