Hacker News Reader

> but beyond that it feels like there are so many issues with not being accountable for your employees social well-being that it's hard to know where to start.

People looking for remote work - which today does require you to go out of your way to find it - are people who quite voluntarily and explicitly don't want the employer to provide social life for them. If colleagues and office banter is what one seeks, one looks for jobs on-site.

EDIT: Different people have different needs at different stages of their lives. Personally, I went from on-site to remote, but I do envision going back to on-site in a couple of years - mainly because nothing interesting (to me, c.f. my profile) seems to happen on remote jobs, unless you're an entrepreneur making your own interesting thing.

The thing is though with audio or video chat you can visit with your colleagues and office banter all that you (both) want even though you are remote.

Or you can do text chat in Slack about work or whatever interests you. Or interact in a 3D or VR office space. Or play video games if you want. Or meet up at a real life coffee shop.

You just have to get the other people to do it deliberately rather than everyone being automatically forced to do it by constant required physical proximity.

> The thing is though with audio or video chat you can visit with your colleagues and office banter all that you (both) want even though you are remote.

Technically yes, though in practice I haven't heard of it happening. There's something... different about it, more distracting. It takes screen space and the noises carry differently - including various grunts and burps that the person over the next desk in RL would not hear, but your Skype buddy will.

The kind of unstructured, background interaction between co-workers that naturally exists in offices is something very hard to replicate in remote setting.

> Or interact in a 3D or VR office space.

This I want to try so hard. I actually upgraded my PC recently with the intent of getting VR gear in the future, and a big motivation here is to explore the experience of shared VR workspaces.

My primary reason for desiring remote work is less time spent travelling and more interesting companies. The impact on social life on the job is the main downside.

You can work on very interesting things remotely, but it takes time/effort to find them & secure them. If you build a superstar profile, even conventional FAANG companies are willing to give you remote work for longer periods of time.

  I would expect that a significant portion of the money that   a corporation saves by having a "remote only" policy would go   into alleviating the social issues caused by that same   policy. I'm not seeing any of that here, which indicates to   me a company that does not prioritize the well-being of their employees.

With all due respect, I think if you feel that way it's probably because remote work is not something you would enjoy. I've been working remotely on and off for about 16 years, and continuously for the past 10 years, and I can't think of any social issue I've suffered as a consequence of this. On the other hand, I do know it has allowed me to be a lot more present for my children, since most of the times I can arrange the work hours as best fits their life. To me, a remote work is the best way to prioritize my well-being. Again, this is meant with respect, and I understand you may feel the opposite, I just wanted to offer another perspective.

Yeah, I think having responsibility for raising children influences this a lot - at the non-remote-friendly places I've worked, the senior people are disproportionately people who have stay-at-home partners taking care of the kids. If you either don't have a family or have someone else to do the bulk of the work of raising/caring for them, office work is just fine (and it gets you an easy social circle that isn't just your family).

> almost the singularly most important factor is the social life of interacting with your colleagues

I'd like to make a slightly different response than "I don't want my company to be responsible for my social well-being": I think part of what you're saying is less that your (pure) social life is derived from work than that work itself is a social experience and that helps productivity/morale.

I think many of the productivity benefits to being work-social don't apply in a remote environment. For instance, at my current non-remote job, one of my teammates is going through a divorce, and it's helpful for me to know that and how it's going so that I'm aware that he'll be out at random times to meet with lawyers or pick up kids or whatever, and that if I needed something from him and he wanders by my desk with his coat on, I should probably drop what I'm doing and switch context because he's heading out the door and this is my only chance to catch up until tomorrow. But if we were working remote, we'd just have some communication system that's geared toward async work, and if he needs to head out and be online at home, that's fine with me—I expect everyone to be online intermittently, and I only expect real-time communications during scheduled meetings. So, I don't need to know what's going on with his personal life, and honestly he might be happier not telling us.

And the second-order effect is that when my team is communicative about what's going on with their lives and willing to let me be communicative about what's going on with mine, and we have matched expectations about whether you're there (both physically and mentally) between 9 and 5, things work well, and when they're not, things work poorly. But again, those expectations would be fundamentally different in a remote-first culture. So the fact that people would be less communicative about personal stuff would not be as much of a negative impact.

> I'd like to make a slightly different response than "I don't want my company to be responsible for my social well-being": I think part of what you're saying is less that your (pure) social life is derived from work than that work itself is a social experience and that helps productivity/morale.

You are absolutely correct, thank you for helping me phrase it.

I prefer to build my social life around the people I choose, not the people I am stuck with.

You ought to have choices to choose.

The problem with remote working is that you are stuck with Whatever people you already knew. And I say this as someone who loves remoting. But most of our friends in the new city we live in are the wife's colleagues and 1 or 2 ex colleague's of mine.

There was a thread in Reddit some time ago, about how difficult it is to make goodfriends on your 30s. Lack of options surely would exacerbate this.

Yes, you have to make effort to go on meetups and conferences, and meet your friends in other cities on your own. Your colleagues are perhaps a "convenient default option" to socialize, but it doesn't replace proper social life.

Thanks for this feedback on the page, particularly the disadvantages section. I recently made iterations to the page with the goal of making it easier to digest -- it was made up of very long, redundant, numbered lists where people had contributed bits here and there over the years. I made sure not to remove any content from the page, but did combine and trim any content that was clearly repeated multiple times, which is why the disadvantages section is the length that it is. We also added new links like this one (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/transition-remote-work-1-mont...) to try to give a more authentic look at what the first month in a remote role can be like — both positive and negative, and there are more on the resources page.

There was no intention of downplaying the disadvantages, but I’m glad to know that’s how it comes across so that we can make it better. To start, I submitted a MR to reformat that section to mirror the advantages section. There will be more to come, but I also want to call out that the page is editable and we want others to contribute to it and make improvements. It’s meant to be an ever-evolving resource. This thread will also be linked on the “Remote-work resources” page for full visibility.

Link to the MR https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

This is a very bizarre conclusion to me. But I suppose I’m one of those people that goes to work, to work, not for a fraternity experience. I want to (and am) friendly with my co-workers but I don’t really want to be their friends, or have “social experiences” filled after my work day with more work stuff. I’d like the freedom to choose myself and sometimes that includes people I know from work.

This seems like something to fix. Remote work imho is the inevitable future and it is going to get better and better as more people join the asynchronous work model and people build services around remote companies (there are very few things currently , compared to the mountain of tools and services available to the corporate office). I m obviously biased, but like others here i think once you go remote you can't go back. As for the lack of office socializing, we can be creative there, it doesnt have to stop at slack and skype. I think gaming is a good fit to replace the 'experience' of a colocated office. A virtual presence (like a second life but for companies) can not only gamify the experience and make it fun, but it can also act as a map of the company and help orient everyone and give a sense of presence.

The primary objective of the employer is to get the work from employee and the employee's primary objective is to get paid well according to the market and skill. Having nice socially intractable colleges is outside the control of both the employer and employee. In my personal experience people who oppose Remote work are the people in managerial positions who does lack coding skills.

Nothing a company can do more for my well being than letting me work without having to be trapped in a social environment.

> It's almost insulting that this is even spun as an advantage: "Onboarding may be less stressful socially"

Going to a new office and meeting a bunch of new people all at once can be overwhelming for some people. Familiar surroundings can help make the transition to a new job less stressful.