Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

I am a fully remote worker nowhere near my "office", which is simply where our company is technically HQd.

I have never met my boss or any of my coworkers in person.

I do highly technical work, on a team that only hires very senior developers who have prior remote work experience.

And I can say, it is NOT for everyone.

If you do not have a life out of work, if you live alone, if you do not have a good network of real friends and/or family, or what you would consider an area "home", that's a problem.

My problem? I have almost all of those issues at the moment. I do have a work/life balance, but I don't do much with the "life" part. My close friends have scattered as they got older, had kids, moved around to different states for work, and I didn't put effort into finding new ones.

I can live wherever I want, but I don't know where I want to live! I can even move to Europe as I am a dual US/Irish citizen, but I don't know where I would want to go in Europe!

I have lived in so many states in my life already, I don't have a "home" really, so that's an issue also.

It seems great, but it comes with drawbacks. I'm working on them, while working on work.

Article conflates digital nomadism with remote working in general.

Remote work allows you to work from a space you control, eliminate commute and allows you to be able to walk around to clear your head without feeling guilty for not being in your seat.

You could use it to travel, but I figure that would be a harder lifestyle and is not synonymous with “remote work”.

The author did try working from home but the damage to his mental health had been done I guess. I have the benefit of using IRC for the majority of my social interaction for the better part of my life. I guess the author is missing face-to-face contact already by that point though.

Also, I did something similar to what the author did, took a one way flight to Helsinki from my home town Coventry in the UK.

No friends, no family, no support structure. Only the promise of a job. It was some of the best time in my life. I was able to live as I wanted to live and present myself as me without any baggage holding me back. It was wonderful.

Although, I did make more of an effort to really meet people- I went to pubs in Helsinki and spoke to locals and asked about their history and language and despite what you hear about the Finns; the ones I met were truly very friendly.

All I’m saying is that: “your experience may vary”

As others have said, in this thread, there are a lot of mixed issues in this article.

Living a nomad/traveling lifestyle =! remote work. Loads of people remote-work from home, but change nothing else in their lifestyle.

I've been working remotely my entire life. 30+ years now. One thing that is key, is looking at the blue sky. Being outside occasionally.

You will note that the article talks about work/life balance, about working a lot, working long hours. And after months and months, become more and more depressed.

What I suspect is happening is, winter! Shorter days! With shorter days, it is harder and harder to find sunlight when you just happen to wander outside. In the summer, at least where I am, daylight lives from 4am to 10pm. I doesn't matter when I wake up, or when I go to sleep.. if I wander out just once, there's almost always light.

Further, there's a much better chance of good weather. In the winter, if it isn't night, it's often cloudy, and therefore darker.

Unless you work away from all windows, this affects the type of light, even when working inside.

On top of all that, in the winter it is more often unpleasant. You think with glee, it's cool/cold, raining/snowing, and I work remote! I don't have to go out into that! Yet, this is a trap, for going out in that is key to your health... just for the light!

My point in all of the above is -- when you work on site, you have to go outside, and transit outside, to and from work. This gets in that vital light, even often in the winter.

It's about the light, it's about blue light from a blue sky, it's about being outside.

That's what 30+ years of remote work has taught me.

I love working remotely, I dread the prison of the corporate offices and commuting hours a day. Probably nothing you can do can cut your carbon footprint as much as working remotely.

That said, I am over 40, with solid friedship relations built over decades, have kids, an ex-wife which is a friend, a younger nerdy but social girlfriend.

Basically, I don't need the work environment for social needs. But once upon a time, when I was younger, my life was the office, and my colleagues. School teaches you that you need an organization where you are physically present everyday to have social interactions, you start working with this mindset, probably in a different city, it takes a few years for you to realize that there's life outside work. And YOU WILL learn it after the first layoff in your life. So, if you are young, I'd recommend starting your life in a office, but never put all your eggs in the same basket. Look to know people outside your company, people that don't even do the same work as you do. Travel, do yoga classes, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, reading circles, whatever, but never believe that you need an office to meet your social needs. You'll need it for a time, it is good to bootstrap your life on relationship terms, heck, you can even do it for the rest of your life. But never, even for a minute, believe that you can't have a social life, friends, meet a significant other without an office.

This same old tired story...

It turns out happiness takes lot of work. Having a healthy social life takes a lot of trying, failing, and some successes that you cherish.

Some people tragically take their co-workers as their friends and the office as their social environment. That's really dangerous. You need to go out there and try, be awkward, fight to make some close friends in the real world. Office drama and venting over a beer after work is not a social life. Also the office is not a dating pool. Being depressed that your office doesn't have any cute girls or boys... oh boy, I've seen it!

Isolation and depression is due to lacking social skill and not having the drive or insight to develop that skill.

Remote work is hardly related. It's related only because people take the office as their social scene and of course when they go remote they lost their entire social scene.

I have decades worth of remote work experience. I don't think the problem is social isolation, as others point out that's another issue, you can experience isolation (alienation) regardless of your work situation.

But if you want to be more than a gear on a team, the main decision making and insight is often strictly between local workers, regardless of what gets said in meetings it's the water cooler or after work beers. If all the decision makers are in one place and you're not there, you're missing a lot of context. A few key in-person meetings as required goes a long way to mitigate this, but for organizations that see cost savings as a main benefit to remote workers this may be difficult to arrange.

I did work remotely for around 5 years and I loved it.

No surprise to me but most people need a village to be happy. That means having neighbours, familiar strangers, a regular routine and social bonds between all of those things. Remote work doesn't isolate you from the village.

I think it should be the predominant way of working. It can encourage villages and less commutes. When I worked remotely I found an office in a co-working space. I made friends with other people who worked in that space. I could walk, bike, or take public transit to the space. I had a mix of friends, acquaintances, familiar strangers, and strangers throughout my day.

It's better for the environment and for people.

I also know people who sail around the world and live a nomadic lifestyle. They all face the same difficulties with mental health: they need a village. The ones who manage to stick it out build a village around their lifestyle. However it's always a risk and one that should be planned for.

This article isn't about remote work, but being a social hermit.

In my experience, if you have difficulty making and sustaining friendships without the heightened social context of a dorm floor/office water cooler, then you're going to wind up experiencing a bit of cabin fever when you are removed from those environments.

I had to make conscious efforts to go out, make friends and do things outside work when I moved away and lived on my own. You're responsible for your own mental health, not your company.

> traveling remote workers

Whoa digital nomads by definition choose loneliness, whether they work or not.

As for the rest , i think the answer is pretty obvious: coworking apartment complexes similar to those dorm rooms but for adults. We need such spaces anyway , with the rise of people living alone and aging alone. It s time for cities to adapt to our needs rather than the reverse for once, because remote working is not going away. Its good for workers, good for business, good for the environment, good for competition, bad for visas and bad for rent seekers.

I've been working remotely for almost a decade, and never have I experienced, or had coworkers who experience the isolation and troubles that I'm starting to hear about. But I am now realizing that we also don't define ourselves by our work. We do have families, lives, friends, and hobbies. We are quite busy people with full lives, who happen to sit down for a chunk of each day and do our work.

Maybe that is the key - go figure out who you are, build up your life, and only then start working remotely.

This applies most if you're a single-ish young-ish person without a highly established personal life outside of work. IMO this is a good message to put out since that's a lot of the crowd being recruited for these positions. When you're in that spot in life you're trying to "figure it out", and the message that you'd be free of any ties to a physical office is pushed very romantically and can be very confusing for establishing an overall life for yourself. It's helpful to know the other side of the coin so young prospective employees can make the choice that's best for both employee and employer.

I saved up some money and quit my first programming job after a year and a half to freelance. I only had a vague idea of the work I wanted to do, but I wanted to have no master and I thought it would be my absolute best life.

Within two weeks I was deep into anxiety and depression. I tried to establish routines, tried working from a coffee shop, etc. None of it really helped. I was still fairly new to the city I lived in and didn't have many friends, and wasn't a social person by nature. I was incredibly isolated.

I started dating someone a few weeks later and that helped. I picked up some one-off contracts, built a website for a local music store, did some personal projects, etc. But still, after another six months I was back in a hole. I wasn't quite so isolated but I still crumbled under the pressure of not knowing what to do next, not being able to take a break from the working mentality even though I could barely bring myself to do any work at all. I ended up taking a desk job just to pull myself out of the spiral.

Economically I probably could have made that work as a source of income, but psychologically it was just unbearable.

As a remote worker myself, I agree with most of the points in the article. I lived on my own right out of school and it was a blessing and a curse. It forced me to go out and be social which brought me out of my comfort zone at first.

> I’ve never worked from a real office or even had a “real” job

I really think that a precursor to working remote should be working in an office. I always advise against younger workers to go remote early in their career. There's a huge benefit to being in the office when you're young and have much to learn in your field. Once you've been in the industry for a few years I think it's much easier to switch to a remote lifestyle.

As far as the loneliness of remote work...my 100% remote company is taking a slightly different approach to solve this problem. The more we spoke with other remote workers in coworking spaces, coffee shops, etc...the more we realized that people work in those spaces to get the feeling of human interaction, whether or not they actually talk to people while they're out working.

What we started doing is hosting these "Work Clubs" where we get 5-6 remote workers together at a table at a coffee shop and we all work together for a couple of hours. It's not a networking event, but more of a casual way to meet people while you get your work done. It gets you out of the house and around other people and we got such good feedback from other remote workers that we're looking to help others hold their own work clubs wherever they work.

We're currently hosting work clubs in San Francisco, San Diego, and Portland, and hoping to grow. If you're interested you can find out more at https://outofoffice.app/workclub/remote

This shocked me:

"to encourage wellbeing: 40 days paid vacation per year: True disconnection is fundamental to help people de-stress and recharge."

Is this common elsewhere in the world? In the US, it Seems like 10 or 15 days is the norm, and maybe 20 after 5 years.

What do the FAANG+ companies offer?

Does the 2 months of vacation also contribute to that disconnected feeling, I wonder?

I’ve noticed the key is lots of zoom one on ones. It’s so productive and fun, and you don’t feel lonely. Also, meditation helps a ton - it’s easy to feel lonely in a crowd if the inner experience is out of whack, regardless of the external situation. Shared whiteboarding software is also great.

Personally I have had a very different experience since I left to travel and work remotely a few years ago.

I was already working remotely and yes at the time I was struggling with depression and loneliness. Given what I have experienced since I don't think remote work was at all the cause of my problems which were much deeper seated.

Leaving all of that behind and living out of a suitcase changed a lot of my perspectives on what I valued in life. I was by no means obsessed with material possessions before but enforcing a life of minimalism brought me understanding of what things actually make my life better vs just cost money and take up space. I had to think more critically about how I want to spend my time each day as oftentimes I had limited time in each place and with each set of people I had been lucky enough to meet. This meant I pushed myself to go out and spend quality time doing things I enjoyed and with people I liked because by putting smaller finite timelines on things I was motivated to do them.

I still have friends I just don't see them in person as much. Often times people would be travelling through the region and I would simply pack up and go hang out with them - this was awesome and I have done it many times over the last couple of years. I treasure all of these memories and hanging out at a bar after work can never compare.

This lifestyle has been amazing for me and has allowed me to climb out of a very dark place personally. I still suffer from depression - I probably always will. However I think this lifestyle has offered me better tools to deal with it.

Things that are hard though:

- Timezones

- Building professional relationships

- Keeping in shape

- Jetlag

Those are constant battles but compared to my personal demons easily managed. :)

If anyone is thinking of taking the plunge I highly recommend it. You don't have much to lose, you can always go back home but it just could change your life.

I wrote about my experience of moving away from a city in Sweden and moving to a small community[0].

And although the article focuses on digital nomad, I see the same problematic with the move we did as I both starting working remotely and moving away from my friends. Finding a social life, or "rooting down", is to me the most important thing for me. While I do talk with coworkers a bunch I do need to supplement it with social interactions outside of work.

[0]: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2019/10/18/we_moved_away_fr...

I think a great antidote for this, specifically for people who are lonely, is to move into a multi bedroom apartment with 3+ other people or even find a coliving space. There are some of these on NYC and from my experience it's comparable to living in a dorm - which is the kind of healthy experience the author says he missed most. You get to meet and interact with a variety of people on a daily basis, some of whom could lead to deeper connections. Plus its cheaper than a studio or 1br apartment!!

When I was younger (~18 yo), I always dreamed of leaving my small central European country and moving to the States, Canada, or somewhere in Australia. I couldn't imagine staying at home. It simply wasn't exciting enough and I didn't see my future here.

My buddy and I used to hype ourselves up and talk about our future plans, which country we'd move to, in which ways we'd survive (our brightest idea at the time was driving cabs in Sydney, haha).

A couple of years later we started doing web development and got our first gigs. Now that we had some cash in our hands, we decided to — for a start — move to Berlin.

My buddy moved right away and got a job in local startup. I followed him a month later and had a remote US based client. I arrived in January. It was quite cold, often raining, and all around kind of depressing. I didn't know anyone and lived in a small apartment with a bunch of hippy roommates I didn't vibe with. Since I worked remotely I didn't have any coworkers to hang out with. I ended up renting an overpriced desk in a hipster co-working place where everyone kept to themselves and pretended to work. After a month I started getting depressed and it affected my work, so I bought a one-way ticket and moved back to my home country.

Shortly after moving back, I finally found my flow. I co-created a passion project with another friend (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547351), started increasing my contracting rates, found higher quality clients, etc. I rented a small apartment in the city centre, hung out with friends and family, and basically loved my life (still do!). When I wanted some excitement and a change of scenery, I would jump on a plane and do a road trip abroad.

My buddy who didn't work remotely stayed in Berlin, made friends with some of his co-workers, expanded his social circle, and all in all had a great time. He then proceeded to get married, moved to San Francisco, worked at a FAANG-like corp, got divorced, and in the end moved back to the home country as well. Not (entirely) because of the divorce, but because he craved real friendship which he couldn't find in SF.

I guess the point of this story is... Being lonely sucks and having friends and family close is important? Yeah.

I've been working remotely for some time already. Currently, I'm the only remote worker at my client's company as I'm living in another country. Kind of nomad style, but I'm living with my wife's family.

As I'm more of a consultant than an employee, I see it a bit differently. What do I mean? Well, I'm trying to turn my side projects into something profitable and hopefully one day, into a company, where I'd be able to hire other people. I choose to work remotely to save time and to skip commute and so on to be as productive as possible not only for my client but also for the time when I'm building (with my SO) products.

I think, as far as it's your choice and you know what are the possible problems on the way, you should be fine. Treat yourself better. Go outside more (not only shopping), visit some parks. Do some hobbies and spend more time with your family.

So far I haven't known anyone to be forced into remote work. If you start working remotely, be serious about it, otherwise you're gonna face issues.

One more thing, don't listen to people that nomadlife/travelinglife/remotework is some silver bullet to whatever problems you have. It's not. It's hard and it's not pretty.

A lot of the comments in this thread are a bit self-defensive and unempathetic to the problems described in this post.

This post, and many unrelated others in general, are talking about their own experiences. They don't seek to deny other people's experiences; and being slightly too general in their wording so that there might be an implication that their experiences apply to everyone, is a mistake that everyone makes and is an intrinsic part of natural everyday language. Pointing this out, and seeing others point it out, gets really tedious after a while, not to say uneducational and uninformative.

Personally, I've definitely been through a similar thing that this article describes. Remote work is indeed very draining indeed for the reasons described. If you have some ways to make it work for you, just say and state them, there is no need to say "the article is wrong / too general, actually it's only true when specific circumstances [X, Y and Z] apply that didn't apply to me", this adds nothing to the discussion and makes it sound like you're denying other people's experiences.

I've been working fully remotely since 2012, except for one year when I had to go to the office every day. Points described in the article are valid, quite a few have occurred to me, but loneliness is the nastiest one I've been struck by. With that being said, I was so happy when my wife was let go from her job... Sure, extra income always helps, but having a human being around me helps a lot. I will sit down at my work desk, a designated place for work and work only, at around 9am and often wouldn't come out of my cabinet until 6pm, but taking the occasional coffee/pee break and seeing another person feels so much better! I started talking to my cat while my wife was still working, it helped, but not a lot. I also started having so many bad habits, like skipping meals, not doing any physical exercise or vaping at my desk, with my window open, not even bothering to go outside on the balcony. Humans are social beings and choosing to be alone is way different from being lonely. I don't think anything good has ever come out of loneliness.

these two paragraphs stuck out for me

> One study found that people with a “best friend” at work were seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Furthermore, those who said they had friends at work felt more productive, stayed at their jobs longer, and reported higher job satisfaction.

> At the end of another two-year study that focused specifically on remote work, over half of an experimental remote group decided not to continue working from home 100 percent of the time. This despite the fact that they were a full-day’s-worth more productive per week, took less sick time, and were 50% less likely to quit than their counterparts who stayed in the office. Why did they come back to the office? They felt too isolated.

that matches my personal experience and wishes. The best times of my working career was working with people who became my best friends. Sadly the last that happened was 12 years ago and now that I'm older it seems much harder to make close friends with coworkers

I know everyone is different but I find it interesting that so many on HN and else where actively try to avoid making friends and work.

ymmv

I bet he is right that its harder for younger people. Having a family means having a routine built-in, you take your kids to school and go pick them up always at the same hour, play a bit, make dinner, bedtime, etc.

For younger people, maybe going to the gym almost every day? I bet that there are shared workspaces with people in the same situation in a lot of large cities at least.

Decoupling work from building connections in meatspace is important. The tech for remote work is improving, and it's saving people in office costs, commute costs, and helps you find talent almost anywhere.

Admittedly some real trust has to be established between employer and employee, and this is still a tough problem to solve generally.

For work I literally use the phone to make calls and send texts to co-workers. There's also conference call software, chat apps, and e-mail. They each offer a different flavor, and you use them as needed and under your terms (usually!). Company flies me down every quarter. It's worked really well for 2+ years.

Now, building and finding communities on your own can feel overwhelming, but it's possible. It's been incredible being able to decide to co-work at a café on Friday with close friends. The same satisfaction from being at an office is there, and without the uncontrollable work-related interruptions.

I’m glad someone is bringing awareness to the negative aspects of remote work / digital nomadism. It’s been romanticized far too much and encourages too many people to take for granted the structures of an office and fixed work times to provide healthy social interaction and reinforced purpose.

From all the different comments here, viability of remote work clearly varies by personality and personal life state. I’ll just share my story a bit for what it’s worth.

I own my own company and now I work remote. I am actually pretty outgoing and effective at making new friends by jumping into groups / activities solo. That said, I did not think about the need to make extra efforts when making the shift to not having an office with built-in community. My initial reaction was get my home setup with all the coffee/food/workstation so I wouldn’t have to leave (how efficient!), but now I realized that exacerbates the negative aspect of isolation. If you don’t have a family or friends pulling you into activities (older friends with families of their own are not going to be inviting you to activities regularly), things can get quiet pretty quick. I definitely miss the team lunches, happy hours and office off-site days (hell I end up crashing some of my friends' company offsites now). As for work balance, I’m quite self-driven but without a set schedule, it requires mindfulness and discipline to keep work flow in a healthy balance. This is an ongoing effort for remote workers, whereas for most colocated jobs, it’s just built-in when you show up.

I love my work so I don’t intend to find a job (although I have seriously considered it and will continue to keep it as an option) but if given the choice between a remote job working for someone else and being colocated with a kickass team, I’d go with the team 100% at least for this single stage of my life. It’s a lot easier to feel engaged with your work, have a healthy work-life balance (depending on the company), and have healthy social interactions.

> Openly acknowledging that there can be serious mental health issues related to remote work. People are not alone in these struggles, and there’s nothing “wrong” with feeling anxious or depressed.

> Encouraging people to use sick days for mental health when they need them.

It's nice that a company actually cares, but I feel there's a way to push this too far... Like not everything is a "mental health issue". You feel sad, unmotivated, anxious about your future some days? Well everyone does, it's called being human (and not a psychopath)! I sometimes get the feeling that by encouraging indulging in these (often ephemeral, fleeting) feelings encourages a victim mentality of helplessness and doom... maybe we should be encouraging resilience instead (not in the "be strong suppress your feelings" kind of way, just as a middle ground).

I'm on a fully remote team. I do like the convenience of not wasting time with rush hour commuting and such. That being said, the next time I have the opportunity to negotiate an added perk I'll be hoping to get a small budget for a local co-working space. Once or twice week would be perfect.

There are a lot of very, very good points in this article, but I can’t help disagreeing with the opening, in which the author talks about (or at least quotes Seneca on) the impossibility of making meaningful connections while living abroad and moving around.

Moving out of my home country and forcing myself to get comfortable meeting strangers was not only the most important thing I’ve done for myself, but gave me a handful of incredibly close friends I didn’t have before, and I was happily working remotely for a company in another country during that time.

It’s not for everyone, but don’t let this article dissuade you from trying it, if you can. Meeting people from all over the world, and learning a new language, all while working remotely was life changing in a way I didn’t think possible.

> "Remote workers shouldn’t feel like they have to travel to lead interesting, fulfilled lives. It’s ok to prioritize friendships, community, and your mental health over traveling. It may not look as glamorous on Instagram, but you may end up a lot happier for it"

It's always enriching to read personal perspective from people that live on a bubble different than mine.

I want to start working remotely to be able to avoid commutes and to have more flexibility on how I manage my time during the day. It never crossed my mind that I should be traveling.

I would phrase that it is not ok to not prioritize friendships and mental health over traveling.

But different bubbles offer different peer pressures. It is good to know about them in order to also understand my own bubble better

i love remote work. i’ve done it for most of the last 12 years, and some of that time was spent traveling.

i hates most of my office years (the other 14). most offices had bad lighting, poor ergonomics, open office plans or low wall cubes, blasting AC, and always a few employees who loved to check voicemail over speakerphone.

regarding loneliness, i know some people who can be lonely in any situation. and then there are people like me who are rarely lonely, enjoy solitude, but also maintain a few long lasting and meaningful relationships.

perhaps the big difference between me and the author is age. spend a decade or more in sucky offices and remote work feels like heaven. i’ll work my ass off, 12+ hours a day, if i can choose where i work from day to day.

I’ve been working remotely for about 2-3 years now but due to a new job I will be working at an office now starting tomorrow.

It is a terrifying feeling to say the least. I am trying to be optimistic and hope to get over it quick.

Working remotely have been amazing and was a life changing experience for me. It was good in that I got to see the world as it is for the first time. Being able to drive out or walk around the town at any time or anywhere is the most liberating feeling you can have. Prior, I was working in office for over 8 years so I had no idea there was a bustling world outside of the office.

So yeah it is scary to be going back but I am going with the mindset that being able to socialize will be worth the trade off.

I work 1 day a week in the office 4 days at home. I am much happier and healthier. Every lunch I go for a run, something I could not do when I was at the office. I am getting more sleep as I wake up later do to no commute. Overall it is much better.

My company is 100% distributed. We have people between California and Moscow.

We try to employ people who have a motivation to work remotely--ability to travel, desire for more flexibility to be with family, reduce commute times, etc. For people with those motivations, remote work can be a real benefit and actually gives us an edge in hiring.

I've been working remotely fully or mostly for the last 12 years. It's great--I can structure my time to ensure I get enough exercise, take naps when necessary, and generally avoid the constraints of some artificial 9-5 clock. It's not for everyone, but at this point I would hate to have a full-time job in an office.

I've recently started listening to the Happiness Lab, a podcast by a Yale professor called Dr Laurie Santos which covers scientific research about happiness: https://www.happinesslab.fm

Some of early episodes touch on the highly-counterintuitive beliefs that pretty much everyone has with the relationship between happiness and direct in-person contact with other people (namely that they'll be happiest if they never have to talk to another stranger again). It's worth listening to and reflecting on.

"the ambitious side that’s never satisfied with the way that things are and the human side that wants to be content and happy" I found this line very relatable -- as with almost everything in life, balance is key. You would think we would know this by now, but it's usually the first thing to suffer. Anyways, I think it's great these topics are brought to the forefront -- instead of being siloed and almost taboo to talk about openly. We're surprisingly closed minded when it comes to mental health issues...

I don't really see why people keep trying to "defend" remote working looking for optimizations in a practice which is fundamentally broken. At what point in our evolutionary history do you think the human animal, which evolved as a pack hunter in a highly socialized environment, was designed to work from home 40 hrs a week? We should be focusing on creating more flexible office environments for our workers where they can come in and work with their coworkers regularly

And here I was getting excited about the benefits of async communications with remote working from another article today:

https://doist.com/blog/asynchronous-communication/

Solitude, "time alone with ones thoughts" or personal time is not everyones cup of tea, but depending on the individual, if thats your wheelhouse, the lack of distractions is priceless in regards to productivity.

What's the consensus on co-working perks/incentives? Should employers be breaking that out as a reimbursement for expenses or should they just bake it into a salary? I feel like too many individual perks/incentives suddenly get the company deeply involved in how work is being performed. As an employer I'd much rather workers just work how best they enjoy and pay them a fair wage.

> Articles about the remote work lifestyle have tended to focus on drinking piña coladas on the beach, traveling the world, and otherwise enjoying a life that inspires envy in your social media following.

Did they though? I have the impression that the last dozen of articles I've seen on remote working on HN concentrate on the negatives. Mainly because the positives are rather obvious.

I really appreciate this discussion and article. I have struggled so much with anxiety/depression from remote working. I've tried so many things to help it. The only thing that helped was finally finding coworking spaces in Berlin/Oaxaca where there was some interaction. For whatever reason, I just could not click with any of the Oakland, CA ones.

Is it true that most remote-first companies only hire people who have already significant (>1yr) experience working remotely? That's the impression I have reading this and other HN threads about remote work.

It's sort of a catch-22 situation, not dissimilar to the one beginning developers find themselves in when looking for jobs that require experience.

The other thing is finding decent salaries. Companies that advertise remote work usually want to drop 80k+ from your salary.

For me the big lesson is it is possible to structure an environment for "accidental sociability" - the most obvious one being individual rooms in a shared house - but there are plenty of other examples

- and this is something I suspect that happier more productive socities as well as companies will embrace

Again another article of “It applies to me, therefore must apply to everybody”

If remote work isn’t working for you, don’t do it. I’ve done everything this dudes done but it has been the happiest time of my life. One would perhaps dare to think, different people react differently to the same things.

Can anyone who’s remote but in a non-engineering role share there experiences?

I’ve always wondered how a highly social job like a Product Manager, or Salesperson could possibly work remotely when you need to have a ton of meetings and face to face contact

> When I was 23 years old ... packed a single suitcase, and booked a one-way ticket from Denmark to Taiwan.

I’m wondering if OP knew the local language or made an effort to, and the lack thereof could be the explanation for social isolation

There is really no reason why you cannot have a vibrant social life as a remote worker, or as a digital nomad. The latter is much harder but it's a choice that people make and I would assume they make it knowingly.

I've been sort of jumping between jobs, many of which are remote, and others which are in different places from home base.

You need to CALL friends, not text. It helps significantly.

I just quit my remote job which was quite a career boost due to isolation, anxiety and depression. I am definitely not going to be doing that again.

(2018)

Neat to see hn grouping previous submissions across 3 different URLs ("past").

Canonical URLs FTW.

I work mostly remotely (although I do visit my clients every now and then), and many of the pitfalls in the article are real, and I had to deal with some of them.

One is the ability to work whenever the hell you want. For me this led to working in the dead of the night. I'd start at around 7PM in earnest and finish by 4AM (!). If you have a family, this is not a sustainable situation, so I had to fix that. It was surprisingly difficult to fix - I'm a night owl naturally, my best work is done late in the day, the later - the better. But I go to bed at 12AM now, which isn't too bad.

Another very real issue is the separation of work and life. That I dealt with by only doing work in one place at my house. I have a separate "work" desk, and a separate set of hardware there (computers are provided by clients), and I don't do work anywhere else. I also have different login keys on client hardware and SSH password login is disabled, so I can't log into them from my personal laptop even if I want to. Finally, I have a separate GSuite account for work Gmail, and Chrome profile, and there's no "work" chrome profile on my personal laptop. This solves the problem reasonably well, without the expense of renting an office, and time sink of adding a commute. This would have been an intolerable situation if I had small kids or a needy spouse though. I'd have to rent an office then.

WRT "mental health" issues, I feel like I'm doing all right on that front. If anything, visiting the offices is more stressful than not going anywhere. It's much noisier and much harder to focus when I'm there. But I suspect the transition would be a lot less clear cut if the office arrangement were more humane, like it was at, say, MS in early 00's - individual offices where you can close the door, library noise levels. I had one of those as late as in 2009. It was heaven compared to what you get now (including at MS). I kept my door open most of the time, but when I needed to really focus, I had the option of doing so.

I think one important thing is to keep a conversation going with whoever manages you and with your direct teammates. You don't have to get into everyone's face, but a low traffic, async Slack channel is pretty indispensable IMO, as is the brief weekly report on what's been done and what remains to be done. If this is not done, it could appear that you aren't doing much: people won't naturally make the consistent effort to go and look, and even if they do, it's often not easy to see the difficulties you've experienced. I.e. you could spend a few days debugging a gnarly issue in TF 2.0 (of which it has a surprising number), and the fix might be one line. That could very easily appear like you've been slacking off most of the week if the only info the other side has about the fix is a brief blurb in the PR.

Finally, another issue is that I feel like remote is more suitable to the kind of work which is not speculative in nature, and where you can deliver results of a predictable size at a roughly even cadence. With some of the best work I've done in my career that hasn't been so: delivery was very uneven, and I'd sometimes not submit anything for weeks on end just because I was thinking of (and prototyping) how best to do what I was trying to do. I imagine that'd be problematic in a remote arrangement, especially if you change a steep hourly rate, like I do.

If someone has found a solution to this last problem, please share.

Out of topic but do anyone know an online community of remote workers?