Ask HN: What's the hardest thing about remote work, even if you like it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the hardest thing about remote work, even if you like it?

35 pointsj4yav41 comments

Whether in your personal life or professionally, I'm curious about the different struggles that you are having around balancing work and life.

For me, coordinating kids is one of the trickiest things between two working adult's schedules. Flexibility is great, but it cuts both ways; when everything is flexible with work, in some ways it becomes harder to set things up predictably in your personal life because all options are on the table.

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I've been 100% remote since August 2019, and 100% remote+onsite with my customers since April 2008

Here are some pointers:

- have a routine/ceremony that starts your day (doesn't matter what it is, be consistent)

- have a dedicated work space ...but be flexible (eg: I work-from-car sometimes (while my wife drives))

- make sure you eat meals

- make sure you take breaks (water, coffee, bourbon, walks, whathaveyounot)

- be "available" while logged-into work (IM, chat, email, phone, etc) like you would otherwise be if you were "in the office"

- don't skimp on your home office setup - whether it's a curbside desk and $19 Walmart chair or a $15000 custom live edge and stainless steel elm slab conference table and $1500 Aeron chair, be comfortable with your workspace (my "comfortable" might be your "agony", or your "extravagance")

- have a routine/ceremony that ends your day

There is a world of variation in how you accomplish the middle items on my list, but you must have the first and last to be successful: if you don't have defined starts and stops to your day, you'll burn out

This is almost exactly the same thing I have been teaching for years. Spot on. I call the morning/afternoon work routine a "commute" because it helps your brain change gears. The only one I didn't teach was "eat meals" because the people I was teaching had scheduled break times.

The only thing I'd add: Have a backup plan! Power goes out, Internet gets spotty, computers go poof etc.

I heard this in a podcast recently about people's perceptions of the pandemic driven work from home situation. Some folks we're saying they missed the "commute". The hosts argued that they probably didn't miss cramming into a subway, being stuck for an hour in stop-and-go traffic, or being stranded out in the rain. That feeling they were missing were just those clear points of delineation between on and off work. Also that it did involve a clear amount of time set aside that was not work or open, free time.

That point and one about how a pandemic caused, mandatory work from home scenario where many other amenities around home were not available is a really weird situation stuck with me most. In particular keeping in mind that we can ameliorate many of people's least favorite parts going forward.

> The only thing I'd add: Have a backup plan! Power goes out, Internet gets spotty, computers go poof etc.

I've had that happen about as often "at home" as I have "at work" (ie a couple few times a year)

White boarding. We had them everywhere and used them often. The big ones in conference rooms were good and pretty standard, but the tiny ones placed near the actual desks for just quick and slipshod thinking out loud type stuff is what I miss most. For the big group type things I find myself often just pre-diagramming things which is way less efficient, but works as I'd probably be the one drawing anyway.

And part of the problem is that I know there are tools and we've kinda sorta used them every now and then, but at my company at least we don't have a solid broadly used solution. It might be the part mentioned by others about the ever looming "return to office" plans that have lead to it being punted constantly rather than properly addressing the need some way. Part of me hopes that there can be some moment where remote is just accepted and we can take steps to making it work as well as possible (with things like tablets with a stylus distributed) rather than just carrying on in limbo.

So I guess broadly the hardest thing is about how we're still, nearly 2 years later, in a nonideal one foot in, one foot out approach to remote working.

It isn't perfect, but I picked up this [1] Wacom knockoff and I use it daily. It is great for sketching out ideas and makes it easy to export and save the result.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FTE9HS2/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_...

Whiteboarding is at the top of my team's list too. We couldn't live without them after going fully remote so we put together this little doozy: https://sharetheboard.com

It's the closest the real thing, IMHO. But I'd love some candid feedback if you're willing to kick the tires on it.

In answer to the original question (coming in after "lack of whiteboarding"), part of my challenge of going fully remote was training my EXTENDED family on what that means. I had aunties and uncles calling me up in the middle of the day or even showing up unannounced... "because I'm home anyway." Even though sometimes they'd bring fresh baked goods, it was still disruptive.

For me the biggest two are:

1. I used my (relatively short [20 minutes]) commute to listen to music or podcasts and get some separation between work and home.

2. A lack of analog whiteboard-style collaboration. We use Miro (and it’s pretty good once you get used to it), but even though Miro is better for some use cases, it’s way worse for others. The high-bandwidth, three different people are all holding a market and sketching ideas together simply doesn’t have an adequate replacement in a remote world IMO.

Edit to add: 3. Group meals (mostly informal lunches) builds a sense of camaraderie and understanding of your teammates in a way that Zoom never will. I treasure the random nerdy conversations over lunch tables.

Overall, I love remote though and expected I’d hate it.

>Group meals

This is the biggest loss in wfh, imo - it doesn't even matter what the conversation is about: there is value in face-to-face communication

I started carpooling with a college and I really miss my time listening to music or podcasts on my commute

Replace the commute with a 20 minute walk, you can still listen to music and podcasts, and it's healthier for you and the environment, and it still serves as separation between work and home.

I don’t think it’s really a separation if you end up in the same place where you started.

You'd be surprised what a difference it makes. Just the symbolic act of moving helps a lot to get the mind in a different 'mode'.

Would be more like a 2 hour walk unfortunately. Maybe I'll get a bike or something.

I work with hardware so I’ve been hybrid-ish, going in to get equipment, working from the office for a few days, then going off and working from home for a couple weeks, rinse repeat.

I think that this style of hybrid works well. I go in and get reacclimated to the space, get a nice burst of work done over a week or two, then finishing touches and planning comes in the WFH weeks. But what I don’t like about this is that there’s a cost to changing spaces: I’m not at peak productivity until the third day after the move in either direction.

Management is pushing for 3 days a week hybrid, which I think is going to be a nightmare. It’s the worst of both worlds. Tuesday will become Monday, Thursday will become Friday, and Monday and Friday will be spent just queuing stuff up for next Wednesday.

I think hybrid is going to be a disaster for most companies unless they understand this and become a bit more imaginative and less prescriptive (“x days in the office per week”).

Our management was pushing for the same thing. This after I started last summer and was told they were 100% remote for those people who wanted to be.

So far it looks like there's been sufficient pushback that it's not happening. We also work with hardware and the first complaint I heard was the pain in the ass of having to move the hardware between work and home multiple times a week.

Showing my screen. Debugging. Well, any discussion in general.

At the office, you want to talk, just shoot them a message on slack asking when they're free to talk, then walk up to them and talk. Remote, you end up scheduling a meeting, then dropping everything 5 min before and after that meeting.

Also "hanging out" in general. No opportunities for lunch together. Can't complain about work without it being logged in a conversation. I'm excited for the monthly 1 on 1s where I learn that my boss is a human and likes skateboarding, lol. But even the hangouts are rushed and if a meeting is done 10 mins early, we end it 10 mins early.

Keeping it.

Every company all hands for the past year wouldn't be complete without an exec making comments about our eventual "return to work" policy, which has been delayed over and over again by surges and variants.

Asses in chairs is not a "company culture". I'm 10x more efficient in my home office than my open floor-plan desk next to the bathroom (with no sound-proofing) in a high traffic area. The 45-minute commute (each way) that I save largely ends up translating into more hours worked from me. With communications primarily happening over email and chat, we now have written records of decision making processes and we lose a lot less information along the way.

We're not a purely software company, so I understand some roles simply don't work remote, but I don't agree with a company-wide policy preventing regular remote work. I'm not looking forward to the struggle that is on the horizon.

Agreed.

Many bigger companies are pushing to get us all to come back to work.

I'm pretty sure the real reason behind this is if remote work became the norm trillions in commercial real estate would become worthless

Many auxiliary businesses, like caterers, cafe owners, would go out of business.

I have noticed small companies have been much more willing to go all in on remote work. I strongly suspect the board members at many bigger companies have stake in commercial real estate. Or maybe I'm hopelessly navie and without billion dollar office buildings in central Manhattan the economy would collapse....

>if remote work became the norm trillions in commercial real estate would become worthless

That's exactly what I don't get. Why aren't they greedily crunching numbers thinking about how much they can save by selling off half the office space and going to a "come and show your face a few days a week" & floating desks even

There's yearly property tax and millions on upkeep on top of whatever pile of cash goes into holding the property when it can be sold off...and if they sell before all the other companies, they can still get a higher sales prices before commercial real estate plummets

The time saved on the commute was an excellent deal, for me it was about 2 hours saved per day where I could work and get paid and as soon as I clocked out I'd be instantly on my own time. But since I couldn't afford a separate room like a home office, using my bedroom for work made it feel like I was always on call and it added some psychological toll. I also noticed that during the cold months I'd have fewer days of stepping out of the house as well as less physical activity. That that made me feel a bit lethargic but I understand it is my own fault for not planning better a schedule to include enough workouts. Now that I am back in the office I miss working from home quite a bit. I am planning to WFH in the future but better prepare for it in advance.

I feel isolated and stir-crazy. I go for walks before and after work every day, runs on alternate days, bike rides most weekends. Also meet friends for meals or coffee most weekends. It's not nearly enough. Much as I hated the open office, the regular routine of leaving the house to be around other humans (something I had my whole life until March 2020) turns out to have been a load-bearing structure in my well-being. I despised the open office, and my home setup is infinitely better for getting focused work done, but I also don't think I'm cut out for such a monastic life.

I feel exactly the same way. The tech industry's (and my own peers') enthusiasm for remote work sometimes leaves me feeling low-key gaslit about how much I've struggled. I never wanted to work remotely full time, and was totally unprepared to have such an (apparently) important element of my mental health knocked out from under me.

Who cares about whether office talk spurs "innovation" or not? I wasn't asking for my baseline level of human contact to be so completely disrupted, and having this loss so consistently framed in the context of business value is incredibly frustrating.

Like you, I exercise regularly and socialize outside of work. But it's not enough, and I'm tired of the narrative that it can/should be. If you'd have shown me this life two years ago, I'd have told you that I'm living like a shut-in. "Monastic" is a really good way of putting it.

On a positive note, I've been seeing a therapist for most of 2021 and cannot I overemphasize how much it has helped. Isolation has been fertile ground for anxiety and imposter syndrome, but I cope more effectively now and its kept me from losing too much productivity at work. If you're able to work with a mental health professional, I really recommend doing so.

I think I'll come out of all this stronger, but it's been hard. I'm really looking forward to the day where I can seriously consider something local, a few days a week in-person sounds magical.

Thank you for posting this, hang in there!

Staying in the loop. When most of the team resides at the office and I'm the one who's mostly remote, remaining in the loop is really difficult.

There's a lot of minor and major discussion on certain things, decisions are made, without one being able to witness them. One simply gets informed. Staying in the loop takes conscious effort.

Might be a middle-management-tier take, but I think there's value in "water cooler" talk when people are working in close physical proximity. Lots of brainstorming, new ideas, new perspectives on how to tackle problems that you rarely get organically via digital comms.

Isolation. If you circle of friends is small and you get most of you human interaction from the office, it is going to be rough the first months. You may feel lonely and even depressed. Distractions. It is very easy to get distracted at home. It helps to have a separate room for work without distractions. It is also good to have an schedule for work.

A few things come up for me, as well as friends who I talk with:

1. Clear separation of work space and home space. Yes, a separate room can help with this, yet physically going somewhere for work feels more effective for me.

2. Connecting with colleagues at the office. Informal face-to-face interactions help to foster communication and build trust over time. The hallway chats, lunch discussions, and personal conversations in a face-to-face setting create a stronger connection that what is usually possible online.

3. For focused work, a quiet home office office is very effective, as so many businesses have gone with open-plan offices. I organize my schedule so I can do focused work on at-home days.

3. No whiteboards, random chats with coworkers - the barrier to start a discussion is a bit high if you don't want to spam people on Slack with stupid questions. As a result I sometimes dig for hours into things that could be a quick discussion as I don't want to bother other people.

2. No morning routine that forces you to go out; also I'm doing fewer real breaks than in the office, I just procrastinate more

1. Some days there's too much going on on Slack and I check too often (and feel like I need to be available all the time) and can't get any real work done. Although lately I'm becoming a bit more relaxed with that.

Informally discussing and idea or approach. At work i can walk over and ask and we can brainstorm a solution, calling a meeting or typing it out in chat is just not the same.

It's hard to concentrate when my kids are screaming and crying.

It harder to communicate with coworkers since you can't just stroll by their desk to talk.

It's harder to do certain parts of my job because of dedicated hardware that lives in the office and operating it remotely is not nearly as good.

Transitioning from months of underutilization to suddenly being expected to actually work at my 100% capacity for 8 hour days. The muscle that allows me to do it doesn't come back over night, it starts as an absolute fight where the only option is to go to a public place and sit myself down and say no bathroom breaks until 1 hour worth of work is done..

And on and on, slowly building up. Until finally my normal 100% is just an effortless thing I do as a biproduct of sitting down and starting.

Now in the office I did have of course 3 or 4 month periods in a go where the only thing I had to do was browse reddit and Slickdeals.net... when work came back to me it was easier because of the psychological fear and pressure of just "what if someone sees me?"

I have been remote for over 30 years: the hardest thing is still meetings with laptops and a whiteboard where you can work together on some problem. I have been building a fairly large project the past 2.5 years with a small team and we are now using the Quest 2 for meetings. After decades of shite solutions, this actually works for us so far. Higher res and less bugs in the software would improve it but this is the best thing for remote I have tried.

Outside that I don't have any downsides to mention; I meet enough people outside work, I meet many people online to talk shop and hobbies. I have an office in the house so when I leave that, the day is done.

The occasional meetings in the kitchen area, or going for lunch and getting to know the company gossip that wouldn't be discussed via other channels.

Other than that not much, as I have been mostly remote for several years now.

Not being able to do work and play in physically different places. I'm so damn tired of sitting at my desk where I work all day, but a good portion of my personal hobbies involve sitting at that desk.

Another thought: Maybe I could do something with the lighting to make it feel like a different space during non-work hours.

Inertia sometimes. That is, I sometimes go days without any exercise. Also, while I like being alone there are times when it feels isolating.

Then other times I’m social and it feels more intense because I’m not used to it. I will say that while I always hesitate to do something social, I almost never regret it. It almost always works out way better than I imagined it would thinking I look something the cat dragged in.

Personally: Focused time for non-work projects.

Professionally: unblocking between busy teams of individuals. Sometimes things just stall for the want of 5 minutes on a busy person's calendar.

Heating bills in winter, too much heat in the summer

Listening to child laugh or cry. FOMO

Having family asking stuff, just can't focus

Aw you know I miss my friends! I’m actually going to go back full time because of this! But I don’t have a family yet so I think that’s where I get most of my social interactions

Not being able to learn as much by seniors help. Definitely not worth the +2 hours per day I was losing before this though.

If other people are in the home with you, you can easily look like you don’t even have a job.

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