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If you don’t mind sharing, why do you find the lack of growth in remote work concerning?

Not OC, but for me it's just a real wonder why it's not better embraced at this stage of the game. We have all the tools to accommodate collaboration within remote teams and in (most) places the broadband to handle it. Add to this the continued funneling of companies into these metro areas where COL is high (NYC, SF, Seattle) and thus people may find themselves being forced into higher commute times just to attain a better COL situation.

I personally am commuting close to 2 hours each way, so 4 hours total, because the job market is much stronger in NYC then my immediate (30-45 minute) area. If a job is open around here the salaries are almost 30-40% lower than NYC despite our COL still being high.

We have tools to accommodate collaboration but I believe something gets lost when you remove those water cooler conversations and physical interaction.

In regards to your commute, wouldn't a 40% lower salary be worth 4 extra hours everyday? I guess it depends on the math but unless you're being compensated for the commute(in which case it's just work on the train/metro) that seems like an incredible sacrifice for a bigger paycheck. At what point is your time worth it?

Klathmon 2739 days ago

That watercooler talk getting lost is absolutely a pain point with remote work, but there are mitigations and benefits that offset it in my opinion.

One option is to re-create that talk. At a past job we would often all fuck around before/after standup calls for a bit, but sometimes that fucking around became work and solved problems. Other times we would just call each other either one-on-one or in small groups just to shoot the shit, and that can recreate that same feeling.

A big part of that is getting over the idea that "calls" are somehow different than walking over to someone's desk, you wouldn't hesitate most of the time to walk over to a coworker and start chatting, but most people hesitate to call someone on slack. At a past job that hesitation wasn't there because the culture embraced it, and suddenly we had our watercooler talk back, just over video calls.

> One option is to re-create that talk

One remote first company I interviewed with told me all their daily calls were video because they wanted to make sure people still felt human. And I think it's such a crucial piece in all this because people have been accustomed to just doing audio only which only further creates a sense of loneliness.

kbsletten 2739 days ago

Yeah. I'm remote at a mostly collocated company and I'm always trying to get my face on other people's screens whether that's a stand-up or not screen sharing off the bat during demos or even just over-commenting in group chats to get at least my name out there.

It's worth it though, and when I'm on-site I get people talking to me that I've never met who recognize me from somewhere I was on a screen.

ozim 2739 days ago

That is the most obvious problem with developers, thinking that you can solve people problems with tools.

So you are right something is lost. Skype, jira, slack will not convey the feeling that there is another person on the other side of line. You will not see coworkers getting sick, going through hardships in life. If you see someone you can tell he had bad night sleep that is why he is upset. You get the watercooler conversation that other guy wife is annoying... You don't care it should not affect quality of work but no one is robot, via electronic communication everything seems so perfect... Then you expect people to be perfect, and they expect from you to be perfect, then you get upset, but you just have flu and cannot focus really...

By tools I meant for collaborating, not replacing humans. I'm not some robot who just wants to sit head down because I'm terrible at socializing. I do enjoy being in the office to see faces, but I also have realized this not a very strong argument for having every company be so resisting to remote work.

And as I stated you can replace this in other ways. Because you're home you may end up at a gym or coffee shop or group bike rides more often. That gives you a different form of social interaction in the day to day to replace "water cooler" talk.

I think "water cooler" talk is over stated because many companies will have different channels to discuss these kinds of things. You no doubt loose the face to face human interaction, but there are other ways to account for this. Getting out and socializing with people via hobbies can help greatly here.

As for the commute, I've worked out a flexible work schedule that lets me be home a few days but as I stated I'm in a higher COL state (NJ). So a 30-40% reduction in pay ends up being a fairly big change in QOL. I've learned to make use of the time on the train by engaging in things I enjoy (video games, podcasts) which may be harder at home. Moving closer also doesn't help because A. it gets even more expensive B. QOL drops due to higher density areas which makes it harder to ride bikes, garden, etc.

We've accepted the choice we make to be where we are because of what we get from our life outside of work, but it doesn't mean I can't hope for better remote possibilities.

shaklee3 2739 days ago

It's not overstated. The only people I've heard say this are the ones that prefer remote work. You're definitely more productive around where the action is happening than in a house with kids screaming.

kbsletten 2739 days ago

First off, forgive me if I don't take your word for it, but I just saw an article recently saying that remote workers are more productive on average. Whether that study was just an anomaly or there's some other explanation like "only productive programmers can manage working remotely", it would hint that your hot take represents the world as you imagine it, not necessarily the world as it is.

Secondly there's something like a "no true Scotsman" vibe about the implication that you can't trust people who prefer remote work to comment on their productivity like you can people who are onsite. That may not be the right fallacy, but there's a fallacy in there somewhere.

Thirdly, nobody should be working with kids crying. God invented doors for just this reason. If you can't make a quieter space at home than you can at work, you're either pulling in some serious perks on the job with your private, sound insulated office or you don't have the fundamental amenities to work at home, it's not the nature of working remote, it's showing up to work unprepared that's holding you back.

Fair enough. Different strokes. Giving up on hope is a scary wormhole, always keep dreaming.

My time is absolutely valuable and I make it abundantly clear on any phone screens for new roles. I've established my own set hours within the office to accommodate the long commute without impeding my life more than it has to. But the reality of going from 100k -> 60k in a high COL state is quite a change. It's entirely possible, we've been there, but it def requires you to readjust. And as the cost of certain goods keep rising it's not as easy as it was for us 3-5 years ago.

fredbo22 2739 days ago

At my last gig, "water cooler" conversations were discouraged because SLack conversations were archived and searchable. No need to wonder what someone said last week, last month or last year. It's all there and ready to read.

It was kind of stupid to come into work when this rule is in effect.

Is that even legal?

todd3834 2739 days ago

Probably not illegal to discourage but maybe illegal to ban

lowercased 2739 days ago

i've found some of the 'water cooler' talk could easily foster gossip and cliques, leading to people "in the know" getting tapped for special projects and promotions, simply because they 'fit in' with a particular manager better, skills be damned. The 'smoke break' phenom too - if your boss smokes, figure out a way to get out there and spend time - that's their water cooler time, and the spoils go to the other smokers.

Of course it's not 100% that way, but my own experience has seen it play out a few times that way.

gedy 2739 days ago

> those water cooler conversations

You mean managers and owners getting to oversee "their people".

That's definitely a part of it. Much easier to hold people accountable when you physically interact with them. If your manager or owner is abusing this, then I imagine working for them remote would involve a webcam and a key logger. Good managers usually find ways to motivate their workers, but it is definitely harder when you never get to physically interact.

souprock 2739 days ago

For true remote with employees at their homes, security failures become far more likely.

There is a middle ground. One can open up small offices in small cities. For example, instead of 1000 people in a city of 5,000,000 people, it could be 20 people in 50 cities that have 100,000 people. Each site gets a VPN connection, with the hardware physically secured in a commercial building.

The COL goes way down. The commute becomes tiny for most people. I'm in that situation, and my commute is 3 minutes if I use a car.

apercu 2739 days ago

Not OP but due to a lack of investment in public transportation in NA over the previous decades, many people spend a few hours a day commuting and in many cases this is done in private vehicles that pollute. For many in our profession there is no need to go to an office to work.

Cthulhu_ 2739 days ago

Only if you consider churning out code to be your work; I for one prefer to work in an office for a number of reasons. Not everyone's a robot that doesn't require social contact; not everyone has a good work-life balance allowing them to not have to be in the office to fulfill their needs.

Plus, free lunch.

Not everyone gets free lunch

notyourloops 2739 days ago

There is no free lunch.

Interesting, I haven't put much thought into the environmental impact of resistance to remote work. I would disagree with your second point however, I believe that you lose something when work is performed remote, regardless of your role. That benefit certainly isn't worth destroying the planet.

apercu 2739 days ago

I (re)started my consultancy in part so I could work from home. My commute had gone from 2 hours a day to 3 hours a day with the rise of traffic in the Toronto area.

I meet with clients a couple times a month and I am on the phone, slack or webex/ringcentral/google hangouts etc.. a few hours a week.

I am _sooooo_ much more productive now (with fewer distractions) that I work on average 500 hours a year less than I used to. That doesn't even begin to factor in the quality of life issues. I now drive 8000km per year versus over 20,000km per year.

Some jobs, some roles, yes, you need to physically go somewhere. For me, for what I do? There is no benefit.

1) https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-temperature-parameter-in-d...

First of all, congratulations! Always scary to (re)start over, and I'm glad it's worked out for you.

I'm a big believer in serendipity. To use a machine learning example, your algorithm needs to have some temperature.[1] Sometimes you want to sacrifice your queen in order to checkmate your opponent in 5 moves. In this situation, that might mean sacrificing on productivity during a project in order to meet with the client more frequently in person, allowing you to develop a long lasting relationship.

I'm sure that things come up in those physical meetings that don't come up during phone calls or Slack for a variety of reasons. In my opinion, if you met with clients a dozen times a month, instead of a couple, you would not be as productive, but you would drastically improve your relationship with the clients.

Loyalty is a currency like any other, it can earned and spent. You can't quantify the value of a relationship the same way you can quantify productivity, but your improved empathy and sympathy to your clients problems will improve your performance. You might also find that your clients trust you more, and give you more freedom and time to find solutions to their problems. Finally, developing relations will pay off in your professional and personal life down the road, long after you have finished working on the current project.

Of course, if you're optimizing for work-life balance, or spending less time on the road, then this can all be ignored. Take the necessary steps to achieve your desired lifestyle. If your goal is to promote growth, build infrastructure, and deliver value, I believe you lose something by going remote.

Personally I think the best system is a combination of Monday and/or Friday remote, with the rest of the days in a physical location. This allows employees to enjoy parts of the remote lifestyle, while still keeping many of the benefits of meeting in person.

moduspol 2739 days ago

Not OP, but I'd like the world to be moving toward a paradigm where physical location is not a significant factor in career / pay / advancement. It makes things more "meritocratic," and it puts pressure on some of these big tech hubs to keep their costs of living competitive.

But I don't want to see it if the market doesn't justify it. I think today there is something beneficial to having people working together in an office, but I'd prefer to be proven wrong by some new remote-work management style (or something). And software development is one of the more ideal use cases for remote work, so if it's not expanding for us, it's less likely to expand in other industries.

souprock 2739 days ago

Rust I can see.

Python is deeply troubling. It is a regression from FORTRAN and COBOL. Long ago, we invented compile-time type checking. The benefits for software quality have been enormous. There isn't really a downside here, as there would be with the performance loss of garbage collection or bounds checking. Shaking out lots of bugs before even attempting to test the software is a wonderful advance that we made half a century ago. Python's incompatibility with compile-time optimization is also horrifying. The situation is so extreme that you can't even make a decent-performing JIT.

luord 2739 days ago

You're awfully unfamiliar with the history of computer science if you truly believe that dynamic typing is some sort of recent invention or that static typing is some panacea that solves all of your problems.

Both systems of type checking have existed as long as... Programming languages have existed, essentially and, sadly, so have the endless comparisons and flamewars.

em-bee 2738 days ago

i learned to love smalltalk and lisp after i realized that despite their age they are just as good as most younger programming languages.

it felt like a revelation, and almost disappointment that there is hardly any innovation in newer languages.

shaklee3 2739 days ago

Python has strong typing as of 3.6, although not at compile-time, since it doesn't compile.

xapata 2739 days ago

And you can use mypy to do some static type inference in 2.x

ubernostrum 2738 days ago

Python was already strongly typed long before Python 3.

Python does not have static typing as a built-in part of the language. It has had the ability to annotate arguments and returns of functions/methods since 3.0, a standard-library module containing helpful code to use this for type hints since 3.5, and the ability to annotate variables since 3.6. Annotations are a completely optional feature and no built-in part of Python will check these annotations or analyze code for correctness in advance of execution; there are third-party tools to do this, if you want it.

Also, Python most certainly does compile -- the CPython interpreter is a virtual machine which runs bytecode, and Python source code is compiled to bytecode for that VM. There isn't a requirement to run a completely separate standalone Python compiler ahead-of-time to generate the bytecode (if bytecode isn't available, Python will compile source to bytecode on a per-module basis as those modules are loaded), but that doesn't mean it isn't compiled.

As to "strong" typing:

"Strong" typing is a term that's only vaguely defined, but most commonly refers to whether a language will implicitly coerce/cast values of incompatible types in order to make an operation succeed. Consider this code:

    a = 1
    b = "2"
    c = a + b

In a strongly-typed language this is an error¹. Depending on other aspects of the language, it may be a compile-time error or it may be a runtime error, but the important thing is that the third line of that sample will never successfully execute. In a weakly-typed language, the third line could execute, and would assign a value of either 3 (if the string is coerced to number) or "12" (if the number is coerced to string). And in fact, in Python the third line above raises a runtime TypeError, since str and int are incompatible types for the "+" operator to work with.

Static typing refers to a situation where both names and values have types, and where all attempts at binding must involve names and values of compatible types. For example, in Java:

    int a = 3;

The name "a" is declared to be of type int, and the value 3 is of type int, so the binding of the value to the name succeeds. Attempting to bind a non-int value to the name "a" would fail. In a dynamically-typed language, only values have types, and the type of a value does not restrict which names it can be bound to.

You can remember this easily by considering why the name "static" is used: it's because you can perform checks of name/value types and bindings statically, without needing to run the code to determine types. In some languages (like Java) this is accomplished by requiring all names to be explicitly annotated with their types; in others the types will usually be inferred automatically from usage, with the option to annotate when desired or to resolve ambiguity.

¹ Yes, yes, I know someone on HN is going to suffer a terrible career-ending injury from how fast his knee jerked at that and possibly from breaking his wrists in his rush to post "Well actually there may be a type defined somewhere that's a union of string and number, so how dare you say that's an error when you don't know if someone might be using such a type!" My advice is not to be the type of person who suffers severe injuries due to such an obsessive need to nit-pick, because reasonable/charitable readers will correctly understand the example with no difficulty.