Hey HN. Working from home a fews days per month can be pretty great. Less distractions, more time to think deeply about stuff, more natural to take breaks and, let's not forget, better coffee.<p>But what about working remotely still sucks? Be it from home, from a beach on Bali, or from a WeWork in Amsterdam.<p>(Im trying to get my company to be more remote-friendly and would like a nuanced view before I make my case.)
I've noticed that it's hard to build rapport with coworkers when working remotely (especially if they are in an office and you're remote). In my experience, remote communication is mostly transactional and doesn't facilitate building relationships with people.<p>I'm not saying I need my coworkers to be my best friends or anything, but I think that you are more likely to have a well functioning work relationship with people that you're comfortable around. In my experience, those relationships are usually built through informal conversations.<p>If any of you have this figured out, I'd love to hear tips. Most of the other aspects of remote work are fantastic.
Video Conferencing (we're using zoom). The "time to conversation" routinely take minutes of idle time or raging about the miserable state of technology.<p>Simple annoyances such as opening the laptop when using with an external monitor (1 out of 10 times making macos unresponsive for half a minute), to changing your bluetooth noise cancelling headphones for music to airpods, reconfiguring airpods tethered to your iPhone to macos. Making sure the wrong input/output audio is selected in macos...<p>People working from coworking space or a regular office, usually want to switch to a phone booth/meeting room, that takes them 2-3 minutes to walk to the next phone booth and get set-up.<p>Once you're up&running too often audio/video is unreliable, or simply airpods running out of battery.<p>I'm experimenting now with a tablet (with its own headset) dedicated to voice&video calls. While the audio/video setup now works seamlessly, there's still some usability issues that need workarounds.
1. Technology is still not good enough for conferencing.<p>2. Some family members/friend thinks your work is easy and not that important. So you should run their errands or take extra responsibilities.<p>3. As someone already mentioned, it is difficult to build team rapport. This affects badly in situations like sudden change in deadlines.<p>4. If you don't have active social life outside job, it becomes very difficult to build new one.
I've been working from home for about 10 years. The only thing that's ever been a problem is maintaining a healthy work-life balance. It took years to realize and resolve all of the various underlying issues before I started feeling comfortable without being complacent with things.<p>My advice for people new to remote work: reserve an hour each morning for exercise, start reading fiction, try out the keto diet, avoid alcohol as much as possible, try to limit your caffeine intake, open your windows to prevent co2 buildup, keep eye drops within reach for long hauls, try to get all of your chores done in the morning.
Working at home, the existential dread and feeling of meaninglessness in my tasks increased with remote work for a time, given my separation from the distractions of workplace politics, drama, etc. that pervaded office life.<p>It is hard to make connections with coworkers, and it is so important to build a social life outside of work if you do not have one.<p>I find I work less hours in front of the computer, accomplish more, and have to spend more time "screwing off" to fill in that void of losing office banter, work lunches with coworkers, etc.
I've been working 100% remotely for the past three years. I guess the specific challenges depend a bit on the nature of your work -- I used to struggle a lot with feeling isolated when I was doing more pure development work, but my job now (technical interviewing) requires a lot of video chat so I'm getting lots of face-to-face communication with teammates and candidates, and I rarely feel isolated or lonely.<p>The downside to having lots of video chat is that I'm really constrained to working from somewhere with good internet, and somewhere without a lot of ambient noise -- which somewhat ruins the "work from anywhere" appeal. It's definitely a trade-off I can live with, though.<p>Aside from those things, I'm honestly struggling to really come up with something that sucks about remote work. My experience with being fully remote has been fantastic and has brought so much more joy to my career.
From a remote management perspective, when your presence is felt in an office, it reminds people to do the small things that keep the ship sailing smoothly - things that are outside of the scope of the current project, so they're on another to-do list, but still need to get done.<p>When you're a remote manager competing for staff time to get these things done with on-site managers it gets even trickier, as people want to please the people they have to face every day, even if they see them just in passing. You need to take extra steps (more reminders) to keep secondary projects moving.
Conferencing, still. You'd think that we had gotten that covered now, but nope.<p>Not just image and audio quality, but Google Hangouts on my phone (so I can carry it around the house and get tea etc during a meeting) slurps up oodles of battery and the phone (OnePlus 5T) gets really really hot too.<p>No such problem with eg. Netflix and Youtube, guess those video codecs have some HW acceleration while Google Hangouts doesn't?<p>Further: I only work some 500km from the office, so I travel there (mostly by train) roughly once a month for a few days. Good mix of remote and on-site for me.
I will give you the issues I have encountered during the brief times I've worked remote. I absolutely loved being remote and found work arounds for most of the issues. I would be eager to have another remote contract but my very large employer definitely isn't coughing one up anytime soon.<p>1) Stable, fast internet for endless video-chats<p>2) Visa/bank account issues.<p>3) Company politics.<p>These 3 things can make working remote a challenge. Video chats are needed to simulate "in person conversations" which company executives believe improves efficiency and morale. Companies are also worried about "how do we legally pay our employees if they claim to be in the USA but are really on a tourist visa somewhere". And third, companies will often has gossip and politics and power struggles where those who are in office have more face time and promotion potential than those who are remote.<p>All of these things can be easily fixed but it requires the employee and the employer to not be incompetent.
For some reason, interacting with someone you see through a video camera just doesn’t feel the same as interacting with someone you’re in the same room as.<p>This is magnified x100 in group settings, especially group settings where more than half the participants are physically present and only a minority remote.
It would be great to have conferencing software which doesn't spin all fans on max speed on the latest mbp. Also one which can detect difference between a camera view and desktop sharing. Tiny fragments of text changing don't need same type of encoding as hd video.
Developer roles are so much better setup to work well in an remote environment. The built in task list organization helps people not only stay on track but demonstrate their output regardless if they're on site or remote.<p>The problem is many non-engineering related roles follow similar organization around sprints and backlogs/task lists. Because of that I think there's a natural suspicion around productivity for people you don't get a chance to see everyday.<p>In other words work organization still sucks for non-engineering related remote work (sales excluded actually).<p>And then internal relationship building i think is also a challenge which impacts collaboration 100% - that still sucks.
Human connection.<p>A major predictor of workplace happiness is if people feel like they have at least 1 other friend or confidant at work.<p>It's incredibly hard to build meaningful relationships over a conferencing system and makes the job feel more robotic.<p>Also I think I'd get incredibly lonely and depressed if I did remote work.
I have 3 days wfh And 2 days wfo situation. Commute is 1 hr away so wfh works out great but man do I miss socializing at tge office. People definitely are the reason wfh sucks for me. This year I plan to move close to the office to work in the office all 5 days.
See this recent thread for some insight: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776655" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776655</a>