Ask HN: Is remote work killing your network? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is remote work killing your network?

78 points71a54xd107 comments

After two years of being beaten into this new way of working I honestly feel more at a loss for what my career is than any other time in my life.

I've been doing software work about four years now, first year or so was at a big co. next two were at a series B startup (8 mo. in person the rest remote due to covid).

I took a full-remote job at another startup thinking their processes would be better calibrated and I'm finding being social / building any kind of work relationships being nothing but an uphill battle. I'm not incredibly social outside of work, sure I can go to a bar and meet new people relative to a group of friends and don't necessarily think I have serious social anxiety (more than the average person) but the idea of 80% of accessible work for me (looking at my level of ability / experience / leetcode foo) is sort of freaking depressing.

My growth has without a doubt stalled, I can focus sort of but working from home with an office isn't great and having to pay for a noisy co-working space isn't exactly a "win" either.

I'm in New York currently, sort of decided to hold out while I have a group of friends here / sort of took a risk hoping office culture would sort of come back. Realizing that's likely not looking like a probable outcome at this point and curious what others on HN think about this. Even at the Big Co. I could get lunch with people, found mentorship relatively easily etc. Now, it's this bizarre constant process of scheduling, trying to "leverage" the time of who you're talking to and all feels very effete and robotic. I should also add that if I ever have to start doing meetings in VR I'll willingly just become a lumberjack and chuck my MacBook into the nearest river.

Basically, I'm on the fence in terms of moving into a rural area with cool outdoor things (and lower CoL) since why live in New York without an office. Or stay in NYC for the "network" but what's the point if I'm not super social and if I don't have the chops to really see the comp gains you get working here?

The Future of Work TM is looking pretty bleak - what do you kind folks think?

Cheers!

View on HN

I agree. I'm in the same boat and I don't like remote work at all. It feeds into my weaknesses and reduces my strengths. I'm tired of all the talk about "You should not rely on office for socializing". Forget socializing, I feel remote work is dissipating even the camaraderie that used to exist within teams at work. It is making mercenaries out of us.

Yeah, the most depressing part of this is that I'm even jealous of the social camaraderie my finance roommate talks about having with the other analysts he spends late office nights with. At least he has the option of an office and people actually go. I'm even saying this as someone who'd admittedly sort of weird, not super social. If everything is remote, I'm tempted to give up on work socializing and just live with some friends of mine in the mountains in CO.

After a certain age, you realize you can only form certain kinds of friendships by spending a lot of time with people struggling on similar problems. Granted, last year I attempted to start a company full remote and I was able to build sort of similar bonds, but it's way too hard to gauge people. Those efforts sort of faded after one of our founders turned out to be too emotionally unstable. But yeah.

edit - but maybe at 27 this is really just me realizing I'm not that social, don't really like people and should maybe just move on from some kind of idealized social life...

It is simply much too hard to build connections when you are not face-to-face with someone. I have read countless articles and HN threads on introverts, extroverts, friendships, relationships, meetups etc, countless hours wasted on this topic and that is my pithy conclusion.

Agree. Thank you for not using this as an opportunity to shill the metaverse :)

Now why in the world would I do that?

Passing stranger here, whenever these sorts of convos happen on here I like to try and imagine the implication, but not investigate further.

Right now I’m assuming you’re the CEO of Metaversal, a fictional metaverse startup that wants to compete with Facebook via a subscription only model (open source code tho, ofc). Best of luck in your endeavors

' give up on work socializing and just live with some friends of mine in the mountains '

Go do it. Now. Spend your free time chatting on the chairlifts and the whitewater parks and backcountry campsites.

I caught a bull shark off my balcony this week. I have bush all around. I travelled the world BEFORE COVID and socialised in all the ways while people grabbed onto the dream and pushed foward with their careers. And now? My travelling the world helped me sort out what was important to me. I love to code, yet i dont like the rat race. I thank covid for allowing me to no longer have to FEIGN socialising to get ahead. I no longer have to be apart of the rat race, i can live and be wherever i want, and still change the world with my code.

Covid lays bare like any other major tramaua to ones life would. 10yrs ago i did my back in; that was my kick start. I said if i could ever feel normal again, i would use that to go explore. and i did. Listen to your covid trauma, if its telling you that you have spent too much time chasing the rat-race, and lost the opportunity to nurture those life connections. dont wait. go connect.

The meaning of life to me is love. No matter how much money you have, without love (of a thing, a friend, a person, a stranger) you have nothing.

> I feel remote work is dissipating even the camaraderie that used to exist within teams at work.

To me this was a major benefit of remote. We went from a place with informal rules and influence to one that is more formal and thus easier for me to understand. The motivations of mercenaries are nice and simple and straightforward.

I feel this is why leetcode rules the roost in the tech industry. Maybe it used to be more about the "approach to the problem and the way the candidate communicates his/her/their thought process", but even when I'm interviewing I have a hard time convincing the others in the panel when the candidate does not present the exact solution even if it is clear they can code and are able to understand the problem.

So what started as a way for a team to gauge the abilities of the candidate and more importantly if the candidate will play well in the team is now an examination with right/wrong answers supplemented by a half-assed "behavioral" interview with some canned questions.

I've read the interview guides at some of my past organizations. The total outcome of the behavioural questions was essentially making sure they were not an ass. Interviewers frequently did not bother to write anything down for them.

Everything else hinged on the leetcode/Java or Python trivia.

Just "their" is fine.

> I'm tired of all the talk about "You should not rely on office for socializing"

I've said similar things, but it's very important to note I'm saying that OTHERS should not force ME into the office to fulfill THEIR social needs. I'm happy working from home, and if push comes to shove, I'm saying that people's social needs should not be a consideration when deciding whether we all work from an office or from home.

I think it's great for people to fulfill their social needs at work, but I have a problem if their social needs become the reason I'm force to set aside my own needs and go to the office.

A team is a condition of mutual obligation. Teams are not the only way of organizing the economy: we have already seen the rise of gig work in the service sector, and I expect that more mercenary models of remote work and contracting have a bright future on the white-collar side of things. But to the extent that I have the obligations of a teammate to you, I expect you to share in the obligations of a teammate to me.

Of course, but is fulfilling your social needs a requirement for being a good teammate? And does the team have any responsibility to me to allow me to work in a comfortable environment (from home)?

Trust, respect, collaboration, mentorship, patience, sacrifice, etc. are services I am happy to perform for my in-office colleagues because they are real people really in front of my tickling the empathy parts of my ape brain, and I identify with them as my people. You are a rectangle on a computer screen. The same expectations apply but the ape-brain emotional supports do not kick in; it is more difficult and less pleasant work.

We don’t have to be best friends, but yes, showing up is part of the “teammate” package. You don’t get to withdraw that part and still demand all the same things from me.

There are also many of us who are fully capable of providing those services and treating our coworkers like "real people" remotely. If you're working in an org that is forcing your to work in an environment that you despise, why not leave for one that better aligns with your values rather than treating your coworkers like subhumans?

That’s the plan! In order to do that though, there has to be some team which requires its members to show up (those who were remote during the pandemic, those who may wish to join later), which the parent feels is unfair.

I think both our preferences are legitimate and people should be able to sort themselves into teams that suit their preferences.

I understand people are distressed about commuting and the office. I’m also distressed about the prospect of spending the majority of my waking hours over the next 30 years on Zoom. If that’s the way things are shaping up I need to go be a farmer or something.

> If that’s the way things are shaping up I need to go be a farmer or something.

Is this something you entertain as an actual possibility or shudder to think about?

I knew I was meant to be a software engineer from about 9 years old until March 2020. I think I will code for the rest of my life. Hopefully I’ll find some way to collaborate in person with people about technical projects for the long haul. But I don’t know how many more videoconferences I can take. 5.5 hours of them today. Anything to make it stop.

Just to be clear, I don't think it's always unfair for companies to require employees to "show up". I only think it is unfair if the only reason they are doing so is to satisfy the personal social needs of employees, because they are putting the personal needs of some employees above the personal needs of other employees.

> because they are putting the personal needs of some employees above the personal needs of other employees.

If a company stays remote because you do not personally need social interaction at the office, what has just happened?

Your personal needs have been put above the personal needs of other employees.

I don’t think the parent was suggesting that companies stay remote _because_ the employees don’t need interaction.

(IMO companies stay this way because it’s simply cheaper and the hiring pool is bigger, but that’s not important in this discussion)

It just happens to benefit those whose prefer to stay at home.

> the hiring pool is bigger

In the US, this is only a benefit to bigger businesses or businesses with a presence in multiple states already (or those willing to take on quite a bit of new administrative work).

I work for a 15-person remote company based in a single state and the additional overhead required to understand taxation, labor laws, and other issues in even neighboring states is higher than you might think. We're putting it off and just hiring locally for now.

What do companies near the border do? If you are a small firm in NYC I can’t imagine it being unusual to employ people from NJ and Connecticut ad well as NY, and even further afield like PA. in Baltimore I can see you could have commuters from both virginias, Maryland, Delaware, Phillidelphoa, New Jersey and DC.

I think NY,CT, NJ are some of the few states with a kind of reciprocity agreement in place that makes this a bit easier.

I’m in Portland, OR and pre-pandemic, we’d have no issue hiring someone in Vancouver, WA, because they’d drive 15 minutes to our Portland office. Now, we choose to turn them away because of the bureaucracy and worry that we’re going to do something wrong. One day we’ll have to cross that (metaphorical/physical) bridge, but we’re not there quite yet.

It’s really easy for big businesses that have big HR departments and/or already have a physical presence in another state. But for 15 people, one doing HR part-time, it’s just not worth it right now.

If you can’t afford to pay to work out all of that complexity you probably can’t afford to be based in NYC. You might be better off being located in one of the suburbs and pulling talent from only one of those states.

Also there are probably a number of firms that specialize in dealing with that kind of situation so you can get outside help affordably.

Fair point. One important difference is that my social needs can be met on my own, while others want to force me into an unpreferred situation to fulfill their own needs.

There's a difference between "just let me work the way I want" and "just make them work the way I want".

Ideally, those who want to work from an office could, while others on the same team could work from home, and everyone would be considerate enough to make it work. This is working well enough at my current company.

> Ideally, those who want to work from an office could, while others on the same team could work from home, and everyone would be considerate enough to make it work.

Again, this is putting the personal preferences of one group above those of another group. What you describe is only ideal if the office people don't mind working with the at-home people and vice versa. You don't have to be considerate of someone else's preferences if you're willing to leave for another job.

Personally, the next job I have will be office only with 0 off-site employees. It's my preference and hopefully I'll find a company whose preference aligns with my own.

Every decision a company makes treats people differently. The goal should be treating everyone fairly. If a person disagrees that they are being treated fairly, they can make their case and try to get something to change or they can get a new job.

If you were to somehow do your work in a way that didn’t require me to join video calls with you, that would be fine. I find those calls as hellish as you find commuting or the city.

>people should be able to sort themselves into teams that suit their preferences.

The teams are going to be companies, in my opinion. There are going to be 'remote' companies and 'in person' companies. That's the only way this type of self-sorting will work, people won't join a company not knowing for sure whether they're committing to an in-person or remote working experience.

I disagree. I think this is going to be like other work life balance questions. Yes the tone is set from the top but each team is going to interact with each other in different ways. I think it will be difficult for an entire organization to make a hard and fast rule.

> I think it will be difficult for an entire organization to make a hard and fast rule.

Thinking about it more, I guess you're right. There will always be sectors within organisations where it's considered that face-to-face meetings and working physically in the presence of other team members is necessary to make effective progress.

> We don’t have to be best friends, but yes, showing up is part of the “teammate” package. You don’t get to withdraw that part and still demand all the same things from me.

… but they arn't.

The person who has meaningful and deep relationships outside work isn't demanding all the same things from you.

Most work are in dense cities and cities are inherently expensive. For the commute to be meaningful, everyone in your team has to be within a short distance of these dense cities.

The “teammate” package you propose is pretty expensive all things considered. You might not realize nor care about the expense but the teammates might.

In the end, the company cares about productive output. Mercenary or not, companies that have the most productive output that makes the customers happy are going to win.

My money are on companies that go remote, keep costs down and pass on those savings internally (employees) and externally (customers).

My money is not on companies that are forced to hire people within driving distance of some arbitrary office.

The point that the "100% remote at all cost brigade" miss is that we are human beings and humans require a mix of small talk and serious work to excel. You don't do that on slack with giphys and emojis. It sucks. I don't care about arguments against it. I personally prefer hybrid model where we should have flexibility to wfh but also be able to work in person with colleagues. The day we completely normalize 100% wfh, we might as well invent robots to do the job. Humans are not robots. We will never be. We need those small talk at times.

I understand why the 100% remote gang don't like hybrid either because it still forces you to stay close to work. But if you want to be a digital nomad, you might as well freelance and not do full time. My opinion.

Shameless plug: We are hiring in South Jersey/Philadelphia region for my edtech startup and if you are interested, hit me up. Various roles. Hybrid would be awesome.

Not in any way I can't mentally handle, because I'm pretty "ambiverted" to start with. I like my solitude; solitary confinement probably wouldn't be a good punishment for me because I'd just stare off into space and architect my own universe.

I've already been working remote for the last ~5 years, and it hasn't killed my network because work wasn't really my primary means of networking, professionally or personally. I networked by attending meetups and conventions. Admittedly, it was more or less easier to get to know people IRL when I worked in corporate offices.

What really put a damper on my networking was COVID. Every social activity I was interested remained closed for a long period of time, and even though I was (am?) a tech meetup host, I couldn't get enough people to show up so I stopped hosting them. Many groups in my area haven't come back or were already in decline a few years before COVID. I do miss the ability to physically hang with other programmers. This idea that Zoom/Discord/Metaverse can replace physicality is bullshit. Certainly not yet, anyway.

The Future of Work as it currently appears isn't really bleak because of remote work itself. Many of us have not only been forced into remote work, but we've had flexibility in our lives removed. Every other discussion at work for the last 2 years has had to be tied to COVID in some way shape or form. Remote work had clear benefits when it represented freedom. Now the political situation across the world has made remote work out to feel more like solitary confinement.

Work to live, don’t live to work. Remote enables the former - you can live in NY and have a 3am Pokemon club meeting less than a mile away, you can live in a cabin in the woods and spend your time fishing, it’s upto you.

It sounds like you want others to live near you and spend their time doing things for you. That’s fine, but you might not find many people who are willing to do that, especially if they are working to live.

Personally I think the future of work is looking great.

In simple terms, I strongly believe that a larger network / more meaningful relationships (above the noise floor) mean more opportunities and room for learning. Generally, I see this as a 1:1 exchange in time / effort. Being remote just seems to make finding connections way harder, since talking to someone is obviously more meaningful than a LinkedIn cold message or an email.

But you're right in that part of my dilemma here is figuring out what I want to do with my time while also optimizing for decent options going forward. Frankly, I'm leaning toward the being away from hoards of people in the woods ;) .

>Personally I think the future of work is looking great.

For the remote work class, sure it is. Some of us still have clean your shit at the wastewater treatment plant, run pipe and fiber to you so we can deliver you water and internet and so you can deliver us your excrement.

Not if they are on septic.

In a city where space is at a premium?

Which space efficient septic tank do you have in mind?

When I lived near Seattle as a kid, our single wide didn’t have sewer, just septic. It’s more common than you think.

> It’s more common than you think

I didn't say septics are uncommon. To ask you differently:

- How large was that plot (on which the septic system was installed)

- Was the septic system dedicated to your house or shared

- How large was that septic system

It was a large plot of land not zoned for SFH residential because it was in a bit of a weird spot (septic tanks weren’t shared, there was enough land out back that it had enough to drain).

There is still a side benefit to the workers that must work on-site: the white-collar work that can be done at home no longer needlessly clogs the roadways with cars every arbitrary 'rush hour'. Many of my blue-collar friends loved the early months of the pandemic where they had zero traffic jams and other commuter headaches to deal with.

Less pollution, less traffic fatalities, less energy use, and more money flowing to remote areas (like where a lot of infrastructure is typically located). All good things for everybody, even if the benefits of working in your PJs are unevenly distributed.

"Some of us"

Nobody on HackerNews.

I have a menial job that pays even lower than the example ones I gave, and I'm on hacker news.

Don't be presumptuous, it leads to errors.

> Some of us

You're on the wrong forum

I've worked at Amazon for 5 years as an SDE.

I'm pretty sure I'm getting PIPed this month. Can't really complain, I've barely been pushing code, most days I mindlessly browse slack all day and do no work.

I 100 percent blame it on the pandemic, and WFH.

I was thinking of going into finance or defence where you're still forced to go into an office every day.

I'm in the same boat. I've worked at a big silicon company for the past year and a bit. Make a hell of lot more, work from home, and have hated every minute when I know, if it weren't for WFH, I'd love it.

I was in the military in my younger years and the people I worked with there are still my closest now. I worked in finance for a few after that and the nights spent working on difficult problems till the early hours of the morning were some of the most fulfilling one's I've had. Perhaps it's different in software land where everyone seems a bit more unsociable but as an EE I loved going into the lab and seeing what everyone is up to for the day. Even when we were just working at our computer desks, we were able to ask each other for help, advice, or just shoot the breeze. The office was never this political battleground where everyone turned up to work miserable that I've heard so much about. It was a place of camaraderie over joint hardships.

Now all I've got are these 4 walls to keep me company, while I try my hardest to keep attention for a mere 20 minutes of productivity before disappearing off to make a tea for the 12th time that day, or glaze over after the 5th teams meeting of the morning. I read these other HN posts and constantly think maybe I'm much more socially charged than I think, or everyone else is much less so than they think. All WFH has done is made me think I'm either depressed, suffering from ADHD, or both - when I felt like a normal, happy member of society before.

> I'm getting PIPed

In English, please?

Put on a Performance Improvement Plan, a prerequisitive before getting fired. Also known as Paid Interview Prep, because that's what it ends up being for many people.

Is this just an American thing? I don't think tech companies can fire like this in Europe. I have 100% worked in companies that used PIP processes which had nothing to do with firing staff.

Same here. Way too distracted and barely written a line of code at my faang workplace today even though it's simple bash script and I would have blazed through stuff like this years ago. Perhaps there is a self-selection policy at play here, the engineers who are distracted and unproductive are the only ones who have enough time to complain on HN about it.

Up until ( if) I get married, I'll always be in a city.

Just easier to meet people and do stuff. I haven't used an app in years ( had a very bad experience and I don't feel safe using them ), and aside from that I love going to concerts. Much easier to do if you can ride the train to one vs having to drive 2 hours

Remote work is amazing, for me I have to filter myself very heavily at work. I don't really care for workplace socializing.

We have bars for that.

Remote work is amazing for people who have mobility issues, as well as an array of other disabilities.

What if I want to socialize on my own terms. Forcing me back into the office so you can make small talk isn't fair.

Have you considered Chicago ?

It's the perfect city I'm terms of quality public transit and affordability. I lived on the Northside and never had any problems with crime.

Met my first long term girlfriend too !

> Have you considered Chicago ?

> It's the perfect city I'm terms of quality public transit and affordability. I lived on the Northside and never had any problems with crime.

And how about them BULLS!

The hardest thing about remote work is code review.

What used to be a collaborative effort where we both take responsibility for making things better now feels confrontational because online code review is now often the only interaction we have with others.

It’s crucial to build trust and alignment with your colleagues. Otherwise you end up blaming all your problems — which, in fields like software engineering and site reliability, shower down upon us with the misty subtlety of a firehose — on the people who you only know by their Unix name / commit email / cat themed github avatar.

The die hard “work to live not live to work!” responses, here, don’t seem to be addressing that. It’s a much deeper problem than whether you should make friends in a bar versus by the water cooler.

Working in a team is social and you have to form social bonds. No one is saying they are the only social bonds you should form in your life. If you refuse to form any social bonds at work then you will not be as effective as someone who does.

Code review has been done "remotely" via Github or other online tool at every place I have worked, I have _never_ seen it done in-person. I also find that doing this in person would be incredibly time consuming and frustrating. The confrontational nature of code review is a good thing because people are able to focus and independently analyze how your code works. Its important to be nice but its also important to not take feedback about your code personally.

Thanks for your comment. I amended my second paragraph to try to make my point clearer.

I am in no way advocating for in-person code review. I’m saying that it’s much harder to do code review with someone you haven’t shared lunch with, chatted with in the pub, or had a non-work related phone call with for 9 months.

Your point about public GitHub is pretty much on point. Some of the least productive and most barbed back-and-forth you see on code reviews is the public FOSS ones where people don’t really know or trust each other that much.

Some of the best are where the reviewers clearly want to work together on something and not be confrontational.

(By the way: I don’t see this behaviour as openly confrontational in terms of deliberate aggression — more commonly it’s a reviewer subconsciously expressing their self-perceived lack of standing by criticising other’s work.)

> The hardest thing about remote work is code review.

code review was done async. and in all practical sense "remote" at all the dozen places I ever worked in an office.

How else do you scale code review on a team of more than 2 people. Get all 5+ people in a room to do code review for a 5 liner?

Thanks for responding. My original point didn’t come across well.

I meant that now we never hang out, we don’t trust each other any more, and code review has suffered as a result.

It’s especially hard for new people joining a team where baseline trust is basically equal to that of Internet stranger.

> I meant that now we never hang out, we don’t trust each other any more, and code review has suffered as a result. > It’s especially hard for new people joining a team where baseline trust is basically equal to that of Internet stranger.

Huh. How's your hiring process like? Do you hire very young people?

The only time I've seen this happen is when the team used to work in a colocated manner, and then some members started to WFH. Eventually some of those people WFH got too tied into the "home" part of WFH and work suffered. Simultaneously other people in the office just started to treat those WFH as second class citizens as well. This really caused a mess.

If this is what you're seeing, the easiest solution is to just move to a remote only team.

If you want to stay, you need to have a good manager in place who understands these dynamics and can mitigate issues.

A lot of it probably depends on your personality.

I don't form organic relationships all that easily. I am not at all relatable to most people and find interfacing with them to be a very mentally costly process, so I am happy that remote significantly cuts down on all that. I also like the need to schedule things far in advance as then I can plan my work around when I also plan to be mentally exhausted.

So remote has improved my network by dramatically reducing the expected cost of maintaining it. A few scheduled meetings/planned weeks in advance lunches over spontaneously running it them and them wanting to have lunch when I have deep work scheduled for that afternoon.

It is also why I focus my network on other cities. The distance makes in person meetings be the kind of thing planned months in advance. It manages itself in an orderly way. I need not try and impose order on it.

Interesting, I guess for me it's hard to tell how strong "remote" relationships really are. Fortunately, I'm more articulate / interesting in my writing than when people talk to me. But "being accountable" over slack for me is at least 2-3x as taxing as just having to hop into a meeting with someone or just some brief in person back and forth.

Sometimes it feels like my team performance is being gauged how much I talk through slack, in ways you'd usually just be expected to do so in person or more traditionally. When in reality, I just forget sometimes or suck at knowing how my writing comes off. Since I have an odd sense of humor / sometimes talk like a robot to make sure I'm being clear.

I view a remote relationship as strong enough if I would willingly refer someone for a job and they would refer in return or I would trust them enough to do a small contract project with them.

As for how I am perceived on Slack, I view my team as a single point of failure and make sure that I am always in a position to get other similar offers. Makes how I am perceived not really matter as I am not the kind to go for an internal promotion anyway as it is more complicated, and again, a single point of failure.

What I've done to combat this is helped lead a local historical organization, that way I get human interaction every week at least.

What might work for you is to set up a meetup/casual thing where someone gives a presentation on a technology people are mildly interested in, like Tailwind or somesuch. If there's demand for that kind of casual interaction (and I don't doubt there is), people will be falling over themselves to help you.

Personally I really like the work/casual divide in my socialization, where my social interaction and work aren't welded together, where work issues can't pollute your friendships and vice versa. This is especially good if you work at a place that appreciates your work but is very different culturally than you. I worked at an oil/gas company for several years, and while I liked some of the formal processes they had, I'm of a profoundly different culture than they are, despite looking like them.

With your social network and work network split off like this, you'll be much more flexible in both.

Good luck!

I left the field entirely a few months into lockdowns. I pretty much went in the opposite direction, I now spend my time on explicitly social things.

I agree that it doesn't look like it's coming back - in fact I'm not sure if my city is coming back (London).

The growth thing doesn't bother me, it's just that the job is now pointless to me. I don't care about shuffling pixels about, I care about actual people in the real world. Card games over lunch, pub at the end of the day, chatting shit, that was the point, the work was just a vehicle to give us the excuse and fund it. We are social animals, there is nothing more.

Something sticks in my mind though, which is that most software developers have a strong preference for just sitting inside. I was one, then I made money and I realised there was a world out there. But some of them just want that forever, and that's fine, it just means I can't work with them any more, that chapter of my life has closed, we part ways and so it goes.

It's like a partner or old friend that you just outgrew.

Eventually I'll give up on HN too I guess.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you do now?

Nothing adjacent to what most people consider "work".

I found that almost all "professional" structures immediately turned into some sort of schizophrenic "cus covid" nightmare and as far as I can tell they're still doing it.

I had no interest in that stuff so I just did my own thing. Self study, social meetup groups, travel, etc.

I was almost ten years in to my career in early 2020 so I can afford to not maximise income. I feel sorry for the new graduates that now just have yet another thing to hate the older generations for.

Even just small things. The university interview. Putting on a suit and tie and meeting _their people_ in a big hall for the first time. Life-defining.

In contrast, I work fulltime, mostly remote (for now), and absolutely love what I do. Technology that I worked on will make the world a better, more sustainable place and I think that's rad.

I go out camping and jeeping with a group from work and have a network of friends outside of work too.

So it is certainly not given that remote working has to be some forlorn place. It is, as most areas of life, what you make of it.

>Nothing adjacent to what most people consider "work".

What are you doing to afford food and rent? We see a lot of people foregoing work, such as yourself, but how are you people surviving? London is an expensive city - how does one survive without income there?

Did you miss the bit of my post where I said I was ten years in?

Money doesn't just disappear if you don't spend it, you need funds to live, not income.

Rude

> Money doesn't just disappear if you don't spend it, you need funds to live, not income.

It does. It's called inflation.

Don't be an asshole on the internet. There are bigger assholes on the internet and they can outwit your smart ass replies trying to belittle someone who hasn't been an asshole to you and was asking a genuine question.

Yeah nobody is forgoing work. The only people who left the workforce could already afford to do so before 2020.

Thanks. I had similar feelings, but somehow felt guilty. I did start the lockdowns with same thought, but couldn't actually do much, due to the guilt. Nice to know that it was ok to go in that direction. Now I feel I have wasted 2 years, doing nothing. But at-least, it was 2 good years of not hating the grind.

As a member of a "professional" structure and a relatively new grad, you're not wrong on either account. I sit on calls all day with people 2-3x my age that swoon over WFH because they get to do their kids school run and don't have to make small talk with Sue in HR or whatever, and I'm sat here thinking that I haven't had a real, none work-related conversation in months outside of my 9-5.

In my last role I was on the football 5-aside team, got to sit around during breaks chatting with other people shooting the shit, went out for pints after work, made friendships with other engineers that were all very similar to me, and travelled around meeting new people in new places. Now I barely speak with anyone socially at work, if at all.

To add to that, as someone who's not very well financially endowed, meeting people outside of work is almost harder than in. Sure I can join the local Pokémon Go club free, but I care nothing for it and likely wouldn't share anything in common with the people there. I can join my local hiking or chess group and be paired up with a load of retirees, or coding club where I go a do something that I get enough of in my 9-5. Whereas, I want to train at my local rugby club? £300 a year, not including everything that goes with that like kit. Meet people at the climbing gym? £80 a month. Go for a drink on the weekend? Maybe £60 for the night, £40 if it was a cheap pub. Half my take home goes into rent, a quarter into bills/car/food, and I'm left with a final quarter to weasel some away into savings and perhaps see my friends on a weekend once a month, or go to a gig once a quarter. God forbid I want to travel anywhere exotic.

I spend most of my days at the moment considering whether I'm suffering from sunk-cost fallacy, and I should scrap the 8 years and £60k+ I've spent on education to go and become a bartender or garden landscaper. At least I'd get to talk to some people that aren't on a screen, and I'd see the sun every now and again.

Feel ya.

Even aside from your difficulty in finding people, the whole argument that "well, you can make friends outside of work" is a non-sequitur. It's illogical for two reasons:

1) Outside of work hours is a different topic. My work hours used to be social and enjoyable, and then they became antisocial and not enjoyable. Outside of work remained similar.

2) The knock-on effect of mass WFH is that outside of work hours the city is less busy and there are generally less people in the cafes, bars, at meetup events and so on because the urban agglomeration effect is reduced.

The second one is probably going to get better over time as stuff like border controls are released and it hasn't really caused me any direct issues (I'm just sad that the buzz is gone). The first one isn't - by definition WFH is less social regardless of whether you do something after work or not.

What happened to London?

Stolen by bats and taken a mile beneath the surface of the Earth

"> I don't care about shuffling pixels about, I care about actual people in the real world"

I agree, and feel that people in tech often forget what/who the technology was supposed to be built for in the first place: us, people, to hopefully make our lives better!

Not to make us more anti-social, separated, and zombie-like. Technology was supposed to be our tool, not the other way around.

You're gonna get a lot of kickback for this post. Don't listen to of the naysayers, these are real issues. Just remember this... as bad as it is for your it's worse on people who work on the business side. Their entire job revolves around networking. Since they run the show this means that everyone is going to transition to the office as soon as possible.

> Their entire job revolves around networking. Since they run the show this means that everyone is going to transition to the office as soon as possible.

Yep. Only hope is that the pandemic at least forced some change that will hopefully remain. I understand the OP grievances (okay, maybe I don't) but for some other people remote+zoom/email is just perfect.

> After two years of being beaten into this new way of working I honestly feel more at a loss for what my career is than any other time in my life.

You have a longer post and I want to make clear I’m only discussing one section here, but your emphasis on new is rubbing me the wrong way.

I’ve been doing software for about 2.5 years as long as you and looked for remote jobs, found a few, but couldn’t land them and was forced into in office roles they would take me. It seems like you are having more of a problem of the default job changing from in office to remote, and how the default isn’t your preferred option. Remote first has been a thing for years now and has worked out as a viable way to run a business

As a fellow New Yorker. If you want to waste hours on a steel shit hole (really many times) of a subway, to get to work, spend too much money on overpriced shitty food, just to sit in meetings all day long, by all means.

Keep on mind that your perception of what the office life will be is not what it will be. MOST people in IT are enjoying WFH and they will NOT want to be back there in the office with you.

As others mentioned, go to meetup and find a group you can socialize with off-hours. Best thing you can do for yourself as those days are over for many, and there's never going back to full time.

A little different, but I work remote, and make a very little amount.. been living in Colombia, Serbia, Brazil, Israel, Russia, Romania, Korea.. the list goes on.. Not fancy places.. I have been doing this for about 6 years, since I left my job teaching 'business english' in mexico city where I did have a large group of friends..

With the pandemic I started drinking a lot more because I was lonely.. The frequent moves, mostly due to visas, the pandemic lockdowns, contributed to the small networks I made in each country shutting down, losing old friends.. I am talking friends, not even business colleagues...

Often I go weeks, without talking to another human besides "No thanks I have my own bag" to the lady at the grocery store.. I am somewhere between outgoing and solitary but needing a group of friends is important. I am 36 years old and I wouldnt choose a different path but if you want to work remote, and live in other countries( there is no way I can afford to live in USA), you should figure out how to stay in just one country you like for a long time(legally). And develop that network. I always manage to date cool girls, fall in love, almost got married last year(also ruined from pandemic lockdowns), but I think having a group of bros/comraderie is detrimental to mental soundness

> but I think having a group of bros/comraderie is detrimental to mental soundness

This contradicts the rest of your post, unless I'm misunderstanding.

Yeah sounds like he meant "necessary"

I mean that it is a good experience, but without a solid circle or group of friends things can get very lonely and it can effect your life.. sorry I am not the best writer, but hopefully you get me

I like WFH and remote working but unfortunately a lot of companies did not really embrace remote working properly. They didn't embrace async communication methods. They deployed tools that required constant attention and showed status availability. They stuck to regular working hours and morning status report meetings. They overused immediate video calls of text.

Badly implemented remote working is bad... (but still better than the office!)

I have moderate social anxiety that flares up a lot in an office and causes all sorts of embarrassing physical reactions. I’m so so so happy that I can now collaborate with people without having to constantly worry about breaking out in a sudden sweat, blushing, etc. Plus, I’m really enjoying the extra free time I get without the commute, meal prep, daily makeup, etc.

For the record, my non-work social life doesn’t usually cause those problems.

Feel like it's common for really big cities to be difficult to befriend anyone. I've been in London for over 6 years and my only sort-of friends I made was from office before. It's a struggle meeting people any other way.

If you want to meet people otherwise you have to get out of your way to travel 1h+ in busy public transport (which already ruins my social mood) to some meetup full of randoms of any background. Most of them desperate guys looking for hookup and that's the case with most socials of this kind.

You could join some fitness classes but then you get an extra bill of £100+ just for the potential to meet people. I've heard of people making friends through hobbies but I really struggle to find 'social' hobbies.

That leaves you with office being the most convenient way of making friends even though it's far from perfect and once you leave the job you rarely meet them.

I spend more time these days building up the online network on Twitter, a Discord I started, an online meetup I started, and one good Slack group.

My network has grown much faster and I've met more interesting people than the old days of in office work and in person meetup, even in NYC.

I think there are certain points/periods in one's career where remote work is incredibly beneficial, whereas there are some other points where remote work is not. IMO, when you've reached a point in your career where you are happy to not further advance (role wise), and you care a lot more about managing your time to take care of your family, or maybe you just want to be a mercenary and jump from contract to contract, remote is great.

I think younger people who want to progress and learn a ton through osmosis, and develop their professional networks should be in person.

I think the future needs to be all about flexibility, with well understood trade-offs.

The companies which offer this flexibility will attract the best talent.

My advice to you or anyone in high pressure industries such as IT (or NBA for that matter) - get a phychologist or some kind of coach, someone you'll pay to talk to on a weekly basis (ideally has a degree in medicine, like a psychiatrist).

Have you tried applying for non-remote jobs? They exist, they are fun, they are full of people who feel the same as you and think all this new normal stuff is odd. You’ll learn more and stress less doing that than you will trying to make “future of work” jobs work for you.

(I’m hiring in person in Chicago if you feel like moving. Rails / Hotwire / React / beers on Fridays.)

Humans used to socialise with family and neighbours. Because we worked with them. Now these are three different groups, and we are not able to socially connect with any of them.

So, we are told to look for people with similar problems in 'Drinking Establishments'. Atleast, it keeps the economy running.

From the anti-WFH perspective, shouldn't the future be looking bright? The Omicron wave is over, and back-to-the-office plans are commencing. No?

They better hire us back in before the next variant

Totally understand the sentiment. If you are in Austin and want to meet and try to get plugged in, email me! (email in bio)

Nope, no issue, but that is up to you to maintain. Work friends won't be there, you need social circles outside of it.

What is dead may never die

Hi 71a54xd!

I've struggled with this too. I was on study career-sabbatical travelling in Europe with my then-girlfriend/partner. She was banned from US entry by Trump exec. order and we came to her home of Australia (I'm from the USA) in March 2020 -- we stayed because it was obvious Trump & fam were treating the pandemic as a way to further profit from dubious science, dividing people & pandering. Down under (Melbourne) we've had some of the most strict quarantine lockdowns of any place in the world -- I like it here and now I can't imagine returning to the USA -- but accepting my network in US is mostly toast. Making new friend during a pandemic is really hard.

The timing for the rapid transition to remote work globally wasn't great. I don't think it will be like this forever (but it might take a decade to sort out). Companies weren't ready, and grey-haired CEO, peter-principal IT leaders & HR departments weren't technically equipped for the transition. Most companies (globally) still relied heavily on email & jira + meetings instead of chat, IT was an expense but not seen as "the core of the business" pre-pandemic. Few companies had transitioned to 'remote-first' & 'async culture' pre-pandemic (mostly only bay area startups do this imho). Async culture(s) suggest remote employees get together 'virtually' for coffee or beer and gives them discussion points - did any of your employers do that? I know most didn't.

Other people have told me you shouldn't go to work to make friends, be mentored, get free sushi lunches, you should go there to work blabla. Also making friends @work is NOT the responsibility of your employer (and imho it is certainly not a priority at a startup who should be product focused!!!) -- unless the company highlights & promises that vibe during the recruiting.

Covid/remote work came during a global period of divisive social misery & wealth inequality creating a lot of cognitive dissonance for anybody paying attention. When you think of "digital social network" which company more than any other 'owns' that space? Facebook. And while I won't put all the blame on Zuck - because I know Russia FSB has a legion of trolls & bot-nets manipulating the platform too. The fact society can't use our Internet's "social network" really failed spectacularly. Facebook and it's related platforms are mentally toxic. FB/meta is algorithmically optimized to make you angry, isolated, pissed off & alienated (just like Fox News) because it suits Zucks & Putin's long term power narrative(s)! Zuck is in my view a fool -- not dumb, but incredibly foolish to have squandered such a responsibility & good-will entrusted to him.

So for this pandemic - as long as meta/facebook is the defacto global "social network", i.e. zuckerberg et. al is the primary party responsible for connecting us 'digitally' with friends, family & peers blabla. yeah we're all sort of isolated & socially fcked mate.

We know now* that Zuck isn't interested in (y)our mental health or making us better. Zuck isn't interested in bringing families together, preventing teen suicide, or even disseminating the truth. Zuck is a horrible person and I would happily kick him in the groin on behalf of humanity if given the opportunity so he could (if only for a moment) share humanities collective pain and perhaps even "feel something" akin to desiring compassion. The pandemic would have been a lot easier (socially) if there was a critical mass alternative to Facebook. I heard Trump launched his own platform today -- maybe there is an opportunity for another alternative which focused on mental health & positive news, and living your best life during the pandemic.

Nah, just kidding .. I don't really wonder how Trump's new social media platform will do that. Trying to finding people online when the primary company which runs the social networks is facebook - consider perhaps it's better to be isolated during the pandemic.

How I cope: Study & learn whatever you want unfettered, humanity has been writing stuff for ~5,000 years now, there's a lot to read (and it's all online woot!!) We live in such a cool age for geeks. You sound technically competent -- it's a shame you don't realize what a hidden blessing this is. I've found a lot of the technical chat rooms on Matrix.org to be 'my people' (it's more like IRC) .. you might look there for whatever online social interaction with people smarter than you. mentoring, etc.

Cheers!

> She was banned from US entry by Trump exec. order

What did she do?

> We know now* that Zuck isn't interested in (y)our mental health or making us better. Zuck isn't interested in bringing families together, preventing teen suicide, or even disseminating the truth. Zuck is a horrible person and I would happily kick him in the groin on behalf of humanity if given the opportunity so he could (if only for a moment) share humanities collective pain and perhaps even "feel something" akin to desiring compassion.

When did he ever claim to work toward these things?

> What did she do?

I'm pretty sure that the US was closed to basically everyone not a US citizen during the pandemic.

I'm curious, were you actually making true friends at work? or was it just people who were nice enough to make it easier to spend the whole day working?

I've never met someone I could remotely call a friend as an employee.

I made a few friends when I was in college, but absolutely none at work.

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