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Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

I always see a lot of hemming and hawing in these threads but it's impossible to underscore just what a HUGE boon remote work is for people who don't want to or can't live in Tier 1 cities like SF or NYC. My career has taken on an entirely new trajectory. Prior to the pandemic I worked at two different companies over 6 years. Since the start of the pandemic I've changed jobs 3 times and my TC has almost tripled.

There are definitely downsides to it no doubt. I'm a social person and I miss shooting the shit with coworkers and in-person interaction. But I have to laugh when I see statistics in the article like "workers view being forced to be in the office full-time as equivalent to a 5% pay cut". 5%? Are you serious? For me, being asked to come into the office = I must physically live near my employer = I take more like a 70% pay cut. For 70% I'll find another social outlet!

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I was forced to torpedo a previous career because a relative got sick, and then I got sick...moving to the city wasn't a good idea but the only choice in that industry, so I had to move on (I grew up in the city in question, utter hellhole, commutes are horrendous, I would have moved because I loved the work but that was all).

Obviously, I have a biased perspective but what frustrated me wasn't the loss to my own career. I just got on with it, retrained, moved on. But the fact that I had useful skills, had spent years developing them, and the most rational thing for me to do was to literally start from zero in an industry that was more accommodating...which seems a bit silly.

So I wouldn't even frame this as a personal thing. The reason the career development opportunity is so large is because the opportunity for employers is so large...and, ofc, they are the ones resisting this.

My wife has a chronic, expensive, difficult to manage, and unpredictable health condition. Having to leave her to be in an office when I’ve been doing great work from home is a show stopper for me. And I’m always upfront about that with employers, I get some companies have an on-prem mentality and I’m respectful of that. But it doesn’t work for me, so I’m not trying to waste their time or mine. And my current employer while I regularly complain about the logistics of working in a gigantic enterprise has been very respectful of our situation and hasn’t once ever made me feel like I’m slowing down or underperforming because of it. So long as I keep making the company money and they keep paying me, neither of us cares where the other sits.

I’m fine with people rotating on and re-training

We do it through college then stop. Think of it like term limits.

How much of this is really actually technical work and just data entry, sexed up for cashiers that got older?

Isn’t this what automation and division of labor are meant to do?

Good job, we achieved the goals. Go do something else.

Yep, my TC is 3x what it was 2 years ago and my career feels like it's on a new trajectory as well because I now have access to a much larger, much better pool of companies to work for.

'Tier' 1 by what metric?

Probably population, population density and/or economic output per square mile.

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