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Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

I have been working remotely for 3-4 years, and I am currently job hunting.

I did not like working remotely honestly. As an extrovert, I did not like the isolation. However, the major drawback was not being able to steer any of the tech/political discussion because I was remote. I had poor managers/CTO that needed a good smack to the head because they were too scatterbrained, but I was not there to do it. Impossible over Slack.

Now that I am job hunting again, I am wary of remote jobs. Of the three roles I am pursuing now, only one is remote. I have a good feeling about this one since there already is a sizable part of the office that is remote.

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The cost savings to employers is so extraordinary ($0 per square foot in office space, $0 on HVAC, electricity, $0 on corporate wifi and the building's ethernet, $0 on cleaning bills, $0 on toilet paper, ink, toner, desks, etc etc - the employer literally is happy to buy all of the above), and to employees a free 5-20% reduction of work hours due to the total loss of mandatory unpaid commute, plus all transportation costs, that I can't help but think something must be missing.

Any employer that could leverage remote workers could have the equivalent of a $1 trillion headquarters employing 1 billion people, tomorrow: at a cost of exactly $0.

So it stands to reason that there is SOMETHING keeping remote-only workplaces from eating their competitors for lunch. Something turns off that growth or ruins the economics.

What is that something?

Here's my hot take:

In places that I've worked, WFH is usually reserved for divisions that are expected to be intrinsically-motivated high performers. Some companies can afford to be staffed with nothing but these types of people; other companies are not so lucky.

WFH only works if the people that are W-ingFH are motivated enough by their work to do it without being supervised.

And for some job roles in some organizations, the savings from not having to hold an office for a role, are more than offset by the lost productivity from having that role as a remote hire.

I'm not trying to say that all HN-ers are magical special large-brained unicorn employees; but I've worked at several places where certain key roles are staffed by people that couldn't figure out how to effectively work remotely if their lives depended on it.

> I've worked at several places where certain key roles are staffed by people that couldn't figure out how to effectively work remotely if their lives depended on it.

For me it was the opposite: I was highly productive, but the onsite managers did not know how to work effectively (if at all honestly)

Plenty of new smaller software companies (startups especially) are totally remote and distributed. "9-5 in an office" culture has been deeply ingrained. The managers with the practice and skills with managing remote teams don't exist in enough number to fill a large company. The investors, the workers, and everybody in involved would have to learn new skills and ways to function.

The thing that ruins the growth and economics is that nobody knows how to do it yet and trying is either risky (you fail) or expensive to train/experiment until you figure it out.

It sounds like your team is mixed between on-site and remote. I've never seen that work well - you need to at minimum have a remote-first team or department for effective communication processes to be engrained. Otherwise, the co-located team ends up having a lot of watercooler conversations that exclude remote, and that throws off the balance.

I definitely agree with your analysis, which is why I mentioned I was only interested in this company because they already have a bigger remote presence. Still small percentage wise, but still better than being that one remote person. I specialize in a niche, so I had employers willing to let me work remote because they cannot find a local resource specializing in this niche. Ironically, this latest remote role has nothing to do with it.

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