Comment by velcii | Hacker News Reader

Comment by velcii | Hacker News Reader

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>Even for the best employee who do the most amazing kind of work, being in person and take advantage of politics and "ass kissing" would only help, not hurt.

I find this statement so out of reality. Because often what happens is that this "best employee" gets side tracked by someone who is not actually productive, but just good at playing politics.

So our hypothetical "best employee" will have to play politics in addition to be productive to have a fighting chance. Or they can just downgrade themselves to be less productive and be more political..

Either way, the company losses the actual productivity of the said employee...

>It seems like you are under this very strong impression of people who derive value for in-person work only do so because they are sub-par employees.

I don't think I said that. I said "in-person" work will be essential for the job security of people who survive soley on politics. I don't think the converse, that anyone who wants to work with people is sub-par, is true.

There are a ton of productivity to be gained for people who otherwise cannot be as productive working alone remotely, that’s something you seem to not realize.

There is so much to measure how much an engineer contributes other than how many lines they churn out or how many PRs they merge. Things like training, mentorship, organizational level influences are critical to a company’s success.

In fact, companies values a lot of those soft impact so much more than raw productivity.

Yea, you can move goalposts all you want, but the bottom line is companies that permit remote work are going to get the best talent, from all over the world, and those companies are going to blow the ones that does not allow remote work, right out of the water...

All this romantic "oh I have to look you in the eyes" sentiment will disappear when push comes to shove, that it when you see your best people leave for competitors that allow remote work...

I'm not moving goal posts at all, I'm simply giving you concrete examples of things you cannot accomplish as well under full-remote. I never said you can't be a fully remote code monkey, and you may be surprised to find out that the "best people" aren't code monkeys.

> but the bottom line is companies that permit remote work are going to get the best talent, from all over the world, and those companies are going to blow the ones that does not allow remote work, right out of the water...

That's just simply not true. Plenty of companies have been allowing remote work since way before the Pandemics and no, they have not blown FAANG companies "right tout of the water".

The best people care most about the project they work on and the people they work with and also the compensation, only a very small percentage of people put remote work as their number 1 criteria when push comes to shove.

In fact, I know a ton of brilliant and driven people planning to leave remote-only companies because they prefer a different work environment. All the internal polls from everywhere I've seen states that vast majority of employees do not want full remote.

>fully remote code monkey, and you may be surprised to find out that the "best people" aren't code monkeys.

Very curious that you have loaded it with the assumption that "remote" implies being a "code monkey".

>they have not blown FAANG companies "right tout of the water".

Sure no one is saying it ll happen overnight. Curious reasoning again, by the way.

>a very small percentage of people put remote work as their number 1

Very curious again, because even in HN there were a lot of stories where people are willing to even resign, to keep the freedom that they discovered with not having to work in strict constraints.

>Very curious again, because even in HN there were a lot of stories where people are willing to even resign, to keep the freedom that they discovered with not having to work in strict constraints

What do you mean by "even HN"? HN is extremely biased toward super introverted anti-social people who prefer working alone and not have human interaction. Using HN as a data point is about as biased as it gets on this topic.

Think logically for a moment, if the majority of people have "working remote" as their number 1 priority regardless of nature of work or compensation, then places like Silicon Valley wouldn't have existed in the first place. The good engineers would all have left and taken a lower paid remote contracting job working from home (and some indeed have in the past).

At the end of the day we do have internal survey data from FB and Google and other companies, vast majority of them do not want full remote work.

>What do you mean by "even HN"?

I only meant that "some forum that we both are reading"

>The good engineers would all have left and taken a lower paid remote contracting job working from home..

Not many comparable remote positions were available, and not may even probably didn't consider the possibility, because it was so taboo.

This is how bad stuff that existed so long in a society eventually change. 9-5 work in an office is an evil that should not have existed where it could be avoided.

> vast majority of them do not want full remote work.

Great, good for them. But that is not stopping a lot of others from doing so.

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