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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> What annoys me the most is that there are still companies out there stating that remote is "complicated". It's different, and you need to adjust your processes, but it's not "complicated".

I’ve worked remote and managed remote teams for a long time. I would say it is indeed more complicated.

You may not struggle with remote work and may do fine interacting remotely, but that’s not true for a lot of people. It’s very common to hire good engineers into remote positions and discover that they can’t focus at home, they misinterpret digital communications, or that they just wanted a remote job because they read somewhere that they could work 2 hours per day and nobody would be able to tell.

The obvious retort is that you just need to hire “right”, but that’s not an easy thing to do.

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It isn't more complicated, it is just different. Here, let me hire for an office instead...

"You may not struggle with office work and may do fine interacting in person, but that’s not true for a lot of people."

I have people who do far better at home than in the office, and some on the other end of the spectrum. People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and finding the right people is the same challenge regardless.

What is hard is tooling and setting up processes that work for remote people. The world is at the start of figuring that out at scale and there is lots to learn. But hiring is always going to be the same game, finding the right people for the role and its requirements.

If I were hiring for an oil rigger it would not be more complex than hiring for a great developer. It will definitely be different, but all recruitment is different and sees different challenges. But it's always going to be about knowing what to ask, knowing your industry, and doing your very best to find a process that selects fairly and efficiently. Remote work hiring is just a different challenge that we are all just getting used to. People are hard problems to solve.

> finding the right people is the same challenge regardless.

Are you claiming that the complexity of managing in-office is usually, roughly the same as managing remote teams? I'm asking towards magnitude/degree, not if both are sometimes true.

If not, you are stating the obvious: "People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes"

In my experience, more people struggle with remote than in-office. I've found a lot of satisfaction in returning to a primarily in-person team for this reason. But that's just my experience, an anecdote. Not everyone should be like me, and I'm not saying everyone should return to the office or that WFH is bad. What I am frustrated about is that it seems like many people take dogmatic pro-WFH positions and do not acknowledge the nuance of these issues.

I am saying exactly the obvious: "People come in all sorts of shapes and sizes", this is the nexus of the original comment.

Case in point, you struggle with WFH, others thrive. I just don't see any problems with employees not enjoying WFH as being significantly more complex than, say, an issue with someone struggling to get into the office on time. Or being stressed out by a stupidly long commute, or having no time with their children. And so on. There are pros and cons abundant that pretty much level it all out.

I’m asking a different question: in aggregate, do you think more people have issues with in office or remote work? Or is it about the same?

I see the nuances. That's what I meant by stating "it's different": I'm currently working with an all-remote team. And it's awesome. Sure, there are moments where I miss them (in terms of in-person interaction), but once in a while we come together and do team building. And that's great.

You really need a team of like-minded people w/r to remork work. They started working as a company with people from different company locations forming "a team". And after Covid started, they realized it's perfectly fine to add people to the team that do not sit in offices.

Thinking back, at my past employer, we had a subsidiary in another city, and failed to work with them. It would have been so much easier if we'd been able to do that. But management didn't like it, so it didn't work.

> Are you claiming that the complexity of managing in-office is usually, roughly the same as managing remote teams?

How could a statement about recruitment be contorted into one about management

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