The Winners of Remote Work | Hacker News Reader

The Winners of Remote Work

nytimes.com

172 pointsremt271 comments

This article really isn't about remote work writ large, it's about websites/organizations that provide platforms for individuals to sell services to consumers. The fact that you can make popular workout videos from your home is orthogonal to the behavior of consumers on the Peloton platform.

It's an interesting and important observation that good communicators win disproportionately as telecommunications get better - e.g. because recorded music is a thing, as a songwriter/guitarist I'm competing with Frank Zappa for mindshare. But this just isn't about remote work. Feel like I got clickbaited.

It's got to be clickbait. If there are winners, then how many workers are losing by working remotely? It seems obvious that the vast majority of people win big by not being forced to commute into a full day at an office where they would rather not be.

To use an example from the parent post, local, cyclist spin trainers are losing, since people are simply using the Pelaton trainers at home, rather than going to an "in person" spin class. The local, small time trainer can't compete with a celebrity/model trainer. Similar to how TV and movies hurt local theatres. In the end, it is more efficient, but there are "losers".

I'm not convinced a lot of these trends stick post-COVID. A lot of people like the in-person part of the spin class and probably would prefer it to the highly-paid video pro.

That said, behaviors will have changed for a lot of things over the course of a couple of years. People have developed new habits. Not all of that--including going into an office five days a week in many cases--are going to just reset.

The same principles that apply to remote work apply here.

Why would I want to drive 10-15 minutes, park, change and all that for a 30 or 60 minute spin class when I can take that same class in my garage or living room.

Because you want to get out of the house and socialize with people as well as get some exercise. Now some of the same logic does apply to people wanting to get back into office. But I doubt it's true to the same degree and most people have more than a 10-15 minute commute.

While I have no personal interest in gyms or exercise classes, they are social for many people.

There's a difference between social interaction because you want it and working. I work from home and use the gym and martial as (non-drinking) social time during the week.

because then you wouldn't need a spin bike in your garage or living room

Because some people like to have separation of concerns in their life. I don't necessarily want to have my home be where I workout and where I work. Especially given that I live in a small studio. I do classes 1x a week still, and being in a room, 15 minutes down the street, surrounded by people in the same mindset helps me focus on that task.

This doesn't fit into everyone's wants and needs...but just because you can't fathom why YOU would want to do something doesn't mean there isn't a completely valid reason for those around you.

I don't know about you but many of us were remote for many many years before Covid.

I don't see this mentioned enough but the fact remains: when you work from home you also live at work. It's a two-edged sword. Its hard to unplug when you sleep next to your desk.

Sometimes I go to the store, just to leave work/home. A gym sounds nice too, just to go somewhere else.

Post-Covid, I tend to agree. If people continue to work from home, rather than in an office, then the in-person spin class and other in-person activities could actually surge in popularity, since people will want more in-person interaction.

What reason do we have to believe that there will be a point in the future with less COVID risk than there is today? By what mechanism will that arise?

Vaccination numbers still have a lot of room to grow, the virus may mutate into something that has a lower kill rate, the vaccine efficacy will likely improve, etc...

Well, and at some point, even relatively cautious rational people go: "I'm not permanently curtailing my activities." I live in a deep blue state and, while you see masks, life has returned to normal in a lot of respects.

My (limited!) understanding is that mutations that make pathogens more contagious but less fatal are evolutionarily advantageous, so to the degree we can talk about Covid-19 having “self-interest,” becoming ever closer to Bad Case of Flu is within it.

In the long term this evolutionary pressure is present, however, it's not an iron law - as I understand, in addition to becoming more transmissible, COVID variants have become a bit more fatal over time.

I've seen this as well. I feel like maybe worst case scenario is a virus that is silent, contagious, and eventually deadly, and can stick around long enough to infect others.

Mass vaccination and exposure. The hope is that our immune systems will collectively get used to it, and its evolution will be constrained enough that, while it will continue to mutate, our immune systems will continue to have a "good enough" answer to it that we avoid the cytokine storm problem that's killing people.

At the rate things are going it would take decades to get everyone exposed, but much less time than that to lose natural immunity.

The only Americans who might be vaccinated in the future but aren’t vaccinated today are children under 12. The FDA is in no hurry on this because it doesn’t make much difference anyway (minimal vaccine risks loom larger next to minimal COVID risk).

I think this is a slightly-too-bleak-for-the-evidence take, because it's not clear how long immune defense persists. COVID antibodies tend to go away kind of quickly, but there are (so I hear) other mechanisms of defense which may persist longer.

Things could of course be much worse - it's possible that the COVID molecule is somehow unusually well situated for immune escape and length of immunity won't matter that much; those of us in countries that can afford it will get our semi-annual microchip infusion with the latest flavors.

Pelaton trainers, on average, are far superior to in-person instructors. The experience is better in-home and less time is in used travelling and changing. My equipment. My home. Die hard educated professional leading the class. The only in-person that comes close runs about $300-500 a month.

It's not all about impersonal efficiency for many people.

Just want to note that pre-COVID, not many people would even have considered not-in-person equivalents to things that they thought they preferred in-person. When I say "not even considered", in many cases I mean "were not even aware they existed".

It might be that their pre-COVID apparent preferences remain their actual preference post-COVID, but I would not take that for granted.

There's also the people using spin class trainers in Apple+ that wouldn't ordinarily use one...it's not a zero sum game. (I have it playing the the background as I ride my roadbike, it provides enthusiasm even if the effort doesn't line up with the road.)

how many workers are losing by working remotely

I think the big losers are the service workers that provided services for all of those office employees: coffee shop workers, restaurants, drycleaners, caterers that provided employee lunches, cleaning people, etc.

A Starbucks, a drycleaner and 2 or 3 restaurants that were in my former office building have shut down permanently. My company stopped stocking snacks and catering lunches 3 days a week, and presumably they or the building have cut back on cleaning as well as general building maintenance staff.

Some of those jobs will come back when (if) we return to in-office work, but since it will probably be part time in-office work, not all of those jobs will be back.

Food trucks seem to be doing pretty well - when employees dispersed, they did too. I don't go into the city much since I don't go to the office, but now I visit the same food trucks in my own town and they seem to be pretty busy.

You’re exactly correct here. Our complex isn’t in the greatest area, but it sure was nice to have a dry cleaner right across the street. But in our complex we had a cafeteria and two satellite snack places. They are closed until our building hits a % of capacity as stated in their contract. I feel like there is a big opportunity for food trucks. Maybe use those empty mall parking lots and set up some times for people to grab food, set up outdoor dining.

Yeah, there are a lot of businesses that have gone under because they were geared to serving office workers. Out here in Silicon Valley, a Panera-esque chain called Specialty’s just shut down completely within a couple months after offices closed; most of their locations were only open Monday through Friday for breakfast and lunch. Downtown San Jose hasn’t been completely decimated, but I’m pretty sure there are a lot of places that aren’t coming back.

(N.B.: There is one Specialty’s location that has re-opened, near Moffett in Mountain View; apparently the family that started the chain decades ago bought the assets, and their one original location, back.)

I think in general you'll just see a lot of those restaurants and businesses that provide services to office employees move to where they can provide services to remote employees. Service industry businesses generally follow people and if people aren't going downtown everyday and instead hanging around the suburbs, then you'll likely see more starbucks etc in the suburbs serving that crowd.

My town already had one Starbucks before the pandemic and still has one Starbucks after the pandemic -- moving people to work from home doesn't change the economics of running a service business like a coffee shop or restaurant. My office building had 25 floors, and probably over 1000 people worked there. That's a lot of foot traffic, probably more than my small downtown sees in a day.

When I work from home I just make coffee or lunch at home - I don't drive down to the strip mall for lunch. But when I go to the office, I eat lunch out with coworkers, and my bus drops me off right in front of the Starbucks so it's easy to stop in for coffee.

I doubt that the employees that the lost jobs from the businesses that served offices were all just displaced to the suburbs, but if you have a reference for that, I'd like to see it.

It will take time for businesses to follow the workers. At the very least I would imagine the distribution of such businesses won't fully adjust until after the pandemic is over.

I think it is too early to say.

And given the shortages in servering labor, we may see a shift in the jobs people have as well.

Going out of business isn't the same as losing at working from home. Going out of business is usually not working.

Otherwise this article would just be the fairly obvious statement that people who kept their jobs are "winners" over those who lost their jobs.

The winners of remote work are those whose services are scalable, and those who excel at it. The content and conclusion was also not what I was expecting, but you can see that it's a completely valid title if you allow yourself to see it from a different perspective.

> are those whose services are scalable

Exactly! I am surprised so few people here see that.

It is a pattern that happened with other technologies before. Music recording allowed some pop stars to become millionaires while most musicians lost income. Movies allowed some actors to get rich while most actors lost public. Industrial manufacturing (e.g. woodworking, textiles, tanning) made some industries big while millions of artisans lost market. Franchised merchant stores (e.g: Tower Records, Toys'R Us, WallMart) destroyed thousands of small merchants.

The economist J. Schumpeter had a name for this: "creative destruction".

The article specifically mentions programmers as well...

Lower floor because a global workforce increases supply of programmers available to the western market.

Higher ceiling because every company is now competing for the top people, who are in limited supply and know how to get top compensation.

So yes, I do think this applies to remote work in general.

It mentions programmers without making any particular claims about it; they don’t actually demonstrate any losers. Outsourcing to India has been a thing for many years, and US companies appear to have every incentive to take advantage of it, but somehow they keep paying pleasantly high wages to Americans.

I haven't seen any mentions here if being in a startup fundamentally changes the argument. I think startups would want to leverage the individual talent and personal time sacrifice to bootstrap themselves and build their dream team. I have found the opposite, that they want to be even more controlling in work environment. I am probably biased as it did take a few months to adjust to remote work and find a decent balance of zoom meetings/reporting but now have a good groove between my peers and boss. Given HR's surveys to determine who wants to return to the office, I would rather stay remote. Out of my past 2 startup jobs in the past decade, it's 50/50 whether remote worked well.

My recent anecdote: Startup out of stealth a month ago informed me during 2nd round that they were only considering programmers willing to relocate and live in Austin. No remote option whatsoever. Asking what would happen if there are additional lockdown measures reinstituted, for Delta or even just whatever other 'virus-of-the-year' comes along, they didn't have any answer other than to repeat Austin-based only.

Bonus: Their founders and early execs are today only located in SF bay area and have no plans to relocate and the in-office only policy would only be for the devs.

Sounds like an awful environment. If a CEO can't see the value in hiring good people that you don't need to micro manage and allowing them to decide if it makes sense to be in person or in office I don't think working at that kind of company would be fun.

Hire good people, entrust them with executing on core business needs, allow them to choose however they make the magic happen.

The issue with this approach seems to be that hiring is fundamentally broken - hiring managers haven't really found a process with a high correlation of "good interview performance" = "good worker". I've personally been burnt a ton of times by remote people who knocked the interview process out of the park and then just didn't deliver and it's difficult to tell for quite a while without some kind of micro-managey framework in place.

With enterprise I'm playing more with averages so that one person on the team that may not be carrying their weight isn't going to drag down the entire business. For a startup where it's more critical that everybody be firing on all cylinders it makes sense they want to have more control and accountability to make sure their limited resources are being spent appropriately.

What do you use in-person that is unavailable for remote work? Butt-in-seat time?

It's much easier to see the intangibles. For instance, I'm a fairly senior team member who's a core subject matter expert for a few major things our team owns. A huge chunk of my day involves people asking me questions about them.

In person, it's trivial to see everyone coming up to my desk, hear me jumping into team discussions, and so on. Remote, it's on me to let management know that's what my time is being spent on, and if I'm lying it's significantly harder to verify.

So what I hear you saying is that management has a trust problem.

Its far easier to quantify slack thread responses and emails than it is to transcribe and parse the audio recordings from your desk of said conversations.

Not every communication is best conducted over slack, many things are much easier in person in my experience.

I think what you're using as a positive signal is actually a negative signal. If people ask you for help and >50% of the responses aren't "here is a link to a doc/previous discussion" then you are a bus factor 1. Also, this can all be done with a ping on jira or your ticket manager and easily be seen.

If it wasn't for the possibility of COVID transmission, an office with remote management sounds like it would be a fun and conveniently located place to hang out and chill.

Sounds like leadership has their heads up their asses. In my experience, a startup that acts like this is either bound to fail or is secretly not a startup - like the one I interviewed with who were owned - and therefore beholden to the whims of - Big Industry Corp. They simply went out of their way to not tell anybody about it publicly.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet there.

the most important thing about startups is that they're much less uniform. there's no over-overlord megalomaniac at the head to make sure anyone does anything. Half seems to be about a good ratio, but I also bet the best remote folks are also startups, they just don't talk to folks about it

This makes complete sense – just another example of power law dynamics of the internet.

Short-term, we're going to see companies pursue a remote model in order to attract talent. This will be great for employees; live in Colorado, go on hikes and have a great lifestyle while commanding a SF salary!

Longer-term, companies are going to realize that (except for the top ~10% of performers, who will always command a high salary) having remote workers in the US is functionally equivalent to having remote workers in Mexico or Argentina. US workers are in for a rude awakening when they realize they're competing in a labor market with a more driven, lower cost-of-living population in the rest of the world.

Shameless plug – I wrote a blog post about all of this back in December: https://paranoidenough.com/2020/12/07/Labor-Market-Arbitrage...

The focus on programmers as the vanguard of the remote work trend distracts from what could be the real change the outsourcing of white collar work.

Why do we need our lawyers, accountants, human resources and other back office employees to be American when Chilean workers will do those jobs for half or a quarter the pay?

What outsourcing did to manufacturing jobs, remote work may do to white collar jobs.

Law and accountancy is much harder to outsource than programming. You usually have to be U.S certified so thats pretty much protected.

You have the Ubers and AirBnBs circumventing laws around the world and you think it's hard to optimize for a remote law and accountancy practice? Just have offshore remoters do the bulk of work and have it signed by a certified local lawyer / accountant.

It's not impossible I guess, you will need to find people who know U.S law well. If you're talking about accountancy that's pretty complex stuff. You can outsource the grunt work easily (going over Excel sheets, that has been ousourced for decades already) but the substantial work no, I don't think it's that easy.

I don't think it's easy either. There are smart people everywhere in the world. If these people could be easily paid and could get their results validated by a local expert, there would be a lot of financial incentive for these smart people to learn the US law, for example, and create case files for the local experts to evaluate and sign on.

Would it cut the need for the local experts? No. Would it reduce their numbers? Maybe, it could also diversify them. Would it lower the cost for the service? I also think so.

Would it result in the "superstar" local experts (to use TFA's terminology) making huge amounts of money? Almost certainly.

I think the big disruption will be automation especially for accountancy, so much of it is grunt work.

Certified lawyers/accountants have ethical compliance responsibilities. They should be doing meaningful review, not just "signing off." There are savings to be realized, but they are more limited than one might think. The difference here is that there are professional associations with both the ability to discipline people who don't follow the rules, and a deep interest in doing so.

You can do meaningful reviews of folders others have prepared for you, others that get paid pennies compared to what you would pay locally.

> The difference here is that there are professional associations with both the ability to discipline people who don't follow the rules, and a deep interest in doing so.

If I understand correctly, then indeed yes, it would be hard to disrupt this space. But I have a feeling someone smarter than me, perhaps even yourself, will find a way to go around it. At one point taxi medallions seemed unmovable.

I think, for law, you could probably get some utility out of lawyers within the same families of legal system (i.e. english descended systems have a lot of similarities) but the specialization here is too extreme... That all said, I've got a relative that's a military lawyer who has done the standard thing of being regularly relocated across the globe - and he is still bar certified in Mass. I imagine if you could build enough of an expectation of work you could take raw law school grads in Mexico City and prep them to pass the NY/Mass/Whatever bar exam as is relevant to your company. This would be a big investment on both the individual and company's side but maybe there's some space there to cut under standard US rates?

Taxi disruption worked to various degrees depending on how much the local certification meant - in most locales it was just "Can drive cars" - in areas where there is a geographic knowledge test the ride-share disrupters have fared less well. I think it's essentially the same for lawyers - their certification is extremely non-trivial, a lot of laywers only ever get certified in a single state due to how much of an investment it is and how little value you get out of it.

I could see a proposition coming from the opposite side - trying to unify portions of the law so that the regional specialty becomes irrelevant - but you'd need to fight against a lot of unfriendly folks and sovereignty concerns to do anything on that front.

Instead, the market players we can see in the legal space today focus elsewhere - legal matters that are predictable enough that you can essentially mass-produce responses for needs. For common contract law this seems like a great fit - but as soon as anything gets complicated you need to pull a warm body into the mix.

To paraphrase Morgan Freeman in the Dark Knight:

So your target for disruption is law firms and your strategy is to do something illegal to build a huge business that destroys them?!?

The problem with law and accounting is that the skills are country-specific. You can outsource software or radiology because computers and bodies are pretty much the same across the world, but a Chilean lawyer does not know USA law (and vice versa), nor does an Albanian accountant know USA tax law. So you can't "reuse" the existing specialists, you have to train them for a weird niche that will be usable only for outsourcing, since they can't serve local customers with knowledge about USA principles, which are different.

While I agree that you need to retrain, I think the economic incentives might push some people to say, "instead of training for my Chilean law practice, I'd rather learn the ins and outs of the USA law so that I may outsource for double or triple the money I would make". Of course this is just wild speculation, but I feel like the dollar's power has the ability to alter career choices.

You could set up a US Law school in another country

There's no shortage of lawyers and law school grads from 2nd and 3rd tier schools aren't actually all that well paid on average. The big NY white shoe firm salaries? They mostly come from a relatively small number of schools, students who did well, often had good internships or clerkships, maybe were on law review, maybe have connections, etc.

The school is less of a problem than the state-by-state bar exam, I believe.

You don't need to pass the bar to be a paralegal & do the grunt work while the firm is billing US rates. Bigger law and accounting firms already utilize this model, whereby entry level employees do the bulk of the raw work, and the audit report/advisory/legal filing gets pushed up the hierarchy while being simultaneously refined and improved, sometimes sent back down the chain. Many revisions later, the final version is signed off, by someone who has passed the state bar, and possibly has their name on the building - if the client is a big deal.

For lawyers they can only practice law in the states in which they have passed the bar in. So, it's even more restricted. If you want to practice in another state, then I think you need to take the bar for that state. It's a 3 day test.

You also have to take the CPA exam to become a CPA, but that looks like you can transfer your accreditation to another state.

There are real drawbacks to remote only in terms of culture and employee committment. Those who can afford it will probably keep being hybrid I think. Those who want to cut costs will outsource. But since software companies are swimming in money I am not sure its a huge priority.

Time zone 'compatibility' is extremely important

Happily hire north/south, but too many hours east/west and people have to give up off-time just to have regular meetings

East/West can work well as well. I have a team in Vietnam with USA clients and we just do 1h overlap per day. Too many meetings may not be a good thing.

I think it really depends on the type of work and people involved whether east/west can work well.

We're working with some contractors with a 9 hour time difference between headquarters and their office, but having really efficient weekly check-ins against concrete, written goals, good async communication, and a lot of people scattered in timezones in between is helping us succeed.

It definitely takes coordination and a good team, but I think it can be really useful. Most of the experts for the super specific thing we're working on are actually in Europe, so it would be more challenging to do this project if we limited ourselves to north/south hiring.

Offshoring failed for the same reason s we will not have the worries you espouse.

I'm not sure why you think it failed, my company's biggest office is in India, same as my last job.

Agreed. My company (Pinterest) recently opened "new offices" for engineering talent, but they were in Mexico City and elsewhere.

The idea that we'll be competing with other US-based workers is wrong.

In the long run our remote-work "more freedom" fantasy will come to an end.

i have plenty of gaps for short hikes but am yet to leave the house for it. next week ill test this out as recently i have run out of laundry to do during the boring parts of the day. good problem to have, need to be better about capitalizing on my free time

great article, I think you should extend this thought as the market settles post pandemic. I also enjoyed some of the articles you linked. Great rabbit hole!

Any thoughts/improvements on the original post?

Fwiw, I'm building a team in South Africa to service Europe based on the exact premise of the article. Culturally similar, timezone, legal structure.

My anecdatum:

I worked from home as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator from 1986 to 2005. I lived all that time in or near Tokyo, Japan's business and government center where the majority of translation clients were located.

From 1986 to the mid-1990s, being physically located in Tokyo was a definite competitive advantage for me. While I knew some translators who worked remotely even then, having to send and receive manuscripts by fax or mail limited the types of work they could accept. For more complex jobs that required meetings, or for jobs that had reference materials that could not be sent by fax, being able to go to clients' offices allowed me to get enough higher-paying, often time-sensitive work to compensate for the higher costs of living in Tokyo.

Over the course of the 1990s, clients gradually went online and it became possible to receive and deliver more jobs in digital form. Around the year 2000, online translation companies started offering services from India and other low-wage countries, charging a tenth or less compared to what translators located in Japan were charging. The quality wasn't very good at first, but the price difference started to hurt the bottom lines of translators in Japan who did the most generic, commodified work.

By that point, I had a stable set of clients who relied on my experience and my knowledge about their businesses. They couldn't easily send the work to others, and I didn't feel any effect from remote competitors. The rise of remote competition was also not a factor in my decision to quit translation and take a university job in 2005. However, I know that if I try to return to freelance translation after I retire from the university in 2023, I will face a much more competitive environment than I did thirty years ago, living near Tokyo will no longer be an advantage, and it will probably be impossible for me to return to the same income level I used to have.

The singular of “anecdote” is, in fact, “anecdote”.

I intended to use a singular form of “anecdata,” not of “anecdote.” See, for example, [1] and [2].

[1] https://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/anecdat...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Yes, hn search comes up with lots of results for obnoxious hn-isms

Anecdote is the word to use here. It's a lovely word. By contrast, anecdata isn't a word at all, and has nothing to do with 'data' anyway. I have a similar pet-peeve with 'guesstimate'. It's just an estimate. It would scratch a big itch of mine if everyone just used plain words.

> anecdata isn’t a word at all

The OED would disagree with you there, and is a somewhat more authoritative source.

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/82246007

Oxford recognises guesstimate too! Drat.

This is anecdotal data, and while it is not common anymore, the singular of data is datum, thus anecdatum.

It is not data. It is an anecdote.

Yeah that's a valid take, but I was just explaining how your correction was misunderstanding the word.

A search HN comments for "anecdata" [1] yields over 4000 instances

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The article describes gains made by "superstars", who can be seen as self-motivated and capable of making a big impact. I am extremely concerned about how we cultivate superstars in the remote work world.

I have been working remote for over 5 years now, but I wouldn't have survived without a lot of luck and years of experience as an intern/entry level employee at an office with some brilliant mentors.

I have tried mentoring in the same vein as those who taught me, but it hasn't caught on as well. I am concerned about how many people entering the workforce fail to reach that superstar threshold because they are missing a few key elements (which may be face-to-face interaction). I am also quickly learning that the high-impact employee does not necessarily make the best mentor.

I entered the workforce in a very different time with very different tools which makes it hard for me to think through the counterfactual: "What if I had had to be remote when I first started working?" But I think it would have been very difficult and I might have been less successful as a result.

Even today, I feel like I'm cruising a bit on existing in-person relationships. (I was large remote pre-COVID but I still met a lot of people at in-person events and meetings.

I’m a fresh grad who has basically only worked remote (except a summer internship freshman year and TA-ing in person 2 years ago), so I’ll report back in 5 years as a counter-factual ;)

same here. i think i get plenty of mentorship with 3 one hour calls with boss weekly. as far as in person networking events, i see no reason i cannot fulfill this with traveling to conferences. a conference will be a time i go all in on networking and connecting with the industry.

We’re fully remote and have hired a few engineers out of college. They’re very independent and productive. Who knows if they’d be even better if they worked onsite, but I doubt it.

As I say, very different time. I didn't even really have email prior to entering the workplace and, while there were conference calls to manufacturing sites and the like and other (frequent) phone calls, it was a very in-person swing by offices/desks/labs sort of environment. But that's obviously different from what a fresh engineering grad has been exposed to.

those kinds of relationships don't go away even if they aren't in-person. being able to hire anyone from anywhere also comes with the risks of hiring anyone from anywhere. [smart] clients can recognize a good thing when they have it so you can still cultivate enough of those relationships to cruise, you just might use different means to do so.

> Avoiding the office saves employees money — in commuting costs, for example

It saves money for businesses exponentially more. The office space, associated utilities, physical security, cleaning, supplies, insurance, etc. are insane amount of savings.

I owned a small "remote business" in the 90's and it allowed me to be competitive with multi-million ventures.

yes but they only make those savings if they can ditch the buildings completely, which most can't.

And now the employee has to pay out of pocket for that ~100sqft or so of the home that has become an office: the heating or air conditioning of that space, the implicit cost in rent when the employee seeks a bigger place to rent, etc.

Yeah, but the comfort for the employee will go up because they get to define their own space and not have to share it. If they want blinding lights and warm: you got it. If they want darkness and cold: you got it.

Companies should probably kick in a small office stipend, but the cost / sq foot of suburb vs cost / sq foot downtown is usually pretty huge.

True. I pay even more, as I rent a small office within walking distance of my house since the pandemic started, to have a quiet separate space for working.

But, I can't complain. While I don't like to pay for it, objectively the cost of the office isn't more than the cost of fuel for the commute and all those expensive lunches at the office.

And my commute is now a couple minutes on bicycle and I can be home any moment, run local errands during the day (impossible when I was an hour away), I no longer need to drive anywhere, etc. Life is better.

Those savings could be wiped out from a security breach by a remote worker. Compliance will be much harder with remote work, and I don't think that's priced in yet since the trend is so recent.

This times 10,000.

A friend worked for a company in Vancouver that rented a building big enough for the 30 person team to work. Before covid they went almost entirely remote, and all 30 people are flown to Vancouver ~8-10 times a year, put up in fancy hotels to do a 4 or 5 day course in the hotel function room.

It's cheaper for the company to pay for all of that than to rent the office space permanently.

The only winners of remote work will be those who are self disciplined enough to get work done without outside supervision or motivation.

That goes for every single field that does remote work - learning, teaching, Knowledge work etc.

But let’s be honest - some people need the motivation of a workplace — and that’s ok!

We are all different. Im somewhere in the middle… love working from home but it’s easy to get distracted with side projects, feeding birds, germinating seeds etc.

I realize when I need to really buckle up, I go in the office for a few weeks and that puts me back on track with the major projects.

(For me) while I also get distracted from work while at home, I find it is about the same amount as in an office. The biggest difference is the distractions are far more healthy and productive than the ones I'm left to in an office.

Exactly. In the office, I spent an enormous amount of time on scrolling Reddit and playing games on my phone. At home, I might do the dishes, fold some laundry, take a quick walk, or get some exercise in my small home “gym.” I’m just so much happier working from home. I desperately hope I never have to return to an office.

I think you are totally right about the self motivation part. I’d wonder though is it just that people who aren’t motivated are easier to see in a remote work setting vs the office as you judge people by their tangible outputs alone. In the office setting this is obscured but the same cohort aren’t actually doing anything more or less.

I can be as unproductive at work as I can be at home, but coasting in the office is so exhausting, I'd rather do work.

I can even recall a handful of times when I was trying to solve a fiddly problem, and couldn't concentrate because our (open floor plan) office was a zoo.

I would tell my boss I needed some quiet, would go home, would sit down and solve the problem, and would come back the next day feeling much less frustrated.

I should have done that more often. Open floor, combined with Slack and over-communication made me 4x less productive.

> love working from home but it’s easy to get distracted with side projects, feeding birds, germinating seeds etc.

For programmers at least “productivity” comes from writing leveragable code, not by working more hours. Watching birds, gardening and generally being relaxed and rested will increase the quality of the code you write. It may even allow you to envision solutions impossible to come up with under the daily grind of commute->stand up->lunch gossip->meetings->commute. I think managers that understand how to develop good software are few and far between.

Productivity aside, your routine sounds awesome and everyone who can should try to achieve something similar without concern for their employer’s productivity. I assure you the concern for well-being is not bi-directional.

There are also plenty of programmers who are just lazy and don't want to work a lot. Check out any of the dozens (hundreds?) of comments on Blind of people working 15, 20, 25 hours a week. Total.

"I'm sitting on my porch drinking a beer and watching birds but trust me I'm totally working right now" doesn't take you very far.

The best code I’ve ever written was when I was only working 10 hours a week. Hours worked has no positive correlation with quality of code written. Good managers know letting their devs watch birds and relax will result in a much higher quality of output then forcing them into the office and dropping by their desk to prod them.

That depends, though. How many people reading this thread would say, "I'm sitting in my cube surfing the 'net, but trust me I'm totally working right now"?

I've had weeks were i worked 60 hours of crunch, but most weeks, even if i was at the office i work barely more than 25 hours. Between reading tech news, gossip, researching a bit on this totally new tech that seems nice, trying to justify a POC to my n+1/n+2 and preparing slides on "why leaving Jenkins totally make sense", i did so much false work that honestly would annoy me if i was a manager. Now i'm leaving my computer for 30 minute pauses, it is far healthier for me, i'm more effective at my job and i stopped wasting my time and the time of my collegues on meaningless presentations. I still do somes on "clean code" or "how to rework your commits to prepare efficient code reviews", but it is for the benefit of the team, while the one i did pre-covid were for my entertainment.

Good for those people, I have worked plenty of jobs where I really don't actually work much over 20 hours a week and still get top ratings.

Screw the grind culture crap

Well wining and dining has taken management folks quite far and writing same-old CRUD app thousandth time by hand is not gonna take developers very far.

That's lovely. I work in consulting and every hour I get distracted I have to make up at some other point in the day. usually late at night after my kid is asleep.

yes I'm looking for other work...

But ... in the office, was the "supervision" really from someone physically looking at you with direct line of sight? I feel like on a remote team, everyone still knows who else is getting stuff done, in part because our work products are digital artifacts which often need attention from our coworkers, whether that's "review this PR", "review this design", "read this email and implement the policy change described in it" etc.

There are some high level stats that suggest that in aggregate, productivity increased with WFH, though I'm not sure how much of that stemmed from people working in the hours that they previously would have commuted.

> enough to get work done without outside supervision or motivation.

Sounds like a business opportunity

Absolutely. The people who can come up with the right tools to motivate at home workers, will be very rich.

Human failings are always a super-large business opportunity.

I have been going into the office when I could work remote.

I don't feel like it is a motivation thing. I was just sick of being home all the time.

I think many people on my team are not doing well mental health wise from being at home so much.

The most miserable people I know are a few software engineers that have been working remote for years making great money. One guy I know works at night because he can. Sleeps to 2pm. Basically, never leaves the house for anything. Seems unable to connect though that being a total shut in is why he is not happy even though he is killing it objectively. Practically hiding from the world in a nice house.

What has been good for my mental health is getting up and actually having to get dressed in the morning. Actually have to get out of the house at a specific time. Seeing people at the office in person. Saying good morning to the security people. Using a fitbit my friend noticed that by 10am they had already done the equivalent of a 20 min walk step wise just going to the office. At home, basically nothing. If you work at home you practically have to do a 90 min walk a day to get enough steps in. Good luck as your conditioning gets worse and worse trying to be happy.

I thought I wanted a non-renote job until I tried it for 6 months. Not for me.

Working from home means living at work. I like my work so mos tlu5fine.

I really enjoy coworking spaces. I don't even if my old one is running anymore but I really want to go back.

imo one of the most important things to learn for longterm survival doing remote work is that you don't have to work from home. i can just as readily work out of the back of my car at a skate spot or do emails and marketing on the chairlift. in the long term i'd like to build a truly portable workspace for backpacking and be able to go fully remote. co-working spaces or the library are good options for many people but really anything that gives you some semblance of normalcy and routine is good enough. hikkimoding is comfy to be sure but the social strain from doing it for an extended period, especially during crunch can be pretty hard mentally, that experience has been pretty universal among the freelancers i've known over the years.

https://archive.is/Vltrp

They attempt to answer "How will this affect the average tech worker?" ... with ... "In June, Google told rank-and-file employees it would reduce the pay of those who choose to work remotely or move farther from the office." and they then say "Should this worry the most in-demand engineers and product management? Probably not."

They finish with "But in the long term, remote work’s promise is more ambivalent." which seems like about the only real thing we can all agree on. We'll know how this all shakes out in maybe 5 or 10 years?

What was pretty interesting, and something I've never heard before was "some Peloton instructors earned more than $500,000".

>What was pretty interesting, and something I've never heard before was "some Peloton instructors earned more than $500,000".

It's not really new in that you had doubtless well-paid "personalities" who had workout shows on TV forever. It just stands to reason that with mass broadcast, the money flows to a relatively small number of popular people rather than a large number of fairly modestly paid people teaching small classes in local studios.

Though I suspect that a lot of this current phenomenon is out of necessity rather than preference from the perspective of participants.

Google is a really bad point of normalization for remote work metrics. Google has consistently emphasized working together in offices as a central strategy and has spent vast amounts on physical facilities and also transportation infrastructure such as their own bus lines in order to support all of this. Even other large companies cannot compete with this level of emphasis on office space.

How many is "Some", because the article makes it sound like it's a career option for all fitness people. It sounds like it is as rare as being a TV fitness person

The Winners of Remote Work don't live in the United States. The pandemic has accelerated globalization.

Working parents in the US have definitely benefited from the flexibility that comes with remote work as well.

Only to the extent that schools and daycares are still open.

The winners of remote work are all fleeing to New Zealand, leaving the rest to wallow in decaying infrastructure and a healthcare system bursting at the seams.

I wasn't aware that New Zealand are accepting immigrants right now.

Which visa does NZ allow you to live there and work remotely?

You'll have to ask the Google execs

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-exec-reportedly-worki...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/08/06/google-...

So are these special cases or are the winners of remote work all fleeing to New Zealand?

Larry Page's son was transported by medavac to a hospital there. He's able to stay due to a visa with the requirement of a $7 million investment.

Then you answered your own question about the type of visas you can get.

Only if you consider Remote Global Work.

As a European, it is very disheartening to see how many companies espouse "we are now embracing remote work company-wide", which on closer inspection means "California hours +-2h time difference".

California to Europe is tough for many things. I work US East Coast timezone and collaborate a lot with Europe--but that feels like it's getting near the limit for any regular synchronous activity unless one side or the other starts to work atypical hours.

I do totally get it. I only take an issue with the (maybe unintentional) duplicity of pretending that "remote work in the continental US" can only mean "remote work".

I have seen many European companies as well who do this unintentional duplicity of "remote" meaning "anywhere in the EU/EEA".

In addition to the obvious time zone constraints, I think payroll taxes and such are a major regulatory boundary that you need to cross in addition to having "all your shit together" as one of the top comments puts it.

> In addition to the obvious time zone constraints, I think payroll taxes and such are a major regulatory boundary that you need to cross in addition to having "all your shit together" as one of the top comments puts it.

This can be annoying even across state boundaries, let alone internationally, for smaller companies that aren't already operating in several states. Consider also things like group health insurance, which are often geographically bound (sometimes even to a single city).

Right?

It boggles the mind that the biggest companies on Earth are the likes of Instagram instead of a huge company called "Adapt" which takes care of all that between employee and employer as a third party.

I have no personal experience but I have been told that even if you farm a lot of things out there is a certain amount of paperwork (and cost) that you have to handle in-house.

Hm, that's a shame. That seems to me to be just accidental, not essential complexity, too.

Well, a lot of it is a patchwork of government rules and regulations. Here's a long post about it from Mitchell at HashiCorp:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563

Right, that's exactly what I find baffling.

Right now, if N companies want to hire in M countries, the total expenditure in HR departments is in the order of O(N*M), when it could (theoretically, ideally) be O(N + M).

Which would then crucify its employees and suck rent out of both sides.

Also there are vast diferences in labor law between countries

It's not nearly as easy to have people in a timezone 16 hours offset than you might think. So I am not surprised that they would be two very different decisions.

Right, so that's the point where your job offer should say "Remote - US" or "Remote - UTC-8 +-3h".

And I have seen a few companies do that! I would say that this is around 20% of the companies.

The other 80% simply list those jobs as "Remote", so they show up on their job pages under all continents, or at least, under their "outside the US" filters.

Then sometimes it's not mentioned at the top of the job offer, but in the footnotes with the "we hire regardless of disability etc." statements.

All of these things are fine. They're just a far cry from that blog post that the CEO made 10 months into quarantine, talking about how the company will open itself to global remote work.

I'm in California, and am currently interacting with developers and application engineers working in India, US East Coast, France, and Israel, and formerly China (haven't had to deal with that team lately). This means that evening or early morning meetings are sometimes needed. We try to keep it to a minimum, and this hits some people more than others.

EU working with developer team in India. There are advantages and disadvantage -

* EU team (e.g. presales) are not available half the day to answer queries and this creates delays, but also forces people to write good tickets if they want anything done

* Conversely, even senior developer staff get half the day clear of meetings to do deep work or focus on internal meetings / mentoring

* Thankfully this team are mature adults, but I've seen an us and them thing develop between engineering and the rest of the company elsewhere. It's natural when everyone outside engineering is short term incentivised to downplay technical debt and such. If it can happen when everyone is in the same building, I can definitely see how easily it could happen if only engineering are sat together and all the evil product owners are just angry faces on a screen.

It's unfortunate for North Americans who want to work elsewhere too. A globalized workforce is good for peace, prosperity, and human rights.

Another comment pointed out that shared time zone "remote working mercilessly exposes some of the flaws in the organization." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28369657)

I'll add that global/fully async remote work is even more merciless, especially on Agile figuring-it-out-as-we-go-along orgs. Communication has to be written and clear enough to avoid back-and-forth, changes are possible on the order of a day, not an hour so planning ahead and evaluating critical paths is more important, and everyone has to be able to pick up and put down work that's become blocked by someone on the other side of the planet. It's a tall order, but I'd like to think that the benefits are worth it for both individual and company.

I recognize past experiences in what you describe - but here's the punchline:

Working for a completely on-site company located in two buildings within 10 minutes' walking distance, it was still sometimes impossible to get hold of some people, or understand their attempts to communicate without going back-and-forth 3-4 times.

I think the company I'm thinking of is simply also a "winner of remote work" because it already managed to survive despite massive mismanagement and miscommunication before remote work.

Just go work for an European Unicorn.

...do you have their phone number?

You can always join, work nights, and shift the hours over the first month or two. Probably worth it for a 2x pay increase.

>The pandemic has accelerated globalization.

Is that really the case? There is some evidence that globalisation had plateaued over the last decade or so. I can't find any recent evidence one way or the other.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-trade-exports-const...

The pandemic accelerated the end of globalization. Globalization is over. The US will become less and less involved in the other countries -- even less than it is now -- and corporations will not be hiring teams that are mix of time zones, languages, and cultures. They will continue to hire people with credentials like those in charge, who look like, speak like, and have the same goals / culture as those in charge.

And that's going to be in US major cities.

Your comment makes a lot of assertions without a single argument.

The winner of globalization was the US though

The whole thing is complicated and companies do, eventually, adjust.

Anecdote. I am in process of looking for a full time remote since my mega boss decided that hybrid is good enough for me and no amount of paperwork could convince her otherwise. Right now I am remote until delta dies off or HR changes its mind.

I told no to recruiter 2 weeks ago, because the job was not remote. Just today it seems the company received a lot of nos, because I got a very similar job description and it is now remote.

Now.. the companies are trying to make remote less appealing ( and trying to argue that you should be paid less ), but, quite frankly, remote is worth a lot to me now. You would think smart companies would want to use it to their advantage.

Instead, most of the stories I hear from my social circle goes smth like this 'old guard wants us back in office'.

I really do think the “old guard” has the most to lose from commercial real estate investments.

Think about who sits on the board for a major company… It’s owners and executives from commercial real estate firms. There is a ton of money around commercial real estate, so letting it all just collapse (or losing even 10% of that market) is billions of dollars shifted around the economy.

Most “normal” people who are working from home have little interest in commercial property (aside from a REIT, maybe), so they don’t care at all if the office buildings go empty.

It’s not hard to imagine the board rooms having these discussions and being pushed toward getting people back in the office. And it’s evident they are pushing the propaganda machine with effectiveness studies and articles about how remote work doesn’t work.

I'm skeptical that executives in commercial real estate have that much leverage over major corporations. I expect things like a bias towards the status quo, sunk cost fallacies, concerns about long-term culture/productivity, and so forth are more than enough to make companies hesitant to go mostly/fully remote.

It depends if said corporations own the building / land or not.

Even if they don’t directly own the land, at some point organizations likely service companies that would be impacted by a drop.

And once an organization gets to a certain size it just makes sense to run and buy your own properties.

I think there is also a lot of commercial real estate tied up in derivatives.

Looking at this in another way. Of the 5 managers i know at the bank i'm working in (and i'm pretty high up since the sbject i'm working on is transversal to 90% of devs teams in the bank), all of them have real estate. Either because they are now old and invested early (in the 2000's), or because they inherited it. I'm not talking about one or two appartments, i'm talking about whole buildings in Paris and Villas on the Cote d'azur. The incentives are here, not only for the executive but also for the middle-high managment.

Exactly - board members / senior executives are the people who can afford to invest in commercial real estate.

What evidence do you have that major companies' boards are filled with "executives from commercial real estate firms?"

Sorry and thank you for calling it out.

I should have written “Executives with interest in commercial real estate”. From heads of consulting firms to executives with commercial real estate in their own organizations, nearly all of them have a strong interest in commercial real estate doing well. I would expect most, if not all large companies to have exposure to commercial real estate and many make a lot of money from building and investing in commercial real estate.

But the people that have the strongest interest in this doing well are the people who are in the boardroom. I really think there are few similar issues where the interest of the board and the interest of employees are opposed (many workers want to stay home, many board members want them back in the office).

Take Google - Robin L. Washington sits on Google’s board and also Honeywell’s. Honeywell has $5 BN on their books in “Property, plant, and equipment”. Not sure how much of that is office buildings vs. manufacturing, but still even 10% is $500 M.

It’s not like it’s some major conspiracy, it’s just that boards are small, you can make hops between large companies, and it only takes a small push to make all large corporations lean toward return to work. For most companies with exposure to real estate it makes sense. Most others’ (I’d argue) have board members with an interest in propping up commercial real estate. Most common people do not have a direct interest, but will feel pain if the commercial real estate market significantly changes.

> Now.. the companies are trying to make remote less appealing ( and trying to argue that you should be paid less ), but, quite frankly, remote is worth a lot to me now.

If remote is itself valuable to you then it would stand that companies could get away with offering a lower salary for remote work, at least in your case.

I have done remote work for a long time (because ...Canada), and the real issue is that it requires management to have their shit together. I also assess companies for acquisitions now so I talk every month to companies about what's working and what isn't. I've seen some very successful companies with partially remote or even 100% remote teams. And... they have their shit together. Managers have to actually know what the hell they are going to do tomorrow, instead of making stuff up when the stand-up happens. Workers have to be lined up in their swim lanes and the whole thing has to be orchestrated... you know, like actual agile instead of the reactive pfaffery that everyone passes off as "hybrid agile" (boy do I hear that phrase a lot in diligence!)

Given how much I've seen it work, and how bad the tech talent war is right now, I'm pretty confident there will be lots of remote only options in 6-12 months when upper managers finally wrap their heads around the fact that this is what they have to do to find and hold top talent now. At the competitive companies, upper execs/board members will start dropping middle managers who can't hack it when they see their attrition numbers in the losing part of the spread.

Yes, it's a wonderful filter, isn't it?

To be fair, same things apply when your team isn't working remotely. It is not like being able to plan one day in advance has less value when you work in person.

It is just that remote working mercilessly exposes some of the flaws in the organization.

For example, people who look for a way to slack off now can do this much easier. The problem really is selecting right personnel and motivating them. If you try to treat the problem with a stick it most likely will fail with remote people.

I've bounced back and forth among remote and co-located positions of varying levels of effectiveness. I haven't seen much trouble with remote workers slacking off. But I have seen a lot of tension with mixed teams, typically around this problem of remote people getting frustrated about management not having their shit together. The overarching theme that I've seen is that it's really easy to confuse "enjoyable" and "effective." And co-located offices give you all sorts of opportunities to mix those up, because oftentimes the most enjoyable ways for a co-located team to work aren't really the most effective. But nobody cares, because they're enjoying it.

By contrast, one of the (un?)happy accidents of remote life is that it tends to cause ineffective organization and communication styles to also be unenjoyable.

>Workers have to be lined up in their swim lanes and the whole thing has to be orchestrated... you know, like actual agile instead of the reactive pfaffery that everyone passes off as "hybrid agile" (boy do I hear that phrase a lot in diligence!)

Swim lanes isn't agile per se, it's just business communicating their priorities and assigning it to development. I remember when agile came out, it was great from the development point of view. It was almost immediately perverted by consultants trying to make a buck trying to sell scrum as a panacea to all development costs and overruns. There's an awful lot of snake oil salesmen in tech. Other than that, I agree with everything you said.

https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

The Agile Manifesto is not gospel.

For starters, I would argue that, "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation," has proven, in the fullness of time, to be an oversimplification.

More importantly, the Agile Manifesto not saying something two decades ago does not mean that it has no place in contemporary agile software development. We've had 20 years' worth of time to learn since then. It would be a shame if we hadn't.

To that end, I do think that active orchestration - and, for that matter, written communication - is critical to being really agile at any sort of scale. It doesn't necessarily need to be done using swim lanes, but they do happen to be a nice mental model (and visual mnemonic) for keeping track of real-world phenomena such as varying quality of service obligations.

But I also think that it makes sense to leave them out of any concrete definition of what it means to be agile. Not only is there more than one way to satisfy that need, there's also no guarantee that every team will have that need.

Agreed. I'm using it as a loose metaphor here, I just mean in general, they need to be a lot more organized and proactive. I've seen many varieties of agile and not-so-agile work well.... if they have their shit together. And even the most well though out agile process can be a gong show if they don't.

The #1 question I wish I could get answered for any prospective company (as an interviewee):

"Do you have your shit together?"

Seriously. This could avoid so much heartache.

Since most companies employ humans, i'd say most of them don't.

I think at a certain point in your career you often get hired because things are messed up. That isn't bad, that is why they are ready to pay for experience and skill.

It’s actually fairly easy to ask, and many candidates ask me that: “how do you organize yourselves?”

It’s a very reasonable question to ask during an interview.

I asked this, almost verbatim, in an interview recently. They appreciated the question and ended up hiring me.

I am desperate to get back to collaborating in person, with my team, in the office.

I'm with you, but fear that also means we're now dinosaurs.

This is partly why I keep thinking I should have become an electrician or a carpenter: the only real competition is local, there is always demand in cities. I knew a very wealthy electrician who started his own business and it seems to be a common path. Unlike programming where the common path is work for someone else and burn out.

1. You still can. 2. Could be good, could be bad.

I believe this has something to do with the statistical distribution of compensation - normal-like for electricians, dentists, and more power-like for coders and people from highly creative or sports fields.

It's all about leverage. There are certainly less good and better electricians and dentists, but at the end of the day they can only string so much wire and drill so many teeth in a day at rates that are pretty much set by the market. They have some leverage if they set up a business and employ people but there are still both lower and upper bounds.

Whereas a Pro Bowl quarterback or A-list movie star is worth maybe $100s of millions to a team or studio relative to players/actors who are "only" very competent. Coders are somewhere in between.

People run out of teeth, there is no limit to code. And if your dentist runs late you don't hire three dentists to make them run even later.

Compensation for coders is probably closer to normal distribution than power. Otherwise the stuff on glassdoor/levels.fyi won't make sense.

Productivity (or impact of code written) though, it might as well be closer to the power law distribution

Never too late to switch. Maybe this remote working trend will lead to outsourcing of programmers and we’ll see a rise of electrician and carpenter bootcamps as people flee software development. You’ll just be ahead of the curve.

Or be the one that sells the bootcamps, or even the one that sells a prebuilt platform that creates bootcamps to those that are selling the bootcamps. Picks and shovels so to speak. But wait now you're developing software again.

That's not developing software, that's selling it.

Its like a platform for platforms but on the cloud yes?

You're still working for someone else in the trades. All your clients are basically mini-bosses and your performance ratings are public on Yelp and Angies List.

I can understand programmers romanticizing "the trades", where effort is more justly rewarded. All of us have had sleepless all-nighters where that bug just didn't get resolved (or, worse, the solution didn't end up being necessary). Compare that to an engineer staying at the job site after hours to keep wiring or returning to the office to process paperwork/respond to inquiries/strategize. It's still hard, but at least the work will be fruitful.

In Software Development, you can "get by" with an effort between 2-6 (where 5 is an average worker) or you can "excel" with an effort of 9-10, but putting in a 7-8 just stops being be worthwhile after a few years. Compare that to a local business owner, where greater hustle always appears commensurate to a greater reward.

... but the greater effort is more or less all "hustle" and not the actual work. Not really comparable, I think, to most programmers' experience of work.

As someone who grew up on construction sites before escaping to cushy office work, I can tell you that there are a lot of negatives that many don't consider when romanticizing the trades. Physical work means physical risks: From injuries to long term issues with knees, backs and shoulders. From constant exposure to toxic materials to the ever enjoyable dust boogers.

There's a reason that tradespeople get paid what they do. (and IMO, it is still very underpaid)

Correct

Electricians have to work in less than desirable conditions (dusty attics, outdoors, etc). Most of the material is your responsibility.

Accidents can and do happen. The days where you are less than 100% but you would be able to WFH don't exist.

Think it's annoying to plug a network cable under your desk? It's like that but 7hrs per day or more.

Electrical is like plugging in a network cable through the wall and up the ceiling, then down a really slim corridor to another wall, before finally placing the cord in the PC (all while trying to not pump another cord going the same route.) I worked beside a couple of electricians in my early 20s and it was fun but frustrating (like programming.)

And developers don't have the risk of death by electrocution even with low voltage - when you work with Medium and High voltage its a lot more dangerous

From what I've seen, the smart ones with good business sense are the ones who make real money in the trades, and they're mostly doing sales, supervision, training, and maybe personally handling some limited amount of the trickier bits of the actual labor (or cases where they have to come back to fix things, if they really care about customer service), by some time in their 30s. They may acquire some minor, persistent aches and pains from the work in their 20s or early 30s, but are mostly out of the rougher side of the job before it seriously harms their QOL. Like a lot of business, the real money's in selling other people's labor at a markup, not in selling your own labor.

Quite correct, but I would add that a necessary skill is also in being able to herd cats with a high turnover workforce that is made up with a high percentage of semi-functional addicts and/or flakes.

> Like a lot of business, the real money's in selling other people's labor at a markup, not in selling your own labor.

I hate that this is true, and am glad I found a way to make a living that avoids both, but congratulations on getting to the core of the matter with great clarity.

What do you do? Looking to do the same.

Funnily enough I actually grew up on building sites too, my dad was a builder / small time property developer. Out of all the trades I noticed the electricians had it easiest. I distinctly remember holding plaster board above my head while standing on scaffolding while a joiner (USA speak: carpenter) nailed it to the ceiling. And him telling me "see this is why you should pass your exams so you don't end up doing this". However it was obvious who the smart guys were they had their own businesses and directed their guys rather than do the dirty work. When I was 16 I said to my parents I was thinking of doing electrician apprenticeship, my dad said it would be a shame to miss out on the fun and adventure of university, so I did that instead. Think it was a mistake.

This problem, and distribution of talent, reminds me a little of Sturgeon's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

Despite the somewhat unkind analogy, the distributions kind of line up and it makes sense to me why the top 10% of workers on platforms like Outschool or whatever earn significantly more. In many cases in life there is a group of people/things/songs/movies etc. that are significantly better than the rest in their respective category (usually about 10%), and the rest fall into a category of their own. idk, this is entirely intuitive, but I'd say it makes sense to me that people, and their ability to do some task well, would follow the same distribution.

Interesting corollary to Sturgeon's Law is the observation that the top 10% of workers in a company or society generate a disproportionate amount of productivity - as you mention - and it seems that maybe the internet allows clients and employers to find or connect with them more efficiently.

The article starts talking about professions where working remotely allows to service more or in fact all possible customers in the world at once (e.g. musicians, teachers).

That is not the case for programmers, consultants and contractors (or more precisely, the Internet already had that effect for website/app/SaaS builders without need for remote work).

What will happen for them is that employees from poor countries and outside main cities will be better able to participate, increasing work offer, but also it will be easier for businesses outside main cities to find workers, increasing work demand.

If there's a large increase in the amount of remote work, I wonder how much software architectures will change in order to accommodate the lessened interaction?

Arguably, some level of modularity is good anyway and that's been the general trend. And a lot of software, perhaps especially large open source projects, are developed by a fairly distributed set of individuals and teams already.

It's interesting that the internet on the one hand broadens the market for niche products and services [0], which means there are also smaller winners who have been able to launch a career by connecting with clients / students to whom they provide specialized services. On the other hand, that does not preclude a pronouncement of the "superstar effect" in the presence of the long tail [1] as described in the article, particularly for fungible content where delivery is most critical.

[0] WIRED Magazine (2004) "The Long Tail" https://archive.ph/OuxGP

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail#The_longer_tail_over...

Survival of the fittest.

Human society has had a lot of versions of "how things work" in regards to obtaining and distributing resources. As some of the work force transitions from physical, in-person employment (trading labor for pay) to increasingly virtual employment, some things are de-coupled, like high "cost of living" areas being less strongly related to "high paying employment centers."

But for employees, it's just an amplification of the previous trend towards inequality in employment that was already happening.

Another way to think about this is specialization. A few people can specialize in certain remote tasks - obviously the examples of education (for fitness, academia, etc.) - because creation is not tied to consumption, especially for digital goods and services.

The distribution of employment has always shifted over time as productivity has increased for certain types of work, and then new methods of employment has popped up as technology and entertainment and culture evolved. In a free country a couple hundred years ago, many people might work their own farm and largely sustain themselves off that work. But today a tiny slice of the population manages massive scale farms. What does everyone else do? Industries have evolved from nothing - large scale housing, transportation, etc.

To try to wrap this up, this article isn't going far enough. The goal might be to predict the future. If everything we know we need and want can be produced by a shrinking work force, what will the rest of the population do to earn their keep? Will some kind of redistribution scheme of resources arise, like socialism or universal basic income?

For the most part of the last century, the question was answered by creating more demand to keep the work force steady, thusly increasing the amount of produced goods and services constantly with the increased productivity.

However the increased productivity also applies to extraction of ressources and destruction of ecosystems. On a planet with limited ressources we need to do the exact opposite, imho. That is decrease the amount of work done in extractive and destructive labour and channel all following and already existing productivity gains into sustainable work.

This will definitely need serious redistribution schemes, as well as lots of regulation.

> As some of the work force transitions from physical, in-person employment (trading labor for pay) to increasingly virtual employment, some things are de-coupled, like high "cost of living" areas being less strongly related to "high paying employment centers."

First of all, there's no transition from trading labor for pay. That remains in place ... because capital.

Secondly, the coupling or decoupling is mostly a short-term choice made mostly by capital. We've already seen some companies signalling their intention to pay people less if they live outside the local area and work remote. I see no reason to expect that the state of this coupling will change to anything other than what-works-best-for-capital.

The answer to fewer people being able to serve a larger market is greater specialization.

It's the flip side of facing greater competition due to producers having greater reach; whereas in the past a highly specialized provider, like a yoga-kung-fu fusion aerobics instructor, could only find, let's say, three customers, due to the addressable market being limited to people living in their city, remote service could allow them to find the several hundred potential clients for this service scattered across the world.

> There are already examples of how gains are captured by the few and not the many.

The New York Times - "Feel Bad About Everything, Always"

Remote work is amazing, net on net it vastly improves lives, reduces commute time / traffic / car pollution, reverses the decades long trend of economic activity centralizing in a few boom cities, and I believe will reduce inequality longterm as workers will be able to get good, high-paying jobs no matter where they live.

But but but.. what about the gas stations, shiny offices and all those things we have built with an explicit purpose to take advantage of you physically moving in?

Creative destruction.

That's only for poor people, those who bring you food, clean your house, and deliver your Amazon boxes.

>The New York Times - "Feel Bad About Everything, Always"

This would be a bad thing for them, if the New York Times sold the news, which I don't think they do any more. The New York Times instead sells brand image to people. They sell a series of a talking points, ideas, and topics that show you are in the in group and on the right side. So that when someone brings up remote work, you can show how empathetic you are, and how worldly you are and say "Remote work is fine but really it shows how the gains are captured by the few and not the many, I read in the Times that... ".

Do you have a trustworthy news source that doesn’t do this?

Try telling that to the office cleaner.

Luckily new jobs for house cleaners will be created.

You'd have a stronger argument if remote work didn't have the potential to increase rural living and exurban sprawl, both of which contribute massively to energy waste and ecological destruction. At least in the US.

Boom cities were never the problem. The problem is commuting, which stems from a lack of housing.

Forcing everyone out of the cities creates a worse set of problems. It means more wasteful roads to nowhere and doubling down on our third-world transportation infrastructure. It means more clearing of wild land, one of the best resources the US has if you've done any traveling at all. It means more boom-bust bedroom communities and vacant strip malls. It means more culturally insulated communities and Trump-like politicians.

>The problem is commuting, which stems from a lack of housing.

I think you'll find that a great many people don't want to live in the denser areas where offices often tend to be. You can scold about that all you want, but you could make cities arbitrarily dense and a lot of people, indeed more, wouldn't want to live in them if they weren't making a commuting tradeoff because of work.

If you're going to quote a line, quote the context. The OP was talking about "boom cities" as a problem, which they aren't by themselves. The problem is the unaffordability of the cities, caused by lack of housing, which leads folks to live outside of the city and commute.

My main point was that arguing for remote work/sprawl was not a ecologically-friendly argument. Sure, lots of people want to live in the middle of nowhere. But the negative externalities, looking to the future, are many, and they are something to consider when trying to praise WFH as a potential solution for anything.

Yes, everyone that reads this forum supports WFH because they benefit directly from it. From a birds-eye view though, looking at urban development and the cultural decline of isolated populations in the US, it looks like it could be a disaster.

That seems like a perfectly fine amount of context to quote to me. You could make cities as dense as you want and many people would explicitly choose to live in an area where they can have a private yard. There’s no strategy of densification that will preserve that for everyone.

You can make the inside of your box as amazing as you can imagine and some (not small) segment of people will opt to live where the sun can shine into their yard.

Wouldn’t wfh decrease the cost of living in the city, since currently most high paying jobs make living within commuting distance a requirement? To make an extreme example, cost of living on the Bay Area should go down if wfh becomes widespread. There are other reasons to want to live in SF aside from getting paid a high salary in tech, so housing prices should “fallback” to whatever people value the culture/scenery… at. What you would probably see is a more even (and healthy) distribution of growth in all metro areas instead of being centered in a few with all of the cost of living increases associated with that.

I'm not sure SF is a great example. For most tech workers, they're giving themselves a worse commute by living in the city rather than somewhere else in the South Bay closer, in many/most cases, to where their office is. So, yes, their jobs may be a major reason they're in the Bay Area overall, but mostly not in SF itself.

This is of course much less true in industries like finance.

Depends when I worked in London id have loved to be able to live near the office in Red lion Square or in a flat with a view of the Thames.

Or Fitzrovia

Demand for homes in dense cities outstrips supply though, and I suspect this will continue to hold even if all office jobs offered remote work as an option to those that want it.

Nevermind the fact that only a fraction of all jobs can be meaningfully done remotely, and a majority of employees wouldn't take the option if it was offered anyway.

You can argue that remote work drives demand for larger spaces, but again this comes down to the housing shortage. There's no reason that more 2 and 3 bedroom apartments couldn't be built if taller buildings were actually allowed to be built in the cities where demand for housing is high.

Why do you imagine that rural towns are all terrible suburban sprawl?

The issue is that we have allowed our built environment to become too centralized. In that sense the Boom Cities ARE the problem. Instead of one strip mall a dozen corner stores on an old school, "It's a wonderful life" small town main streets we have Times Square, and a bunch of overbuilt "new urbanist" attempts to mimic the magic that took 200 years to build.

Leon Krier has made this point visually here. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUX70P7UYAEchHS.jpg:large

I don't really agree with your post, but wow, that is a beautiful and profound image.

Large corporations will always win because they have the power and might. Remote work will just allow them to hire cheaply from low income locations and what employees are going to do about it.

> Google [...] would reduce the pay of those who choose to work remotely or move farther from the office. Avoiding the office saves employees money — in commuting costs, for example

I don't understand the reasoning behind this, and I've seen it being used again and again. Employees are compensated on the work they provide during work hours, and only rarely do companies provide compensation to specifically accommodate for commutes, usually done as an incentive for people with costly commutes.

The concern most companies have has to be more about the real estate play, and how the offices they have paid for or are renting won't be getting as much use. Other than that, in terms of energy usage, heating/cooling, etc., I would imagine the cost savings of having people work remotely are considerable.

If anything, as I see it, work from home employees should be compensated for the costs of working from home, which include higher utility expenses, or even office furniture to enable their work — some companies have paid stipends for home office setups, for example.

I think, long term, companies may have to rethink how they set up their offices so not as much cost is sunk in real estate, so much so that they risk penalizing employees who would be saving them money otherwise, if it weren't for the existing office-centric solution.

>I don't understand the reasoning behind this, and I've seen it being used again and again.

They do it because if you won't accept a 20% cut to work out in the sticks then there are plenty of other good people who will.

It's got nothing to do with the length of your commute or the cost of unused offices or even the value you provide (as long as that covers your wages).

They can do this for exactly the same reason they only need to pay a cleaner minimum wage. That is there is more than enough supply to meet the demand.

> They do it because if you won't accept a 20% cut to work out in the sticks then there are plenty of other good people who will.

So the options are:

1. Convince all of the other good people that they can and should demand more.

2. Convince your bosses that you are indispensable.

3. Quit because you don't want to work for a company that thinks so little of you.

Quit work you mean? Because I can tell you now that the executives and owners of big companies don't really think about you as an individual at all.

> Other than that, in terms of energy usage, heating/cooling, etc., I would imagine the cost savings of having people work remotely are considerable.

You'd have much higher costs around compliance and taxation, which represent an ongoing expense since laws are always changing and people moving. That probably works out after a few employees in any given state. Companies also lose money by flying everyone in once or twice a year. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind seeing some math on the subject.

> Google [...] would reduce the pay of those who choose to work remotely or move farther from the office.

Sample size of 1 here: Google approved my working remotely in a small town outside a major city at the same compensation as working in the office in that major city. So no pay cut.

I think there's a game of telephone going on with the facts in these articles:

"could see different changes in pay" -> could lose money" -> "would reduce pay"

Exactly (Google employee here as well). Those articles are completely disingenuous. You could have made the headline “Google will increase the pay of remote workers” and it would be equally true.

> Employees are compensated on the work they provide during work hours.

Industry-average compensation is primarily a function of supply and demand. Remote work increases labor supply and decreases costs of labor. Both of these factors will cause compensation to go down. How employers justify pay decreases is largely besides the point, imo.

> In June, Google told rank-and-file employees it would reduce the pay of those who choose to work remotely or move farther from the office.

To echo the statement from the other Googler who posted, this quote from the article is simply not true. It implies that if any employee chooses permanent WFH, you get a pay cut.

If you follow the link [1] from the article, you'll see the following reasons:

* Google supplied an online calculator to see how their possible relocation would affect their pay

* Pay rates are defined by metropolitan statistical areas (MSA)

* Google says "Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from,"

So, if you choose to WFH permanently and you commute far enough to live in a different MSA than your office, then you might see a paycut.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/the-great-reboot/pay-cut-googl...

1. Perform gradient descent using online MSA calculator and Zillow

2. Move to superfund site nearest NYC or FS

3. Profit!

New York Times articles really disappointing me lately.

Honest question: Why would a company pay an US based engineer a high salary when they can get a team overseas equally or even more qualified (whatever metrics you prefer to use: leetcode count, school ranking, GitHub stars, etc...) for the same amount of money or less? I understand if you are Raedon/Being/... Wouldn't remote work at least in the US force local engineer to accept less money for their work?

No. Companies able to manage additional offshore complexity produce enough per engineer to not care for the savings, and the effort required to deal with that complexity can in many cases be more productively spent on growing revenues. Such companies go offshore for additional talent, not savings.

^ This.

Engineering needs product management. This isn't cheap or easy to do when you're offshoring for cost.

Time zone. For whatever reason, and not for lack of looking, there aren't really development ecosystems like India/Pakistan/Estonia/Slovakia/... in south and central america.

I’m a developer located in Latin America, I’ve worked for several clients and I know tons of companies that outsource work from here. What do you think is missing? I sincerely would like to know the perception from the other side.

Sorry for the delay. I would say it's a variety of things.

One, a lot of what makes India and Pakistan work, or Slovakia, are that there are class natives who can navigate the vetting process. This is huge and there are tons of Indians or Chinese in the valley who can fill this role but who are themselves demonstrated top-tier talent, not just people selling outsourced teams of unknown quality.

Second, English. English is simply an absolute requirement and one of the things that absolutely kills non-US teams is a lack of English skills. Chinese teams have a lot of problems here and it gets even worse elsewhere. Eastern European teams (Poland, Estonia, Solvakia, ...) tend to have competent technical leads (not salesguys) with solid english skills even if the average is zero. I deal with a ton of people who have marginal English skills, but there's a very steep ramp between Bangalore, Chennai, ... and then other options.

Third, and importantly, the populations are large enough that they can provide outsourced work at scale - I'm not talking huge numbers, I'm talking managing a team size of 30-40 people even with departures, etc.

Fourth, there's an honest question of demonstrated competence (or demonstrated good-enough mediocrity, more often than not).

Fifth, there's work culture. I know Indian, Chinese, and eastern european work culture. I know what to expect and there's basically been a selection process at work selecting outsourcing destinations based on what actually works.

I'm probably starting something in a few months. I'd much rather outsource to a common time zone with Pacific or at least eastern time. I wish I could find a way.

Thank you for taking the time to answer. It’s insightful to get to know the perspective from the other side.

If it helps, I can recommend you to take a look at https://nearsoft.com/ it’s a Mexican company, I personally know very talented people working there. They have high standards during interviews, they seem to really care about who they hire (disclaimer, I don’t work there).

Also, even though Costa Rica is a small country they have an interesting growing IT industry, if you haven’t already, you should check it out. I’ve met several great Costa Rican developers.

I hope you find what you’re looking for! :)

Makes sense.

I believe it will, and what Google has done, by adjusting (down) remote salaries, essentially hands managers at lesser companies an argument-ending example.

There will be exceptions, especially among the most skilled and experienced HN readers. But I am on calls all day with engineers and managers whose salaries may vary by six figures depending largely on their location.

When the results of paying far less are acceptable to companies, companies will pay less and less.

Yes but you also have a number of other issues to take into account: timezones, language barriers, cultural differences, ability of an engineer to get on a plane/car/train/boat and meet face-to-face in a reasonable amount of time, and so forth.

Remote work within borders is one thing, but remote work from different continents is an entirely different beast.

Not to mention the sheer difference in labour-related laws and conventions across the world and how little recourse you may have if - let's say - your employee decides to take your source code with them and resell. Or take the idea and start a product themselves. Or anything similar that you could very easily sue locally. How much trouble would you go to sue? Translate and certificate every document? Comply with local laws regarding representation? Can you even sue?

You may think these are extreme examples, and yes it all tends to work out in general, but even with local employees people sometimes get burn so you need to take these into account when jumping into something uncertain. It's becoming more common for sure but there are risks and they are not null.

Many small companies lack the ability to organize these kinds of efforts, as hiring is usually local or word of mouth.

Large companies like NVIDIA/Intel/Microsoft have tried to do it with mixed results. In particular your savings rarely exceed 50%.

If they can put them in US-compatible timezone, sure.

But coordinating teams across anything more than a 4-ish hour difference is a total pain

> when they can get a team overseas equally or even more qualified (whatever metrics you prefer to use: leetcode count, school ranking, GitHub stars, etc...)

Those people are already in demand and oversubscribed, so the US-based engineers are still in demand.

Yes, companies would love to pay less, but at the high end it is already a world market for talent.

The simple answer is that "whatever metrics you prefer to use" include qualifications that overseas engineers often cannot satisfy.

Great engineers are human members of a team, and there's more to a team member than their LeetCode score (seriously?) and/or how many GitHub stars they've obtained.

Just some examples off the top of my head:

If you're building products to target US-based consumers, you don't need to provide as much contextual information to a US-based engineer. They will have a stronger intuitive understanding of the product, and there's a better chance that they'll know when it's appropriate to push back and question something. There's a reduced cognitive load in communicating with them. And of course, there's a better chance you're going to enjoy spending hours working with them.

> Great engineers are human members of a team, and there's more to a team member than their LeetCode score (seriously?) and/or how many GitHub stars they've obtained. I was referring to performance metrics in general, I didn't said those were the ones to take into account. I have definitely seen people here in HN referring to github stars, stackoverflow points, etc... as some sort of badge of honor.

Also I find your answer pretty condescending towards folks overseas, although that's your opinion. In my team at Google, we have people from all over the world, and they are amazing. Don't see how they don't have the "required qualifications" you are referring to.

It really depends on how much influence the engineer has over the final product, and whether it's intended to be marketed locally or globally. The GP's concerns is probably more relevant in small-ish teams developing a US-centric product.

I wouldn't say it's an overarching concern that would justify turning away overseas (disclaimer: not located in US myself) talent, but can't say he's totally wrong in specific contexts..

My apologies. Your anecdotal experiences on a random team at Google clearly prove that anyone who hires US-based engineers at market rates is making a giant financial blunder.

Also it wasn’t even slightly condescending of you to declare that US-based engineers are overpaid and ask HN for validation. It was just a brave stance taken by a bold intellectual who knows better than everyone else.

I would estimate that well over half of Silicon Valley engineers are foreign born. If you add the non local US engineers, you are probably at over 90%.

Those equally or more qualified overseas people working for little were in short supply. Why would they work for you for pennies when they could move to Silicon Valley, make tons more, and have potential for much, much more?

With remote work, what makes you think that the market will be inefficient? The overseas equally or more qualified will demand more money and look for more opportunities.

These companies that adjust pay based on location remind me of the wage fixing scheme led by Steve Jobs. Once Mark Zuckerberg refused to play along, compensation exploded. Companies that pay the best for remote workers will have their pick of the best.

> Why would they work for you for pennies when they could move to Silicon Valley, make tons more, and have potential for much, much more?

Who says all talented engineers overseas can come to the US? There is a huge amount of QA companies in Ukraine that contract their service to the west, for example, can they come to the US? I doubt it. Overseas workers don't get the chance to make demands, US companies have leverage over them. Because there are way more talented engineers than high paying jobs. I have you seen how much people get paid in toptal, and other online contractor companies?

I am saying that the US was already playing the pick the cream of the crop game. It was playing it in two ways. First it identified obvious talent (math Olympiads, etc...). Second, the people who were the most driven got to Silicon Valley by any means necessary, showing tremendous grit.

Examples:

former boss's family got out of Russia, had guns pointed at them on the way to the airport

coworker who got an H1-B, was desperate to get out of Russia, we found him because a product he was working on was exceptional

several coworkers from other countries that were math or computer science olympiads

btw these people end up in American colleges as undergrads or grads

Also, there/are were other tech centers that proved just as if not more attractive than Silicon Valley.

Over 10 years ago, I had a coworker who remarked that all her classmates who stayed in China had become rich. She said that it was because it was an open field.

All you had to do was take a proven American concept and apply it to China. Since there was no existing infrastructure or competition, you had the whole market to yourself.

This wasn't just applicable to tech. People were doing things like opening coffee shops (queue the Luckin Coffee fraud 10 years later).

Also, look at Spotify, JetBrains, WhatsApp, and Shopify.

Many big companies do exactly that, and have done since long before Covid. I work with IT dev, support, and QA groups in India and the Philippines and it definitely can be made to work. There are the usual frustrations though, mostly around timezones and some cultural differences.

> when they can get a team overseas equally or even more qualified (whatever metrics you prefer to use: leetcode count, school ranking, GitHub stars, etc...) for the same amount of money or less?

If they could, they would [0].

[0] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/

Are the wages of US tech workers skyrocketing because they switch jobs often? If so, remote workers can switch even faster. The most capable workers had already emigrated to US, so the question is, has the pool of workers expanded more than the pool of competitive jobs?

> The most capable workers had already emigrated to US

This is insanely wrong. What makes you think that?

i dont see evidence of the contrary

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