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Comment by moconnor | Hacker News Reader

I’ve worked remotely for 15 years, variously in a bustling major city with a startup scene and currently do so in a small seaside town a few minutes from the beach.

Quality of life depends where in life you are. City is better for meeting people, seaside town for raising children. Remote work is generally good for work-life balance, nobody cares if I stay at home with a sick child or finish early for a school play, but I probably travelled a lot more than I otherwise would have.

I thought (and was told) remote work would be a career limiter, but I have still ended up where I want to be (ML research).

What I miss most is being around many like-minded colleagues. What I enjoy most is being able to close the door to my office and work uninterrupted for as long as I choose.

I think I’m more productive because I can’t just “show up”; if I’m not making a difference I might as well have spent the day at the beach.

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Are you me? I also work in ML and am raising a child in a small seaside town. Your comments are very similar to my experience. I was told going remote and leaving the city was career suicide, but it's been quite the opposite. The amount of assumed travel (pre-covid) was a bummer and often happened at inconvenient times at multiple companies, but I still wouldn't trade it. I never talk about tech outside of work, which is nice, although a little lonely at times. In some ways I think my worldview has broadened by not living in a tech hub anymore. Work-life balance is super healthy, I don't spend as much time in front of screens anymore either. The pros totally outweigh the cons in my opinion.

new grad here. any city and seaside town recommendations?

If you like having ocean, forest, mountain, lake, and city all within close range, and not paying state income or sales taxes, New Hampshire's coastal cities (Portsmouth, et al) are awesome.

Yes, it gets cold, but you don't have to go out in it if you don't want to. You can go from heated space to heated space pretty easily.

I've heard NH is quite barren, though.

The southeast, especially around interstates 93 and 95 are quite populated. It might not look it sometimes due to lots of trees between homes in the older developments, though.

I think you're supposed to cruise along the coast and take in each city one by one. Then circle back and stay at the one that seems most cozy.

Agreed. I did this in 2012 - Fort Lauderdale to Ocean City, MD. Landed in Myrtle Beach, SC for 7 years.

I work remotely and live in a seaside town in Florida. No state income tax, reasonable housing prices and cost of living, biking, boating fishing, golfing, 12 months a year. Many great options in Florida such as St Augustine, Sarasota, Jupiter, Pensacola.

I'm most concerned about crime and hurricanes in FL. Any thoughts?

Vaasa in Western Finland is quite nice.

Congrats on year 15! I'm on year 5 of working remotely.

Working in software I definitely think most companies are fine with remote individual contributors, and that it has been shown to work effectively.

If the company is setup for majority distributed communication (slack, wikis, ticket tracker, etc), then I even think tech team leads can be remote.

That seems to be the limit though unless the company is remote first or close to it. I haven't seen any remote employees in Sr. Management roles. Although Sr. Management at the company I'm working for have been working from home, I think when things are back to 'normal' the expectation is that they will be in the office again, although I'll be curious to see if they work from home one or two days a week.

YMMV

I've been a remote employee at my company for more than 7 years now, and I'm at a tech lead (principal) level and still effective there. Since I'm not interested in the management track, I'm not concerned about limitations there. It's true, though, that COVID has made upper management rethink the need to be constantly in the office.

I'm not seaside, but bayside, and my experience is similar to others in that regard in this thread. Great for family and all that, not so much if you don't like feeling a bit isolated. In the before times, I'd travel to one of the company motherships three or four times a year to get in-person time with the team. That works well to keep the team gelled.

I can send that. I've been fully remote for 4 years. Because the small village where we wanted to live has 0 tech jobs within reasonable commute distance.

I've gone from IC to team lead, to group lead. I think this is my limit at the moment. Not because I'm remote, but that's how much I can handle at the moment.

I don't get some of the hallway chats from the mothership, but the feedback routinely is that we're one of the strongest groups in the company. So I would take that as a sign that the remote aspect isn't a deal breaker.

Personally I wouldn't go back to the office routine unless I was out of options.

And yes, I do spend 80% of my time in various calls. This is not different from being in an office and working with a distributed team (also in offices in their regions).

> I think I’m more productive because I can’t just “show up”; if I’m not making a difference I might as well have spent the day at the beach.

Wonderfully put. This right here is the perfect expression for why I love remote work. You play your part and make a difference, then the rest of your time can be enjoyed elsewhere. No “the next 8 hours are dedicated to being at the office, maybe I’ll get some work done and chat with my co workers and go to meetings...”. Remote work seems to condense all the dead space in between, by allowing you to fill it with other non-work parts of life.

You've summed up my experience, both with location descriptions and pros and cons, to a T.

new grad here. any city and seaside town recommendations?

So it's great if you're married with kids and have the money to own an house?

But in many areas a house is totally within reach on a tech salary.

Yes. Here in the Midwest it's perfectly within reach of even a modest tech salary to own a home in a nice suburb. The coasts are just so detached from reality

No, there isn’t a detachment from reality. It’s simply that fewer people want to live in the Midwest. Considering the environmental and social problems that come with living in far flung (cheap) suburbs, it’s a wonder real estate isn’t more expensive on the coasts.

It's not a choice between live in Palo Alto or live in some far-flung Midwestern suburb. I think that sort of dichotomy gets set in place because it is pretty hard to get to cheap real estate close enough for a daily commute from most of Silicon Valley.

But throw out daily commuting (or even, really, just accept a reasonable driving commute) and many possibilities open up in many coastal cities, especially given that many jobs aren't in the cities anyway. Yes, if you want to live in the city, many of the coastal cities will be more expensive but, e.g. Chicago is not especially cheap either.

I mean, I don't think that Minneapolis, Detroit or Chicago are missing in basic quality of life facilities but enough people disagree to make them a lot less expensive than NYC or sf and, imo, that's their loss not mine

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