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Comment by CrLf | Hacker News Reader

"I’ve worked remotely my whole career"

I wonder how much of a role does this play in (not) caring about your employer's problems...

As much as I can understand the benefits of working remotely on occasion, doing it all the time will cause a kind of disconnect all by itself. You see the problems as your employer's problems, instead of your team's problems. Your are fixing your employer instead of helping your teammates.

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Even if you're f2f, at some point, especially if you've worked a few places, you'll still see the same patterns of problems cropping up, and the same ennui will likely set it. Perhaps not as soon as for remote workers, but it will happen.

If you really bond with your teammates, but still see the same recurring problems, you'll almost certainly develop an 'us v them' mentality against 'management', justified or not (though, it likely will be justified if you're seeing jr-level mistakes constantly promoted as the next magic bullet).

But it'ss much easier to avoid burnout. Even if your objective is based on an "us vs. them" mentality, you still have a purpose. If you feel like you're working alone (and sometimes this happens even with other people around) it's much easier to find out that your work means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

"easier to avoid burnout" feels to me more like a function of time vs actually being f2f with folks, assuming the work doesn't change dramatically. But... my data points are primarily my own and some colleagues, not a comprehensive view of techfolk.

That's a social problem we'll have to address as remote working becomes ubiquitous. It helps if the remote environment is more immersive, with the team aware of each others' presence and activity even when they're not directly communicating. Keeps your head in the space, so to speak.

I think you just described somewhat of a dystopian future... :)

Most work is a group effort. Group efforts require the feeling of belonging to a group to be effective. You just cannot get that if you work remotely. Real human interaction cannot be faked or successfully replaced by electronic means.

Working remotely a couple of days a week is probably beneficial. It alleviates the pressure of constant interactions preventing some tasks from being accomplished. Especially for us technical folk, where the dominant personality is not one that draws energy from other people. We still need to interact though.

Periodic face time is important. But even in the same building I rarely speak face-to-face with everybody. A message or call or video share is normal even for 'local workers'.

Remote workers can be very effective with the right tools. Hundreds of companies are switching as we speak. I work at Sococo, and we enable it! Some of our clients have actually closed their offices and gone entirely remote, and they love it.

" Group efforts require the feeling of belonging to a group to be effective. You just cannot get that if you work remotely"

I wonder if someone told all the (paid, for the sake of argument)devs working on Open Source projects that they can't have the feeling of being part of a group since they are scattered all over the world.

I grew up on the Internet. I've only ever worked on anything remotely — my job, miscellaneous FOSS, my own things that happened to attract a few collaborators. I met all my closest friends on IRC. I still manage to care about problems. Just not these ones.

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