| For number 3, I mean lonely in general. I've experienced it myself and witnessed a number of good people get burned. As engineers, makers, tinkerers and creators, we tend to find our social networks among like-minded folk. When I was remote, I was living in a smaller town, where not much happened. There were a number of IT employers, but nothing particularly interesting. So I didn't have much "professionally aligned" groups to hang out with. Working from home also allowed to skip trivial outdoorsy stuff, and the weather being inhospitable for >6 months a year didn't help. At the office we meet like-minded people all the time. Those at the company who lived in large cities (3 in the entire country that qualify) could meet in person outside of company activities, and they had groups of other makers to socialise with. Where you have a tech scene, you tend to have lots of nicely aligned activities. Living in a more distant location, you're alone. As for number 8, you're of course right. It's not specific to remote, but I've found that at an office environment talking about some tricky problem that has surfaced during code review happens automatically, and discussing wider aspects of the code review in general tends to be part of workflow/tooling. Yes, I do review code review at the office but it's not essential. (Important, sure.) But when your communication channels are not in-person, going over code review as matter of course becomes critical. Not being able to walk over and chat about engineering practices is something you will only miss once you've seen both sides for long enough. The selection for wealth? Here I'm talking about jobs that require deep concentration. Tech is notorious for our constant search for the flow state. Interruptions and bad ergonomics can be devastating. But more than that, in order to remain mentally stable at a remote-only job for a long time, you need to be able to respect office hours and have a clear way to cut yourself off of the work environment. If your work machine is the same as your personal use machine, those lines can get awfully hazy. Not good for mental wellbeing in the long run. |
I find this to be true even with my phone! I have decided to get a cheap used Motorola smartphone to put slack + email + PagerDuty on and leave it in the desk unless I am oncall.