Ask HN: Are my expectations for a workplace unrealistic? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are my expectations for a workplace unrealistic?

12 pointsmillenialism9 comments

I'm from a westernized country in Europe and I'm having a hard time finding the right developer job for me, making me feel that the problem isn't the sameyness of the workplaces, but my unrealistic expectations towards them. Being an avid reader of HN, I see stories about places like GitHub and Automattic that talk about how great it is with remote workers and how to put an emphasis on work done rather than set hours per day. So when I go to job interviews (at startups and large firms alike) where they talk about "core hours", the importance of "having fun during those 8 hours a day" and being "a part of the team in-house" it all feels like they're stuck in an industrial age mindset.

I've worked at a handful of different companies and they fluctuate on how strict they are with work hours (one place had me on a rigid 9-to-5 schedule while another had me fill in a timesheet to prove I've spent 8 hours a day working), but they all adhere to the standard butt-in-seat-8-hours-a-day and are taken aback when I mention my interest in more autonomy. At one point when I was gauging a prospective employer's views on remote work in an interview the air got surprisingly tense as he aggressively scoffed at the idea of someone taking the job only to move to a 3rd world country to rake in the money.

I've spoken to other developers about this and we all somewhat lament the lack of freedom, but everyone just accepts it as the price to pay to be a programmer. It's a little sad that when I ask my friends how their job is the answers range from "meh" to "alright" and I find the situation somewhat stifling to our creativity and efficiency as "knowledge workers". I don't understand how at an age of ocean-crossing communication and untold abundance we are still working like factory mules.

Are my expectations unrealistic or is there an ideal I can aim for?

In my personal experience (UK and EU mostly):

* 100% remote working is rare

* Flexitime around core hours is relatively common

* Remote working from the start is very rare. Most employers want you on site to absorb the company culture and gel with the team before they would consider remote working. You need to show that you're effective and productive first.

* Companies measuring outcomes rather than effort - non-existent outside of the smaller startups.

If you want remote work and outcome based companies then currently you need to be looking to the smaller more startup-ish organisations. Which has associated impact on risk and salary. Or you need to get into a suitable position within the organisation to help make the change to more remote/outcome based work yourself.

A few things to consider from the employer's side:

* If you and the employer are in different countries it can add a considerable administration burden on the employer. In many cases they won't have the skills in-house so you are asking them to acquire a specialised set of HR skills and knowledge for one hire. This is a tough sell unless you have the answers to that problem to hand.

* Something you notice as an employer is that people often mistake their personal productivity with the team productivity. There is quite a lot of evidence that distributed teams are less productive than co-located ones (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145358 - any research based counter examples very welcome!). You need to have a good argument that remote working will pay off for them.

* Running distributed teams well takes effort and skill. You need to adopt new tools, new structures, take more effort on things that "naturally" happen when folk are co-located. Unless a company already has this in place it's a lot of effort to make for a single new hire.

Thank you for your thorough answer. You've given me a lot to think about.

Looking for remote-only positions is hard as most companies don't want to hire outside their own country, meaning that 95% of companies that post on remote job boards are out of the question. Of course I understand that the clerical necessities would be too much for a small startup to want to deal with.

Your point about introducing my desire for remote work after I've proven how awesome I am is probably the best way to go about this, seeing how I'm shooting myself in the foot by talking about it in the first interview. My experience with it at former workplaces hasn't been completely positive (the suggestion always seems to cause an apprehensive reaction), but I realize that I need to make it worth it for them and prove that I'm worth it.

As embarrassing as it is to ask such an entitled question, I'm quite happy for the feedback.

If your main interest in in remote work you'd be much better off by applying to companies with a remote working culture rather than trying to convince a traditional company to change it's work structure.

Open source companies in particular tend to be very open about remote working.

Yes, it is opening up but you are being a little unrealistic. They do have their reasons. The average "knowledge worker" today, is not self-correcting and self-motivated enough to stay on the line of productivity.

That being said, it looks like you've made a mindset that autonomy of time is a sure-shot metric of the quality of a company. It is true, to a great degree, but the implication isn't reversible. Some of the best work in the world is being done by people with more or less fixed timings.

Don't let the timings and work-from-home option mark your final judgment over a good firm. There is so much more to it.

This is my first post to HN and I was dreading a backlash, so I appreciate your tone and candor.

I definitely think my pursuit of the ideal has made me blind to other benefits offered by the companies I've interviewed at. I guess I'm just a little tired of every company having the same attitudes towards remote work no matter how "hip" they want to seem that I've zeroed in on that as the only metric to judge them by.

Food for thought, so thank you.

One thing to keep in mind is that you won't genuinely be able to judge a workplace until you've been in it for a while. Some of the best jobs I've had were ones where I thought I was just taking them because I needed any job; conversely, the very worst I ever had was one where I was absolutely certain going in that it would be perfect.

I'm somewhat experiencing this now. I left my former job for the chance to do something new (the grass was fresher, if not greener), but I was sorely disappointed and my fruitless pursuit of the perfect job is causing me to remain in a position where I'm desperately unhappy.

+1

There are so many factors that come in that unless you're there on your own, you cannot decide. Even advice from people does not really work because people have so many filters and biases themselves.

i work at a fairly challenging workplace and love it here. i do have colleagues who hate the job for precisely this reason.

> where they talk about "core hours", the importance of "having fun during those 8 hours a day" and being "a part of the team in-house" it all feels like they're stuck in an industrial age mindset.

There's a reason for it. People communicate best in person. No amount of technology can totally replicate face to face communication.

And many would argue that communication is essential for high performance teams. I certainly do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com