I rarely work remote even when I have the opportunity to do it; I'll explain.<p>The author seems to have a single-mindedness about optimizing their own performance. If performance in terms of your value to the business was about sitting down at a computer and coding, getting in a "flow" state, etc, I would agree. Problem is, personal efficiency doesn't necessarily align with value generated. I've seen engineers spend months regularly obtaining "flow" with few interruptions or meetings, only to have the projects scrapped because they weren't what the business needed. The fact that the code was immaculate didn't end up mattering at all.<p>Informal, personal communication can make a big difference. Yes, getting up and talking to someone <i>is</i> more efficient than starting an email thread or slack conversation in many cases. Many of those conversations are engineer to engineer and involve important technical decisions.<p>And, an aside: remote meetings are simply worse than in-person meetings. Having worked on several teams where some members were in completely different locations (and time zones), I never want to experience that again. Give me every person relevant to my work in the same physical space; I don't want to get blocked from doing my work because you've gone dark on slack.<p>I promise, I get it. If I had my way, I'd work on whatever I wanted to work on, with no meetings or interruptions. I'd just be a lone wolf cranking out awesome features and feeling great about it. That's just not what any business needs, and it's certainly not what they pay me for.
Agreed. I've been working remotely for 2 years now and don't think I could go back to an office. The open office floor plans are just horrendous for actually getting any work done.<p>The article doesn't talk about the high cost of commuting but this is the biggest factor for me. Having that extra two hours per day, and not being exhausted when I get home, has really expanded the amount of living (social, fitness, hobbies) I've been able to do and has expanded my life more than anything else. Not to mention the cost savings.<p>It's a lot more difficult to find remote jobs than traditional office jobs, especially ones that pay well. But the extra effort in the job search more than pays off.
I've worked remotely for years, I've worked in an open-office where presence was mandatory, and now I run a startup with a distributed team of engineers on several continents.<p>While working in a shared office has pros and cons, the benefits are huge. One of the main benefits is in how information is shared. Sharing an office, you overhear conversations, and the chances of random but important information about how things work and how people relate to each other is much higher. In addition, the bandwidth of the non-verbal and paraverbal information is much richer. People working remotely forego most of that information, and their understanding of the org and its culture is diminished.<p>So why do we have a distributed team? Because we hire the top contributors to our open-source project without imposing a geographic filter, and it's the best, most efficient way we've found to build a really strong engineering team. We're aware of the shortcomings of how information flows, and struggle constantly to improve how we communicate.
I feel that gigantic metropolises are not optimal environments for software engineering.<p>NYC, and it's helter skelter of noise and traffic and garbage and tiny living spaces, in my humble experience and opinion is not conducive to hard engineering problems.<p>I am probably completely wrong here and just a hopeless introvert with an axe to grind, but from my experience, working in home offices in towns like Boulder, Colorado, with a central, easily bikable office/startup HQ, would present the optimal small company setting.<p>A quality employee cares, they care about the problems of your company when they shower, when they sleep, when they are knowing their spouse in a biblical sense. The problems of the company they have pledged their allegiance to, like a knight in Game of Thrones pledges allegiance and service to their lord, are always on their mind.<p>So if you are paying for knowledge work, you would do well to dispel any notions of body/mind duality. Physical health equates to mental health, and a town like Boulder, CO is about the perfect size for optimal maintenance of a human body/mind. And there are hundreds of other communities in America with similar attributes to Boulder, CO.<p>And if you can take advantage of the space that your workers are already paying for in their rent or mortgages. Spaces that may have gyms and/or pools which are physically and mentally rejuvenating, well you will come out ahead.<p>I think the future of work will be semi-distributed, and this mad consolidation into a few coastal cities will be seen in the future as a gross inefficiency.
Richard Hamming said [1] it best:<p><i>Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame. </i><p>[1] - <a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html</a>
Remote work optimizes for the individual employee, and often the short term gain of finding early talent before you have an established brand and network effects where talent starts gravitating towards you.<p>However, at the later stages of a company when you want 100+ engineers or more, it can be a major damper to organizational growth. Front line management becomes a necessity to keep teams healthy and get a consistent culture across the company. Career paths also require curation that is hard to do with people spread across offices and timezones.<p>So essentially what we end up with is remote work being optimized for small startups and slow growth companies. Large companies that will always waver back and forth on it, without actually figuring out how to make it work at scale. From a career stability standpoint, it's kind of a beating. Every job will seem awesome for a short period and then devolve into a shit show.<p>Those of you who are betting the farm on remote work should keep all this in mind. The smartest remote folks I know have realized this and just do consulting/contracting and making lifestyle choices to support this way of life.<p>I say this as someone who worked remote for 3 years from Texas and moved out to SF to work in a big office for a major tech company. There's huge benefits to remote work, but it's not a panacea.
Other reasons to allow or even encourage remote work:<p>In the US, there's a growing polarization between the coasts and middle America ("flyover country"). I, for one, don't want all the good programming jobs to be on the west coast.<p>Remote work, where the workers bring their own equipment and office setup, is probably better for people with disabilities. For example, an employer doesn't have to care or possibly even know that a worker is using a screen reader or other assistive technology. Assuming, of course, that all the applications one has to use on the job are accessible.<p>In fact, let's take it a step further, and propose remote work with strictly text-based communication. Yes, yes, we lose the nuances that are communicated through tone of voice, facial expressions, etc. But think of all the kinds of discrimination, whether overt or accidental, that disappear. Disabilities (including hearing and speech impairments), accents, race, and age are now completely irrelevant. Sounds like a big win to me.
At home I can control the noise & temperature of my work environment. These aren't brought up often but they're huge to my productivity. I can't work well when I'm uncomfortable. Trying to code with numb fingers or while sweating is miserable to my productivity.
I completely agree with the author's points, except for one small caveat--the overall quality of projects that one can find in remote work (at least based on my personal experience and search) is usually abysmal. At first glance, a good indicator would be the salaries that remote companies pay, and most remote companies tend to pay peanuts, using 'remote' as an excuse to underpay, and thus also signaling that they don't care to pay a premium for software engineers because their projects don't really need top talent or a lot of experience. From all this, it also follows that career development is quite stagnant at remote companies. I wish things were different, but until the Big Five start allowing and encouraging remote-only distributed work, things won't change a lot...
The time to travel to the office is often ignored too (it sounds lazy to even mention it because it's the norm). If you're working remotely and it takes 30 mins to get to the office, you're at an absolute minimum burning 5 hours a week going back and fourth from the office when you could be doing something else. Add in the extra time changing to and from work clothes, and having to leave the office to get food instead of eating at home and the time adds up.<p>If you're freelance and bill by the hour as well then those hours easily add up to an extra day a week you could be working.
I work at a company which has a beautiful building, I spend the majority of time in the office which is fantastic, the social aspect plus internal networking is very good.<p>I work from home on average maybe 0.8 days a week, for various reasons, but I get lots of work done and am quite productive from home.<p>There are some things that you just can't do the same from home. You can be much more agile when working in proximity. Face to face conversations are important and effective. There is a lot of missing out if you work 100% remotely in companies that aren't 100% remote.
Lone wolves can and do produce a lot of valuable output for businesses. However, on bigger teams, somebody's gotta take care of the juniors.<p>Junior devs, interns, even moderately experienced devs can all benefit immensely from mentoring by senior devs. Mentoring is a fuzzy thing that happens in the margins, and that's exactly the kind of thing that's hard to replicate in full-remote work.<p>Of course, everything in moderation. Senior devs need some time alone to churn and burn through tasks, but less experienced devs need guidance, leadership, and experienced perspective. And sometimes you need a mercenary like the author to just run solo and get it done. Different strokes for different folks.
Yep, I've been 100% remote for 5 years now (wow, it feels weird to see that number!) and am never going back, for the same reasons.<p>The only caveat is that it's important that you work in an organization that is aligned with remote work, if not remote-first. Just scoring 'permission' to work remotely somewhere not used to it, is probably a recipe for a pretty bad time.
>It’s the same reason that communism does not work nearly as well as capitalism — things work best when you give people freedom as individual actors.<p>You said "capitalism" but you meant "liberalism," and you said "communism" when you meant "authoritarian dictatorship."<p>But setting aside this equally unnecessary and inaccurate argument, the whole tone of this article seems to glorify the archetype of the "110%" employee. I'm "passionate" about programming and computer science, but I also don't just want to pull up a JIRA and bang away code.<p>Even if we accept the author's premise that open offices and social work environments are bad for productivity (which many people here have already pushed back against), I didn't try to find a job with lots of smart people so I could only interact with them via email. Sure, an open office occasionally distracts me and gets me out of the "flow," but it's almost always to help someone or join an interesting conversation. These things are valuable to me on their own, because (1) I like interesting conversations and (2) it means I can ask someone for help whenever I need it. And that's a better long-term feeling than slamming out code every day, which, by month two or three, starts to feel a little uninspiring.
Different Strokes for different folks. My personal feeling is that a company should allow employees to do what they want. If the company has an office setting and an employee wants to do the office thing then let them. But if you have an employee who is telling you that they work better from home take them at their word and let the results the judge of whether or not they're telling the truth.
I have been working remotely for nearly 3 years now. It is a necessity for me, my kids are very young and some some medical issues, so there is a lot of therapy and special schools involved with 1 pm dismissal times.
I love the flexibility but my wife has trouble distinguishing between work-from-home and stay-at-home-dad and that is constant struggle.
Some employers would argue that your privacy is forfeited during working hours. After all they pay you a salary, and if they want you in the office so be it - even if it is a less effective environment. Needless to say, I sympathize with the OP view here.
I agree that forcing the same strict work hours (9am - 7pm) is not always effective. The author explains exactly why that doesn't work for them and why they are much less effective.<p>However, I've found that when people all have different hours (especially over different timezones) it's difficult for the one-off meetings when something needs to be hashed out in person or skype. I suppose this problem may actually be a side effect of our office having strict working hours so we don't know how to operate on the days when most of the office is remote and working on different hours. Companies like 37Signals have clearly figured out how to build a collaborative and productive company across multiple timezones.
I've been 100% remote for the last 8 years. I recently have been commuting for personal reasons and its only 30 min each way and I can already feel the drain it causes. Over a working career a normal commute(30min-1hour) each way can add up to a massive amount of lost time. Working remote is optimal for the kind of work I'm doing now. Previously I was running a larger business and we started to run into issues around 50 people on a remote team. There's advantages to both. I think the ideal environment is 4 days remote, 1 day in an office for in person meetings. To combat being out of contact with people in the business/industry, I attend as many conferences and meetups as I can.
For as much as people like to hate on open offices on HN, it still baffles me why there aren't more Y Combinator startups founded with remote work or private offices as core company principles.<p>Just a guess, but I wonder if the decision to just go with open offices has to do with the ability to scale such a plan quickly and easily, whereas scaling a remote team is too difficult or building or rearranging private offices takes too long and costs too much.<p>A possibly poor analogy might be the difference between going with some cloud provider which scales more quickly vs building out your own server which is more costly and possibly more difficult to maintain.
None of the authors headings are necessary in an in-person office environment. We have both "open" areas and offices with doors. We don't enforce a specific work hours and we most definitely could care less about butts-in-seats, results are what matter. That said I just spent an hour in an office with a co-worker comparing notes on our two separate projects with similar needs and scored a sample of some nice fudge his partner made. Yesterday i spent the morning at the cafe and last week I sat at my desk and got 9hr straight coding without talking to anyone.
<i>I am restless in bed and can’t sleep because I drank too much coffee and I’m worried about getting up early. By the end of the week I am tired, frustrated, angry, and disappointed with my performance.</i><p>The author blames this on a 9-6 schedule. But honestly I think it's way more likely a problem with drinking too much damn coffee. Everything he wrote in that part hit home, i was experiencing it very badly... until I started limiting myself to one big caffeinated drink before lunch a day. It's improved my quality of life a lot, I am tired way less.
The main problem I see with this article is the author is totally focused on himself. If you are a solo developer this is fine, but if you are part of a team then his attitude is detrimental.<p>I work as part of a team and we all work remotely most of the time, but we work the same hours because working different hours would cause problems. It's hard to conduct a daily stand up if everyone's working weird hours. We have some flexibility for people but everybody has to be around for the 9:30 stand up. This helps with coordinating of larger projects and bringing up blockers which the PO or Scrum Master can remove.<p>If some lone developer is working 3pm to 11pm then that person is not really coordinating with the rest of the team.<p>Also I'd really hate to hear what this guy thinks of pair programming.
The article mentions that strict rules hurt good actors and help bad actors, and you should fix this by filling your organization with good actors. For very small startups this might be possible. However if you need to hire a large number of developers this becomes increasingly difficult. It is far easier to hire "bad actors". If a company finds itself in a situation where adding a bad actor will increase company revenue beyond the actors cost, it financially imperative to hire bad actors. Eventually the good to bad ratio slips in the direction of bad, and strict rules end up helping more than they hurt. Good people leave to new places, and the vicious cycle continues.
The first question I now ask recruiters when they reach out is whether or not the position is on-site or remote. Google, Microsoft, Amazon... no remote work, at least not for any of the positions they frequently contact me about.
IMO humans are just bad at communicating in a precise / efficient way. Most people I meet / work with who are not in a technical field are usually very bad at explaining their business needs in face-to-face let alone by email or over the phone, etc... And ironically isn't it usually the case that these are the people who are (a) the stakeholders, or (b) the ones writing the paychecks.<p>Until technical folks start taking over the world (maybe we're in the infancy stages of that?) I think most people who want to work remotely will need to expect to be in the office regularly if not every work day.
This is super important. I can sign under this text like I wrote it.<p>I can say that I like to see people in person and interact with them, but all the problems, not only with startups, but with office environment in general were spot on.
Everyone has something that works really well for them. It's nice to have an employer that respects that.<p>Personally, I find a lot of value in putting a face on everyone in my team. To me, it's a lot easier to work through a problem in person vs. over Slack or Skype.<p>But that's not to say I disagree with the OP. I totally value the efficiency of working in isolation if and when I'm at a point where I just need to be heads down to finish a task. At my office, we have the luxury of isolated couch rooms where it feels like working from home w/ the office and your coworkers steps away.
I pretty much strongly agree but I will offer one defence of "work rules" that isn't completely pointy-haired.<p>The reality is that not everyone has the same level of productivity or commitment. With a few rules it's often possible to get more than their salary's cost out of them. Sure, we'd all like to work in an environment of nothing but awesome co-workers, but that doesn't scale. Hell, you presumably support "rules" like "we've decided that the implementation language is L" so everybody's code works together.<p>What <i>is</i> brain damaged is that some companies are too stupid or fearful to understand when the rules do and don't apply.
I've had good results with finding companies that don't force bad working conditions, and asking for an alternative to open seating when necessary. I've always been accommodated. If people aren't at least asking for flexibility, they should be.<p>I haven't had to sacrifice the ability to have face to face communications and relationships with my co-workers. I'm not saying these are my best friends, just that there's subtly more that comes across in person vs. remote.
I'm still trying to figure out the ideal lifestyle.
When you work remotely, it gets boring after a while not being able to socialize.
When you have to go to work every day, it gets tiring commuting.<p>I'm thinking the perfect mix is to live 1.5 hours from a big city where the jobs are. Go to the office if needed once/twice a week. Do the rest remotely, enjoy living in a house instead of a cramped appartment.<p>Is anyone doing this?
Having to work remotely is one of the main reasons why it's so hard for me to contributed to open source projects (i am a student btw). I guess it's not for everyone.<p>I need people to function, people to work with, people to talk about work, people to discuss decisions with and people to not talk to one another. It's what's motivating me, what keeps thinking for hours about problems.
Did this at a previous workplace and it seemed to work but the company culture has to be aligned as well. There is an intangible touch-feely stuff that gets lost behind the unfeeling glare of the monitor and if the rest of the company is ill-equipped to deal with that missing piece then it won’t work out.
In my experience, both, an entirely distributed team and an entirely localized team do well. It becomes exponentially harder to pull it off when you have some people working in the office, and others distributed.
I agree with every word of this article and after 25yrs experience as a developer I have all similar experiences. Being a computer programmer is about the same as being a 'writer' (book author), and no one expects an author to sit with other authors in a special building to be able to write. With modern technology, and the wastefulness of time and energy spent commuting, there is just no longer any reason for a programmer to not be able to work remote. I mean even if all you are considering is gasoline use and pollution savings, even that alone is enough of a reason for society to say let developers work at home. There's just no downside to it.<p>I have been working at home for the past year, and I don't think there's any way i'd ever accept another non-remote job again. In any large city you're gonna be sitting in traffic a total of 10hrs a week. That's insanity. That's well over one full work day. With a web-cam you can still have face to face meetings. The only thing that I find missing occasionally is the use of a whiteboard, but that is a very minor thing. Having a whiteboard is not a good trade-off for 10hrs spent in traffic. Not even close. Of course in 10yrs VR will totally make it irrelevant where someone's physical location is, but i think even the basic webcams we have today already does as well.
A question to all of you who only work remotely, and I'm sure it's been covered by HN so forgive me, but where do you find reliable work that's remote? I can see getting lucky maybe and scoring one maybe two gigs that allow remote but a caterer doing it? When my wife's gig is up she would love to work from home. She already works from home two days a week.<p>But she has no idea how to make a career out that reliably. She started out doing QA/testing, now she is all into oracle and DB2. Using oracle tools and IBM tools for managing/writing SQL for enormous databases. Government sized databases.<p>She is making low six figures now here in KC.<p>Thanks for any advice or leads on remote only work as a career!
Great post - with a very huge caveat: being out of the office means you miss a lot of nuance that is very, very important.<p>There is a cultural language, and a lot of facts outside the scope of normal direction.<p>I've worked remotely often and this has always been a huge issue: requirements can almost never be communicated succinctly, they come in waves and indirections.<p>So if we can solve that one ... this makes more sense.<p>As for the 'open office' concept, I can't think of anything more absurd. When I visit my clients I can't get anything done.
I think a right balance between remote & on-site is a better argument. I've worked remotely for a few years and I quickly found myself very isolated and it's contributed to my social anxiety.<p>Remote working can be a blessing during bad weathers or you want to take a little break from commuting.