| I've worked both onsite and remote as a software dev / data engineer. I started out onsite. There are major disadvantages to remote work: * Amount you learn from the office community is orders of magnitude lower than onsite. If you're good at pushing yourself to learn new things, that can help, but your knowledge will almost certainly end up less diversified living remotely. You're just not exposed to the company's tech challenges as deeply, yet that's usually one of the main reasons for working at the company. * You don't necessarily get top projects, but rather perhaps good projects that fit remote work. Taking a remote role almost certainly hurts your career if you want to compete with traditionally onsite roles. * You likely don't get to participate in hiring or shaping the culture in a substantial way. * You'll have a much harder time building the network needed to get access to key resources (e.g. data, people, etc). * Your company better have a nice VPN or you're going to be doing a lot of systems-oriented stuff for yourself. It can be fun but can slow you down. * You're probably more likely to be laid off. The company I worked for started offering remote much more frequently due to recruiting and retention problems. I don't think the net result had a very positive impact on the Eng org. In particular, a lot of junior people were allowed to go remote for retention reasons but they didn't end up doing much in that role-- they would have been much better off just joining a different company (either local to them or one with a much much stronger remote culture). Agree with the poster that PG's essay has some holes; seems orders of magnitude less polished than his older essays. |