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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

It's funny that no one wants to admit that Covid-19 was the forcing function for shifting to remote wholesale. I have many peers who have been fighting for internal accessibility of working remotely, most of whom gave up and jumped ship. I even know a few people who left Stripe in 2019 due to their inflexible remote work policies.

So to now come out and say "look at all the remote hiring we're doing" sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, because you have no choice!

The talent has realized they have all the cards and bargaining power in terms of remote work right now. Anyone who is fighting to return to the office is missing the point. We should all be striving to unlock permanent mobility within our professions.

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> permanent mobility within our professions.

This is one of the most understated things about remote work. I hate when the arguments for the benefits of remote work all seem to end with "well you don't have to sit in traffic". It's way way more than that.

* I just moved across the country. I didn't hate where I lived but it was meh, moved to Colorado where I'm now going skiing every weekend and a general 180 for my lifestyle.

* I'm planning far more trips. If my office is now my laptop so who says I can't do it from anywhere. I just came back from a few weeks in Hawaii and planning another trip to the Keys in a month or so. I work my regular hours in all of these places.

How I look at work has completely and diametrically shifted in the last 2 years, and it's made me a much more active and healthier person. It's honestly hard to believe how one change in my career (going remote) has been in service of all of this.

This is realistic only in your 20s-early 30s. Once you start a family, relocation is hard, more of a chore than a perk.

It only works in your 20es because everyone else in your age group is also relocating. When you move you tear up your friends network and have to make new friends. Sounds easy, but people only have room for so many close friends in their life, they will be friendly to you but most won't have room to add another friend so making close friends is hard.

I’m at the age where most of m friends are flung across the country. Close relationships take tons of time and mental investment so at this point I like living in lcol and flying out for a week to visit or them visiting me

WFH has obviously lots of advantages for those with kids too. No more paying half a salary for childcare so they can be looked after because you are cooped up in an office. Also in terms of living somewhere kid friendly.

Watching a kid while working is not really possible. They get into too much.

Depends on the age and you can also do some of the work later when they are asleep and start earlier etc.

Under the age of 12/13, it is just not possible. I am a parent of 2 young kids and will NOT believe anyone who says that they can work from home with a 7 year old in the house without another caretaker present. I have seen it firsthand and it is just not possible to wing it with a kid in the house who has no one else to attend to.

It very much depends on the kid, and your appetite for low-level risk.

In the end, you likely don't lock your knives away, and you can bet that your kids know where they are.

It would have worked with me at 7 but not my sister. I was babysitting a 2 year old by myself by the time I was 10.

I agree with you. There might be some alternatives though. Where I live (Nordic country) we can choose to work less time when we have kids. If one parent only works 80% that means he/she (most often she) can work from 8 am to 3 pm and be done. If the kids are in school or pre-school this may be enough. Of course, it requires pre-school, kindergarten or similar for smaller kids (school basically starts at the age of 6 here).

Without kindergarten I don't see how you could work full time and take care of a kid under 6 years old. Especially not the first 2-3 years.

I suppose once you have kids, working from home is also more of a chore than a perk, which I suspect is a big part of reason for the split in attitude

As somebody who has done it for almost 11 years, it depends: on its own, it's actually cool that you get the flexibility to deal with kids' schedules; however, if it means sharing the house 24h with them or the wife, as it can happen in early age or under lockdowns, it can be very challenging, and there the office feels like respite.

Working from home for the past 2 years has allowed me to help a lot with my own growing family. I do clock in my normal work (if anything I do more now because of my home setup, being able to jump in and out of work, whatever the hour.) My kids have certainly grown up accustomed to the setup, too. We've got good boundaries and I'm able to see and take part in a lot of their "firsts", all while continuing to do good work.

Or, later, when all of your kids are moved out. I've been working at home for about 12 years now. I would not even start a conversation with a company that wanted me "onsite".

My work location exceeds anything any other company could possibly provide me. Except, maybe I don't have snacks sitting around all the time, I don't get free lunches.. and, I don't have a ping pong table to challenge my co-workers at.

I miss a few of those things, but, generally, I'm happier working at home.

I agree, but realistically that takes you in the 50+ range. The median age of the US workforce, so the top of the curve, is 42 (under 40 if minority or in tech but still well above 30).

There is no requirement to start a family after early 30s, or really ever.

It's not directly about constant relocation. It is about keeping options open and the freedom comes with it. Yes, relocating has it's costs especially on one's social circle, but I'd still prefer a job that lets me decide where I work.

What if my aging parents get sick and I want to spend time with them? Maybe my partner doesn't have the ability to work remotely and needs to relocate for work? What if I develop a health condition that can be improved by location (climate, air quality, distance to medical center)? All of these can be pretty stressful situations and apply to all ages. Do I really want to be forced to find another job or deal with possible financial insecurities during any of these?

On the other hand, the company I work for that IPO'd the year before COVID is now hiring a ton of remote...in Mexico City, the Philippines, and in Poland.

So I'd correct your phrasing: "The talent in the US have all the cards and bargaining power". So the "smart" thing companies are doing is find talent outside the US.

And also before anyone mentions lower quality devs (for which I have an eye roll and a "get over yourself"), I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.

> I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.

There is. The best devs are equal as developers, but local developers have an intuitive understanding of the market and so will make good decisions for the future without needing to be told, while remote ones won't have that feel and so will write code that doesn't scale. Note that remote and local is relative to your target market. If you want to sell to Poland then developers in Poland have the advantage, if you want to tell to the world you need developers from all over the world to capture as many different cultures as you can.

I don't know about Poland, but I know in India there are a lot of bad developers who wouldn't even try to be a developer in the US. This is nothing about their best developers who are just as good as anyone else but you have to shift through more bad ones. (There are a lot of bad ones in the US as well, just not as many)

What?

Sorry but that makes no sense to me. There are good developers and bad developers. Doesn't matter where they're from.

If you're talking about "understanding of the market" that has nothing to do with development. Might make a difference if you want the 1 man startup kind of person, but still, that has nothing to do with actual development. I sincerely don't understand how you can equate lack of knowledge of a local market with writing code that doesn't scale.

Hiring developers for their understanding of the market sounds to me like you're not in need of a developer. Even then, once a good developer gets into a specific market he'll learn it just like a local developer would.

For some anecdotal evidence, I've never set foot outside of my country (Brazil) and worked with very few US developers that are in the same ballpark as me. I've met people from the Philippines, Greece, Sweden and many other countries that are better. Country is a non-factor.

IMO being a good developer has nothing to do with the zip code you were born in. People become good developers if they're invested in it and work on it. Maybe you're a tad better if you were born with the right genes, but 99% of it is self-improvement.

Being a good developer is not only about coding skills. It is about right the right product. Sure someone can give you a feature list, but if you have an idea should you implement it - the right answer means you get a large bonus, but the wrong can result in losing your job.

I agree with you and never said that. But specifically hiring local developers for "knowing the market" doesn't match that criteria to me.

I've given plenty of ideas that were profitable, relevant to the product, market and vision of the company. Yet I never lived anywhere close to those markets.

Maybe you had contact with only low quality developers of other countries or we're not speaking about the same thing here...

The reason India gets a bad rep because it has a lot of people whose best chance out of poverty is to try and break into tech to make money. So the noise is higher and there is no doubt about it. But thats just because of the population and choices they have. You said US has bad ones but not that many. That is again because if you look at Per capita, there aren't that many devs in US especially people trying to get into tech. Well, that is kinda changing. Nowadays, all these bootcamps popping up are milking money in the US and I am interviewing plenty of people who are bootcampers and can't write a single line of code correctly. So there is that.

> I've worked with enough of these devs by now to tell you there's next to no difference in quality.

Sure. But if your company is not a Tier-1 or Tier-2 company. You will not have access to those quality developers... at least in India.

> hiring a ton of remote...in Mexico City, the Philippines, and in Poland

I think FAANG developers have protected themselves from that by normalizing leetcode-style interviews. Absolute majority of developers here in Eastern Europe are not prepared to implement some knapsack algorithm on whiteboard in 20 minutes (yes, even the good ones!).

Only a matter of time. If it can be gamed, it WILL be gamed. Do you really believe that non FAANG devs cannot crack leetcode if they really wanted to ?

> If it can be gamed, it WILL be gamed. Do you really believe that non FAANG devs cannot crack leetcode if they really wanted to ?

Well, of course it can! I presume this is how absolute majority of FAANG devs got there in the first place (judging from the popularity of leetcode, CtCI, etc.). It is just that people who have time, ability and motivation to "game" (e.g. learn) all of the required skills (leetcode-style questions, distributed systems design (even for positions that have nothing to do with distributed systems), behavioral (remember, here in Eastern Europe people don't always behave in typical American "happy-positive" ways, in fact you would be considered weird by your coworkers if you do that, but you will fail an interview to FAANG-type companies if you tell them straight up that your boss was an asshole or the code was complete crap) and don't forget about good written and spoken English) usually aim to move to western countries, because why would they chose to work for peanuts on remote (did you see Google salaries in Poland? I assume they will pay similarly for remote positions if you happen to live in that location).

Yep. The "remote or nothing" advocates are forgetting that it is levelling the playing field and now if I have to hire remote anyway, I would hire anywhere in the world. I have worked with many developers across US and the world and I can tell you that there are bad developers everywhere and great developers everywhere. Sure, in some places, noise is high but overall if you know how to hire developers, you can get a good one for a fraction of the cost and this is the reality.

Of course everything can be made to work but in my experience and from what I've heard from others there are some cultural differences, language barriers and time zone problems that makes this is bit less efficient and sometimes outright hard.

For a small or medium company it may also be a bit more work to handle foreign employment laws and tax laws.

> It's funny that no one wants to admit that Covid-19 was the forcing function for shifting to remote wholesale.

On the contrary, I feel like HN has a hard time admitting that remote work didn’t conquer the workplace like we were told it would at the beginning of the pandemic.

Finding remote jobs is definitely a little bit easier now, but actually getting those jobs seems to be even harder than ever now that everybody is competing for them. Some companies are embracing remote, but it seems many more are eager to get back to in-office work as soon as reasonable.

The standard corporate fortune 500 types are pushing very very heavily to go back to the office. In my experience, this seems to be driven majorly by the executives and managers. I believe this is because in so many of these large companies the managers and executives spend so much of their time in constant meetings, which is better in person. In person you sit around in a nice office, you talk with people, and do your power points. Remote you stare at a zoom call with no cameras on and talk and people occasionally talk back. These companies also seem very set in their ways and don't try and change to figure out how to work remotely better. I recently left one of these companies not long ago and these seem to be ring true from similar corps.

I am seeing a lot more smaller tech companies and smaller firms that are embracing remote. The small companies where there aren't multiple layers of management, where cancelling an office lease is a big improvement to the owner. They are going remote. I also took a remote tech job, and it seems more innovative companies are embracing remote.

My prediction, which may be wrong, is that traditional companies that go back into the office are going to face strong attrition to remote companies. And companies that go remote are also going to get a huge benefit in talent. I know a lot of really great engineers that do not want to move to SF/Seattle/NYC/Boston. There are great engineers in small towns and cities that like to live near friends and family, and get good salaries for the area (that are lower than big companies). These people are going to go to the remote first companies, leave their old stodgy companies. This is a huge boon for companies that are willing to take it.

> My prediction is that traditional companies that go back into the office are going to face strong attrition to remote companies. And companies that go remote are also going to get a huge benefit in talent.

Your prediction is right that remote work might benefit small companies, but there is a big risk. As soon as those companies grow to a decent size, then they middle management layers which is typically imported from outside. In a remote-only setup with no opportunity to form strong connections, small innovative companies may find it hard to transition to big established giants.

> it seems more innovative companies are embracing remote

maybe because early stage companies, who do not have communication overhead find it easy to embrace remote and such companies are more innovative by their nature? If that is true, then a real test will come when these companies need to scale.

> remote work didn’t conquer the workplace like we were told it would at the beginning of the pandemic

This is not my observation and experience. I've worked "remote" for 20 years. During that time I've noticed a gradual increase in the prevalence and acceptance of remote work, to the point where around 2017 it was common to have "remote-only" organizations. I worked in a few of those. But there were still "remote-mixed" organizations where as a remote participant you were usually calling in to the dreaded Polycom-in-a-meeting-room (or the modern Google Hangouts equivalent).

What I have seen since 2020 is that the "remote-mixed" orgs converted to "remote-only". They no longer have meeting participants in meeting rooms. They're all online. They have been hiring people wherever they can find them, rather than beard-stroking about whether they can handle another remote worker or not. The result, at least at the places I can see into, is that I am skeptical that they will ever truly go back to how it was. How, for example, can you have meetings where the majority of participants are in a room, when you spent 2 years hiring ex-Amazon people in Seattle and ex-Google people in NYC, and your headquarters is in the city (SF)?

I also did remote for a long time before Covid, and I noticed the industry moving towards accepting remote in sort-of lurches.

First it was OK for exceptional cases where the person was really important or had some medical-ish rationale. Then ten years later all those remotes were "normalized" and people got home-office subsidies. Then Covid hit and it was WFH everybody temporarily. Then Covid obviously wasn't going away maybe ever, and it was "hybrid" which I read as "manager decides." Now the workforce is making demands and we'll see where that leads.

(Ironically enough I turned down a job last year because it was on-site and would require a move, and then Covid didn't go away and they closed that office and put everyone on remote.)

I believe it was Andreessen who said over and over again that proximity is a competitive advantage and thus startups will always favor it and by extension so will the Valley. I don't even disagree with the premise, but it sure looks like people are going to "route around" that advantage in order to capture other advantages for the foreseeable (forever-Covid?) future.

The question (that I cannot answer) is will companies find ways to work full remote. Hallways and lunchroom accidental meetings are where a lot of things get discussed.

I don't believe hybrid with some full remote some not can work. You can do everyone in the office on specific days (M-F, or only Tuesday...), but I don't think a mix can work.

My company is hiring right now and many of the candidates we are finding are looking because their company is going back to the office. I think you are right about the everyone competing for them. There are more people that value remote now than before and are looking for organizations that allow it.

Not that I disagree, but I would like to add that I think another contributing factor is the livability of the Bay Area.

Back in 2013 I might have wanted to live in the Bay Area despite how already costly it was. Today, I make far more than I did back then and there's no way in hell I'm living in the Bay Area both for financial and cultural reasons.

>So to now come out and say "look at all the remote hiring we're doing" sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Yeah, because you have no choice!

What you're saying isn't as ubiquitous as you might think. I left my last company because remote work was "just temporary" for more than a year and I was unable to plan my life around "just temporary" remote work. What you perceive as choiceless is still a choice (being badly made) by many companies.

Interesting, I know folks at Stripe that have been remote since around or before 2019, and one of the reasons I joined Stripe was because of the fantastic remote policies (hint: they are awesome). I wonder if 2019 was a tipping point for remote work at Stripe?

The other large companies I've interviewed at for the past couple years definitely felt like they tacked on remote work because of COVID, and I wasn't confident it would last once the pandemic calmed down.

The real question is in 5 years - after it is safe to be 100% in person with no mitigation measures will companies go back to full in office. Right now my company is saying anyone who wants to can be full remote for forever. I've been around long enough to know that once a certain number of people are in the office, the people around the water cooler get promoted first so I'll be going back to the office at least one day a week once it is possible. (I live within a long bike ride of the office so this isn't a big deal for me so long as the weather is okay)

Which is to say i don't trust full remote to last.

> Anyone who is fighting to return to the office is missing the point. We should all be striving to unlock permanent mobility within our professions.

It's not mobility if you're being forced to work in a way that doesn't suit you. If everyone is remote, then the x% of developers that don't want to be remote are left without an alternative.

Sometimes you need a forcing function for change.

This is the cynical view. Remember, the reason anyone is looking for work is because they have to work, too. One could go so far as to say the entire human enterprise is carried out by force.

> the entire human enterprise is carried out by force

This is true not because we are human, but because we are living things.

Only according to the pessimist. It’s arguably less true for humans than for other living things. I can end my life at any point.

“The whole world is made of people who didn’t kill themselves today. Life can get very difficult, very sad, very upsetting… but you don’t have to do it. You really don’t have to do it… because you can kill yourself.” Louis CK

Any bad thing I have to do, I am putting myself through. Agency is freeing.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

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