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Comment by kierenj | Hacker News Reader

Don't shoot me but - why is this "fully / 100%" important? Why is remote working a good thing? Or rather, when is it a good thing?

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I like my house more than I like my office. I also prefer saving the 40-60 minutes per day that would have been spent on the road.

100% remote (meaning all employees are remote) is important because it eliminates drive-bys and the water cooler. If only some are remote, those people will miss out on face time and conversations that were held in meatspace. Those people, regardless of their qualifications, drive, and contributions, will be held back relative to their in-person peers.

> why is this "fully / 100%" important?

If you're looking for a remote job, you don't want to have to filter through a bunch of onsite jobs. This site does that for you.

> Why is remote working a good thing?

There are many benefits to working remotely.

- It saves you time and money because you don't have to commute.

- It generally gives you a more flexible schedule, which lets you spend more time doing things you love (hobbies, family, etc).

It's definitely not for everyone - you have to be self-driven otherwise you might have productivity issues. It also means you have to seek out your own community because you won't have as much social interaction with your co-workers.

I've worked remote for 5 years. In my case it's not flexible. I think if I was a pure developer it would be, but I have to be avaiable for requests/customer calls etc same as I would be in the office

For me personally, it alleviates a lot of stress from coming into the office.

I'm way more productive because I'm actually working and not BS-ing with my neighbor in the next cube/desk. This in turn brings down the noise level and reduces interruptions to "flow". For some reason, people will walk up and ask stupidly trivial questions on a regular basis in person, but when in a remote environment they are more reluctant to ask questions over communication mediums. I'm not sure why that is. Concentration++;

I don't waste any time in traffic. I've put about 3,000 miles on my car all year (excluding long travel vacations). I used to average 15,000 miles! One could say this significantly reduces my carbon footprint :)

Not having to waste time commuting to work, commuting to an appointment (e.g. doctor) near my home, commuting back to work then commuting back to my house.

It saves me a ton of money. No fuel expenses, less maintenance expenses on my vehicle, and I don't have to get a babysitter for no-school days.

I dodge the typical office bureaucracy and badmouthing of colleagues.

If I have to attend a useless meeting, I can tune it out and still get work done while they chatter about. In the office I couldn't do that because it would appear "rude" or even some meetings had a no laptop policy.

EDIT: oh another bonus... because i'm not sitting in traffic for 2 hours a day, I get to spend that time exercising or enjoying more quality time with my family.

Companies need to be good at remote for workers to be successful. Merely offering it isn’t an option, you have to know you will be visible and able to not miss out on communication with the rest of the team.

Companies that are 100% have to be good at this. Others may sleepwalk into operational mistakes regarding your career.

I don't think the implication is that "fully/100% remote" is inherently good, but that it is an important quality to a population. For example, I only seek fully remote work, so knowing that a position is 100% remote is critical to my search when looking at jobs.

There's more to it than that. You don't want to be "the remote guy" on the team. You want the whole team to be remote. Otherwise, you are going to have a far less pleasant experience and no chance at career growth.

I don't think you even need everyone to be remote. I've noticed that its enough to just have two separate offices with teams that have a mix of employees between those two offices.

Once you have that, adding people that are fully remote becomes almost trivial, since you are already accounting for most cases where people aren't always in a single space.

I live in small-town Canada but work remotely for a big tech company. Quality of life is important to me. I was also able to pay off my house quickly.

It's good for senior developers and the self motivated. Difficult for junior roles which need hand-holding. Difficult for parents or those in condos without a seperate space.

The surprising thing for me working at a fully remote company for the first time (Seeq Corporation - over 100 employees) is that, with the right tools, I think it's actually better for junior roles that need more help. For one thing, there's a lot less friction hopping on a video call than finding someone at their desk. Another thing is that results are the only metric you have to go on, so you don't fall into the mistake of assuming someone is doing okay just because they're sitting in front of their computer and not asking for help.

You really need to have a separate room in my opinion. As a remote worker you save a lot of money not travelling and spending money on lunches, and/or can live where space and housing is much cheaper, so this is possible. I built a home office: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/garden-office-most-mos...

Looks very good. Was it a DIY project?

No I hired a couple of people to assemble it (for about $1200). It certainly would have been possible to build it all on my own - it's just a big, complicated shed kit after all - but it probably would have taken me a month so it made far more sense to hire them. I did give it three coats of paint and stain inside and out though!

We have quite a few parents on our fully remote team and generally remote seems to work well for them as it gives them the flexibility to deal with childcare and allows them to spend more time with their kids. It's not uncommon for babies and sometimes older kids to be passive attendees in our Zoom calls.

So...I pretty much have to work remotely. My wife is a resident and got placed in a small Midwestern city. Throughout her med school and residency, there have been pretty much no local dev jobs. The very few that I have available pay terribly. I either have to live 3+ hours away or - work remotely.

I've worked remotely for the past 5+ years. Most of it has been teams that have been mostly co-located. As a remote worker, this leaves you out of so many important company functions. No water cooler talk, no random whiteboarding sessions, dial-in to a conference room where you can barely hear cross chatter, get left out of in-house announcements, etc. You're really bounded to interacting via email, chat, and project management tools when you're the only remote employee.

100% remote companies have their challenges, but those challenges are shared by everyone. People understand the need to communicate in public places, avoid isolating patterns, and intentionally surface information to larger groups when possible. Nobody really has to worry about getting left out or missing a promotion because they didn't have "face time".

"fully / 100%" remote/distributed is important because it is difficult to be the only remote employee when everyone else is on site. Having remote employees brings a lot of benefits, but it comes with some expenses. Having the tooling/practices for meetings, discussion, whiteboarding, communication, etc. If you're only one of the 5% of the team remote, be ready to be forgotten often for important convos.

Remote working is a good thing for many reasons. No time spent commuting. Possibility to live anywhere you fancy. And for companies, it gives them access to an enormous pool of candidates.

Some people like remote work better for whatever reason. If you are a remote worker it’s often better to be in a fully remote company where all systems and processes are geared towards remote work.

One of my Coworkers wants to RV 100% of the time. She can work anywhere she has sufficient bandwidth. She's a good worker, and having a hard time finding a 100% remote employer. She wants to have 3 weeks at one National Park, then 3 weeks at another...etc.

Because some people dream of moving to the beach and working fully remote from literally a house on a remote beach somewhere. But they still want to make good money and can commit to a solid 8 hours "on" every weekday.

Not everyone enjoys city living.

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