Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville
erniemiller.org
erniemiller.org
You need to expend time and energy on:
- preparing precise specs instead of explaining and interacting
- interpretting imprecise specs instead of questioning and interacting
- writing precise emails
- interpretting imprecise emails
- guessing body language and tonality from written communication
- dealing with conference calls and web-based meetings
- building relationships without benefit of breaks and meals
- understanding the human terrain without benefit of gossip and the water cooler
- being noticed and recognized for who you really are by new people
- being included when you're "out of sight, out of mind"
You kinda get the idea. If you can be excellent at these things, great. Otherwise, be prepared to see your work suffer.
And honestly, if you're not spending time on preparing precise specs or writing and interpreting clear and precise emails while working on location then you're doing something wrong. Most of the communication and project management still happens on computers whether or not there are remote workers involved.
Written communication is lower bandwidth than oral communication. And phone conversations are lower bandwidth than face-to-face. Relationships/friendships are part of work (for most people) and can help you be more effective on a team. And work ideas often get discussed during "non-work work time" (lunches/watercoolers) -- often leaving the remote team member out of the loop.
This is not necessarily true, especially if you have fast typers on your team. And typing out conversations means you have a written record of everything that was said. Important points are no longer lost to the ether.
> And work ideas often get discussed during "non-work work time" (lunches/watercoolers) -- often leaving the remote team member out of the loop.
It's true, you do miss out on some of these types of conversations. But if your team makes heavy use of online communication tools, you often have conversations springing up during non-work hours. Also, missing out on 30 minutes of semi-casual discussion during lunch isn't that compelling of a downside for me, especially when weighing it against the upsides of increasing your potential labor pool.
I'm a little puzzled by the first few items in your list... I work at a pretty big company, so maybe that is why. Specs are a way of life where I work. I would hope that everyone would be good or learn to become good at writing useful precise specs.
Accurate and concise emails goes without saying.
I would agree with the body language from written communication if you never spoke with anyone on the phone, but that would be pretty unusual I think.
Web-based meetings, virtual whiteboards, are fantastic. I'd much rather do web based than sit in a conference room.
I don't really have work relationships anymore, but it's not a loss. More of an exchange for relationships outside of work.
The water cooler comment I agree with. I don't have the "pulse" of the human terrain anymore. It bothered me when I was losing it, but I don't mind anymore.
I used to worry about the "being included" part, due to the out-of-sight, out-of-mind effect. I have to be more of an advocate for myself than perhaps I otherwise would. However, my work speaks for itself, and people want me on their projects. I keep in touch with various project leads and let them know what my availability looks like. I don't feel like I'm missing out.
All that said, I worked at my company for close to 10 years before going remote. That was a big help. I personally knew everyone I was working with for the first couple years. Turnover has changed that.
Working remotely requires discipline, perhaps more-so than working in an office. For many people, the commute to work and being in a different environment helps them shift state of mind into a "work" mode. That is harder to manufacture working remotely.
You need to be more available when you work remotely. When someone calls you in an office and you don't answer, they think "oh, maybe they were taking a break or in the restroom". When someone calls you and you work remotely and don't answer, you worry that they will think, "Is this guy really working?"
For the first couple years I worked remotely, I made sure to answer the phone whether I was on lunch or break or whatever. Now that my reputation as an effective remote worker have been established, I don't worry about it so much, but I do still think about it.
Remote contract work doesn't quite count, but because of it, I have never been attached to working onsite.
Working remotely in a non-contract situation, though, does need some connection with the rest of the employees. It helps if the rest of the team is also remote. The whole team had to figure out how to work with each other.
I was honestly hoping this was a joke, but I don't think it was. By the time someone writes an accurate spec, the business need has already changed. Spec's don't work.
What?
Since when did specs become immutable? Needs have changed? Patch the spec. It's faster than patching the software.
From http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html:
"The most important function of a spec is to design the program. Even if you are working on code all by yourself, and you write a spec solely for your own benefit, the act of writing the spec -- describing how the program works in minute detail -- will force you to actually design the program."
Sure, you'll still find out the design was wrong in some areas, and you'll have to change it. But at least you'll have a design to start from, as opposed to a hodgepodge of features carelessly tossed into the interface wherever the programmers found it most convenient to stick them, implemented in whatever way made the most sense to the programmers at the time.
I don't understand how this can be faster. You patch the spec, then patch the software to match. I can't see how the spec could be patched faster. That is unless you patch the spec in isolation, prior to writing any code, which is a bigger mess. I've never, ever seen any group that can write a spec in isolation prior to writing code to demonstrate it, and have it come out well, its usually a disaster.
The idea is by having a spec, you're more likely to see where it needs to be patched upfront, before delivering poorly designed software to angry customers, so you spend less time re-working it later on.
> I've never, ever seen any group that can write a spec in isolation prior to writing code to demonstrate it, and have it come out well, its usually a disaster.
Can you elaborate? I'd be interested in hearing what they were building, who (in general terms) they were building it for, how they went about writing the specs, and what went wrong.
My experience has been completely different, and I'm curious as to why that is.
Edit: Of course you can't expect the customer to write the spec. Designing the software is your job. But that doesn't mean specs are broken; it just means asking your customers to write your specs for you is broken.
The majority of people who request 'software' haven't a clue what they want, they can't possibly describe it, you can't possibly write a spec for it. See years of research regarding waterfall vs agile development as a reference.
See _Leprechauns of Software Development_
Business software isn't about "what they want", it's about coming up with a solution to meet a business need. If the customer can't define what their business need is (the why of specs), then they have no reason to be in business.
It's not the job of the spec writer to define the business need, it's to take an existing need (after clearly defining it through consultation with the customer) and then defining the parameters of the software - inputs, outputs, business rules.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with agile vs. waterfall development. A well-written spec is crucial to ANY business software project.
We do agile development at my company (a 25 year old enterprise software company) and will not begin work until we have a well-defined spec. I continually reject spec docs if they don't have enough info or if I have questions about an aspect of it. It's your job as a developer to help the spec writer see what problems may crop up and define a solution for them.
I think you need to read Code Complete. It's absolutely mind-blowing the respect for specs you get after reading that book, even just chapter 3.
In my experience you never really understand a problem until you've implemented it. You can describe a problem and a solution in excruciating detail, but you'll never find every corner case. Sometimes (often?) those corner cases are really big deals.
Better to prototype and iterate. Software should be the spec.
Agreed. Version 1.0 is a glorified prototype anyway. Nothing about writing a spec prevents you from prototyping and iterating, though. These are not competing ideas.
Of course you won't get everything right in the first draft of the spec. You won't get everything right in the first release of your software either. That's not an excuse to stop trying.
Let's suppose you write a spec, then go on to write some code. For each design problem that makes you break from your original plans, one of two things is true:
(1) Someone noticed a problem while writing or reviewing the spec, and changed the design. You've saved a ton of time over implementing the wrong thing and then changing it later.
(2) You didn't notice the problem until implementation. It still takes just as long to fix as it would have if you hadn't bothered writing a spec first.
If #1 is common enough, writing the spec saves you time. At worst, #1 never happens and you're out the time it took to write the spec. But how long does that take? In my experience, it takes a lot less time to write a spec than to actually implement it.
There's a lot of potential upside and little potential downside.
I don't advocate Epic Design Up Front—at some point, it's time to stop planning and start doing. But I do advocate Some Design Up Front, as opposed to Let's Wing It And Hope For The Best.
> Software should be the spec.
Software is not a spec. It's written in computerspeak so only the programmers can read it, and sometimes they're not even completely sure what's going on. Without a spec, QA has nothing to test against, so you get into arguments about how things should work because there's no record of any decision on the matter. There's nothing to write documentation against, so the documentation ends up worthless. Sales and marketing make up all sorts of neat features you get to implement whether they make sense or not because they've already been sold, and you can't really say they should've known better because you never bothered to write down what they should know in the first place.
If all you have is code, you don't have a spec. Code is not a spec.
Maybe you are talking about running your own start-up where it might not be successful yet? And you're trying to find your market fit? Then sure, maybe just writing new code and changing the product on a whim is what is best without writing up a spec.
Now consider a software consultancy with enterprise customers. The enterprise usually wants time and cost estimates, which usually means agreeing on precisely what you will be delivering in advance. You WANT to write a spec, to prevent scope creep and limit your liability, and they want you to tell them how long and how much (and a spec helps estimate those things). It's win-win.
Most enterprise customers can't wrap their CFO's head around true agile with iterations and open-ended times and costs. They want as much of a guarantee as you can give them for what/how long/how much.
Not saying one way is better or worse - but maybe it's a case of the right tool for the job?
We use specs because our customers tend to be somewhat staid and want certainty and predictability. By keeping chunks of functionality relatively compact (say 3 person months typically, then developed over a period of maybe 6 weeks) writing an accurate and useful spec is absolutely doable.
Doing that we'll usually be 95% (or more) right and any adjustments can be made in a small release a couple of weeks later.
The approach has elements of agile and iteration in it (small releases, the UAT and fix process is basically a short agile sprint) but specs are absolutely a working part of it. Could we do it another way if our clients would accept it? Sure? But do the specs work in the current process? Yes they do.
If you get your feedback on iterations in writing, you will probably get fewer self-contradictory or illegal, immoral, unethical, or unimplementable demands.
A lot of this stuff depends on individual personality. Some people do better on site, and the stuff you write applies. But some people do better off-site, and all of those advantages you cite can turn into disadvantages. I would be extremely wary of painting remote work as something that's always a disadvantage, albeit one that can sometimes be dealt with, no matter who's doing it.
Being included when you're "out of sight, out of mind" -- that's cultural issue. When you are one click away in Skype - you are more reachable than on-site co-worker 2 cubicles down the hall.
I agree about the advantage of breaks/meals/water cooler/gym /walks around the office etc. That could be simulated online though.
I think online gaming communities are ahead in online socialization, so we can learn some tricks from them.
We occasionally have "game break" on Fridays, where the team gets together for an hour to play a board game or video game (popular favorites have been The Resistance and Mario Kart). When one of our teammates moved to Texas (we're in NY), we started Skyping him in for games of The Resistance (it's sort of like Mafia, but with cards). Since it's a card game, we had to find some interesting workarounds - we use http://www.adoodle.org/ for anonymous votes in the game (instead of cards), and hold up his role card to the screen w/out looking at it so he knows if he's a spy or not.
It's been a lot of fun, and a great way to stay connected w/ teammates outside the office. At some point, I'd like to write a Skype bot that handles all the vote-counting and card dealing, but our little hacky version of the game has worked pretty well so far.
Body language in technical specs and design documents should be irrelevant.
Conference calls...yes...they happen in either case. Not sure what there is to "deal with" differently when working remotely.
Being noticed by new people: I think you are suggesting something specific here that I can't relate to.
"Human terrain", gossip, water cooler chats....yes, clearly you are suggesting some kind of requirement for something that is not actually required to do work.
It seems you are suggesting a very heavy personal interaction with people as a general requirement but I think that in a number of positions this is not the case. If you are in an organization where shared personal time, water cooler chats, and face to face email followups are important, then obiviously remote work is not going to be effective. You've essentially built the perfect anti remote work scenario and suggested that it is going to be that way in every job so if you can't combat those things then forget it. What you have to do instead of trying to fight such a culture is to find a position where those things don't matter.
Personally I find a business where people know each other fairly well and understand how each other operates is preferable over one where I am only considered for my "job function;" so I can relate. But perhaps I am just idealistic.
Perhaps in your case, as described in your last paragraph, you would find that to be better for you. But I don't think it is undeniably better in all cases, for all people.
Many startups are actually remote only and I don't think they would accept that they are somehow inferior for it.
The situation you are describing arises when you try to introduce telecommuting into an organization, without making it part of the culture. When it is an exception and not the norm. As with any exceptions, it has to be properly managed, and results in extra effort being required form both sides of the fence in order to make it work. However, making it the exception is the main reason telecommuting doesn't work out for organizations.
At the company where I worked, the norm was that all member of the development staff were telecommuting. Most other departments were on-site, with the exception of about 50% of sales. Pretty much everyone that came into the office did so by choice. I did about 50/50, as my job included a lot of meetings with executives.
The main aspects that made this successful, were the same as in the office - there was a very specific expectation of behavior: - When the day starts (at you preferred/agreed upon time), you send an email stating you are working to the dev distro list. - When you are working, you are expected to be on IM (statuses are meaningful, if you are set to "do not disturb", you are not disturbed, unless an emergency arises). - When you leave, take a long break, etc, you let the team know by email. - A daily "stand-up" call was held at specific time. - Everyone had a published contact list. Especially, leads, managers and PMs were expected to answer the calls from devs.
Essentially, when someone would IM you, it would be like dropping by someone's cube to talk. White-boarding sessions were done over gotomeetings or webex.
For people not used to this, it might sound like a chatty, annoying type of environment, but in reality, being aware of the need to communicate, it made for a much more hospitable place to work. When you needed to concentrate, you could shut everything out. When you needed to collaborate, people were an IM or phone call away.
Given how much you post on HN, it strikes me as somewhat hypocritical to talk about email as an inferior communication method. The internet and writing are increasingly critical to business success, even for local mom and pop shops. I am well aware that people routinely talk like there is something inherently superior about "IRL" interactions. It frequently makes me want to ask "So, then, why are you here?" Because, inevitably, it is someone getting enormous value from their virtual life who is dismissing remote/virtual something-or-other as "not real" or otherwise somehow inferior. Naturally, they do it a lot on the Internet, just to add to the irony.
And especially: "being included when you're "out of sight, out of mind""
A remote presence device can make a tremendous difference. We know this because we use them ourselves, with our own distributed team. We have people on three continents, in the same office, every day.
One challenge we have (full disclosure, my company makes such a device) is how to explain the benefits, and how it changes life and work, without a live demo. Our research shows that it takes about 30 minutes of use before people start to see the differences. I'd be curious to know what the folks at Double Robotics, Anybots, VGo, and some of the other new companies have found as well.
On the other hand, I worked for a company which employed large numbers of remote workers and it wasn't really an issue. One of our clients integrated two of our people into a team which was spread all across north america.
That said, I think if you don't capture the water cooler, lunches, etc., you're not getting the full value from the person. Having worked solo/remote for five years, I'm now working in a conventional office setup, going to lunch with colleagues, shooting shit with people at the coffee machine, and so forth -- and the value that these informal encounters have for the project and organization is simply phenomenal.
Serendipitous encounters with other smart, passionate people can be amazingly powerful -- I seem to recall an article citing examples such as "Building 20" at MIT where researchers constantly bumped into people working in random different fields, and Pixar's campus where all the bathrooms and snacks are in the central hub. I think that if you're working with the right people on the right project, you want to be together (until the technology for being together -- e.g. electronic "wormholes" -- when you're apart gets a whole lot better).
I found the article I was thinking of:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_...
On the other hand, it's very easy to quantify the benefit of remote workers. You increase your potential labor force if you remove geographic restrictions, which cuts costs and improves productivity. I personally was able to quantify the benefit of working remotely in terms of distractions. I work remotely on a medium sized team and I occasionally travel to the headquarters to work on-site. My productivity always drops when I'm on-site because of the constant interruptions and meetings, both initiated by others and myself.
Skype, Facetime, G+ Hangouts etc all help, but there is still a significant qualitative difference to being in the same physical room as a bunch of smart people - both in terms of coming up with better ideas and solutions, and of avoiding miscommunication and misunderstandings.
No doubt as our comms tech gets better that gap will decrease (it's a lot narrower than ten years ago), but it's definitely there.
But, oh, it does matter. Some companies are just NOT set up to handle remote work, even if they have the technology to do so.
Yes, that is the trade-off the remote worker makes. However it is important to understand that the folks on the employer's side also have to make that extra effort to manage communication effectively with remote workers, and they don't get the advantages of working remotely. That is not to say that it should never be done (doing a project with remote workers is indeed advantageous in certain scenarios), but the balance of the advantages in remote working (barring financial overhead issues like providing an office) are with the worker. So one should not be surprised that companies want you to relocate before they know about you.
Now for certain individuals, it is to the benefit of the company to support the remote working agreement because of the value they get from working with that particular individual. Which is why there is a huge selection effect when people blog "hey, I telecommute and don't lack in work". It's similar to a famous actor saying "hey, I don't do anything special and I don't lack in dates".
The people who couldn't find work that way? They relocated and aren't blogging about remote working.
But absolutely - if you can make it work for yourself, go for it - no argument that it improves your quality of life.
That's not necessarily a bad thing considering that most communication within most office environments, like it or not, is not "productive communication".
When you have many people together in the same environment with a low communication cost it is inevitable that interactions will not always be productive (in the sense, "do we really need to talk about this, right now?").
To some extend the notion of community and belonging is lost when working remotely - as someone else mentioned, is like reading a book vs an e-book. However, if you manage to get past the feeling of not "being real" or not "feeling it" you realise that the function (working) is quite distinct from the form (sharing an office).
Sometimes when I talk with my workmates over skype and listen about time lost on discussions over office politics and needless meetings I feel great, because I'm glad I missing that kind of communication. At the same time, it is difficult to understand the context of a discussion without each party knowing the environment within which the other party is communicating from.
From my experience the downsides of working remotely are far less than the upsides. In addition to that, most downsides can be easily overcome (company or team-wide retreats, better culture management, etc).
The upsides on the other hand, for both parties, are unique in working remotely and cannot be reproduced or copied whilst working on location.
Personally, I enjoy my work the most when I work in two markets: education and music. The country I live in has exactly zero potential for me in those two markets with the skills I have. So working remotely is my only viable option (aside from migrating). Likewise, my employer has a highly skilled individual, who cares deeply about the product he's building, working for him - the type of individual he wasn't able to find locally.
It really is a win-win situation but at the same time, like everything else in life, you win some you lose some.
I've just seen enough people outwardly complain about the differences between being remote and on-site and wondered why this tool doesn't get mentioned in the conversation more.. Maybe it just doesn't work..
http://agilescout.com/an-agile-virtual-office-beam-me-up-bro...
I know have an ipad and I found that my reading habits again. I'm reading medium-short non fiction. Stuff I can dip in and out of. Yesterday it was 4 Hour Body, Sun Tze & The Communist Manifesto. If I'm reading for an hour I will read a dozen or two pages from 3-4 different things.
Medium changes things. Remote employment has pros and cons (for both parties) but it is not the same thing. It's harder (or at least different) to develop employees, build a culture, produce ideas from multiple minds.
It goes the same way for someone who works in the office every day then decides to work at home. When I've had a dedicated office space in my home and worked there for an extended time, I always feel like I missed out on some social aspects that I needed from the office environment, including both productive and unproductive communication, but my productivity went up. But now that I've been working daily in an office, and I do not have a dedicated space at home, when I do end up working from home, i'm far more distracted. I think it's easy to look at either side and flail your hands attempting to qualify as well as justify what you're doing. But it's not that cut and dry. In your experience working from home may make perfect sense, but I still don't think it's easy to quantify the benefit of remote workers. For a lot of people working remotely is distracting in a different way, and you end up giving up a lot of essential in-office interactions, sometimes without ever realizing it.
It's not that your city isn't fun and exciting. It's that your office is in a building in that city, whereas my office is anyplace I feel like being at the moment.
Now I might feel like being in your city for a while. Possibly even in your cool office. But for half the year I'll probably be someplace completely different. Because I can.
The author hit the nail on the head when he explained why this gig is so great: we can do it from anywhere.
The good companies have figured this out and are encouraging their people to do just that. Since that's now a viable option, it's tough to understand why people are still working for companies that don't give that option.
You may be able to do the job from anywhere, I'm not challenging that because I don't know you, but not everyone can, and not everyone is best suited to do that.
With that, if you make remote working the default, people can structure themselves as they see fit. If you need to be around others, then you can group with others in the company who feel the same way. Those who want to be off doing their own thing can do that. If people are free to work where they want to work, they'll optimize for what works best.
There isn't a right and wrong answer here, IMO. In my experience, working in the same location and working in different locations are very different working experiences. For some companies and employees, one will work. For others, it will not. I will be very hesitant to ever enter into a remote working situation again- I did not like it at all. But that's just me.
All that is required is for you to make sure you work for a company that matches you- don't get angry if a company/prospective employee doesn't match what you want. That's where the article's complaints about recruiters ring true- they don't know/care. But they don't know/care about anything other than the buzzwords on your resume, so this shouldn't be anything new.
(Ironically, just this morning I got a LinkedIn spam message from "CultureFit Staffing". Anything but, folks...)
Working remote is awesome, I hope to do it again some day (Clojure or JavaScript for me, if anyone is hiring) but its very important that everyone is on the same table about expectations. You get into the habit of working long hours for a couple of reasons: first because you are home anyways and might not have anything else to do (not a terrible reason), and secondly because you want to show the company that you're working hard -- something that isn't an issue when working locally.
I've turned down a couple of good opportunities because I didn't want to relocate. Of all of the reasons to relocate to a new city, I think doing so for work is possibly the work reason. It's too easy to fall into a trap where work becomes your life.
A lot of smaller startups lack long-term capital. You could be relocating for a job that isn't there in seven months. Relocating to join an established company that will honor your multi-year contract? That's one thing. But relocating for a company that may not be in great financial shape (and may have never even made profit) is another thing entirely. Uprooting your entire family for what could be a massive risk is a lot to ask, especially when employees can remote work to see if the job is a good fit for a year or two. Startups really should be offering more remote employment if they want to be able to attract more established talent.
I would also quibble with his cost of living calculations. He doesn't say whether or not these short trips involve walking or driving a car. Based on my knowledge of Louisville and the tenor of his post, many of them may in fact be car trips, which are much more expensive than walking or public transportation trips -- both financially and physically. If you live in a truly walkable area, you don't need a gym membership. Exercise is called living your daily life.
Old cost of living indexes just factored in housing and some other data, leaving out transportation. When you factor in transportation, often a households second highest cost (and highest in rural areas), many of these areas become much cheaper. We live in the DC area right on the Red Line and only need one car because of it. All of our trips this past weekend -- going to parties, to the movies, to stores, to get pizza -- either involved walking or public transportation. While my housing is assuredly more expensive than someone living in Louisville, my families transportation costs are incredibly low.
So when we talk about cost of living, we have to factor in everything. I'd still bet that Louisville is cheaper than NYC, but it's a lot closer when you apply an apples-to-apples comparison. This is particularly true when you compare housing in the same metro. Much of that exurban housing is suddenly a lot more expensive when you factor in transportation.
This is bullshit. Walking is not sufficient exercise. You need to elevate your heart rate in order to get true cardiovascular exercise.
I traverse cities just about as fast as I possibly can without breaking into a jog. It definitely gets the heart rate up.
So...you're saying I should run?
> I traverse cities just about as fast as I possibly can without breaking into a jog. It definitely gets the heart rate up.
No offense, but if your heart rate starts rising that much without breaking into a jog, you're seriously out of shape.
Going to the gym is largely an Americanism. Not exactly a culture I'd want to emulate for healthiness.
Consistent movement is much more healthy than sporadic bouts of high intensity. Walking everywhere is just about the healthiest thing you can do.
Were we ever talking about living longer? Exercise is important because improves blood flow to the brain, and therefore brain function. It can make you happier and better rested.
Longevity is impacted by a lot of other lifestyle factors, many of which have nothing to do with exercise.
So basically you're conflating those other cultures' incidental lack of cardiovascular exercise with the fact that they live longer (which is due to completely unrelated factors), and then making the specious claim that exercising leads to shorter life spans.
> Going to the gym is largely an Americanism. Not exactly a culture I'd want to emulate for healthiness.
Going to the gym isn't an "Americanism", it's something done by a certain percentage of Americans who are significantly healthier than the American population at large.
The fact that you're even suggesting that intense exercise at the gym is bad for your health is just appalling.
> Consistent movement is much more healthy than sporadic bouts of high intensity. Walking everywhere is just about the healthiest thing you can do.
I never said that you shouldn't walk around, it has its benefits too. My point is that "walking around" is not "exercise".
Sure he does, e.g.: "I bought a house near my stepdaughter’s school, so she can walk to and from school, and transportation for extracurriculars is less of a problem." When he says he's two minutes from his gym, I assume he means two walking minutes; even if he doesn't, two driving minutes is not a significant transportation cost
Plus no matter how much you might have to drive to go to a party or a movie, none of that is going to compare to cutting out a commute by working from home.
It's also much easier to get into a company if you can talk to the people working there in person regularly rather than doing remote interviews and phone conferences. A couple pair programming sessions, hackathons, or fun projects together and you might be in the door without any of the usual suffering. Although lack of process like that is part of smaller startups as well.
I also live in a non-tech center area, where my tech job household income is approximately 4.5 times the median wage. Needless to say the odds of my getting $472K per year in Mountain View are extremely low. Laughably I had a conversation with HR at a well known employer in the area and their pay rate was something absolutely ridiculous compared to the $472K I'd need to live an equivalent lifestyle in CA, barely 10% more. I have no interest in a massive terrifying downgrade in the standard of living for myself and my family. I have no interest in moving from "CEO neighborhood" to "cardboard box under the overpass". Sorry HR.
(edit: whoops I crossed household and individual income. Doesn't change the overall outcome, I need 100% to 200% pay raise to move and live an equivalent lifestyle and they offer 10% to 20%... its not going to happen)
Concur with author 100%. There are lots of nice cities in the US that are way cheaper and more livable than the big 2, and moving from one of them to effectively make less, commute more, and have less personal time, even after taking a hit on the cost of living adjustment is pretty questionable.
If I were to move to SF I don't see how I could afford a place that was both close to work and had a garage where I could tinker unless I felt like commuting 2 hours each way. But I'm also spoiled by a real estate market where you can a decent house for under 200k, sometimes close to 100k, where I'm living now.
What doesn't work very well is having a few remote people and a large mass of people in an office all working together on the same project. There is significant high bandwidth communication that happens when people are together physically. This leaves remote workers out to pasture. Things get missed. Tension builds.
The same effect occurs when you have multiple offices working on the same projects. I've been in the middle of this first hand as well. You can quickly end up with teams doing a lot of internal communication without talking to the teams in other offices. Rivalries will build. It will probably become an "Us vs Them" situation as animosity over small things snowballs.
This can be combated largely by explicit written communication. Use chat rooms. Use good issue tracking. Use internal social networking.
"Don’t take (or keep) a job because you like the people. If you’re a decent person, you’ll find people you like (and who like you) at any job you take."
This is patently NOT true. The people you work with, in my experience, matter far more than any other factor.
I've been in the experience of having an okay job, with an amazing group of people. It made the okay job better. I then took a job about a product I cared about, and the people were great, too, making it an even better job before. I'm happy to wake up in the morning for the work I'll be doing, not the people I'll be chatting with over coffee, who don't really enjoy their job either but like me.
Also to note, I still hang out with at least 5 of the people from the previous job on a weekly basis.
I'd say both matter, but sometimes, great coworkers just put a mask on your otherwise shitty job. Finding a job you truly care about will surround you with people that do as well -- and, odds are, you will get along.
According to the article, if I like the job, I should just stay and new people would come in that I like. But that isn't true. The 'people I like' leaving is a harbinger that the company culture is changing.
The compromise that I've made is that in spending a few days in Mountain View every 6 weeks or so. It's not terribly inconvenient for me, allows me to pad my frequent flyer miles, and I generally enjoy California. I think that the cost of living between California and Maryland are a lot closer than Louisville would be, so I've always got my eye open to possibly relocating somewhere even cheaper than here -- my home town is Memphis, TN, which is damn near free to live in comparatively, but I really like Annapolis, its proximity to DC and Baltimore, and the knowledge that almost everything is within a couple of hours.
The biggest trouble I have is that I really like the bigger cities. I love the time I spend in and around San Francisco, and on occasion I'll spend time in NY, which I also enjoy. I can't ever tell though if it's just because I'm effectively a tourist, or how much I would enjoy it as a permanent residence. Ultimately, I think I'm plenty happy anywhere with a temperate climate and the ability to work from home, so I'm occasionally torn on job offers I receive to work in sexier locales. Grats to Ernie for having found his ideal place. The spot I'd move to to maximize dollar value (Memphis) is too hot to be perfectly happy, and all the places I've found with better climates tend to be more expensive -- so perhaps I'm still searching for my idyllic setting, or perhaps it's just a matter of the grass being greener.
New York City is a great place to live... until it isn't. I define living in NYC as actually living in NYC. What tends to happen is that you get married and have kids.
At that point, the random things that happen when you live in a city shift from "quirky" to scary. Maybe its your car getting broken into. Or the incessant noise of "Mr Softie" in the summer or fire trucks year round. Or your kid's bike getting stolen. Or paying $7 to go over a bridge. Or being packed in a tight subway car. Or your kid walking to school. Or when your kid gets older, taking the bus and subway to school.
While you're going through that, half of your friends have moved to the suburbs. Your kid's cousins in Long Island go to schools with olympic pools that hand out iPads. They have a big backyard and idyllic quiet. So eventually, most people relent and find themselves with a 90 minute commute to a cul de sac somewhere.
As for mr softie: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=bDXL90KXPHQ&desktop_uri=%...
Well, at least modern American parents do....
Companies—especially small ones—are defined by their culture, and I really think culture is best developed and maintained in person. We recently had three of our team members move away for various reasons, and they're now working remotely. It has been a shake-up. I won't say it's a bad thing, because I truly want them to be happy, and I'm truly willing help them make it work, but it has been a surprising culture shift for our entire company. At this point, I think we'll make it work, but the day-to-day work experience for all our employees has changed dramatically and that's not something to take lightly.
Find a place you truly want to live (which definitely doesn't have to be in the Bay Area) and find a company that you want to work for locally. Go into the office every day. Talk with people about more than work. Connect and develop relationships. Work toward a true culture that exemplifies what the company stands for both internally and externally, and make it meaningful to everyone involved.
That's what makes me happy, and that's what I'm optimizing for. Am I in the absolute number one place that I want to be in, period? Maybe not. If I had my say I'd be living and working on the east side of the Sierra Nevada within 1 hour each of Mammoth mountain and the Yosemite highlands—and that may be my eventual destination.
But right now, location is far less important to me than the people I spend each day with, the people with whom I work, and the company culture that I'm helping to generate and preserve. That's what moves me forward each day, and I truly believe that will make my company more successful and sustainable.
I understand you though. I went through a time in my life where I was more attached to places than people. Turns out I was in the right place all along, but I just hadn't run into the right people. That changed for me, and now I truly believe that location is a small price to pay. It's complicated—it is of course better to have a great employee working remotely than a poor one in the office, but I think it's even better—perhaps exponentially so and especially to a startup—to have that great employee in the same room.
*Edit: I'd like to add, that part of this is the "who moved my cheese" problem, of going from a 100% local company to a significantly dispersed company. We are adapting as a whole and each week we improve our process and culture. The challenge has become "how do we maintain a culture and coherence remotely?" I think in time we will be successful at that, and continue to be a strong group, but it's still a challenge, and one that you'll have to weigh against other challenges if you so choose.
I'm a hell of a lot more attached to people outside of work than I am inside of work. My school, my church, my neighborhood, my family. I'm barely willing to move 40 minutes of drivetime let alone all the way across the country to a community I barely know.
My children and my family are going to be a legacy whether I make it my focus or not or not. I choose to make it my focus. (even the choice not to have children or family is some type of legacy choice for generations to follow)
It is definitely important to make decisions for family and community as well as for work. Since I spend much of my time at work with coworkers, I tend to think of those relationships as being important at this point in my life. YMMV.
From the perspective of the company itself, priorities surely differ from your own. I think it's important to bring all these needs into account when determining how to make our companies and our lives better and more successful.
I'm currently not interested in moving because of people. I like my friends here. I like my community. Jobs are easy to find. Good friends and community? Now that is difficult, and is life without friends?
Like the OP - I also grew up in the middle of nowhere, PA.
I previously worked remotely for companies during college, and I've been surprised by how much I'm enjoying the co-worker experience here -- just a different one. Nearly every day I go to CoworkMYR (www.coworkmyr.com), and we're excited about building a tech culture here, and touting the benefits of lower cost of living, and all MB has to offer.
I agree with OP and calinet6: People have a lot to do with your happiness. I've met more neighbors, made new friends, and had more in-depth interactions with them in 4 weeks here than in 6 years in Boston. That blows me away. I think its part environment, and part busy: Most people in Boston are there to get education, get started with careers, etc: They're extremely focused on that, and not so much on friends, relationships, etc.
Another huge benefit of leveraging the cost of living towards happiness is that we've realized my wife doesn't need to work full-time. She's pursuing other interests, she just got a job teaching. Her happiness has increased so much! (Her metric for this was that I've caught her giggling in her sleep numerous times here, as opposed to worrying sleep talk in Boston).
TL; DR: I agree with OP on the values of working for a good company remotely and having more control and flexibility over your time and life. I invite calinet6 to come visit and give it a try ;)
You know I'm a huge believer in coworking, and I think it's for similar reasons—you meet people and generate ideas and relationships that are also valuable. I just think it's also a great thing to be coworking with your own coworkers, or at least that it shouldn't be discounted as unimportant in the general case.
For us, it's a shift that we're really working at, and we're getting better at it by the week. Just because I say I would be hesitant to start a company with remote workers or bring people on remotely doesn't mean it's not applicable to the current situation, or at a later stage. Even with a different company I'm sure it would be a more difficult and more complex decision than I anticipate.
I still think it would be great to all be working in the same room, but at the same time, it's great to have everyone happy and living the life they want to live, and it's a small price to pay. That is truly of unmeasurable importance and I couldn't be happier for you for following your dreams.
I am actually generally an introvert who has developed some people skills over the last ten years or so. I am not always a "people person;" I simply recognize the advantages and see what makes a company tick, or not, and I think personal interaction is one of the big reasons.
After all, a company is a group of people, and interaction between people is one of the key features of a growing business weather or not it is your personal preference.
I'm not saying that you can't do well without being a "people person" and I absolutely do not mean to project my preferences on others. My statements were observations based on a variety of people at several companies, and seem to be true for most cases. YMMV. In any case, these ideas are still good to think about and evaluate.
So, what, people can't do this type of stuff online? The remote team I work with hangs out on internet chat all day long, every work day. We talk about plenty beyond work related stuff. We even post messages over the weekend. We care about each other and our personal lives and have a very cohesive team. Again, this is ebooks vs. paper books. People have a romantic notion about what true interpersonal communication is supposed to be, but when it comes down to it there's no reason why one method of communication is inherently better than any other.
This can lead to new and creative developments and projects that would never happen from simply talking to people on your team. These projects have, at least for me, often been the most fun and challenging (and profitable) project I've been involved in.
The method of a single chat room means multiple crossing conversations become hard and there's constant distraction trying to see what people are talking about only to find it's not interesting to you.
There is no reason that can't be done remotely, and surely people are getting better at it with current technology. But it is decidedly more difficult, in my experience, than a physical presence, and you may not realize what might be missing.
Not wanting to move for a job is the default for 99% of the world.
What the author is saying is that in this day and age, in this profession, having to move is a bit silly and wanting to move is cool.
I can get more work done, experience less distractions - to be honest I don't really give a dam what a companies culture is like to a large extent, tell me what you need done & when you need it done by, if I think its achievable then I'll make it happen. I don't want to play xboxes, get free lunches or any of that nonsense - I want time with my family & lots of money for future security - that & working from a location of my choosing is all that really matters to me, in return I'll work my ass off, remain loyal & ensure my employer is getting value for their $
Employers will avoid remote workers at their own loss.
I am also on the receiving end of many of those same emails. However, I actually live in California, in beautiful Monterey. Every single Silicon Valley recruiter does not think it is a big deal for me to move two hours away. I am so close, why not? If I wanted to live in Silicon Valley, I would live in Silicon Valley.
BTW, I do not believe in working remote. Working locally has numerous benefits for both the employer and employee.
I was the first person to vote / comment on it, and I doubt I would have even looked twice at it if I had pigeonholed it as "a post about Louisville." I'm glad it got to the #1 spot for as long as it did with the originally-submitted title.
I guess the lesson here is give blog posts principal titles that are more attention-grabby, so HN editors won't edit them on you.
I would say startups are probably most likely to be able to take advantage of this.
BTW, this post makes me want to move to Louisville and join Ernie :) (not really, Chicago is really nice).
Optimizing for happiness, put in the context of actual real-world happiness, is a strong point. I'll keep praying about it...
Essentially the efficient frontier is a finance concept that says that combinations of assets can be graphed and form a line called "The Efficient Frontier" where only portfolios of assets on that line should be considered.
Sorry for the link to wiki, but this is a really short article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier
When I consider where I live, I want to optimize to make sure I am on that frontier. Instead of risk and return on the axises, I think of a multivariant optimization, but essentially what I am saying is that many cities do not make it on the efficient frontier when looking logically.
For example, is there anyway that Louisville has as rich of a history as NYC, or DC, Boston or even SF?
Does Louisville have better night life than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?)
Does Louisville have better skyline than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?)
Does Louisville have better live performances than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?)
Does Louisville have better museums than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?)
Does Louisville have a better hipster scene than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?). Its probably better than Boston's, but I don't care whether hipsters are part of the culture or not.
And the OP's biggest point, that he likes to drive to rural areas in 15 minutes. Its more like 20 minutes from SF, but some of the best mountain biking, trails etc. is right there. Boston has the same thing 20 minutes away. IMO DC and NYC are harder to get to rurual areas.
Liking Louisville is completely understandable if you just like being familar and don't want to move and have to make new friends etc. but it should be 100% understandable why a recruiter cannot imagine someone wanting to stay when viewing the opportunity as an outsider.
[ADDED] I reread what I wrote and it seems like I'm bashing Louisville, more my intention was to put out the efficient frontier concept for selecting a location.
[To unalone and the OP] Sorry for coming off as pompous. It does read a little that way, but I used the OP's criteria, not my own. The OP could have made a much better arugument by specifying what he likes about the criteria, but he didn't do that so I just asked the questions rather than making an assertion about them. Notice that I didn't specify whether DC does have better nightlife than Louisville? I instead just asked the question which the reader can answer on their own.
What? This is absurd! A city's qualities cannot be pared down to such an easy evaluation. "Better night life" is itself a complex and multifaceted value; "better skyline" is hardly worth caring about, "better live performances and museums" suggests you think culture is so precious, so rare, that it can only be found in the biggest cities in the country. Lemme tell you, I spent my early life growing up in the remote mountain suburbs of New Jersey, and even there it is quite easy to find things to do. In any city of even moderate size you will never be left wanting for options.
The "efficient frontier" is a pompous way to describe what every single person does when they're deciding where to live: weigh the various advantages and disadvantages against each other, and decide which place seems like it would work best for you. I mean, that's what the entire goddamn post was about: hell Ernie described Louisville so persuasively that now I'm curious to see what it's like for myself.
It's odd that you felt the need to tell the OP he's wrong to value Louisville over your completely weird set of values. You might say you weren't out to bash Louisville, but your entire comment was just a justification to talk about how Louisville might not be as good as OP says it is, and how therefore recruiters are completely justified to think people want to live in fucking New York City. Which, eeesh, I get why some people do, but... eeesh.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. I may not always love my job, but the beauty of the mountains in the morning ride/drive in always makes me smile. The only other place that comes close is my previous residence, where the Sandias were glorious for the ride home (go ahead, look up the definition of "sandia" in Spanish and imagine the colors).
You're right, though: everyone does the evaluation of where to live (whether consciously or not), and everyone has different values. Me, I like being able to ride my bike to work and be able to go bouldering or climbing after work almost year round. "Better night life" is hardly worth caring about to me.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think it's as important that Louisville be the "best" in any one of those categories so much as "sufficiently good".
It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Satisfaction at one tier opens up the others.
Does Louisville have a better cost of living than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston)?
So, lets say a factor of 15.
So a question; "If you wish to work at a remote location, are you willing to take a salary that is commensurate with the median salary at that remote location?"
I find people are somewhat split on that question.
> are you willing to take a salary that is commensurate with the median salary at that remote location?
Salary is just a function of supply and demand. If a bunch of people with amazing talents in Louisville are willing to do it for $36K, then that will push down the wages in California too. The only thing that has really kept SF developer prices as high as they are is that even the skilled people of Louisville want $100K+ to do the job.
At my previous job, after acquiring a company that had a mostly-remote workforce, everyone eventually moved away from our home area (DC) to cheaper parts of the country. No one took a pay cut to reflect the fact that they now were living somewhere cheaper (and everyone new we hired was in the same range regardless of where they lived).
Also, having lived and worked in Boston, the Bay Area, and now the Beltway, I was surprised to find that salaries weren't any lower or higher in any of those places, despite the costs of living being all over the place. It's possible that my particular corner of the industry (infosec) is just less geographically-dependent.
From the company perspective, limiting discussion to US only, the benefit of remote workers is much more about hiring talent rather than being able to save a few dollars.
I honestly don't see why this would even come up. It's not the recruiter's job to understand why someone wants what they want. The recruiter just needs to know what they want. If I want to do X, then they need to work with that, either by accommodating it, or figuring out what compensation I'd need to do not-X. They don't need to understand the rationale, and there doesn't even need to be a rationale.
I've been living in a small coastal town now for 4 years, not close to much of anything related to my field, yet I am working and happier than I could ever be in some metropolis.
As for salary? I demand Bay Area pay wherever I live. I also demand to watch my daughter grow up and not suffer through any more BS commutes on 85/101.
As far as Indianapolis goes, at least it's not Cleveland or Buffalo...
Also, I didn't see anything in the post about the great local coffeeshop scene in Louisville :)
Cultivate relationships in whatever form they take.
Keep in mind that for many people it's exactly the lifestyle which makes NYC attractive... certainly it's not for everyone (some people just want a big lawn and lots of parking at the mall)—but it is for many people.
[I don't want to move back to the U.S., but if I do, NYC is one of the very few places I can imagine living....]
Yes, there are tradeoffs. I probably won't advance in your company or have a prestigious resume, even though I've been working on Internet technologies since the early 1990s. I don't want to be a founder or first employee, I want to be your first contractor. You can even meet me, too; I've been known to fly out to conferences and company meetings.
For my part, I use the partnership's Redmine ticket system religiously, and the customer can see the solid results I deliver by working for the agreed-upon amount of hours (or more!) per day/week/month, and if the customer doesn't like the results (experience suggests most do, but some are better suited to cheap stuff from India), then they do not renew the contract.
Besides my zipcode, I get an interesting choice of working situations. I've been on conference calls while I had two divers in the water getting lobster. A week ago, my office was on the tailgate of the truck as my wife and I worked blue crab fishing holes. I may even be on the sailboat moored near a coral patch reef, a few miles out to sea (there is LTE up to 5nm out to sea generally, around here). I don't tell all clients about this; Some are cool with it, others would prefer to think I sit in an office all day. It doesn't matter, because in the end I'm serious about productivity, regardless of my surroundings (and this is why you won't generally find me trying to work from the countless bars down here, experience suggests it's bad for productivity, to put it mildly).
It isn't for every company, and it isn't for every developer. But it certainly works very well for some companies and some developers.
Email+issue tracker for the rest of the communication. Asynchronous communication help me to stay focused.
It works really well for both of us.
In that sense, money is time... and time can be represented as money.
If you had gone in with the mind set, "I want to work locally, and relocating isn't something that works for me." I can respect that, but when you say I wont locate for YOU, comes off as saying, hey I make the decisions not you. Or an attention grabbing title for a post.
For a full time employee, remote work is like a long distance relationship, more often than not, they just do not work. Heck contract remote work is already difficult as is.
Is it any less pompous to say: "I would like to hire you, but you have to leave where you live and everyone you know and come to me?"
uhh, isn't that the way it should be?
This is false. You only need to make twice as much as you are spending. I don't think anyone making something like $100k in Louisville would be spending all their money and then would need to make $220k in New York.
And, what the heck do you think happens to the extra money? It goes away? The difference between 100k and the cost of living in Louisville is hopefully invested back in his own family. Even if it is wasted he is still using it.
As for investing money back, I'd assume you would have some kind of an investment account (for future, retirement or even your child's college fund) that would provide the same returns no matter where you are.
What you're paying when you suffer Manhattan or Bay Area rent is the career benefit (?) that it confers to live in such a place. You may be overpaying; you probably are. I don't think anyone has good data on this, which is why the extortionist mega-landlords who set prices (by limiting supply through NIMBY regulations) can get away with so much. No one has a good handle on what it's actually worth to live and work in a star city. I think a lot of people pile into star cities because they're driven by FUD and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
I don't know what "the right answer" is but I can see the appeal of living in these high-rent areas. It really sucks, though, because we're in an uncanny valley where people are just mobile enough to stratify by ambition (with a lot of noise in the mix; I am not saying that people who don't live in expensive places aren't ambitious, but the correlation exists) in their 20s, but not enough to render location obsolete.
It's difficult, but it's not impossible. I was recently promoted to CTO, and the company I work for is based on the opposite coast from me. It helps if you work for a company where working remotely is part of the culture - we have people all over the world in many different timezones, about one third of use work remotely. You can definitely make it work in the right company.
You may be right. I have no idea. I'm not in SF/SV. I will say that I'm not convinced that VC-istan has any real edge over the rest of the business world. It's just better at marketing itself.
FOMO is real but it's not only about geography. There are just very few companies that will pay for anything interesting. It's not like every 22-year-old in Silicon Valley gets to work on cutting-edge machine learning algorithms.
Ultimately, it's hard to get decent work. I don't know if moving to an otherwise overpriced location has decent ROI. I just don't have the data to answer that question.
It's going to be funny when everyone starts figuring that out!