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Comment by dsleno | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to Yahoo's crackdown, I think working at home has gotten a bum rap lately. I work at home, and so do my 4 employees. It can let you build a great a lifestyle, and help small businesses hire talent where ever they can find it.

In my case, I traded the city for a modest home on a beautiful lake in rural Minnesota. It also lets me be near my autistic son who attends online public school (school at home is another digression, but off topic).

Yes, there are challenges, like deciding if today is a shave day or not.

All kidding aside, working at home is tool that great companies with great employees can wield effectively to obtain excellent results and acquire talent they can't find locally. Companies, like Yahoo, that don't understand this are not great companies and probably never will be.

Long live working at home!

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It comes with downsides as well in the sense that it's a very rare privilege. If your company decides one day to let you go , cancel work-at-home privileges or simply goes under, your life is going to suddenly become much, much harder, especially in the case of people who, like you, took this opportunity to move to a very isolated area.

I live in an area with pretty much 0 worthwhile tech jobs. I've been working remote for a while now and done so with 3 very different organizations doing very different types of work (plain old software dev to machine learning research), and I've personally found this not to be a "very rare privilege" at all. Currently about 9% of the jobs on Stack overflow careers are remote, and if you look carefully you can find a very wide range of work.

I find the remote space is rapidly advancing and expanding. The tools are getting much better, and the diversity of companies offering remote work is as well. It's definitely sustainable to choose to work only remotely, and even if I were to move to a city with better tech jobs I would have a hard time going back to full-time working in an office.

We shouldn't specifically criticize Yahoo, or read too much into it: It was (and may still be) a completely dysfunctional company where, it seems, a lot of employees had simply accepted the slow ride into obscurity, where relevance came only "by default" (I still can't believe that Yahoo is the most visited website). Mayer essentially hit the reset button to regroup and figure things out again, and she has specifically talked about her action having little to do with actual remote work, and more to do with trying to get the organization back on track. Sucks for the employees of Yahoo, but, to put it bluntly, they were the employees of Yahoo. So long as you work for someone else, they get to make those decisions.

And her action then kicked off many others to read way too much into it, usually to springboard off for their own interests. Mediocre managers who have no clue what their charges are doing, and can only manage suffering, for instance, all cheered and forwarded and linked.

Awesome, what kind of business do you run?

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