Remote work appears to be here to stay, especially for women | Hacker News Reader

Remote work appears to be here to stay, especially for women

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This affects women more because caregiving is a responsibility which falls disproportionately on women.

Though I'm no longer working, being able to shift to remote a few years ago let me move home and care for my parents + kids at the same time. It wasn't about working less, it's about being available in case of emergency and not having to do a commute. My hours worked didn't change at all - if anything, they increased, because I didn't have to rush home from the office as a precaution.

I like to think that remote work is particularly valuable for men because it makes it possible for them to rise above systemic factors and be present and engaged in caregiving in a way which was previously artificially denied them. I like to think the biggest benefit for women isn't that they're able to work remotely to more effectively be caregivers, but that their spouses are able to work remotely so they aren't obliged to be caregivers. I wish that were how it was presented.

Elizabeth Barber's Women's Work points out that for centuries (millennia even), textile work was both economically valuable and fit the criteria for caregiving: interruptible and capable of being done at home.

Then the industrial revolution happened, and textiles became cheap...

Totally agree, both my wife and I were able to WFH when the kids were young and as a Dad I got to spend so much time with them that I wouldn't have otherwise if I had been in a 5 day WFO role. Gymnastics/dance classes, school pickups and drop offs, play dates etc etc. It's the small stuff, but so many memories.

WFH meant my wife didn't have to quit her job and was able to continue to advance her career.

Now it meant catching up on work in the evenings after the kids were asleep, but it was totally worth it. With both of us being able to WFH, we could schedule things so that each of us was where we needed to be work-wise for meetings/calls etc.

I agree in some ways but for me, probably the biggest potential benefit is that it dramatically improves the ability to return to work after a career break for maternity or family caring responsibilities. We know that this difficulty is one of the biggest reasons we don't see more senior women in many careers; larger corporates have started putting in places returners programmes specifically because of this.

The "old" way to deal with this was part time working. But in many careers the truth is that returning part time simply means being paid 80% or 60% of a full time wage but with close to full time hours and responsibilities. WfH 3 days a week opens up the possibility to manage a full time role together with some care responsibilities when returning. In that way it's potentially a huge change for the better.

As a guy, now that I've been working remotely for a few years I don't plan on taking a role that involves going into an office on the regular unless there's a massive comp jump involved. The time, money, and sanity that gets spent on commuting 5 days a week is undervalued to a stunning degree and regardless of line of work, should be compensated.

Yes. Not to mention the range factor. If I were to look at onsite roles, I'd be limited to offices in a certain distance of my house, and then once I'm there I'd only be able to hire people in the same driving or public transit distance who either prefer in person who can't get a remote offer.

Moving for a computer-bound job, especially if you have a house/family/etc., seems laughable in 2023.

No matter how hard the commercial real estate interests lobby for butts in seats, those are hard facts to overcome.

Remote hiring can be a real ace in the hole for startups through midsize companies if leveraged correctly. They have access to high quality talent that FAANGs which insist on WFO likely never will, at least until pigs start flying and the CoL of areas surrounding FAANGs become more reasonable.

Well, certainly full remote as a perk gives them access to some pool of talent at a lot lower price tag than large in-person tech companies have to pay.

It depends. It's not that uncommon for remote-only companies to offer location-agnostic compensation with tech hub city comp being used as the baseline.

I can't prove it but I strongly suspect that top-tier Silicon Valley compensation for remote startups isn't the norm. I know if I were running one I would absolutely consider using benefits like remote work to lower my compensation packages if I could.

I don't run a company either, but I suspect it boils down to how serious one is about not only attracting but retaining talent.

The flipside of having access to a vastly wider pool of talent is that the talent has access to a vastly wider pool of employers. As such undercompensated employees already know of or will quickly discover their value and are likely to move to greener pastures when the opportunity inevitably presents itself.

There is also the reduction in pollution/carbon and overall savings. Letting a building of 500+ people wfh even one day a week takes an average of 100 cars per day off daily commute routes. During covid I remember going outside and just being surprised at how clear the sky was. I know that that kind of reduction is not economically feasible but I do feel guilty sometimes driving into work knowing that it is entirely unnecessary. I work for a government agency and most, if not all of our meetings are over Teams anyway because we are spread out all over the downtown area.

I know a senior manager that likes to express his favorite concern that we don't have enough women in tech. The same manager (and his peers) also espouse the importance of face-to-face communication and the famed spur-of-the-moment discussions that spark collaboration.

Considering it is undeniable that due to the additional family responsibilities that women take on, remote work is especially beneficial to them - I want to ask these managers that if they care so much about women in tech, what are their plans to reconcile that with their eagerness for return to office? Should women be back doing double duty like they were before the pandemic and get stretched between work and family commitments? Or is all that hand wringing and concerned furrowing about shortage of women in tech, as I suspect, just posturing and lip service?

If I was uncharitable I suspect it's signaling and if charitable, a conflict of hierarchy of values.

Remove all reference to gender. From the employer perspective the choice between an employee who must be unavailable every forty five minutes or one was available for a solid four hours at a time, the employer who requires more focus will position for the latter.

From the employee perspective, I work with someone who doesn't manage their sleep, is depressed, and avoids all conflicting perspectives. When management asked why my task is incomplete, due to the above person taking naps 2x every work day and avoids all conversations. I tell management clearly their work life balance and mental health is a higher priority than the task. Deadlines get missed. Words of affirmation are spoken. Stakeholders get updated delivery dates.

What's the hierarchy of value? I don't mind as long as it's made known.

All the jobs dominated by woman are highly in person work(nurses, dentists, assistants, hairdressers etc.). Tech is by far the biggest sector with most remote friendly job and has the one of the lowest ratio of female.

I didn't see the word "pregnant" when I searched this page so sorry if this is a dup.

I would think WFH is great for women of child-bearing age as their ability to go to an office is a function of their "pregnancy safety" not the desire of their management. Having the ability to keep working when possible, rather than blowing holes in their career due to parenthood, is a good thing. Parental leave as offered outside the US is an option, but it's still a career gap.

This is the second big pillar [1] of the debate about remote work that we need to reckon with. When you have kids, someone usually has to dial back their career, and it's often the woman. Remote is a way for these people to have both the career and the child. There are probably other big pillars. We need to find compromises that work for all the pillars.

[1] The first is the idea that remote work is not great for people just starting their career.

the way a corporate leader would read that is they wanna use company time to do child rearing tasks

they love the office because you can’t do stuff like that there

Yes, I can see that. I think the pandemic has changed the equation a bit, though. You've now got a bunch of women in more senior positions because remote work enabled them to keep the job and raise the child. And they have a track record of a couple of years proving that they can still get the job done under this setup. And owing to their more senior nature, these women have more access to the ears of the corporate leaders, or at least people not far removed from the leaders. So now the leaders are possibly much more aware that they might be inviting an exodus of senior workers. Unless all the companies collude to squash remote work and there is nowhere "to exodus" to.

FAANG is starting to take a strong position against remote work and distributed teams. This doesn’t seem to be a popular decision with workers, but employers hold all the cards right now given the slow pace of hiring across the industry.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/08/google-to-crack-down-on-hybr...

[2] https://fortune.com/2023/06/08/google-remote-work-office-att...

To end remote work, just grandfather the existing people and roles with remote work and no longer offer remote work in future roles.

Then as the Bob's say it just works itself out.

The employers hold the cards because they pay the money and workers who need money and are willing to work in an office are basically the scabs of the remote work union.

Remote workers have no power until they can get everyone to agree not to work in an office

Fortunately, there are other employers who do want remote workers and will be happy to take them from employers who don't want them.

When bad decisions are made, the best people leave first.

> When bad decisions are made, the best people leave first.

We don't know if it is a bad decision yet. It has not played out long enough to affect other parts of the economy or other businesses.

So far all we know is some people benefit from remote work and commerical real estate and local business within are being affected

> We don't know if it is a bad decision yet

I agree that in the bigger picture things are still playing out, but if the best performing engineers are working remotely, then mandating that they come back onsite is a bad decision from their point of view. It might be good for the company, but the conflict of interest will result in them leaving.

The problem with this is that in my organisation at least I see a reasonable anti-correlation between perceived value of team member and resistance to using the office. YMMV of course, but the point is it ain’t as simple as ‘the people the business values will leave without fully remote’.

Depends on how performance is measured. If performance is measured by talk and politics then those on site may be perceived as more valuable.

This ignores that employers compete with other employers. It’s not as simple as employers vs employees. There are also plenty of companies in smaller regions enjoying being able to hire remotely over being limited to their local pool of candidates.

Workers hold significant moat. Google, and facebook already enjoy a noticeable drop in product quality. By spooking experienced engineers their products will further regress.

People are not getting as much done, low performers are harder to manage (hide easier), most importantly people don’t build the same quality relationships they used to. This is uber important at a big tech company where ppl collaborate with more ppl on average.

All of these were known benefits of WFO prepandemic, but then WFH was forced, and worked for a bit as people worked off of relationships established in the past. Then wishful thinking set in, and now reality is kicking in.

That is not to say that there aren’t people who thrive in WFH (this might be you). But a big company needs a system that works across the variety of ppl and teams it employs.

My ideal was and is to form Remote teams, made out of ppl who really are good at WFH. Mixed teams of remote and onsite ppl suck for everyone.

For sure! Mixing in person and remote seems to me a recipe for inefficiency. I'd say the same to distributed teams (where an immediate team is split across locations). This seems to drastically impact performance of the team.

Except that people being spread around offices and even countries/continents (and traveling) is pretty much the reality at most large companies. Immediate teams may be co-located but the norm for a lot of people is spending a lot of the time on the phone or, now, video calls.

Sorry I wasn't clear. Agree with you here. I'm on a team where my immediate team is is distributed, which I feel is a waste of time for our team to coordinate. A larger team can have the subteams distributed, but immediate teams should be colocated or fully remote.

> People are not getting as much done, low performers are harder to manage (hide easier), most importantly people don’t build the same quality relationships they used to.

None of these problems were ever dealt with in all the WFO settings I was ever in, so this seems like little more than scapegoating WFH for all the sicknesses that afflict large organizations. I’m currently working on a remote team that’s a collaboration across a few different orgs, one of whom is primarily WFO, and we have the highest rate of execution across all our parent organizations.

The reality of every place I’ve ever worked is that product and project management are really bad across the board, far worse than your so called low-performers. But the top of the hierarchy rarely disciplines itself when it can just let shit roll down hill, which is why we end up with the fairy tales about how the lack of water-cooler chat is preventing the otherwise guaranteed success.

This is essentially the same argument that Paul Graham made, which is that WFH worked decently during the pandemic because people were able to "coast" off of previously built pre-pandemic relationships, but as time goes on that the difficulties in building new relationships that are as strong remotely shows up. I get particularly worried about younger employees and new grads. I learned a ton as a new grad being onsite, and I had the benefit that the first company I joined after college had a "bootcamp" training onboarding for new grads - a quarter century later I'm still friends with many of the people from that bootcamp and have gotten many professional jobs through that network.

The strife over WFH vs WFO is what I call a standard "all of these are true" problem, meaning that the points people make on different sides are both true - the problem is people want to optimize for different things. E.g. I think all of these are true:

1. People can save a ton of time and money WFH.

2. The additional flexibility from WFH makes it easier for people with outside responsibilities (e.g. child or elder care) to contribute productively in work.

3. Overall productivity, especially for non-rote tasks, goes down measurably when the vast majority of people are remote. The FAANGs appear to have data to back this up. For everyone that says "but I'm more productive!" it's not hard to believe a bunch of other people are taking multi-hour lunch breaks.

4. The overall strength of work relationships goes down when people are remote. Again, not for everyone, but in aggregate.

5. People are spending much more time alone. The article shows the data for this. I think long term this will be particularly bad for society. It's much harder to empathize with people from different groups if you never interact with them, nevermind that loneliness in and of itself is something of an epidemic.

6. WFH makes people less likely to be "career obsessed" in the first place. I think this is the thing a lot of companies are realizing, that if anything the masses are actually getting to see the "wizard behind the curtain". That is, pre-pandemic, loads of tech companies wanted to motivate their employees with grand talk of "changing the world", and it's a lot easier to feel that motivation in a colocated group. Of course, for most companies, you're not actually changing the world, and most importantly, the company doesn't really give a damn if you change the world or not. They just want to make money. So I think WFH leads a lot of people to re-evaluate their priorities into what they want out of life in the first place, and this is overall bad news for companies that want to convince employees that they should put work above all else (primarily for the benefit of shareholders).

I pretty much agree with all of that. I started my career in a very different time but it's really hard for me to envision graduating and working from my apartment by myself all day.

And, even today, I suppose I developed some new professional relationships during the pandemic but, yeah, a lot of it has honestly been coasting from the before times. It's always hard to separate out various effects but it would be pretty natural if a lot of people felt less engaged when they don't even need to pretend to be engaged.

If a manager can’t differentiate between a high performer and a low performer unless the employee is sitting next to the manager, that sounds like a manager deficiency

If I was a sadist and a FAANG manager (and I am neither), I think I'd just say something to the effect of "in-office attendance is not mandatory, but it is a potential factor in determining promotions" and watch what ensues.

Regardless of what a manager says, the evidence is pretty clear that remote workers are less likely to be promoted (just google "remote workers are less likely to be promoted" for a bunch of studies and articles), and I think most workers are aware of that.

…at companies demanding WFO. I just got a promotion at my all remote company. We have two offices that people are free to work from, but people only do occasionally or when they need to meet clients etc who are in town.

Sure, if your company is all remote, it would seem self evident that you're not at a disadvantage (in your company in any case) compared to in-office workers, because there aren't any in-office workers.

That’s exactly what they’ve come out and said: attendance will factor into annual ratings, and remote workers will be ineligible for stepping into management roles going forward

Well... Do workers WANT to be promoted? If you're not dealing with an "up or out" situation, and you're making enough to sustain a lifestyle in Not The Bay Area, do you care? How many stories are there of people who took management positions that they hate because it was the only promotion available, only to find that the extra income didn't make up for the increased stress?

That's actually great for the rest of us who have no interest in FAANG jobs. Most other companies will continue offering remote work as a perk FAANG doesn't give you in order to compete for talent.

It’s great for you, except that FAANG policies have often set the standards for the rest of the industry for many years now. It would be great if other companies took a different tack, but I’m skeptical. What’s more, many tech companies are beholden to their Silicon Valley VCs, who have been among the strongest critics of remote work so far. Most have a financial interest to get workers back to SF/Silicon Valley.

> FAANG policies have often set the standards for the rest of the industry

They have indeed, precisely for offering really good perks that everyone wanted. If they start doing the opposite, others will see opportunity.

> many tech companies are beholden to their Silicon Valley VCs

The tech landscape is much, much bigger than SV. At least if you're not targeting 300k+ salaries.

That’s the thing. As soon as the economy stumbles and just having a job means you’re lucky, remote work will be scaled back to a large degree.

Yes, and it’s already happening.

They are shooting themselves in the foot. By rejecting wfh they limit their talent pool to leetcode solvers or junior devs. Naturally some experienced devs will prefer onsite, and thats fine, but by and large experienced engineers prefer renote.

The really interesting statistic in this article is the dramatic drop in “hours per day spent caring for children” for women while the number for men stayed relatively flat. Interesting for a number of reasons:

1) The numbers for men and women are much closer together now which narrows (but does not close) a gap that has existed for hundreds or even thousands of years. Would be amazing to see it close completely.

2) If I’m reading this correctly women are doing less childcare but men aren’t doing more … so are children being cared for less? That seems impossible as a consequence of remote work, which provides much more time for at-home tasks like childcare.

One reason for this long-term trend is that people are having fewer children and having those children later in life. Post-pandemic there's been quite a significant drop in birth rates on top of that as well.

I suspect there will also be a trend of children spending more time being looked after by schools/nurseries/childminders/nannies but that's probably smaller.

> so are children being cared for less?

Probably fewer children overall and increased daycare usage.

If reproduction rate hits zero the gap will definitely close. Would be amazing!

… and the same people on Twitter freaking out about low birth rates are the ones condemning remote work.

Telework is the most pro-family development in work culture in at least three generations.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ng8e2

Why women? Like men dont also have caregiving activites.

More women have caregiving responsibilities, meaning that they are more affected. You might say they are especially effected.

But you knew that.

We encourage women into the workplace with a million diversity initiatives, we also need to encourage and support men in caregiving roles and not give women preferential treatment in caregiver roles.

> Like men dont also have caregiving activites.

Data has shown they do less of it and society has been setup this way. Women have been giving up their career - not because they want to but because that's what society and their family pressured them into.

Data has also shown men's view of what counts as domestic work is vastly different from that of women. Sadly a lot of men only do 1/2 the job.

It takes a lot of strength to stand against the pressure of society and family or social pressure. We interact with about 30% patriarchs and 70% matriarchs. The tension builds when there's a heavy imbalance when one type of structure outnumbers the other type because it becomes stark that one household leads differently than the other.

I was a stay at home dad for both of my kids, and still do the lion's share of caregiving in my family. If nothing else, the experience showed me exactly how unbalanced the distribution of caregiving work is between men and women, both in concrete terms and in people expectations of who's job it's "supposed to be."

There's plenty of petty sexism around it, I had plenty of people say things like "oh you're giving mom a break," or, "you're babysitting the kids today," and there's very much an expectation that men are worse at it than women. You could view that as misandrist, but (imo) there was often the unspoken assumption that my wife wasn't living up to her responsibilities because I was doing "her" job.

It's not that we don't have those responsibilities, it's that we (as a group) are overwhelmingly less likely to be primary caregivers and to have to adjust our for-money work lives around the those responsibilities.

Best to remember that these kinds of statements are statistical rather than definitive.

23% of US households with children have just one parent and 86% of those households are single mothers.

I am not even sure what this article is claiming to compare but it strikes me as ridiculous to not take the above information into account.

Of course it is harder to provide child care if the kid doesn't even live with you and I would think most the men are providing some form of child support.

> Women more often have higher degrees...

There will now be a public outcry and a whole set of measures to support men left behind, right?

> ...women were more likely than men to take on child care as a primary activity, spending more than double the average hours per day taking care of children than men did.

I guess not.

Doubt for top tech companies. Hybrid is the way for many and here to stay.

Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. You need to still live close to an office and commute 3x a week, but then you also need to have a proper office/desk at your own home for the remaining 2 days. I'd rather just go in to the office everyday and optimize my living situation for commuting, or (much much preferred) just work remotely every day with occassional company-wide meetups.

Personally, I wouldn't even interview with a company that was hybrid, even if that's unfortunately becoming more and more common.

> Personally, I wouldn't even interview with a company that was hybrid, even if that's unfortunately becoming more and more common.

That’s fine. They’ll find another candidate

In general, hybrid working arrangements allow you to come in every day although it's possible, depending on the company, that you won't have a dedicated desk. (Probably something you can negotiate.)

Hybrid is my preferred option. I’m happy to do individual work at home, but absolutely hate long running calls. I’d prefer to come in a few days a week for collaboration.

Women here seems to be clickbait, since working from home is more about types of jobs, with women and education level being a looser correlation to those factors.

I think the title here is polarizing gender politics, but it is backed up with data. More women work from home vs men due to child care.

Their own data shows that education level is much more significant than being a woman in predicting if someone works from home.

Its hard to stack a shelf, wait a table, build a house, put out a fire or man the oil rig pipes from home

Yeah, but it's real easy to write code, be a radiologist, manage money, ... I really doubt that most of the HN readers would be able to deal with that fire or oil rig.

Are they talking about predictive value in 2022, or about the change between 2018 and 2022?

I see the following change in WFH gaps:

          delta(women/men)  delta(degree/no degree)
    2018        0%                    19%
    2022       13%                    30%

(Note: the level of education lines given are not quartiles. Less than high school is 9%, high school 28%, some college or associate's 25%, and bachelor's or higher 37%. We have to split that "some college or associate's" bucket into both higher and lower halves, so assuming [poorly!] we can do so linearly and that educational attainment is roughly constant over 2018-2022, we get:

   52% no degree
   47% any degree

and

   WFH  women   men    degree no degree
   2018  23      23      34      15
   2022  41      28      49      19

(educational attainment from https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/educatio... )

Its not really due to child care. Its due to being allowed to work from home. Needing to take care of your child doesnt give you the prerogative of working from home. People have needed to take care of children since forever and remote work is pretty new.

> People have needed to take care of children since forever and remote work is pretty new.

In the past that meant women had to give up on their career and/or the children was sent to a child care.

Remote has opened up other options.

if by "clickbait" you mean that society is more likely to prioritize an issue if its presented as an issue faced primarily by women, then yes.

see https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-homeless-women/ tldr: 1/3 homeless people are women. who cares about that 2/3 that are men.

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