Remote Work Is the Future

Anecdotal, but I'd take lower pay to go remote and move back to my hometown (not a small town, but a small city with a weaker tech market than where I currently live). Being able to live near your friends and family that you grew up with is a massive benefit.

Second this. I'm particularly interested in whether or not the rise of remote work will affect the demographics of smaller cities that have some appeal from a tourism perspective. I can think of so many cities with low costs of living and vibrant cultures that are fun to visit, but where I could never live because of the lack of work. I wonder how that all changes when the majority of jobs are remote-friendly.

I've been working remotely in various forms for nearly a decade, while also living in a rural area.

Organizing coder groups is hard, but one of the most interesting things I've discovered is that you don't get to be as picky about the specifics of technology. A hacker group (which is in a bit of down period right now), had a bunch of hardware guys, an active member of the clang community, a few Haskell/FP curious guys and someone who mostly worked in network device manufacturing. Really, really neat group of people, with even a few women. What you don't get are your hyper-focused Python groups or groups dedicated to frameworks like Rails, which I always thought was probably a net-gain.

I think this is already happening. Mid-size city demographics are shifting significantly, especially those within an hour band of a reasonable larger city (700k+).

Texas Monthly did a good piece on this recently. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/high-rents-rural-re...

I’ve seen some contracting firms do domestic “ruralshoring,” but IMO recruitment costs become controlling due to the lower density of talent and general difficulty with remote management as a practice. The common approach is to concentrate on small university towns that have a young CS talent pool — similar to Epic’s hiring approach — but eventually your talent moves to urban areas for culture/amenity/economy reasons, so you end up with a predominantly young remote workforce, which brings its own managerial issues.

Conversely, if the only value you add can be codified and delivered as work packages without physical contact with your peers, what makes you think that you have more value than someone offshore / a robot?

If you're doing real, creative, problem solving work, then daily physical contact with your colleagues is essential. The bandwidth of knowledge transfer is vastly in excess of anything that can be done remotely, and quickly bouncing ideas off other people will get you through problems and blockers far more effectively than anything else. We still don't have any collaboration software which can replicate this experience.

So true. My impression of one guy at my current organization is that he had some skills and productivity years in the past, but now he’s just given up and fiddles around on his phone while doing occasional low-effort tasks and trying to bully newcomers into doing things he can take credit for. Why he’s still there is beyond me. Very unlikely (in my opinion) that he could get away with this remotely.

Don't delude yourself and don't let others delude you. Work is an exchange measured in cold hard numbers.

Works well nearly as well as in person. But I do notice how its easier to explain things to non-technical departments when I am onsite.

Call-centers are another industry that can be entirely remote.

I work remotely, as does pretty much my entire company. Some of the biggest issues we have due to remote work is communication tools. I haven't found a tool that can replace the ease of communicating with a large number of people in the same room when having a collaborative discussion. I think the issue is largely due to latency. It's take a lot of practice to understand how to communicate effectively using video conferencing software.

Another issue is team building / comradery. I don't know my current coworkers nearly as well as I've been able to know coworkers from previous companies I've worked with. When remote you don't get to go to lunch, grab coffee or a beer with your coworkers. We do travel a lot to meet up, but I still only see people I work with closely when doing so. As the company grows it's much more difficult to even begin to meet everyone in the company which is much easier when in and office because everyday you can bump into someone different.

We've tried to solve this to some extent through randomly pairing two people every two weeks to schedule a short 15 minute meeting. However the scheduling itself is not automated and it's not always easy to schedule time due to lack of proper calendaring software and distributed share calendars. This is definitely something that could be solved but it's just another challenge of working remotely.