I honestly don't understand how any startup can even hope to compete if they don't offer remote options.
Hiring is incredibly tight right now, and I'm sure glad my options are "anybody within ~2 timezones" over basically only people within a 15 mile radius of my office because traffic is horrendous in my city.
Not to mention, how have companies not realized how to build robust remote company cultures over the past 2 years? My city currently has the highest hospitalization rates of any time during the pandemic, so hardly anyone is in the office anyway.
Just don't understand how any of these startup board members or VCs would be willing to invest in companies at this point that prohibit remote work.
Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company.
People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.
Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person.
The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity. People going into remote should acknowledge this.
People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true.
> People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.
Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be paying for office space because of tradition or internal momentum, because it confers status or because it gives executives a feeling of control. (This isn't even speculation: I've actually heard executives say that they want people back in the office to keep an eye on them and make sure they're working hard.)
It's not that engineers "don't understand" that "every other function functions better in person", it's that they disagree—with a pretty reasonable basis at that. Companies pushed open offices on the back of the same kind of baseless assumptions contravening both research and individuals' direct experience, and the push to return everyone to the office isn't any different or better-supported.
> Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses
You're right, so let's follow the money...
I regularly work with investors who acquire businesses (AUMs are typically ~$1B, I guess that is serious enough?).
> knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company.
- I don't know a single one who deliberately has said "there is a performance hit if they are remote, we should switch to in office to increase performance".
- I know of no industry study that is able to quantify this.
- "People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason." People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance. We still haven't agreed either of these are true. Thus, this is a poor argument.
I actually don't have any concrete evidence for one way or the other, but I do know there isn't unequivocal evidence that confirms your statement to be true.
The last two companies I've worked for where 100% remote, in both of these places engineering was a lot more productive. I personally invested less total time in work (about 7 or 8 hours total) and got a lot more done.
Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable.
For the kind of work I do (web development) in-person interactions are only good for middle managers that enjoy micro managing as a way to justify their job.
What does not work is to try to keep doing the same things you did in the office in a remote way. You need to adapt to the new context.
If your company went remote and suddenly you have 5 video calls a day, you're doing it wrong. Of course it will be worse and less productive.
"People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason."
Ah yes, the magical world where office politics and power dynamics does not exist.
Back in the real world at a certain corp I am closely familiar with there are 3 redundant projects that do the exact same thing and it takes 2 months for a new joiner to be issued with their work computer, and two more to get an admin account so they can start development.
For a basic non-engineering example, think about B2B sales. How much of a typical B2B sales cycle involves phone calls and emails and video meetings versus how much involves in-person meetings? Hasn't the first part of that more or less been "remote" since well before the virus?
To an extent, I think a large part of this view, as other comments have noted, might involve things like expensive office leases, etc., and to a certain mindset - realizing that a company doesn't necessarily need much of a physical presence highlights many varieties of poor longterm decision-making.
My employer believed as you are claiming, and so we had office space. I had to fight tooth and nail to keep my work from home part time schedule pre-pandemic because they were so obsessed with people being in the office. Then the pandemic hit and they saw no discernable loss in productivity. They no longer require people to come in and in fact we expanded our hiring to allow remote workers because there was 0 reason not to.
> Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company.
Yet, VC investments and returns soared in the last two years they were all working remote.
> Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person.
Sales, Marketing and Customer Support departments in typical tech companies have had a sizeable fraction of their employees located outside the office for some time now, long before Engineering.
Office work aids productivity of some functions. There is no good reason, IMO, to make sweeping universal statement about productivity.
This. As someone who works remotely and loves it, I’ve observed this on HN for years. It’s like engineers can’t (or won’t?) acknowledge that other roles in an organization go beyond staring at lines of code on a computer screen.
Hell, even product managers I know like coming in to an office to collaborate on the big whiteboard wall they can’t fit inside their home.
everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company
That's an interesting opinion, and very different to my experience, because investors were the first group of people I encountered who really embraced remote work. Two decades ago I worked for a company that had remote meetings with investors, remote board meetings, and that did work remotely. We had full time remote staff hundreds of miles away. The company paid for video conferencing hardware and ISDN lines for some of the staff. Most investors I've met since, including ones who invested in things I did, had no issue with remote work and understood the economics of it very well. I definitely don't think any of them believed fully remote companies were less effective, and I'm pretty sure they were happy money wasn't being spent on fancy offices (although I never grew a business enough to really get to that point to be fair).
I'd be very surprised to hear that the idea of remote work being less effective was coming from serious investors.
> The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity.
No, the trade-off is being able to hire the best people possible instead of the best people who will work in the office. Honestly, the office has been dying since 4G and high speed internet got everywhere. Offices should be optional - there if you need it, there for meetings, team work sessions and presentations. We don't have to work like it's 1998 anymore.
If a business takes a performance hit, perhaps their talent acquisition, organisation, process flows and leadership are sub par?
Don't believe me? Wait till you lose your best performers because you want them in an office. There's a bigger performance hit you'll take there, along with staff who are demoralised and stressed out with one eye open on the job's market, trying to drop kids off or whatever else they need the flexibility for.
Remember my post as a warning the next time you espouse this view, because it's inaccurate and it isn't valid in every single case.
Even if all of this were true (which I don't think anyone seriously believes anymore), there is still no way startups can compete right now without remote offerings.
The only reason I would consider working in an office full time (and I already live within commuting distance of a major tech-hiring metro) would be for $450K total comp or higher. Plenty of big companies can offer that these days, but startups are still going to mostly pay $200k as an upper limit (since they have no RSUs to throw on the pile).
There are plenty of companies that offer remote and total comp in that former range, there is absolutely no way you're going to hire any talent as startup now without remote as an option, even if remote were sub-optimal for your long term development.
There is a precisely zero percent chance that customer service works better in person. I have done it personally. My mom did it for over a decade from home. Engineering is not the only task that can be done remotely.
My company (management consulting) has smashed profitability records the last two years. A large part of that was not having office expenses and not doing in-person events. It’s completely apparent that many people used the office as their social outlet, with little work of value happening during those interactions. We are more productive in fewer hours.
Beyond that, our clients are seeing increased success on their major initiatives — communications are much easier when handled digitally as it forces some amount of PMO hygiene if you want to get anything done.
I actually am noticing a bifurcation of companies: the ones who pivoted to full remote indefinitely are able to pay more and are winning the war for talent, particularly in engineering roles. On top of that, it turns out out in-person isn’t so great or efficient when over half your meeting participants are virtual: everyone in the meeting room needs their laptop open anyway for the camera and hot mic issues abound.
Personally, I’m not going back. If they try to push us back, I’m getting another job. This is why employers pulled back on trying to bring everyone back — one of my clients who announced in October they were requiring everyone in-office in January saw 30% of their engineering staff walk out the door over the course of 6 weeks. That’s apocalyptic, it will take them a year plus to recover as most of their teams are now in the “on-call death spiral”. They are now permanently hybrid for all roles, not just engineering.
Does everybody really know this? How do they explain all-remote unicorns where all the departments seem to be able to be effective remotely? My experience having worked at a couple of them now is that people are more productive once async working really takes hold.
While I agree with your comments and find them very true, it must be said that widening the talent pool means hiring high skilled professionals for the same or less money. The remote penalty can be offset by a stronger team in a cost effective way.
> People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.
Companies have been paying for open plan offices for years. When I first started my career I found it bizarre that open plan offices were in any way considered suitable for programming problems.
However it's evident that many companies haven't got an issue with handicapping their staff in this way.
There’s also the mechanical money aspect behind it, if you pay bay area money to someone who lives in Idaho Falls, at some point they’ll be like “well my house is paid off my retirement money is full and life costs nothing here and I already live here, why would I work here 60 hours a week when I could enjoy life?”. Doesn’t happen the same with your bay area employees.
There's still a market for in-person jobs/workers, and people are willing to relocate as they did pre-pandemic. It might be significantly smaller, but if it matters enough on both sides to be in-person, I think it's a factor to consider when growing a team/picking a job.
While I don't have hard numbers, I know a few founders who are seed-stage and need to hire only 2-3 people; they want to be in an office (safely) in their early days. (Who knows what will happen as they grow.) Likewise, many job seekers I talk to want to be in-person and working alongside colleagues (safely) because they miss in-person interactions.
To your last point, I don't know if any angel investors in YC startups take into consideration a startups' willingness/unwillingness to be remote as a signal for whether they should invest. My guess is that there are better signals (technical founder, past experience, progress already made) that are more important deciding factors.
For very early stage (2-5 people) companies, I understand. You're building the business together, will be making tons of moment-by-moment changes, and the working relationship is critical, so I understand. We took that approach initially at the startup where I work.
Once you start to grow significantly, though (series A or later) it's just become much to prohibitively difficult to hire significant numbers of great people if we limit ourselves to the teeny area around our office. This is especially true for some hires where we need specialized expertise.
Companies love to crow about diversity, and one of the primary reasons they give is that diversity is a natural consequence of searching high and low for all the best people. Imagine if you limited your hiring to only brunettes with green eyes. Limiting your company to a teeny geographic monoculture is no less absurd. This is why I think VCs should take a long hard critical look at any growing company that is not willing to expand their geographic diversity.
There seems to be a maddening amount of head in the sanding by execs/VCS etc. I work at a company that’s been fully remote for 2 years but they keep trying to target a Return to Office date that keeps getting pushed back.
Just see the reality, accept remote is going to be permanent and invest in making that better for everyone.
I work at a company that’s been fully remote for 2 years but they keep trying to target a Return to Office date that keeps getting pushed back.
Likewise, and it's maddening, because I don't have any sense of long term stability to invest in my home as I'll have to move if the Return to Office actually happens.
I guess most execs/VCs are the kind of people who spent most of their career at "McKinseys" of this world, and this all they know. They want to return to their comfortable baseline.
I think organizations should be free to shape their own culture, and candidates can chose where they wish to work as well. Maybe the remote/in-person ratio will skew towards remote in the future, but there is no need to deny others' preferences as well. Remote work isn't a "right". There isn't one way of doing things that works in every situation in every industry in every country/culture. People are different, some are more social, some are less, etc, etc. Personally, I enjoy working with others, I love the little personal interactions in the hallway especially with people who I don't regularly work with, and it furthers bonding in our organization. But we're a vaccine company so there is literally no way for us to be remote anyway.
A company with a few people vs. a company with a lot of people are two different beasts. If things are not rigidly defined, it can be a lot more effective for people to be around each other, especially in the phase of spontaneous brainstorming or kitchen conversation or happy hour drinks. Most new companies aren’t hiring super experienced engineers to grind out a high risk venture, and maybe those are the people least affected by remote. Much harder to train or onboard someone who’s remote if you’re starting from 0.
Maturity is correlated with age, but age isn’t as strongly correlated with talent. Just because a team is just as capable working remotely doesn’t mean they’re as generally capable as a different team that’s more effective in person.
How do you reach the same level of effectiveness teaching or debugging math problems on a whiteboard without investing a lot of time asynchronously?
Our focus was originally on shared whiteboarding (PdMs + devs) but in 2020, for obvious reasons, schools started contacting us and using the tech for remote/hybrid teaching.
But it's true: the real-time part of teaching/writing/debugging is critical in the learning process. For this same reason, many of the teachers we work with use our app to share a piece of paper in real time. Similar result and you don't have to own a whiteboard.
(if you get a chance to kick the tires on it, I'd love some candid feedback)
Saw a developer position recently which stated remote, but with expectation to come into the office twice a week. This would include workers from quite far away who would likely spend the day travelling, or have to spend two nights a week away from home.
This seemed very odd - why would I need to schlep my laptop to come into the office to do the same job I do at home? I mean the occasional on-site is fine, but twice a week?
My conclusion was either that they wanted to have two day-long onsite meetings a week and damn the productivity hit and travel costs (Red Flag #1) or their management was deeply insecure and had to somehow justify their existence (or a property rent payment) by dragging their dev team into the office (Red Flag #2).
I mean either commit to remote or stick to on-prem, but this made their management look like idiots.
I actually wrote a blog post about this divide of how some people really prefer to work in the office, whereas for others it's a non starter, at least after the pandemic showed to us that remote work is very feasible in this industry "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...
In the long term, i only see this divide growing, cultures forming around each of the approaches based on what works for different types of individuals. Who knows what that will look like in a few years.
Wherever you may be hospitalised people are surely a tiny minority
People may not be in the office because of the isolation policies after getting in touch with someone with the flu, which is common, as usual
Even if this number slides to 50% in a few years, we've accelerated what would have probably taken 20 years or more of transition in to just a few years. The impact on every city and region outside the historical major growth centres will be huge.
We are just in the opening phases of that change. A big %# isn't the only indicator of change, it's the amount relative to pre-pandemic.
Good point. I live in a big city (Washington DC) and I'm a huge fan of remote work. I like living in a city but that doesn't mean I want to spend hours every week shuttling back and forth to and from an office. My job went from pandemic-remote to forever-remote and I love it.
Some people will take their big city salaries and move to rural areas. More power to them. After the pandemic, I figure we can all get together once a quarter or whatever and socialize. Otherwise, we can focus on getting work done.
Meanwhile, I'm happy to see some startups trying to fix the "remote (US only)" stuff.
It could be a great business. On one hand, many great talents (including me) around the world are blocked from these opportunities (like those from India, Russia, China, etc). On the other hand, many companies would like to have great talents with lower cost, but most of them don't want to deal with the hassle.
Small companies really can’t fix this. It means having the capability to legally comply with whatever US and foreign laws govern the hiring of a worker from that country. If you’re a tiny startup, there’s little incentive to take time to incorporate in a foreign country on the chance this potential hire is a superstar. So you work out some kind of contracting arrangement instead.
There are a bunch of companies out there that provide this as a service - remote employment. They setup a company in each local country and handle all the tax and legal implications.
Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I was saying maybe there could be startups tackling this issue, and offering their solutions as services, making the process as easy and smooth as possible.
There should be quite some companies are willing to pay for this kind of service, because remote working is booming, and the compensation varies a lot in different parts of the world.
Usually this gets done "under the table". I don't think there's anythibg really preventing it stateside since labir protections are flimsy and are there only for citizens /residents.
Be interesting to know for the "remotes" how remote is remote. Some are localish remotes, some are world wide remotes, and some somewhere in-between.
One of the problems seems to be ( and I'm sure some start up will try to solve this) is employing people worldwide has a lot of legal issues with regards to local employment laws and payment issues.
I think a common solution to this is that if you want to be a remote worker with a worldwide employment pool, you need to set-up an entity from under which to invoice, whether that would be freelancing or having an LLC, and then you take care of your taxes, healthcare, and so on yourself. At least this is how I know everyone (myself included) do it. It's not really complicated, you just need to hire an accountant, and company formation usually is also not expensive.
The more common this becomes the more likely people in the US (where most people are trying to work) take notice and enforce existing labor laws, and push for more regulation.
I’ve worked with people doing this in the past and they almost certainly are contractors in name only. That is they are essentially full time employees operating as contractors to skirt legal issues.
I think most "remotes" are within time zone-proximity.
The employment regulation burden is also massive for going truly global-remote.
Australia and NZ for example have strong employment laws AND do not overlap time zone-wise with most of the rest of the world. We have some great talent here but it's often too hard to make it work.
Disclaimer: I made https://rafo.com.au to collate remote jobs that work for Aussies & Kiwis.
There are certainly companies looking for talent that is only time-zone friendly. Having run an engineering team co-located in SF & Beijing, I know how hard it is myself to be working odd hours for standups, product syncs, etc.
That said, there are other companies that are hiring truly global. I know OneSignal is one such YC startup, having hired somebody during the pandemic in the Netherlands.
Last year alone, YC startups hired across over 40 countries. I can dig into more data re: how many were US-based companies hiring abroad -- that's a good distinction.
I dunno bro, contactors generally dodge the employment law issues. That's why a contractor charges out at 110 an hour whilst an employee would be happy with 50.
As someone who prepandemic was contracting back to nz whilst living in south america and now is starting to hire contractors, NZ and OZ don't represent good value spend in comparison to many other countries that have great people also but are getting paid 5 instead.
I have friends back home I would love to bring on to my team but the thought of paying them gives me shivvers.
it's also hard to work with people across hemispheres because of daylight saving time. I'm used to the hour difference I have with people I work with in Europe but I have no idea how many hours I'm separated from Australians because it changes 4 times through the year.
There's companies that specialize in global employment*, either by being employers of record in the employee's country and managing all that means, letting the actual company that wants to hire the employee not worry about that. Some similarly assist with contract positions in such situations
letsdeel.com and remote.com are two such companies that provide this kind of service.
* well I should actually call it global HR, not employment.
Payment in remote countries is a solved issue, by the likes of GlobalizationPartners or via.work
I've been working for US companies while living in Mexico for years. 100% legally hired in my country, with all the benefits and even equity from the USA startups
It isn’t that difficult to sort out issues wrt to employment laws. The bigger issues are probably due to data sharing/privacy concerns, threat of legal action by local Governments and problems with teams working in very different time zones.
Yeah, I'm sure it can vary widely; we try to stick with US timezones, which at least brings all of South America into play. Deel is really great for the legal issues of onboarding international folks.
I see a ton of comments from people on both sides of the issue, saying that either a) "I can't stand remote work" or b) "I'll only ever work remote from now on". This seems to imply that employees at non-remote-friendly companies will gradually leave to work at remote-friendly ones, and vice-versa.
If that's true, over time we can expect company cultures to start becoming more homogenous (and therefore more strident) in either their pro- or anti-remote work stance. It will be interesting to see what % of companies will fall into each camp.
Agree. This is what I've been saying to all my friends/coworkers. You like remote and your company doesn't? switch jobs. You like being in the office and your company went remote? Switch jobs. Problem solved... not everyone is the same and not everyone enjoys the same way of working.
There is no enough money in this world to make me go back to 2~3 hours a day commute in a crowded bus.
Mixed environments (within a team) don't work well. People at the office will have conversations that won't get written down anywhere, so remote workers are in disadvantage all the time.
In my experience, either the entire team is in a single place or all of them are remote. Now having teams some teams in the office and some others 100% remote, that could work, but I'm skeptical too.
I've worked on teams where everyone else was in-office and I was remote. I was constantly missing important "water cooler" conversations and my role slowly shifted into "code-monkey" since I no longer had the relevant business context.
Are there any startups attempting to sort out the tax situation when working from different places. It would involve a lot of figuring out with governments but as things stand I think being a digital nomad is going to be done semi illegally.
I would definitely sign up and pay my fair share to the correct jurisdiction.
And not just for salaries, which can be handled with companies like Deel and Remote. For me equity is the bigger concern.
If I join a UK startup, best case scenario is paying 10% tax on the upside of any exit windfalls. If I join any company outside the UK, that immediately jumps to ~55%.
Nobody is going to do that are they, it's insane for tax jurisdictions to want to do this they are just doing themselves out of 10% rather than winning 55%.
A common solution is to use employers of record, intermediary companies residing in the country you want to hire in that hire the employee for you using local contracts. Then as an employee you can travel where you want, you will work under the laws of the country your contract was written in.
I'm surprised this isn't brought up more when talking about taking companies remote. Even in the US it's a huge amount of work to set up separate legal entities across different states to deal with taxes if you want to hire remote engineers across the country.
Multi-state employment can be quite complex and a lot of startups are struggling with it. I work for a company called Insperity that completely solves this problem (full stop) by taking on full responsibility for payroll taxes and a lot of HR related compliance issues. Some of our success stories include Netflix, Trulia, Workday, Buzzfeed, Hello Fresh etc. Anyone curious about this platform that enables remote work in any state is free to drop me a line--happy to discuss. zac.mutrux@insperity.com
Its not just tax its employment law too. If you're an employee in Europe you have a lot of protection, you can't just be fired, you need to follow a lot of laws. What US startup wants to employ someone in France with those conditions?
There are co-employers like Trinet, which allow a company to piggy back off their payroll infrastructure. So you have an operational employer and an HR, pay, and benefits employer.
Seems like a problem that will eventually self correct as more jobs go remote and countries realize they have to compete with each other for residents so they can profit off of these worker's productivity.
>Looks like there's plenty of countries that offer remote work visas
Not really; the selection of countries is very small and the visas very restrictive/bureaucratic. It's essentially a non-option for most people. Regular work visas are still the way to go unfortunately.
"Nomad visas" are essentially a rainbow-and-unicorn thing; we (developers) really want it to exist but it doesn't (at least in the way we'd like).
That list claims the Australian Working Holiday Visa is (quoted from article: "designed to allow digital nomads to spend a year in the country with the ability to apply for an extension". It's definitely not designed for digital nomads, it's designed for backpackers doing short stints of casual work, especially in fields like agriculture, mining, and construction [1]. Hell, to get the extension you need to work for 3 months in the above fields. And getting it that wrong puts the rest of the list into doubt.
I don't know about other industries/professions, but... for developers? Not gonna happen. The demand for our skill is incredibly high, we're in a power position and as long as it is that way, pandemic or not, we can choose. And I know many people that, as me, would rather take a pay cut than go back to an office every day.
Salaries might at some point stabilize I suppose, as people will prefer to relocate to cheap places and overall there will be more offer of developers charging less money.
Overall I think this is a win-win for everyone (except middle managers that like micromanagement, those are the ones worried right now).
90% I predict. There is little to no advantage of having an in-office work force for tech startups unless physical presence is necessary for the job. Managers can crow all they want about wanting to see asses in chairs but the data does not support it.
Readit News
Hiring is incredibly tight right now, and I'm sure glad my options are "anybody within ~2 timezones" over basically only people within a 15 mile radius of my office because traffic is horrendous in my city.
Not to mention, how have companies not realized how to build robust remote company cultures over the past 2 years? My city currently has the highest hospitalization rates of any time during the pandemic, so hardly anyone is in the office anyway.
Just don't understand how any of these startup board members or VCs would be willing to invest in companies at this point that prohibit remote work.
People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.
Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person.
The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity. People going into remote should acknowledge this.
> People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.
Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be paying for office space because of tradition or internal momentum, because it confers status or because it gives executives a feeling of control. (This isn't even speculation: I've actually heard executives say that they want people back in the office to keep an eye on them and make sure they're working hard.)
It's not that engineers "don't understand" that "every other function functions better in person", it's that they disagree—with a pretty reasonable basis at that. Companies pushed open offices on the back of the same kind of baseless assumptions contravening both research and individuals' direct experience, and the push to return everyone to the office isn't any different or better-supported.
You're right, so let's follow the money...
I regularly work with investors who acquire businesses (AUMs are typically ~$1B, I guess that is serious enough?).
> knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company.
- I don't know a single one who deliberately has said "there is a performance hit if they are remote, we should switch to in office to increase performance".
- I know of no industry study that is able to quantify this.
- "People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason." People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance. We still haven't agreed either of these are true. Thus, this is a poor argument.
I actually don't have any concrete evidence for one way or the other, but I do know there isn't unequivocal evidence that confirms your statement to be true.
The last two companies I've worked for where 100% remote, in both of these places engineering was a lot more productive. I personally invested less total time in work (about 7 or 8 hours total) and got a lot more done.
Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable.
For the kind of work I do (web development) in-person interactions are only good for middle managers that enjoy micro managing as a way to justify their job.
What does not work is to try to keep doing the same things you did in the office in a remote way. You need to adapt to the new context.
If your company went remote and suddenly you have 5 video calls a day, you're doing it wrong. Of course it will be worse and less productive.
Ah yes, the magical world where office politics and power dynamics does not exist.
Back in the real world at a certain corp I am closely familiar with there are 3 redundant projects that do the exact same thing and it takes 2 months for a new joiner to be issued with their work computer, and two more to get an admin account so they can start development.
For a basic non-engineering example, think about B2B sales. How much of a typical B2B sales cycle involves phone calls and emails and video meetings versus how much involves in-person meetings? Hasn't the first part of that more or less been "remote" since well before the virus?
To an extent, I think a large part of this view, as other comments have noted, might involve things like expensive office leases, etc., and to a certain mindset - realizing that a company doesn't necessarily need much of a physical presence highlights many varieties of poor longterm decision-making.
Yet, VC investments and returns soared in the last two years they were all working remote.
> Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person.
Sales, Marketing and Customer Support departments in typical tech companies have had a sizeable fraction of their employees located outside the office for some time now, long before Engineering.
Office work aids productivity of some functions. There is no good reason, IMO, to make sweeping universal statement about productivity.
Hell, even product managers I know like coming in to an office to collaborate on the big whiteboard wall they can’t fit inside their home.
That's an interesting opinion, and very different to my experience, because investors were the first group of people I encountered who really embraced remote work. Two decades ago I worked for a company that had remote meetings with investors, remote board meetings, and that did work remotely. We had full time remote staff hundreds of miles away. The company paid for video conferencing hardware and ISDN lines for some of the staff. Most investors I've met since, including ones who invested in things I did, had no issue with remote work and understood the economics of it very well. I definitely don't think any of them believed fully remote companies were less effective, and I'm pretty sure they were happy money wasn't being spent on fancy offices (although I never grew a business enough to really get to that point to be fair).
I'd be very surprised to hear that the idea of remote work being less effective was coming from serious investors.
No, the trade-off is being able to hire the best people possible instead of the best people who will work in the office. Honestly, the office has been dying since 4G and high speed internet got everywhere. Offices should be optional - there if you need it, there for meetings, team work sessions and presentations. We don't have to work like it's 1998 anymore.
If a business takes a performance hit, perhaps their talent acquisition, organisation, process flows and leadership are sub par?
Don't believe me? Wait till you lose your best performers because you want them in an office. There's a bigger performance hit you'll take there, along with staff who are demoralised and stressed out with one eye open on the job's market, trying to drop kids off or whatever else they need the flexibility for.
Remember my post as a warning the next time you espouse this view, because it's inaccurate and it isn't valid in every single case.
The only reason I would consider working in an office full time (and I already live within commuting distance of a major tech-hiring metro) would be for $450K total comp or higher. Plenty of big companies can offer that these days, but startups are still going to mostly pay $200k as an upper limit (since they have no RSUs to throw on the pile).
There are plenty of companies that offer remote and total comp in that former range, there is absolutely no way you're going to hire any talent as startup now without remote as an option, even if remote were sub-optimal for your long term development.
Beyond that, our clients are seeing increased success on their major initiatives — communications are much easier when handled digitally as it forces some amount of PMO hygiene if you want to get anything done.
I actually am noticing a bifurcation of companies: the ones who pivoted to full remote indefinitely are able to pay more and are winning the war for talent, particularly in engineering roles. On top of that, it turns out out in-person isn’t so great or efficient when over half your meeting participants are virtual: everyone in the meeting room needs their laptop open anyway for the camera and hot mic issues abound.
Personally, I’m not going back. If they try to push us back, I’m getting another job. This is why employers pulled back on trying to bring everyone back — one of my clients who announced in October they were requiring everyone in-office in January saw 30% of their engineering staff walk out the door over the course of 6 weeks. That’s apocalyptic, it will take them a year plus to recover as most of their teams are now in the “on-call death spiral”. They are now permanently hybrid for all roles, not just engineering.
Source: I know many agency owners, also am one. Also, most marketers I've been trying to recruit have said their agency's are remote indefinitely now.
Companies have been paying for open plan offices for years. When I first started my career I found it bizarre that open plan offices were in any way considered suitable for programming problems.
However it's evident that many companies haven't got an issue with handicapping their staff in this way.
I think we just have to face the fact that many people and companies spend a lot of money on suboptimal things.
Every other "function" is a person who hasn't bothered to learn to use a damn computer.....
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There's still a market for in-person jobs/workers, and people are willing to relocate as they did pre-pandemic. It might be significantly smaller, but if it matters enough on both sides to be in-person, I think it's a factor to consider when growing a team/picking a job.
While I don't have hard numbers, I know a few founders who are seed-stage and need to hire only 2-3 people; they want to be in an office (safely) in their early days. (Who knows what will happen as they grow.) Likewise, many job seekers I talk to want to be in-person and working alongside colleagues (safely) because they miss in-person interactions.
To your last point, I don't know if any angel investors in YC startups take into consideration a startups' willingness/unwillingness to be remote as a signal for whether they should invest. My guess is that there are better signals (technical founder, past experience, progress already made) that are more important deciding factors.
Once you start to grow significantly, though (series A or later) it's just become much to prohibitively difficult to hire significant numbers of great people if we limit ourselves to the teeny area around our office. This is especially true for some hires where we need specialized expertise.
Companies love to crow about diversity, and one of the primary reasons they give is that diversity is a natural consequence of searching high and low for all the best people. Imagine if you limited your hiring to only brunettes with green eyes. Limiting your company to a teeny geographic monoculture is no less absurd. This is why I think VCs should take a long hard critical look at any growing company that is not willing to expand their geographic diversity.
Just see the reality, accept remote is going to be permanent and invest in making that better for everyone.
Maturity is correlated with age, but age isn’t as strongly correlated with talent. Just because a team is just as capable working remotely doesn’t mean they’re as generally capable as a different team that’s more effective in person.
How do you reach the same level of effectiveness teaching or debugging math problems on a whiteboard without investing a lot of time asynchronously?
If I may be so bold, we've taken a stab at this: https://sharetheboard.com
Our focus was originally on shared whiteboarding (PdMs + devs) but in 2020, for obvious reasons, schools started contacting us and using the tech for remote/hybrid teaching.
But it's true: the real-time part of teaching/writing/debugging is critical in the learning process. For this same reason, many of the teachers we work with use our app to share a piece of paper in real time. Similar result and you don't have to own a whiteboard.
(if you get a chance to kick the tires on it, I'd love some candid feedback)
This seemed very odd - why would I need to schlep my laptop to come into the office to do the same job I do at home? I mean the occasional on-site is fine, but twice a week?
My conclusion was either that they wanted to have two day-long onsite meetings a week and damn the productivity hit and travel costs (Red Flag #1) or their management was deeply insecure and had to somehow justify their existence (or a property rent payment) by dragging their dev team into the office (Red Flag #2).
I mean either commit to remote or stick to on-prem, but this made their management look like idiots.
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In the long term, i only see this divide growing, cultures forming around each of the approaches based on what works for different types of individuals. Who knows what that will look like in a few years.
- PayPal wants their people in Austin.
- Amazon wants their people at one of the hubs.
- What other large firms are telling applicants they have to reside in a particular city or close to a hub?
We are just in the opening phases of that change. A big %# isn't the only indicator of change, it's the amount relative to pre-pandemic.
Some people will take their big city salaries and move to rural areas. More power to them. After the pandemic, I figure we can all get together once a quarter or whatever and socialize. Otherwise, we can focus on getting work done.
It could be a great business. On one hand, many great talents (including me) around the world are blocked from these opportunities (like those from India, Russia, China, etc). On the other hand, many companies would like to have great talents with lower cost, but most of them don't want to deal with the hassle.
There should be quite some companies are willing to pay for this kind of service, because remote working is booming, and the compensation varies a lot in different parts of the world.
One of the problems seems to be ( and I'm sure some start up will try to solve this) is employing people worldwide has a lot of legal issues with regards to local employment laws and payment issues.
I’ve worked with people doing this in the past and they almost certainly are contractors in name only. That is they are essentially full time employees operating as contractors to skirt legal issues.
The employment regulation burden is also massive for going truly global-remote.
Australia and NZ for example have strong employment laws AND do not overlap time zone-wise with most of the rest of the world. We have some great talent here but it's often too hard to make it work.
Disclaimer: I made https://rafo.com.au to collate remote jobs that work for Aussies & Kiwis.
There are certainly companies looking for talent that is only time-zone friendly. Having run an engineering team co-located in SF & Beijing, I know how hard it is myself to be working odd hours for standups, product syncs, etc.
That said, there are other companies that are hiring truly global. I know OneSignal is one such YC startup, having hired somebody during the pandemic in the Netherlands.
Last year alone, YC startups hired across over 40 countries. I can dig into more data re: how many were US-based companies hiring abroad -- that's a good distinction.
As someone who prepandemic was contracting back to nz whilst living in south america and now is starting to hire contractors, NZ and OZ don't represent good value spend in comparison to many other countries that have great people also but are getting paid 5 instead.
I have friends back home I would love to bring on to my team but the thought of paying them gives me shivvers.
letsdeel.com and remote.com are two such companies that provide this kind of service.
* well I should actually call it global HR, not employment.
I've been working for US companies while living in Mexico for years. 100% legally hired in my country, with all the benefits and even equity from the USA startups
If that's true, over time we can expect company cultures to start becoming more homogenous (and therefore more strident) in either their pro- or anti-remote work stance. It will be interesting to see what % of companies will fall into each camp.
There is no enough money in this world to make me go back to 2~3 hours a day commute in a crowded bus.
In my experience, either the entire team is in a single place or all of them are remote. Now having teams some teams in the office and some others 100% remote, that could work, but I'm skeptical too.
I would definitely sign up and pay my fair share to the correct jurisdiction.
If I join a UK startup, best case scenario is paying 10% tax on the upside of any exit windfalls. If I join any company outside the UK, that immediately jumps to ~55%.
Seems like a problem that will eventually self correct as more jobs go remote and countries realize they have to compete with each other for residents so they can profit off of these worker's productivity.
Not really; the selection of countries is very small and the visas very restrictive/bureaucratic. It's essentially a non-option for most people. Regular work visas are still the way to go unfortunately.
"Nomad visas" are essentially a rainbow-and-unicorn thing; we (developers) really want it to exist but it doesn't (at least in the way we'd like).
[1] Full list here: https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-we-do/whm-program/speci...
Let's see how this looks 2 years after the pandemic is over.
Salaries might at some point stabilize I suppose, as people will prefer to relocate to cheap places and overall there will be more offer of developers charging less money.
Overall I think this is a win-win for everyone (except middle managers that like micromanagement, those are the ones worried right now).