[code4tee]

I saw a great quote recently that said something like “Everyone loves work from home until you lose a deal to the competition that turned up to your customer in person.” There’s an element of truth to this.

Best advice I’ve heard is to say the draw for living in a city may go away but you need to be close. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to look like such a great idea when people start gathering together again. Maybe not as much as before, but it will still happen. For these reasons I see why the suburbs are seeing a real estate boom in many areas. I’m much less sure about the long term move to places much further away from the cities.

[ulfw]

Not everyone is a salesman though. Why would an engineer need to be in an office coding away so "he can turn up to his customer"?

[humanrebar]

Your customer is the person handing out raises, promotions, key assignments, etc. The person who makes it to happy hours will have the edge, fairly or not.

[cercatrova]

Raises, promotions and the like are not the way these days to make significant chunks of cash. It's job hopping every 1.5 to 2.5 years. In this case, there is no need to worry about promotions.

[nostrademons]

The way to rise in your career is to work on a string of high-value projects, not to slave away on the same codebase for years. When a VP has a great idea that needs a prototype delivered in 2 weeks, who is he going to go to? The engineer in the next office who he sees in the microkitchen every day, or the engineer working 2 timezones away who he never sees and doesn't know exists?

I think remote work will be a great option for the next 2-3 years, and then once the pandemic has receded and folks start switching from fear to greed mode, there will be distinct advantages to being near people with large budgets.

[three_seagrass]

IME junior engineers benefit from being physically around senior staff, but that's just anecdotal.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I got more from reading the source code of Emacs, Ultrix, Dynix and TeX,then eventually NCSA Mosaic and Linux than I ever did from almost any other "senior staff" that I ever encountered.

I would hope the same is true of the comparison between reading the source code of Ardour and meeting me in person.

[code4tee]

You live in the middle of nowhere and appear on Zoom calls. The rest of your team meets with company leaders in person. Who do you think has the best relationship with the leadership? Not saying it’s impossible to do this remotely but when others don’t it becomes very very hard. Applies to everything, not just sales. Full remote works until someone breaks the chain, then everyone working remotely is at a disadvantage.

[vmception]

and the people that survive in the denser environments will - by nature - be more fit to acquire goods and resources

so its unlikely that everyone in their remote prepper bunker will remain competitive just because we have video phone in the 21st century

[refurb]

To add on top of that, what about just general travel or business travel?

I could understand moving away from the bay area, but living in a remote town has it's costs. Need to jump on a plane for a business meeting? Well, now you're driving 2 hours to the airport and then connecting to some hub.

I've done it in the past, it adds a ton of friction to travel.

[tylerjwilk00]

Reducing wasteful polluting plane travel is a bonus not a bug.

The "space" dimension is so overrated when it comes to meetings.

If that is the only thing that has been keeping cities together then they're doomed.

[refurb]

Assuming you remove all "wasteful" travel, you're still causing more pollution living away from a major hub. Instead of a non-stop SFO to JFK flight, now you're taking a 1 hr Uber (or driving yourself) to a local airport, then taking a connecting flight to SFO.

[tylerjwilk00]

You're still in a bubble. Taking a flight for a business meeting is wasteful. Full stop.

[refurb]

You’re clearly extrapolating your own experience to everyone. And have never done sales.

Doing meetings, serious meetings, over Webex sucks balls.

If your some developer who never has to talk to anyone, then sure, your unproductive team meetings don’t have to be in person.

[robocat]

> I saw a great quote

I recall that being in Matt Levine’s Money Stuff (I did a search for it, however I didn’t find it.)