Comment by drewburg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewburg | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

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.

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

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