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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

100%.

The last 10 days I've been in an open plan office instead of my home office I've used for 8 years.

I've had to trade a 5k ultrawide monitor for 1080p, an Aeron for a cheap chair the company bought secondhand, desk at a height that's comfortable for one that isn't (I'm 6'5), natural light for fluorescent and 500ppm of CO2 for 1200ppm+. And a 10 second walk for a 45 minute drive each way commute.

I don't even think CO2 is on anyone's radar, but some complain of headaches and many seem really lethargic by late morning.

And everyone in the office uses cloud software, but there's a distrust of remote working. I was hoping this battle would be won by now, I'm almost at the point of thinking it should be encouraged by legislation.

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I started a fully remote company in 2008 and thought it was a matter of time until all new startups were fully remote.

It's a win for the environment, productivity and much less overhead which means higher wages. Your hiring pool also increases substantially.

We were successful but I'm surprised how many startups today still want to hire within a small radius of a physical office.

> It's a win for the environment

My friend works at a company in the city we live in. People working in that particular office live in nearby towns or even two countries over (EU).

Well, this amazing company requires everyone to be physically present in the office every day. So, the people living two countries over fly in every Sunday night in a second apartment they're renting here and leave on Friday afternoon, flying back home for the weekend. Every. Week.

The math works for said employees because they are earning a very high CoL salary (they're local employees, of where the office is) but they live in very low CoL countries, so in fine they get paid multiples what they would holding a job local to them.

And here I am having qualms about flying once or twice a year on vacation... This kind of things really makes me think we're completely fucked and we'll cook ourselves to our death. Very tempting to be like them and say "fuck it, I'll do whatever is convenient, pollution and the rest of you be damned. Why shouldn't I?"

Personally I think initial seed-stage should be so that team is the same place, but when you want to scale remote team makes sense. I think the missing ingredient now is that there are not lots of examples and procedures on how to go remote, scale and manage remote teams.

I'm not sure about higher wages following my admittedly limited experience.

I applied to some remote-only companies based in France, but I was quickly out of the competition because the companies could hire other people at much lower wages than what I (living in the most expensive city in the country) was looking for.

I think that hiring remotely will lead to lower compensation on average, because all else being equal companies will prefer those with lower salary expectations.

That's explicitly the point -- target qualified or mostly qualified individuals in lower COL areas. You may not be the best qualified remote worker but we can shave your salary by 80K if you live in rural Kentucky and still get a good enough IT worker in ~6 months.

Companies also make office overhead costs into an externalized problem, in that the employee is responsible for desks/tables/chairs/heating/cooling, plus bandwidth and even computers. I see big advantages and downsides to this, but it is useful from a cost cutting perspective.

The tradeoff is the difficulty of hiring, managing, and communicating remotely. Plus I don't think everyone is cut out for remote work -- after 5 years remote I'm starting to think I'm not...

Not sure how increasing the hiring pool also increases wages.

Less overheads. The two are not interlinked as the sentence suggests.

Out of curiosity, what do you use to measure CO2? (I've heard devices to do so are fairly expensive)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01DY30PG8/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_...

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