[curiouscat321]

People who espouse remote work seem convinced that it’s the end-all way to work.

I don’t care if I have to go into an office. I like offices. What I care about is that you don’t mind if I work from home every once in a while. I care that it’s okay for me to leave early or come late.

[cs02rm0]

Remote work is the only way I'd go now. Having had twins in the last year it's been vital.

It doesn't work for everyone, but a way I've seen remote-first companies get around that is to offer to rent a desk in somewhere like WeWork, so you can choose to be around other working people, away from home and then look to hire others in the same city who might opt for a desk there too, at least some of the time.

If the article is right that remote working works for, say 50% of people, a company able to attract remote workers is going to have a vastly bigger talent pool to fish in.

[humanrebar]

> Having had twins in the last year it's been vital.

Employers that actually want workplace diversity should really consider how many lifestyles their work culture can accommodate. Some people adopt lots of kids and need more room. Some people love their families and won't move more than a few hours from them.

Nearly everybody needs flexible work arrangements from time to time: health problems, ailing family members, young children, everyone's-getting-married-this-summer, etc. Talking to your employer about a different pattern of availability is professional. But having to ask permission with forms and HR people in the room is not decent or necessary. If someone isn't earning their paycheck, that's a reasonable conversation to have. But assuming that's not the issue, let's just be decent human beings.

[kod]

The problem is that not all humans are decent. The more of them you hire, the more likely one of them is the asshole who will take advantage of flexibility and ruin it for the rest.

[barleymash]

I'm not sure I agree with this. Do you think an otherwise good person/employee with a newfound ability to work remote would become an asshole and abuse the privilege? Seems like they'd probably be an asshole to begin with. Also, if someone is an asshole and taking advantage of the flexibility, why not fire them? I'm not sure how keeping them in an office solves this issue of people being bad employees.

[squid_ca]

That's true, but I don't think the solution is to treat all humans like they're assholes.

[ageofwant]

The 'one bad apple' thing never cut it for me. If you are bad apple's manager, you have measurable metrics on her performance, and you act based on that, no more no less. This has no bearing on any of the other apples.

[kod]

And what exactly do you think objective metrics for developers should be? LoC? Defects? As soon as a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure.

If one person in a group takes unfair advantage of flexibility by e.g. only going to the office half as much as the rest, it sure will have an effect on the "other apples".

[ageofwant]

Why would she need to go to the office? Work is something you do, not a place your'e at. If you, as a manager do not have any way of measuring how the people you are managing, then you have no reason to be there.

[Retra]

How are they ruining anything?

[usernam]

I worked remotely for more than two years because I had to move to another place. I loved the company and they were quite happy as well, so they let me work remotely full time without problems. I absolutely loved it for the first six months, then I quit my job after the second year despite being a "dream scenario" for many.

I generally work alone when I want to think, but I loved the interaction with excellent colleagues and sitting at home with skype wasn't exactly the same.

I would still work remotely for 2-3 days a week, because it's so much more productive for certain tasks, but no more. I do not consider full-time remote jobs.

[DLay]

I’ve always been hesitant to try remote work because it seems like there’d be an added pressure to seek out face to face interactions or else I’d slowly become a hermit. I consider myself an introvert, but even that has its limits.

[usernam]

My take from the experience was that if you have an active social life outside of your colleagues and work is "just work" for you, then a full-time remote job is probably fine. Saves you the commute too.

I do have an active social life, but I expect my work to be something more than "just work". I enjoy what I do, and working at a distance detracts from the experience.

[invalidOrTaken]

Doesn't work in all situations, but what's worked for me is to treat it as something that you need to keep an eye on, and then liberally take trips into the office.

[rsp1984]

My opinion as an employer: Sure, feel free to take your work hours as you like and WFH every once in a while.

Just make sure that overall your total hours are what we agreed to in the employment contract.

[Jacqued]

It's probably different where you're located, but around here it's pretty much a given that an engineer will work more hours than what is written in the employment contract, even if they regularly come in late / leave early / WFH.

Imho flexible hours are a good thing as they remove the pressure to stay around doing nothing until late because you can't be seen leaving before 7pm.

[humanrebar]

> Just make sure that overall your total hours are what we agreed to in the employment contract.

What's the justification for monitoring total hours and not something more directly tied to business success? End users and profit margins (assuming your engineers are salaried) don't care about whether your engineers had consistent 40+ hour work weeks.

[_rerr]

In my previous company, they has a name to distinguish these two kinds of metrics.

- Inputs are the things employees can act on easily, like the number of LoC written or the number of features developped.

- Outputs are related to business success, for example the number of customers, or the revenue.

The key here is to consider the external business environment as a complex machine, in which you put some effort, measured by inputs, and you observe the outputs as a result (reward). Because you don't know how the environment is going to respond, running the activity consists in adjusting the measures of inputs according to previous results, and trying to maximize those.

This is sane for business because executives can focus on maximizing the input metrics, without caring too much about the outputs, and evaluate separately the assumptions they made about the business (e.g. that x number of features requested by customers developped within 1 month increase the userbase).

It kind of looks like a reinforcement learning process actually.

[humanrebar]

> This is sane for business because executives can focus on maximizing the input metrics, without caring too much about the outputs, and evaluate separately the assumptions they made about the business...

That's basically the problem right there. If you treat the employees as a giant black box, you don't observe when workplace policies (that might not even work!) get in the way of human decency, let alone helping a diverse group of employees each flourish in their own way.

Employers instead sit around wondering why there aren't enough Latino engineers without even considering a remote work policy that would let engineers live in El Paso, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Miami.

[JustSomeNobody]

That problem I worked on all day? I'm still trying to solve it when I'm cooking, showering, washing dishes, etc. I'll solve it before I get to the office tomorrow. How should I track all that time?

[JoeAltmaier]

By adjusting your pay rate.

As a society, we agree on pay for hours. We pay more for folks who bring more, better solutions during those hours. How they do that is beyond the employment agreement's scope.

Short of being a contractor with a fixed-price-on-delivery contract, we'll have to be content with that.

[intelhearts]

Most of my least fulfilling work experiences we're when I was remotely full time (3-4 years)

it sounds great in concept but in practice it gets really lame after extended periods of time