Hacker News Reader

Comment by h1karu | Hacker News Reader

This is why "work remote" jobs are so fantastic if you can get them. You don't have to worry as much about politics. In an office environment you have to worry about if you're getting along well enough with people on a personal level and this nebulous "I enjoy working with him or not" factor might make or break your career. At an office job you need to put in hard work to "become friends" with everyone otherwise some people will bear a grudge. Sometimes this is not easy depending on the situation. There are too many "social factors" in office jobs which can make or break you and that have nothing at all to do with your ability to "get shit done". Not so with remote working. All that matters is your ability to be productive.

https://37signals.com/remote/ weworkremote.com

View on HN

I recently left a position which provided an office in town for the several of us here, but in practice allowed up to 100% remote work, since the rest of the company was 900 miles away.

There were just as many opportunities for personality conflicts with that arrangement. I joined a company with a better-aligned corporate culture and an expectation to be in the office every day because I decided they are healthier. I mention that, because it was the people, not the policy, that made the first gig ultimately unsustainable.

You're right. If you've done open source work you know that of course there's a huge amount of space for personality conflicts to arise even when working remotely, but at least those personality conflicts are usually centered around differing views about the project vision or how best to implement it and not based around office politics having to do with who's dating who, who's drinking buddies with who, offline politics having to do with the developer's wives being friends and then no longer being friends (see github drama), etc etc.

I think that going to the office every day jobs are definitely healthier than sitting alone in front of your keyboard with no social contact at all slaving away on a codebase. You need a social life I'm just advising that for me it's nice to keep that social life completely decoupled from my financial situation, and that is really hard to do in a normal office environment.

Here's an example from the viewpoint of someone doing the hiring. Lets assume your goal is to hire the top 5% of technology X programmers in America.

The first 5 people you hire are all early to mid 30s white guys who go out drinking together, get together to play paintball every few weeks, etc. Then the 6th person you need to hire is a Bangladeshi woman aged 42 who doesn't drink at all and of course doesn't play paintball. Well it's not a big deal at all, the team welcomes her, is very professional around her, recognizes the difference in culture and age so they don't give her a hard time for not participating in the drinking and paintball culture. So far no problems..

The 7th hire is another white guy, aged 31, but the difference is that this 7th hire also doesn't want to drink socially or play paintball. Unlike the Bangladeshi woman he has no convenient excuse to not want to do those things, so therefor even if he's very friendly, professional, and competent on the job he is ultimately labeled as "distant" by the other coworkers his age, and over time the rest of the team will grow to resent him for not "trying harder" to become friends outside of the office. People will assume that he thinks he's "too good for us", but those same people will not make such assumptions about the attitude of the Bangladeshi woman.

The Bangladeshi woman's choice to not try to become close personal friends with her coworkers is well respected and is not a problem at all, she is given all the space she could ever want socially and is only judged based on her contributions to the company. The young white guy on the other hand is held to a different set of standards, for him to not actively try to become personal friends (outside of work hours) is something that could cause him to be perceived as not a good cultural fit and possibly cost him his job in the long run all due to a hidden expectation linked to his skin color and age.

This is the kind of drama that can crop up in a real office which just completely disappears once a company "goes remote".

Though being alone might bring some people social anxiety disorder, IRC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com