The single biggest problem with working remotely is that you have to be excellent at a lot of things that don't matter when you're on site. And since your energy is a zero sum game, being excellent at these things steals energy from building.
You need to expend time and energy on:
- preparing precise specs instead of explaining and interacting
- interpretting imprecise specs instead of questioning and interacting
- writing precise emails
- interpretting imprecise emails
- guessing body language and tonality from written communication
- dealing with conference calls and web-based meetings
- building relationships without benefit of breaks and meals
- understanding the human terrain without benefit of gossip and the water cooler
- being noticed and recognized for who you really are by new people
- being included when you're "out of sight, out of mind"
You kinda get the idea. If you can be excellent at these things, great. Otherwise, be prepared to see your work suffer.
Having been 100% remote for the last 5 years, I feel I can comment here.
I'm a little puzzled by the first few items in your list... I work at a pretty big company, so maybe that is why. Specs are a way of life where I work. I would hope that everyone would be good or learn to become good at writing useful precise specs.
Accurate and concise emails goes without saying.
I would agree with the body language from written communication if you never spoke with anyone on the phone, but that would be pretty unusual I think.
Web-based meetings, virtual whiteboards, are fantastic. I'd much rather do web based than sit in a conference room.
I don't really have work relationships anymore, but it's not a loss. More of an exchange for relationships outside of work.
The water cooler comment I agree with. I don't have the "pulse" of the human terrain anymore. It bothered me when I was losing it, but I don't mind anymore.
I used to worry about the "being included" part, due to the out-of-sight, out-of-mind effect. I have to be more of an advocate for myself than perhaps I otherwise would. However, my work speaks for itself, and people want me on their projects. I keep in touch with various project leads and let them know what my availability looks like. I don't feel like I'm missing out.
All that said, I worked at my company for close to 10 years before going remote. That was a big help. I personally knew everyone I was working with for the first couple years. Turnover has changed that.
Working remotely requires discipline, perhaps more-so than working in an office. For many people, the commute to work and being in a different environment helps them shift state of mind into a "work" mode. That is harder to manufacture working remotely.
You need to be more available when you work remotely. When someone calls you in an office and you don't answer, they think "oh, maybe they were taking a break or in the restroom". When someone calls you and you work remotely and don't answer, you worry that they will think, "Is this guy really working?"
For the first couple years I worked remotely, I made sure to answer the phone whether I was on lunch or break or whatever. Now that my reputation as an effective remote worker have been established, I don't worry about it so much, but I do still think about it.
Great insight! Think you nailed everything head-on. The precise specs, I envy you on that though. I've unfortunately never worked somewhere where precise specs we're handed over. I've either had to build my own specs to the problem, or am given partially written specs and had to fill in the gaps. Which ends up in a lot of back and forth, so the point being made in the initial comment about the specs is accurate everywhere I've worked.
I have worked 100% remote in the past six months, worked onsite for 2 years before that, and 100% remote doing contract work for 10+ years before that. Most of my adult working life has been in remote contract work.
Remote contract work doesn't quite count, but because of it, I have never been attached to working onsite.
Working remotely in a non-contract situation, though, does need some connection with the rest of the employees. It helps if the rest of the team is also remote. The whole team had to figure out how to work with each other.
> Specs are a way of life where I work. I would hope that everyone would be good or learn to become good at writing useful precise specs.
I was honestly hoping this was a joke, but I don't think it was. By the time someone writes an accurate spec, the business need has already changed. Spec's don't work.
"The most important function of a spec is to design the program. Even if you are working on code all by yourself, and you write a spec solely for your own benefit, the act of writing the spec -- describing how the program works in minute detail -- will force you to actually design the program."
Sure, you'll still find out the design was wrong in some areas, and you'll have to change it. But at least you'll have a design to start from, as opposed to a hodgepodge of features carelessly tossed into the interface wherever the programmers found it most convenient to stick them, implemented in whatever way made the most sense to the programmers at the time.
> Since when did specs become immutable? Needs have changed? Patch the spec. It's faster than patching the software.
I don't understand how this can be faster. You patch the spec, then patch the software to match. I can't see how the spec could be patched faster. That is unless you patch the spec in isolation, prior to writing any code, which is a bigger mess. I've never, ever seen any group that can write a spec in isolation prior to writing code to demonstrate it, and have it come out well, its usually a disaster.
The idea is by having a spec, you're more likely to see where it needs to be patched upfront, before delivering poorly designed software to angry customers, so you spend less time re-working it later on.
> I've never, ever seen any group that can write a spec in isolation prior to writing code to demonstrate it, and have it come out well, its usually a disaster.
Can you elaborate? I'd be interested in hearing what they were building, who (in general terms) they were building it for, how they went about writing the specs, and what went wrong.
My experience has been completely different, and I'm curious as to why that is.
Edit: Of course you can't expect the customer to write the spec. Designing the software is your job. But that doesn't mean specs are broken; it just means asking your customers to write your specs for you is broken.
In my experience you never really understand a problem until you've implemented it. You can describe a problem and a solution in excruciating detail, but you'll never find every corner case. Sometimes (often?) those corner cases are really big deals.
Better to prototype and iterate. Software should be the spec.
Agreed. Version 1.0 is a glorified prototype anyway. Nothing about writing a spec prevents you from prototyping and iterating, though. These are not competing ideas.
Of course you won't get everything right in the first draft of the spec. You won't get everything right in the first release of your software either. That's not an excuse to stop trying.
Let's suppose you write a spec, then go on to write some code. For each design problem that makes you break from your original plans, one of two things is true:
(1) Someone noticed a problem while writing or reviewing the spec, and changed the design. You've saved a ton of time over implementing the wrong thing and then changing it later.
(2) You didn't notice the problem until implementation. It still takes just as long to fix as it would have if you hadn't bothered writing a spec first.
If #1 is common enough, writing the spec saves you time. At worst, #1 never happens and you're out the time it took to write the spec. But how long does that take? In my experience, it takes a lot less time to write a spec than to actually implement it.
There's a lot of potential upside and little potential downside.
I don't advocate Epic Design Up Front—at some point, it's time to stop planning and start doing. But I do advocate Some Design Up Front, as opposed to Let's Wing It And Hope For The Best.
> Software should be the spec.
Software is not a spec. It's written in computerspeak so only the programmers can read it, and sometimes they're not even completely sure what's going on. Without a spec, QA has nothing to test against, so you get into arguments about how things should work because there's no record of any decision on the matter. There's nothing to write documentation against, so the documentation ends up worthless. Sales and marketing make up all sorts of neat features you get to implement whether they make sense or not because they've already been sold, and you can't really say they should've known better because you never bothered to write down what they should know in the first place.
If all you have is code, you don't have a spec. Code is not a spec.
> My experience has been completely different, and I'm curious as to why that is.
The majority of people who request 'software' haven't a clue what they want, they can't possibly describe it, you can't possibly write a spec for it. See years of research regarding waterfall vs agile development as a reference.
Business software isn't about "what they want", it's about coming up with a solution to meet a business need. If the customer can't define what their business need is (the why of specs), then they have no reason to be in business.
It's not the job of the spec writer to define the business need, it's to take an existing need (after clearly defining it through consultation with the customer) and then defining the parameters of the software - inputs, outputs, business rules.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with agile vs. waterfall development. A well-written spec is crucial to ANY business software project.
We do agile development at my company (a 25 year old enterprise software company) and will not begin work until we have a well-defined spec. I continually reject spec docs if they don't have enough info or if I have questions about an aspect of it. It's your job as a developer to help the spec writer see what problems may crop up and define a solution for them.
I think you need to read Code Complete. It's absolutely mind-blowing the respect for specs you get after reading that book, even just chapter 3.
I find it interesting that I've gotten downvoted for this comment. Building an MVP and then iterating seems to be the modus operandi of the HN community. Building a detailed spec is the anti-thesis of this movement. How does this correlate?
I didn't down vote you, but my experience with writing specs has been positive.
Maybe you are talking about running your own start-up where it might not be successful yet? And you're trying to find your market fit? Then sure, maybe just writing new code and changing the product on a whim is what is best without writing up a spec.
Now consider a software consultancy with enterprise customers. The enterprise usually wants time and cost estimates, which usually means agreeing on precisely what you will be delivering in advance. You WANT to write a spec, to prevent scope creep and limit your liability, and they want you to tell them how long and how much (and a spec helps estimate those things). It's win-win.
Most enterprise customers can't wrap their CFO's head around true agile with iterations and open-ended times and costs. They want as much of a guarantee as you can give them for what/how long/how much.
Not saying one way is better or worse - but maybe it's a case of the right tool for the job?
Because the fact one model is working for the HN community doesn't mean that other models don't work but you made a very definite and sweeping statement.
We use specs because our customers tend to be somewhat staid and want certainty and predictability. By keeping chunks of functionality relatively compact (say 3 person months typically, then developed over a period of maybe 6 weeks) writing an accurate and useful spec is absolutely doable.
Doing that we'll usually be 95% (or more) right and any adjustments can be made in a small release a couple of weeks later.
The approach has elements of agile and iteration in it (small releases, the UAT and fix process is basically a short agile sprint) but specs are absolutely a working part of it. Could we do it another way if our clients would accept it? Sure? But do the specs work in the current process? Yes they do.
If you get your feedback on iterations in writing, you will probably get fewer self-contradictory or illegal, immoral, unethical, or unimplementable demands.
So you frequently experience imprecise emails that require a face to face meeting to clarify what was just written? That doesn't seem like an advantage for working in closer proximity. As far as interpreting imprecise emails, a phone call is possible whether you are in the office or not. And if you are having to do this frequently, I think there is a staffing problem.
Body language in technical specs and design documents should be irrelevant.
Conference calls...yes...they happen in either case. Not sure what there is to "deal with" differently when working remotely.
Being noticed by new people: I think you are suggesting something specific here that I can't relate to.
"Human terrain", gossip, water cooler chats....yes, clearly you are suggesting some kind of requirement for something that is not actually required to do work.
It seems you are suggesting a very heavy personal interaction with people as a general requirement but I think that in a number of positions this is not the case. If you are in an organization where shared personal time, water cooler chats, and face to face email followups are important, then obiviously remote work is not going to be effective. You've essentially built the perfect anti remote work scenario and suggested that it is going to be that way in every job so if you can't combat those things then forget it. What you have to do instead of trying to fight such a culture is to find a position where those things don't matter.
You can't relate to new people in the company? It is hard to read you here. You sound from this that you have a very specific idea of your job role where your adaption is to leave.
I can't relate to a requirement for being "noticed and recognized for who you really are by new people" as a reason to work in the office. I'd be surprised if most employees really know each other anyway. I'd be even more surprised if that was somehow important to job function for most jobs.
For most jobs maybe that's true, but many startups strive to be better than that and more than just job function and day-to-day.
Personally I find a business where people know each other fairly well and understand how each other operates is preferable over one where I am only considered for my "job function;" so I can relate. But perhaps I am just idealistic.
" many startups strive to be better than that"
Better than what? Are you implying that an environment where forming close personal relationships with coworkers is a requirement is distincly "better"?
Perhaps in your case, as described in your last paragraph, you would find that to be better for you. But I don't think it is undeniably better in all cases, for all people.
Many startups are actually remote only and I don't think they would accept that they are somehow inferior for it.
Having spent 5 years working with a remote team of 30 developers (mostly west coast based, but almost never in the office), there is definitely a different side to the story.
The situation you are describing arises when you try to introduce telecommuting into an organization, without making it part of the culture. When it is an exception and not the norm. As with any exceptions, it has to be properly managed, and results in extra effort being required form both sides of the fence in order to make it work. However, making it the exception is the main reason telecommuting doesn't work out for organizations.
At the company where I worked, the norm was that all member of the development staff were telecommuting. Most other departments were on-site, with the exception of about 50% of sales. Pretty much everyone that came into the office did so by choice. I did about 50/50, as my job included a lot of meetings with executives.
The main aspects that made this successful, were the same as in the office - there was a very specific expectation of behavior:
- When the day starts (at you preferred/agreed upon time), you send an email stating you are working to the dev distro list.
- When you are working, you are expected to be on IM (statuses are meaningful, if you are set to "do not disturb", you are not disturbed, unless an emergency arises).
- When you leave, take a long break, etc, you let the team know by email.
- A daily "stand-up" call was held at specific time.
- Everyone had a published contact list. Especially, leads, managers and PMs were expected to answer the calls from devs.
Essentially, when someone would IM you, it would be like dropping by someone's cube to talk. White-boarding sessions were done over gotomeetings or webex.
For people not used to this, it might sound like a chatty, annoying type of environment, but in reality, being aware of the need to communicate, it made for a much more hospitable place to work. When you needed to concentrate, you could shut everything out. When you needed to collaborate, people were an IM or phone call away.
I think a lot of it comes down to the corporate culture. I worked at one company remotely for eighteen months (at the end of which I was laid off). When I started my team had two people working remotely (and we were among the only remote workers at the company). Eventually the other remote guy quit, and then I got laid off (in large part because I was the only person remaining needing special handling, such as out-of-state health cover).
On the other hand, I worked for a company which employed large numbers of remote workers and it wasn't really an issue. One of our clients integrated two of our people into a team which was spread all across north america.
That said, I think if you don't capture the water cooler, lunches, etc., you're not getting the full value from the person. Having worked solo/remote for five years, I'm now working in a conventional office setup, going to lunch with colleagues, shooting shit with people at the coffee machine, and so forth -- and the value that these informal encounters have for the project and organization is simply phenomenal.
Serendipitous encounters with other smart, passionate people can be amazingly powerful -- I seem to recall an article citing examples such as "Building 20" at MIT where researchers constantly bumped into people working in random different fields, and Pixar's campus where all the bathrooms and snacks are in the central hub. I think that if you're working with the right people on the right project, you want to be together (until the technology for being together -- e.g. electronic "wormholes" -- when you're apart gets a whole lot better).
So in other words, it's harder to play corporate politics when working remotely. That I would agree with. Whether or not that's a bad thing, I'm not sure.
And honestly, if you're not spending time on preparing precise specs or writing and interpreting clear and precise emails while working on location then you're doing something wrong. Most of the communication and project management still happens on computers whether or not there are remote workers involved.
If you're going to say, "in other words", it's an interesting exercise to wonder if the person you're paraphrasing would agree with you that you're accurately paraphrasing them. I'd say that's not remotely the case here... Though it certainly is harder to play corporate politics remotely.
Written communication is lower bandwidth than oral communication. And phone conversations are lower bandwidth than face-to-face. Relationships/friendships are part of work (for most people) and can help you be more effective on a team. And work ideas often get discussed during "non-work work time" (lunches/watercoolers) -- often leaving the remote team member out of the loop.
> Written communication is lower bandwidth than oral communication
This is not necessarily true, especially if you have fast typers on your team. And typing out conversations means you have a written record of everything that was said. Important points are no longer lost to the ether.
> And work ideas often get discussed during "non-work work time" (lunches/watercoolers) -- often leaving the remote team member out of the loop.
It's true, you do miss out on some of these types of conversations. But if your team makes heavy use of online communication tools, you often have conversations springing up during non-work hours. Also, missing out on 30 minutes of semi-casual discussion during lunch isn't that compelling of a downside for me, especially when weighing it against the upsides of increasing your potential labor pool.
I personally find the opposite to be true with a lot of these "precise" points. Written communication is, at worst, as hard as spoken when it comes to technical matters. Done well, it's better. There are so many times I've tried to explain an idea verbally only to give up and take thirty seconds to outline the shell of it in pseudocode or whatever and suddenly everybody understands.
A lot of this stuff depends on individual personality. Some people do better on site, and the stuff you write applies. But some people do better off-site, and all of those advantages you cite can turn into disadvantages. I would be extremely wary of painting remote work as something that's always a disadvantage, albeit one that can sometimes be dealt with, no matter who's doing it.
When I worked for BigCo, the vast majority of my comunication with customers was in writing. The vast majority of my training for interacting with customers was geared towards face to face interactions. I never once had a face to face meeting with a customer. I felt strongly that more internal communication in writing (like email) would have improved the company's ability to interact with the customer -- you know, the folks paying our bills.
Given how much you post on HN, it strikes me as somewhat hypocritical to talk about email as an inferior communication method. The internet and writing are increasingly critical to business success, even for local mom and pop shops. I am well aware that people routinely talk like there is something inherently superior about "IRL" interactions. It frequently makes me want to ask "So, then, why are you here?" Because, inevitably, it is someone getting enormous value from their virtual life who is dismissing remote/virtual something-or-other as "not real" or otherwise somehow inferior. Naturally, they do it a lot on the Internet, just to add to the irony.
This dynamic is changing. For several of these:
"guessing body language and tonality from written communication", "dealing with conference calls and web-based meetings", "building relationships without benefit of breaks and meals", "understanding the human terrain without benefit of gossip and the water cooler", "being noticed and recognized for who you really are by new people"
And especially:
"being included when you're "out of sight, out of mind""
A remote presence device can make a tremendous difference. We know this because we use them ourselves, with our own distributed team. We have people on three continents, in the same office, every day.
One challenge we have (full disclosure, my company makes such a device) is how to explain the benefits, and how it changes life and work, without a live demo. Our research shows that it takes about 30 minutes of use before people start to see the differences. I'd be curious to know what the folks at Double Robotics, Anybots, VGo, and some of the other new companies have found as well.
What would stop remove worker from explaining, questioning and interacting remotely? There is Skype, there are good screen sharing tools.
Being included when you're "out of sight, out of mind" -- that's cultural issue. When you are one click away in Skype - you are more reachable than on-site co-worker 2 cubicles down the hall.
I agree about the advantage of breaks/meals/water cooler/gym /walks around the office etc.
That could be simulated online though.
I think online gaming communities are ahead in online socialization, so we can learn some tricks from them.
My team does attempt to simulate this online, at least w/ one of our remote folks.
We occasionally have "game break" on Fridays, where the team gets together for an hour to play a board game or video game (popular favorites have been The Resistance and Mario Kart). When one of our teammates moved to Texas (we're in NY), we started Skyping him in for games of The Resistance (it's sort of like Mafia, but with cards). Since it's a card game, we had to find some interesting workarounds - we use http://www.adoodle.org/ for anonymous votes in the game (instead of cards), and hold up his role card to the screen w/out looking at it so he knows if he's a spy or not.
It's been a lot of fun, and a great way to stay connected w/ teammates outside the office. At some point, I'd like to write a Skype bot that handles all the vote-counting and card dealing, but our little hacky version of the game has worked pretty well so far.
There will always be dogma associated with the belief that in-person interaction is more valuable than remote interaction, much like the same dogma people some people have about preferring physical books to e-book readers. People aren't able to truly quantify the benefit of working on-site, but they will flail their hands vigorously in an attempt to qualify it.
On the other hand, it's very easy to quantify the benefit of remote workers. You increase your potential labor force if you remove geographic restrictions, which cuts costs and improves productivity. I personally was able to quantify the benefit of working remotely in terms of distractions. I work remotely on a medium sized team and I occasionally travel to the headquarters to work on-site. My productivity always drops when I'm on-site because of the constant interruptions and meetings, both initiated by others and myself.
It is hard to quantify, but having done the remote working thing for a while myself, there is a lot of communication that one misses.
Skype, Facetime, G+ Hangouts etc all help, but there is still a significant qualitative difference to being in the same physical room as a bunch of smart people - both in terms of coming up with better ideas and solutions, and of avoiding miscommunication and misunderstandings.
No doubt as our comms tech gets better that gap will decrease (it's a lot narrower than ten years ago), but it's definitely there.
> there is a lot of communication that one misses.
That's not necessarily a bad thing considering that most communication within most office environments, like it or not, is not "productive communication".
When you have many people together in the same environment with a low communication cost it is inevitable that interactions will not always be productive (in the sense, "do we really need to talk about this, right now?").
To some extend the notion of community and belonging is lost when working remotely - as someone else mentioned, is like reading a book vs an e-book. However, if you manage to get past the feeling of not "being real" or not "feeling it" you realise that the function (working) is quite distinct from the form (sharing an office).
Sometimes when I talk with my workmates over skype and listen about time lost on discussions over office politics and needless meetings I feel great, because I'm glad I missing that kind of communication. At the same time, it is difficult to understand the context of a discussion without each party knowing the environment within which the other party is communicating from.
From my experience the downsides of working remotely are far less than the upsides. In addition to that, most downsides can be easily overcome (company or team-wide retreats, better culture management, etc).
The upsides on the other hand, for both parties, are unique in working remotely and cannot be reproduced or copied whilst working on location.
Personally, I enjoy my work the most when I work in two markets: education and music. The country I live in has exactly zero potential for me in those two markets with the skills I have. So working remotely is my only viable option (aside from migrating). Likewise, my employer has a highly skilled individual, who cares deeply about the product he's building, working for him - the type of individual he wasn't able to find locally.
It really is a win-win situation but at the same time, like everything else in life, you win some you lose some.
I agree, there is definitely something to be said for "unproductive" communication. But I would change that to: It can potentially drive creativity. I've been in plenty of office environments where it was far more just a distraction.
I wouldn't say usually but you are correct. "Unproductive communication" is not always easy to distinguish from a productive one, but most of the time the distinction is clearly obvious.
Have you tried a remote agile tool like Sococo? The "instant on" communication being able to "walk up" to anyone in the virtual office, share your screen looks intriguing. I don't work for them or even subscribe to the service.
I've just seen enough people outwardly complain about the differences between being remote and on-site and wondered why this tool doesn't get mentioned in the conversation more.. Maybe it just doesn't work..
You have to resolve to work at communicating at or approaching the level you would in a real office. It takes more effort, but I think it can be effectively balanced against the other advantages of working remotely.
It takes more effort, but I think it can be effectively balanced against the other advantages of working remotely.
Yes, that is the trade-off the remote worker makes. However it is important to understand that the folks on the employer's side also have to make that extra effort to manage communication effectively with remote workers, and they don't get the advantages of working remotely. That is not to say that it should never be done (doing a project with remote workers is indeed advantageous in certain scenarios), but the balance of the advantages in remote working (barring financial overhead issues like providing an office) are with the worker. So one should not be surprised that companies want you to relocate before they know about you.
Now for certain individuals, it is to the benefit of the company to support the remote working agreement because of the value they get from working with that particular individual. Which is why there is a huge selection effect when people blog "hey, I telecommute and don't lack in work". It's similar to a famous actor saying "hey, I don't do anything special and I don't lack in dates".
The people who couldn't find work that way? They relocated and aren't blogging about remote working.
But absolutely - if you can make it work for yourself, go for it - no argument that it improves your quality of life.
I've worked for companies that did remote well and I've worked for many that did remote poorly. It really has to be an understanding of how people communicate. Theoretically, it should not matter if I'm one desk away from someone or 1,000 miles away, since most people sit at their desks or in their office and communicate over IM or email.
But, oh, it does matter. Some companies are just NOT set up to handle remote work, even if they have the technology to do so.
Fundamentally, all the remote technologies in the world put together don't even approach the bandwidth of in-person communication. You're right, it can work -- but you have to be constantly vigilant.
When I got my kobo I found that my reading habits changed. I enjoyed long fiction more. Medium-lite long reading.
I know have an ipad and I found that my reading habits again. I'm reading medium-short non fiction. Stuff I can dip in and out of. Yesterday it was 4 Hour Body, Sun Tze & The Communist Manifesto. If I'm reading for an hour I will read a dozen or two pages from 3-4 different things.
Medium changes things. Remote employment has pros and cons (for both parties) but it is not the same thing. It's harder (or at least different) to develop employees, build a culture, produce ideas from multiple minds.
I think the cutting costs and distractions are extremely important variables when even thinking about trying to quantify the benefit of remote workers. But of course your productivity drops when you're in the office when you're not usually. People are taking advantage of one of the few times you're on-site, increased distractions already. The environment you're working in on-site is no longer what you're used to working in. Meaning you don't put up with distractions as well as you would if you worked there every day. And your body doesn't really go into 'work-mode'.
It goes the same way for someone who works in the office every day then decides to work at home. When I've had a dedicated office space in my home and worked there for an extended time, I always feel like I missed out on some social aspects that I needed from the office environment, including both productive and unproductive communication, but my productivity went up. But now that I've been working daily in an office, and I do not have a dedicated space at home, when I do end up working from home, i'm far more distracted. I think it's easy to look at either side and flail your hands attempting to qualify as well as justify what you're doing. But it's not that cut and dry. In your experience working from home may make perfect sense, but I still don't think it's easy to quantify the benefit of remote workers. For a lot of people working remotely is distracting in a different way, and you end up giving up a lot of essential in-office interactions, sometimes without ever realizing it.
I'll tell you why working from home makes sense for me, and it doesn't involve hand-waving: without it being an option, I would simply make less money. I am not willing to move to work for a company, so every company that allows me to remotely contract increases my revenues. This goes both ways, too. Without being open to remote workers, these companies would have a far smaller talent pool to draw from, which would mean they will inevitably get worse talent at a higher cost.
I think you make a lot of very valid points, and honestly I hope that companies continue to see the benefits of remotely contracting work as well as just telecommuting in general. I'm definitely not arguing with the benefits. Just offering minor support for the value of in-house talent as well. For me personally, I've worked in offices on the east coast, then moved to the bay area to follow 'that dream'. Offices on the east coast offered me little in the form of tech culture or inspiration, aside from some interpersonal relationships. Here in the bay area I found a lot of things to be worse than I idealized in my mind before moving, but one thing that has been very apparent is the culture and tech community. Even just the conversations I hear outside, on my commute to work, let alone the conversations i'm involved in at work are just so different than what I was used to. Feel like for the first time in a long time, i'm no longer just doing a job, but i'm growing, i'm getting better, i'm learning, and I'm constantly motivated. I worked for a number of years thinking the remote lifestyle was a dream come true, and for a lot of people it is. I think your point about the limited local talent pool at least for the majority of places is extremely accurate, and something that needs to be considered. But just in my little bubble, I have to say that going to the office, even despite the increase in interruptions and distractions, it's been extremely favorable for my career as well as the quality of work that i'm able to give back to the community and my job. And moving across the country, despite the hardships I faced in the few month transition, a year later it ended up being one of the best decisions of my life.
Great insight. I'm in no way saying that working on-site is worse than working remotely. I'm simply trying to say that these days, one isn't any better than the other. I could list of a lot of things I miss about working on-site, including a lot of the points you just brought up.
It's not that your city isn't fun and exciting. It's that your office is in a building in that city, whereas my office is anyplace I feel like being at the moment.
Now I might feel like being in your city for a while. Possibly even in your cool office. But for half the year I'll probably be someplace completely different. Because I can.
The author hit the nail on the head when he explained why this gig is so great: we can do it from anywhere.
The good companies have figured this out and are encouraging their people to do just that. Since that's now a viable option, it's tough to understand why people are still working for companies that don't give that option.
I don't believe that it's as cut and dried as you say, or that the more traditional benefits of in-person collaboration and technical relationships are so easy to dismiss.
You may be able to do the job from anywhere, I'm not challenging that because I don't know you, but not everyone can, and not everyone is best suited to do that.
I agree with you that everyone is different and has different employment needs. I've worked remotely for the last decade or so and cannot imagine working from an office.
With that, if you make remote working the default, people can structure themselves as they see fit. If you need to be around others, then you can group with others in the company who feel the same way. Those who want to be off doing their own thing can do that. If people are free to work where they want to work, they'll optimize for what works best.
The OP is not willing to move to work for your startup. That's fine. You may not hire him because of that. That's also fine. Another company may be more than happy to hire him. Great.
There isn't a right and wrong answer here, IMO. In my experience, working in the same location and working in different locations are very different working experiences. For some companies and employees, one will work. For others, it will not. I will be very hesitant to ever enter into a remote working situation again- I did not like it at all. But that's just me.
All that is required is for you to make sure you work for a company that matches you- don't get angry if a company/prospective employee doesn't match what you want. That's where the article's complaints about recruiters ring true- they don't know/care. But they don't know/care about anything other than the buzzwords on your resume, so this shouldn't be anything new.
(Ironically, just this morning I got a LinkedIn spam message from "CultureFit Staffing". Anything but, folks...)
There are a few HNers who live in Louisville, myself included (want to grab a beer some time Ernie?). 1 major downside: probably 85+% of local programming jobs are .NET. Maybe another 10% are Java, 4% are Ruby, and the remaining 1% is hard to come by.
Working remote is awesome, I hope to do it again some day (Clojure or JavaScript for me, if anyone is hiring) but its very important that everyone is on the same table about expectations. You get into the habit of working long hours for a couple of reasons: first because you are home anyways and might not have anything else to do (not a terrible reason), and secondly because you want to show the company that you're working hard -- something that isn't an issue when working locally.
I've turned down a couple of good opportunities because I didn't want to relocate. Of all of the reasons to relocate to a new city, I think doing so for work is possibly the work reason. It's too easy to fall into a trap where work becomes your life.
Myself, @jfedor[0], and a few like-minded others are usually at the Grale on Fridays around 4-ish. Consider yourselves (+ any other locals in the thread) invited.
This post missed one of the biggest reasons to not relocate for a startup:
A lot of smaller startups lack long-term capital. You could be relocating for a job that isn't there in seven months. Relocating to join an established company that will honor your multi-year contract? That's one thing. But relocating for a company that may not be in great financial shape (and may have never even made profit) is another thing entirely. Uprooting your entire family for what could be a massive risk is a lot to ask, especially when employees can remote work to see if the job is a good fit for a year or two. Startups really should be offering more remote employment if they want to be able to attract more established talent.
I would also quibble with his cost of living calculations. He doesn't say whether or not these short trips involve walking or driving a car. Based on my knowledge of Louisville and the tenor of his post, many of them may in fact be car trips, which are much more expensive than walking or public transportation trips -- both financially and physically. If you live in a truly walkable area, you don't need a gym membership. Exercise is called living your daily life.
Old cost of living indexes just factored in housing and some other data, leaving out transportation. When you factor in transportation, often a households second highest cost (and highest in rural areas), many of these areas become much cheaper. We live in the DC area right on the Red Line and only need one car because of it. All of our trips this past weekend -- going to parties, to the movies, to stores, to get pizza -- either involved walking or public transportation. While my housing is assuredly more expensive than someone living in Louisville, my families transportation costs are incredibly low.
So when we talk about cost of living, we have to factor in everything. I'd still bet that Louisville is cheaper than NYC, but it's a lot closer when you apply an apples-to-apples comparison. This is particularly true when you compare housing in the same metro. Much of that exurban housing is suddenly a lot more expensive when you factor in transportation.
Were we ever talking about living longer? Exercise is important because improves blood flow to the brain, and therefore brain function. It can make you happier and better rested.
Longevity is impacted by a lot of other lifestyle factors, many of which have nothing to do with exercise.
So basically you're conflating those other cultures' incidental lack of cardiovascular exercise with the fact that they live longer (which is due to completely unrelated factors), and then making the specious claim that exercising leads to shorter life spans.
> Going to the gym is largely an Americanism. Not exactly a culture I'd want to emulate for healthiness.
Going to the gym isn't an "Americanism", it's something done by a certain percentage of Americans who are significantly healthier than the American population at large.
The fact that you're even suggesting that intense exercise at the gym is bad for your health is just appalling.
> Consistent movement is much more healthy than sporadic bouts of high intensity. Walking everywhere is just about the healthiest thing you can do.
I never said that you shouldn't walk around, it has its benefits too. My point is that "walking around" is not "exercise".
> I would also quibble with his cost of living calculations. He doesn't say whether or not these short trips involve walking or driving a car.
Sure he does, e.g.: "I bought a house near my stepdaughter’s school, so she can walk to and from school, and transportation for extracurriculars is less of a problem." When he says he's two minutes from his gym, I assume he means two walking minutes; even if he doesn't, two driving minutes is not a significant transportation cost
Plus no matter how much you might have to drive to go to a party or a movie, none of that is going to compare to cutting out a commute by working from home.
That depends on if you need multiple cars to get other tasks done in your life. In some areas, you can get by with zero cars. Others with one for multiple people. Louisville is not a place easy to get by with no car.
That's a good point, although if you are willing to relocate to a hot spot, you won't have too much trouble picking up a next job when the first fails. I get asked multiple times per week if I know any developers looking for work here in San Francisco.
It's also much easier to get into a company if you can talk to the people working there in person regularly rather than doing remote interviews and phone conferences. A couple pair programming sessions, hackathons, or fun projects together and you might be in the door without any of the usual suffering. Although lack of process like that is part of smaller startups as well.
having lived in louisville, i can say it's extremely difficult to do things without a car. i lived there without a car for several years. it was do-able, but i was dependent on friends to drive me places every once in a while. also, it's the mid-west so when people find out you don't have a car, they treat you like a space-alien.
This topic is like discussing watching television or religion. If you think a well written and logical essay will change the opinion of an addict, you have another thing coming. Some of the more ridiculous rationalizations are pretty hilarious to read. You really can do almost anything abusive to a human being, and at least a fraction of the victims will thank you and take their oppressor's side.
I also live in a non-tech center area, where my tech job household income is approximately 4.5 times the median wage. Needless to say the odds of my getting $472K per year in Mountain View are extremely low. Laughably I had a conversation with HR at a well known employer in the area and their pay rate was something absolutely ridiculous compared to the $472K I'd need to live an equivalent lifestyle in CA, barely 10% more. I have no interest in a massive terrifying downgrade in the standard of living for myself and my family. I have no interest in moving from "CEO neighborhood" to "cardboard box under the overpass". Sorry HR.
(edit: whoops I crossed household and individual income. Doesn't change the overall outcome, I need 100% to 200% pay raise to move and live an equivalent lifestyle and they offer 10% to 20%... its not going to happen)
My main reason for wanting to relocate to CA outside of work was the access to Napa, Tahoe, and Yosemite. Being able to do all three in a weekend if you started after work on Friday. I have no interest in rotting in a large house to pretend I'm a CEO.
As one of those "Highlands Hipsters", I couldn't agree with you more. I've relocated a couple times for jobs in TX and CA, but found myself missing Louisville enough that I was spending a significant portion of my income flying back here.
Before leaving SF I was absolutely terrified I wouldn't be able to find a local job doing the kind of work I enjoy, and it turns out even though I was right about being able to find something local that really interested me it didn't really matter -- within a month of beginning my job search I had 3 competing offers for remote work. This experience has helped me realize that far more companies are open to remote employees than recruiters would initially have you believe, particularly if you're willing to make a 2-3 day trip to one of the coasts every month.
I like having co-workers and actually going in to the office, but you'd have to start talking MASSIVE salary increase to get me to go NY or SF with the cost of living so high, commutes so awful, and onerous laws so numerous.
Concur with author 100%. There are lots of nice cities in the US that are way cheaper and more livable than the big 2, and moving from one of them to effectively make less, commute more, and have less personal time, even after taking a hit on the cost of living adjustment is pretty questionable.
If I were to move to SF I don't see how I could afford a place that was both close to work and had a garage where I could tinker unless I felt like commuting 2 hours each way. But I'm also spoiled by a real estate market where you can a decent house for under 200k, sometimes close to 100k, where I'm living now.
I've worked remotely off and on for the last 10 years. I'd say at least half the time I have been out of the office. I have managed remote teams in Mexico, Ukraine, India, Arizona, Switzerland and even randomly dispersed developers/artists all over the world. Remote teams can work very well.
What doesn't work very well is having a few remote people and a large mass of people in an office all working together on the same project. There is significant high bandwidth communication that happens when people are together physically. This leaves remote workers out to pasture. Things get missed. Tension builds.
The same effect occurs when you have multiple offices working on the same projects. I've been in the middle of this first hand as well. You can quickly end up with teams doing a lot of internal communication without talking to the teams in other offices. Rivalries will build. It will probably become an "Us vs Them" situation as animosity over small things snowballs.
This can be combated largely by explicit written communication. Use chat rooms. Use good issue tracking. Use internal social networking.
If the project requires a team it works best when the whole team is remote and/or extremely conscious of using written communication. That is, if you want the remote person to feel like they are a part of the team. If you have outsource contractors it doesn't really matter. You just tell them what to do in meticulous detail anyway. But, if you want a contributing team member that buys into the company, make sure they are included in all communication. The easiest way for this to happen naturally is if everyone is remote.
I agree with the bulk of the article, with one exception:
"Don’t take (or keep) a job because you like the people. If you’re a decent person, you’ll find people you like (and who like you) at any job you take."
This is patently NOT true. The people you work with, in my experience, matter far more than any other factor.
There's an important piece of that quote that's missing here, which is that those people are likely to change. If you're at a position because you like the people, you're probably making a mistake. You can have a personal relationship with those people regardless of where they end up going, and if you truly do like them, you should want them to go if that's the right choice for them.
The staff of all workplaces change over time. That doesn't disprove my point at all. I have worked at some companies where I really enjoyed the people I worked with, but then one day looked around and realized most of them were gone, and soon after, I was, as well.
According to the article, if I like the job, I should just stay and new people would come in that I like. But that isn't true. The 'people I like' leaving is a harbinger that the company culture is changing.
I've been in the experience of having an okay job, with an amazing group of people. It made the okay job better. I then took a job about a product I cared about, and the people were great, too, making it an even better job before. I'm happy to wake up in the morning for the work I'll be doing, not the people I'll be chatting with over coffee, who don't really enjoy their job either but like me.
Also to note, I still hang out with at least 5 of the people from the previous job on a weekly basis.
I'd say both matter, but sometimes, great coworkers just put a mask on your otherwise shitty job. Finding a job you truly care about will surround you with people that do as well -- and, odds are, you will get along.
Great, thoughtful article. As someone whose office is in Mountain View, but lives and works from home in Annapolis, MD (the entirely opposite coast,) I definitely relate.
The compromise that I've made is that in spending a few days in Mountain View every 6 weeks or so. It's not terribly inconvenient for me, allows me to pad my frequent flyer miles, and I generally enjoy California. I think that the cost of living between California and Maryland are a lot closer than Louisville would be, so I've always got my eye open to possibly relocating somewhere even cheaper than here -- my home town is Memphis, TN, which is damn near free to live in comparatively, but I really like Annapolis, its proximity to DC and Baltimore, and the knowledge that almost everything is within a couple of hours.
The biggest trouble I have is that I really like the bigger cities. I love the time I spend in and around San Francisco, and on occasion I'll spend time in NY, which I also enjoy. I can't ever tell though if it's just because I'm effectively a tourist, or how much I would enjoy it as a permanent residence. Ultimately, I think I'm plenty happy anywhere with a temperate climate and the ability to work from home, so I'm occasionally torn on job offers I receive to work in sexier locales. Grats to Ernie for having found his ideal place. The spot I'd move to to maximize dollar value (Memphis) is too hot to be perfectly happy, and all the places I've found with better climates tend to be more expensive -- so perhaps I'm still searching for my idyllic setting, or perhaps it's just a matter of the grass being greener.
I have a bunch of family/friends who are from NYC. My family left when I was about 10 years old.
New York City is a great place to live... until it isn't. I define living in NYC as actually living in NYC. What tends to happen is that you get married and have kids.
At that point, the random things that happen when you live in a city shift from "quirky" to scary. Maybe its your car getting broken into. Or the incessant noise of "Mr Softie" in the summer or fire trucks year round. Or your kid's bike getting stolen. Or paying $7 to go over a bridge. Or being packed in a tight subway car. Or your kid walking to school. Or when your kid gets older, taking the bus and subway to school.
While you're going through that, half of your friends have moved to the suburbs. Your kid's cousins in Long Island go to schools with olympic pools that hand out iPads. They have a big backyard and idyllic quiet. So eventually, most people relent and find themselves with a 90 minute commute to a cul de sac somewhere.
I highly recommend moving to a big city while you have a chance! It's an entirely different experience, and you're right, you'll never know until you try it for an extended time. It's expensive, but it's more than made up for by the wealth of opportunities available (the sheer number of people opens up countless connections and possibilities, it's hard to describe) and the fun to be had. If you still have the means and willpower to relocate, go for it.
Based on several experiences doing startups with remote people versus local, I would now be extremely hesitant to hire someone who would not relocate or work locally.
Companies—especially small ones—are defined by their culture, and I really think culture is best developed and maintained in person. We recently had three of our team members move away for various reasons, and they're now working remotely. It has been a shake-up. I won't say it's a bad thing, because I truly want them to be happy, and I'm truly willing help them make it work, but it has been a surprising culture shift for our entire company. At this point, I think we'll make it work, but the day-to-day work experience for all our employees has changed dramatically and that's not something to take lightly.
Find a place you truly want to live (which definitely doesn't have to be in the Bay Area) and find a company that you want to work for locally. Go into the office every day. Talk with people about more than work. Connect and develop relationships. Work toward a true culture that exemplifies what the company stands for both internally and externally, and make it meaningful to everyone involved.
That's what makes me happy, and that's what I'm optimizing for. Am I in the absolute number one place that I want to be in, period? Maybe not. If I had my say I'd be living and working on the east side of the Sierra Nevada within 1 hour each of Mammoth mountain and the Yosemite highlands—and that may be my eventual destination.
But right now, location is far less important to me than the people I spend each day with, the people with whom I work, and the company culture that I'm helping to generate and preserve. That's what moves me forward each day, and I truly believe that will make my company more successful and sustainable.
I understand you though. I went through a time in my life where I was more attached to places than people. Turns out I was in the right place all along, but I just hadn't run into the right people. That changed for me, and now I truly believe that location is a small price to pay. It's complicated—it is of course better to have a great employee working remotely than a poor one in the office, but I think it's even better—perhaps exponentially so and especially to a startup—to have that great employee in the same room.
*Edit: I'd like to add, that part of this is the "who moved my cheese" problem, of going from a 100% local company to a significantly dispersed company. We are adapting as a whole and each week we improve our process and culture. The challenge has become "how do we maintain a culture and coherence remotely?" I think in time we will be successful at that, and continue to be a strong group, but it's still a challenge, and one that you'll have to weigh against other challenges if you so choose.
"I went through a time in my life where I was more attached to places than people."
I'm a hell of a lot more attached to people outside of work than I am inside of work. My school, my church, my neighborhood, my family. I'm barely willing to move 40 minutes of drivetime let alone all the way across the country to a community I barely know.
My children and my family are going to be a legacy whether I make it my focus or not or not. I choose to make it my focus. (even the choice not to have children or family is some type of legacy choice for generations to follow)
Absolutely—I didn't mean to make a distinction about which people you want to be with, or which priorities are important to you.
It is definitely important to make decisions for family and community as well as for work. Since I spend much of my time at work with coworkers, I tend to think of those relationships as being important at this point in my life. YMMV.
From the perspective of the company itself, priorities surely differ from your own. I think it's important to bring all these needs into account when determining how to make our companies and our lives better and more successful.
If you're relocating for jobs, you're clearly making a distinction between work and non-work people. If you care about people, relationships, community, you won't go chasing jobs all over the country. A few moves? Sure. But there may come a time when you say, "I like where I live and the community I have here, I have to work remotely." Relationships and community take a long time to build.
I'm currently not interested in moving because of people. I like my friends here. I like my community. Jobs are easy to find. Good friends and community? Now that is difficult, and is life without friends?
I also tend to think of my coworker relationships as important but most companies have a culture where if a person leaves the company s/he's is brushed under the carpet and never to be mentioned again. Startups tend to be smarter than that, but what a waste in general!
As one of calinet6's said co-workers who recently relocated from Boston to Myrtle Beach, SC - I feel obligated to reply.
Like the OP - I also grew up in the middle of nowhere, PA.
I previously worked remotely for companies during college, and I've been surprised by how much I'm enjoying the co-worker experience here -- just a different one. Nearly every day I go to CoworkMYR (www.coworkmyr.com), and we're excited about building a tech culture here, and touting the benefits of lower cost of living, and all MB has to offer.
I agree with OP and calinet6: People have a lot to do with your happiness. I've met more neighbors, made new friends, and had more in-depth interactions with them in 4 weeks here than in 6 years in Boston. That blows me away.
I think its part environment, and part busy: Most people in Boston are there to get education, get started with careers, etc: They're extremely focused on that, and not so much on friends, relationships, etc.
Another huge benefit of leveraging the cost of living towards happiness is that we've realized my wife doesn't need to work full-time. She's pursuing other interests, she just got a job teaching. Her happiness has increased so much! (Her metric for this was that I've caught her giggling in her sleep numerous times here, as opposed to worrying sleep talk in Boston).
TL; DR: I agree with OP on the values of working for a good company remotely and having more control and flexibility over your time and life. I invite calinet6 to come visit and give it a try ;)
Thanks man :) We will definitely visit and I'm looking forward to seeing the coworking spot and checking out life down there.
You know I'm a huge believer in coworking, and I think it's for similar reasons—you meet people and generate ideas and relationships that are also valuable. I just think it's also a great thing to be coworking with your own coworkers, or at least that it shouldn't be discounted as unimportant in the general case.
For us, it's a shift that we're really working at, and we're getting better at it by the week. Just because I say I would be hesitant to start a company with remote workers or bring people on remotely doesn't mean it's not applicable to the current situation, or at a later stage. Even with a different company I'm sure it would be a more difficult and more complex decision than I anticipate.
I still think it would be great to all be working in the same room, but at the same time, it's great to have everyone happy and living the life they want to live, and it's a small price to pay. That is truly of unmeasurable importance and I couldn't be happier for you for following your dreams.
Being someone that may soon be in a remote working situation, I'd be very interested to hear what tools you (and others) find crucial for your day to day remote communications. I am not an engineer, but in more of a producer role so personal communication is a large part of my day to day work. I'm wondering if I can get anywhere near the level of communication that I've grown accustomed to, working onsite. I'm obviously familiar with Skype/iChat, Basecamp, Campfire (we use these tools extensively even though we are in the same office)... Just wondering if there is anything else that helps more than these tools, or if its just a matter of being very diligent with them.
> Talk with people about more than work. Connect and develop relationships. Work toward a true culture that exemplifies what the company stands for both internally and externally, and make it meaningful to everyone involved.
So, what, people can't do this type of stuff online? The remote team I work with hangs out on internet chat all day long, every work day. We talk about plenty beyond work related stuff. We even post messages over the weekend. We care about each other and our personal lives and have a very cohesive team. Again, this is ebooks vs. paper books. People have a romantic notion about what true interpersonal communication is supposed to be, but when it comes down to it there's no reason why one method of communication is inherently better than any other.
The one big difference I have found isn't about communicating with your team, but that when you are actually at the office you spend a lot more time talking to people not on your team or in your department. People with entirely different backgrounds and working on entirely different projects.
This can lead to new and creative developments and projects that would never happen from simply talking to people on your team. These projects have, at least for me, often been the most fun and challenging (and profitable) project I've been involved in.
I tried to propose an idea where I work of having a threaded chat room to mimic conversations in the hall. It could get even better by having some intelligent gleaning of conversation keywords and showing those visibly by each chat room, so people know when their ears should be tingling and can join in on the conversation.
The method of a single chat room means multiple crossing conversations become hard and there's constant distraction trying to see what people are talking about only to find it's not interesting to you.
The product I work on is called http://kona.com and we use it to collaborate online. It allows us to have multiple chat rooms going on at the same time for one team that are separated out by topic. We have discussions both dedicated to work topics and non-work topics. It simulates the "water cooler effect" quite nicely.
In my experience, relationships grow proportionally with the time and energy you commit to them.
There is no reason that can't be done remotely, and surely people are getting better at it with current technology. But it is decidedly more difficult, in my experience, than a physical presence, and you may not realize what might be missing.
You appear to be one of those "people persons". Awesome, great for you! Still though, please don't project your personality traits to everyone and try make them sound as absolute ideals. Avoiding talking with people "about more than work" and generally keeping an arm's length from "company culture" (whatever that means) is a major reason some of us have started (or can't wait to start) working remotely, more than location or any other factor.
You have a valid point, and I readily recognize and appreciate the various personality types and interaction styles people have.
I am actually generally an introvert who has developed some people skills over the last ten years or so. I am not always a "people person;" I simply recognize the advantages and see what makes a company tick, or not, and I think personal interaction is one of the big reasons.
After all, a company is a group of people, and interaction between people is one of the key features of a growing business weather or not it is your personal preference.
I'm not saying that you can't do well without being a "people person" and I absolutely do not mean to project my preferences on others. My statements were observations based on a variety of people at several companies, and seem to be true for most cases. YMMV. In any case, these ideas are still good to think about and evaluate.
Thanks for being honest that the reason you want to remote work is because you don't want to interact with people. That is somewhat orthogonal to the OP though.
I have been working remotely for 3 years now, full time & would find it very hard to go back to commuting full time.
I can get more work done, experience less distractions - to be honest I don't really give a dam what a companies culture is like to a large extent, tell me what you need done & when you need it done by, if I think its achievable then I'll make it happen. I don't want to play xboxes, get free lunches or any of that nonsense - I want time with my family & lots of money for future security - that & working from a location of my choosing is all that really matters to me, in return I'll work my ass off, remain loyal & ensure my employer is getting value for their $
I completely understand where the author is coming from and then some.
I am also on the receiving end of many of those same emails. However, I actually live in California, in beautiful Monterey. Every single Silicon Valley recruiter does not think it is a big deal for me to move two hours away. I am so close, why not? If I wanted to live in Silicon Valley, I would live in Silicon Valley.
BTW, I do not believe in working remote. Working locally has numerous benefits for both the employer and employee.
Yeah, I don't know why the editor at HN felt it was better to change it to the pre-parenthetical title, but the second part was so much better. A pretty shlubby (and completely unnecessary) move. How does that help anyone?
I was the first person to vote / comment on it, and I doubt I would have even looked twice at it if I had pigeonholed it as "a post about Louisville." I'm glad it got to the #1 spot for as long as it did with the originally-submitted title.
I guess the lesson here is give blog posts principal titles that are more attention-grabby, so HN editors won't edit them on you.
It works for 37 signals. It shows you that companies that treat their devs as people (like 37 signals) instead of resources or head count can develop superior software and somehow have their people happy without the need to make fake enthusiasm.
I would say startups are probably most likely to be able to take advantage of this.
BTW, this post makes me want to move to Louisville and join Ernie :) (not really, Chicago is really nice).
I absolutely agree with this. I recently moved across the country to a city where there is very little tech work, but this move wasn't for work. I moved to support my local church, and not as a pastor or worker, but as another member. I can't imagine a better reason to move. Because of this I wouldn't consider moving even 2hrs north to DC for triple the income. Through this experience I've realized how little value money really has in terms of true peace in my heart. Living month to month, contract to contract even gives me a richer experience of life that I wouldn't trade for the world. Working 9-5 making 100k+/year would certainly be easy, but I don't live for money.
Thanks for this Ernie. I've been considering a job far from home because I like the people and the organization. The job role is a step down from where I am in my "career path" and leaving all of my family, separating my son from his extended family, are real issues for me.
Optimizing for happiness, put in the context of actual real-world happiness, is a strong point. I'll keep praying about it...
After living in Florida (Orlando, Naples), CA (Santa Clara), Boston and DC, I like to apply "The Efficient Frontier" to locations I choose.
Essentially the efficient frontier is a finance concept that says that combinations of assets can be graphed and form a line called "The Efficient Frontier" where only portfolios of assets on that line should be considered.
When I consider where I live, I want to optimize to make sure I am on that frontier. Instead of risk and return on the axises, I think of a multivariant optimization, but essentially what I am saying is that many cities do not make it on the efficient frontier when looking logically.
For example, is there anyway that Louisville has as rich of a history as NYC, or DC, Boston or even SF?
Does Louisville have better night life than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?)
Does Louisville have better skyline than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?)
Does Louisville have better live performances than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?)
Does Louisville have better museums than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?)
Does Louisville have a better hipster scene than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston?). Its probably better than Boston's, but I don't care whether hipsters are part of the culture or not.
And the OP's biggest point, that he likes to drive to rural areas in 15 minutes. Its more like 20 minutes from SF, but some of the best mountain biking, trails etc. is right there. Boston has the same thing 20 minutes away. IMO DC and NYC are harder to get to rurual areas.
Liking Louisville is completely understandable if you just like being familar and don't want to move and have to make new friends etc. but it should be 100% understandable why a recruiter cannot imagine someone wanting to stay when viewing the opportunity as an outsider.
[ADDED] I reread what I wrote and it seems like I'm bashing Louisville, more my intention was to put out the efficient frontier concept for selecting a location.
[To unalone and the OP] Sorry for coming off as pompous. It does read a little that way, but I used the OP's criteria, not my own. The OP could have made a much better arugument by specifying what he likes about the criteria, but he didn't do that so I just asked the questions rather than making an assertion about them. Notice that I didn't specify whether DC does have better nightlife than Louisville? I instead just asked the question which the reader can answer on their own.
> it should be 100% understandable why a recruiter cannot imagine someone wanting to stay when viewing the opportunity as an outsider
What? This is absurd! A city's qualities cannot be pared down to such an easy evaluation. "Better night life" is itself a complex and multifaceted value; "better skyline" is hardly worth caring about, "better live performances and museums" suggests you think culture is so precious, so rare, that it can only be found in the biggest cities in the country. Lemme tell you, I spent my early life growing up in the remote mountain suburbs of New Jersey, and even there it is quite easy to find things to do. In any city of even moderate size you will never be left wanting for options.
The "efficient frontier" is a pompous way to describe what every single person does when they're deciding where to live: weigh the various advantages and disadvantages against each other, and decide which place seems like it would work best for you. I mean, that's what the entire goddamn post was about: hell Ernie described Louisville so persuasively that now I'm curious to see what it's like for myself.
It's odd that you felt the need to tell the OP he's wrong to value Louisville over your completely weird set of values. You might say you weren't out to bash Louisville, but your entire comment was just a justification to talk about how Louisville might not be as good as OP says it is, and how therefore recruiters are completely justified to think people want to live in fucking New York City. Which, eeesh, I get why some people do, but... eeesh.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. I may not always love my job, but the beauty of the mountains in the morning ride/drive in always makes me smile. The only other place that comes close is my previous residence, where the Sandias were glorious for the ride home (go ahead, look up the definition of "sandia" in Spanish and imagine the colors).
You're right, though: everyone does the evaluation of where to live (whether consciously or not), and everyone has different values. Me, I like being able to ride my bike to work and be able to go bouldering or climbing after work almost year round. "Better night life" is hardly worth caring about to me.
Does Louisville have a better cost of living than any other big city (DC, NYC, SF, Boston)?
As of 2006-2010, median price of a house in Louisville is $48,300. The median sales price for homes in San Francisco CA for Sep 12 to Nov 12 was $750,000.
Well housing costs are just one part of cost of living but sure, it costs less to live elsewhere. Generally salaries in the SF Bay Area are higher in part of offset that cost. Wikipedia [1] claims Louisville has a median salary of $36,484.
So a question; "If you wish to work at a remote location, are you willing to take a salary that is commensurate with the median salary at that remote location?"
I find people are somewhat split on that question.
I've never actually encountered an employer who set job offer salaries to reflect where remote candidates live. People point that out as a benefit to companies hiring remote employees (it'll save them money!), but does that actually happen?
At my previous job, after acquiring a company that had a mostly-remote workforce, everyone eventually moved away from our home area (DC) to cheaper parts of the country. No one took a pay cut to reflect the fact that they now were living somewhere cheaper (and everyone new we hired was in the same range regardless of where they lived).
Also, having lived and worked in Boston, the Bay Area, and now the Beltway, I was surprised to find that salaries weren't any lower or higher in any of those places, despite the costs of living being all over the place. It's possible that my particular corner of the industry (infosec) is just less geographically-dependent.
Not to nitpick, but Intel does have a 10% salary supplement for California employees, to offset the cost of living (or at least the difference in taxation) wrt OR, AZ and NM employees.
Generally, there are some differences but the differences for a given job don't usually reflect the magnitude of cost of living deltas between high-cost and low-cost areas. All three of the areas you mention are fairly high cost (although somewhat dependent on where in those areas). So, all other things being equal, people will usually be able to, most notably, buy/rent more house/apartment in a cheaper area than a more expensive one.
From the company perspective, limiting discussion to US only, the benefit of remote workers is much more about hiring talent rather than being able to save a few dollars.
It is really the other way around. Costs in the valley are high because people generally have more money to spend, not because there is an intrinsic reason why it costs more to live there.
> are you willing to take a salary that is commensurate with the median salary at that remote location?
Salary is just a function of supply and demand. If a bunch of people with amazing talents in Louisville are willing to do it for $36K, then that will push down the wages in California too. The only thing that has really kept SF developer prices as high as they are is that even the skilled people of Louisville want $100K+ to do the job.
And the average house isn't as nice, doesn't have year around nice weather, and isn't in a walkable neighborhood. I'm not arguing the cost isn't an issue, but the OP's standard of living numbers made a lot more sense here (2x)
> ...but it should be 100% understandable why a recruiter cannot imagine someone wanting to stay when viewing the opportunity as an outsider.
I honestly don't see why this would even come up. It's not the recruiter's job to understand why someone wants what they want. The recruiter just needs to know what they want. If I want to do X, then they need to work with that, either by accommodating it, or figuring out what compensation I'd need to do not-X. They don't need to understand the rationale, and there doesn't even need to be a rationale.
FWIW, I didn't take it that way (Louisville-bashing).
I get what you're saying, but I don't think it's as important that Louisville be the "best" in any one of those categories so much as "sufficiently good".
It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Satisfaction at one tier opens up the others.
It is also worth pointing out that you can fly to DC and NYC in under 2 hours from Louisville. You can fly to Chicago and get there before you took off thanks to the time change. So you have access to pretty much any of the "best" of those things listed here in about 3 hours including the time it takes you to drive to the airport, get through security and board.
Glad you said this and glad it was voted to the top. Sometimes, while lost in the feedback loop of HN and startup news in general, its easy to lose sight of the fact that our world exists in a layer that shouldn't tie one down to a physical location.
I've been living in a small coastal town now for 4 years, not close to much of anything related to my field, yet I am working and happier than I could ever be in some metropolis.
Well, this morning was spent shredding powder in the mountains. This afternoon I am coding. Why wouldn't everyone demand to live where they want? Revolt and make these companies wake up & realize that remote workers produce equal or better than those who are local. There is 0 benefit for local devs and I have been doing this for 5+ years. Sure, a recent college grad might be worth to have local, but folks with legitimate experience and who contribute, who cares any more?
As for salary? I demand Bay Area pay wherever I live. I also demand to watch my daughter grow up and not suffer through any more BS commutes on 85/101.
Louisville's general awesomeness makes me embarrassed for Indianapolis. It really blows us out of the water. I wouldn't expect someone to relo out of Louisville either.
I definitely agree with the OP. If I could work remotely I would in a heartbeat. Be that as it may, I do understand how a lot of companies/startups would be hesitant to offer a remote worker a full time job plus benefits. In all honesty, if I owned a company, I would most likely prefer on location workers than remote workers.
Also, I didn't see anything in the post about the great local coffeeshop scene in Louisville :)
I'd have addressed this in the article, but it was getting too long already. Short answer is that many of the best opportunities I've received have arisen as results of relationships formed on the Internet, first, and maybe over a few beers at a conference.
Cultivate relationships in whatever form they take.
Thanks for the reply. I was asking because a study done by 'Freelance confidential' asked Freelancers "Where do you find work?" "Referrals" scored 39%. Portfolio website scored 19%. Didn't think about it but I suppose referrals via the web work just as well. 71% of all freelancers complete most of their work at home btw.
I am not terribly sure why this needs to be an article. If you don't want to work somewhere or for someone, be respectful. Kindly pass. Being declarative, boastful, and at times a bit cocky is not a good quality to broadcast to all employers.
Hey to each his own. Not everyone has the same circumstances and I can completely relate. I moved to NYC to get involved in the startup scene but only after my daughter had graduated high school and I was free to do my own thing. It's not for everyone that's for sure. I can't even get some people to visit NYC let alone live here. So I get it. But to see it how I see it let me give you this analogy - I see NYC as a gold mine. It's not all bad but it's not all good. The money that can be made here is astronomical. But it comes with sacrifice. Some people are not willing or simply can't sacrifice their current lifestyle to move here.
> The money that can be made here is astronomical. But it comes with sacrifice. Some people are not willing or simply can't sacrifice their current lifestyle to move here.
Keep in mind that for many people it's exactly the lifestyle which makes NYC attractive... certainly it's not for everyone (some people just want a big lawn and lots of parking at the mall)—but it is for many people.
[I don't want to move back to the U.S., but if I do, NYC is one of the very few places I can imagine living....]
Lower Florida Keys here, haven't had a job within 300 miles of my home since 2003. Although I've lived in a few large cities with decent job markets, I settled here for reasons of personal choice and sanity. Like the author of this piece, I'm utterly unwilling to move (I'd sooner change professions; I'll be a USCG licensed boat captain soon). I understand the tradeoffs involved, and I work in a partnership of like-minded individuals around the country. The partnership gives us healthcare and retirement benefits, while the senior partner in LA has physical access to a large job market to keep us stocked with contracts, if we need more work.
Yes, there are tradeoffs. I probably won't advance in your company or have a prestigious resume, even though I've been working on Internet technologies since the early 1990s. I don't want to be a founder or first employee, I want to be your first contractor. You can even meet me, too; I've been known to fly out to conferences and company meetings.
For my part, I use the partnership's Redmine ticket system religiously, and the customer can see the solid results I deliver by working for the agreed-upon amount of hours (or more!) per day/week/month, and if the customer doesn't like the results (experience suggests most do, but some are better suited to cheap stuff from India), then they do not renew the contract.
Besides my zipcode, I get an interesting choice of working situations. I've been on conference calls while I had two divers in the water getting lobster. A week ago, my office was on the tailgate of the truck as my wife and I worked blue crab fishing holes. I may even be on the sailboat moored near a coral patch reef, a few miles out to sea (there is LTE up to 5nm out to sea generally, around here). I don't tell all clients about this; Some are cool with it, others would prefer to think I sit in an office all day. It doesn't matter, because in the end I'm serious about productivity, regardless of my surroundings (and this is why you won't generally find me trying to work from the countless bars down here, experience suggests it's bad for productivity, to put it mildly).
It isn't for every company, and it isn't for every developer. But it certainly works very well for some companies and some developers.
100% agree, I moved from Switzerland back to Spain for similar reasons.
Now I'm freelancing for a couple of companies in NYC and my quality of life and productivity improve a lot, the only drawback it's the 6 hours of difference.
We do a skype meeting once per week, for 1 hour or two. The day of the meeting I had to stay at work until 8-9 pm, so this day I come to work late in the morning.
Email+issue tracker for the rest of the communication. Asynchronous communication help me to stay focused.
When I worked remote for a shop out of London (I'm in St. Louis, Missouri, so the time difference is similar), I just woke up a bit earlier. It worked fine. I was there early enough to catch what needed to be done so they didn't need to stay longer just to accomodate me.
Good article but I would quibble on the point about "time ≠ money". To me, one has a finite amout of time, that must be "spent" no matter what you do, the goal is to maximize the "trade" value for your time. With my job, I trade my time for money – which I can then turn around and trade money for someone else's time. With my hobbies, I trade my time for for skills/knowledge. When I'm relaxing, I'm trading for my own sanity. You can't really "waste" time; instead of you simply trade it for something of little or no value.
In that sense, money is time... and time can be represented as money.
Sorry but this comes off as really pompous. Essentially what you're saying is that I am so good, you will be hired on your terms.
If you had gone in with the mind set, "I want to work locally, and relocating isn't something that works for me." I can respect that, but when you say I wont locate for YOU, comes off as saying, hey I make the decisions not you. Or an attention grabbing title for a post.
For a full time employee, remote work is like a long distance relationship, more often than not, they just do not work. Heck contract remote work is already difficult as is.
Kudos on the "frind a way to make workouts work into your schedule" - I used to work at a company that serviced the health club industry, so we all got a free membership to one of our customer's gyms just down the road. All the developers would go work out over lunch (and contrary to stereotypes, a lot of them were jacked). That routine was fantastic and is the thing I miss most about that job. It also made everyone more productive in the afternoon.
> The cost of living in Louisville is 7.6% below national average. The cost of living in NYC is 123.8% above national average. In other words, I’d need to earn over twice as much money to maintain the same quality of life in NYC.
This is false. You only need to make twice as much as you are spending. I don't think anyone making something like $100k in Louisville would be spending all their money and then would need to make $220k in New York.
Actually I would argue that over twice as much is not enough. Having made a similar comparison living in Phoenix the cost of 'extras' in the New York metro area is much higher. If I wanted to invest, send my daughter to a private school or go out to eat is dramatically higher.
And, what the heck do you think happens to the extra money? It goes away? The difference between 100k and the cost of living in Louisville is hopefully invested back in his own family. Even if it is wasted he is still using it.
I would assume cost of living would include things like sending your children to school and so on, or going out on a fun weekend. If it does not, then I am sorely mistaken as what "cost of living" is.
As for investing money back, I'd assume you would have some kind of an investment account (for future, retirement or even your child's college fund) that would provide the same returns no matter where you are.
Assuming that a serious developer will easily earn more than enough to cover his/her costs of living whether in NYC or in Louisville, this isn't really a strong point. There's also the matter of what you can do in the near vincinity with the income surplus and many people will prefer spending it in NYC (though some won't).
> The population has deemed they would rather pay 15 times more to live in San Francisco than KY
Price is not necessarily correlated with value, but rather with supply and demand. And in the case of SF, no, it's not because of the population that the demand skyrockets.
I like this idea a lot, but here's the issue that I find. For most projects, I get to a point where I actually care (sometimes that happens way too fast) about the health of the project, which means that I want to be in a decision-making role-- not necessarily "management" but some sort of creative or technical leadership. Getting that seems to require in-person contact. It requires trust so it rarely happens when people haven't shared physical space.
What you're paying when you suffer Manhattan or Bay Area rent is the career benefit (?) that it confers to live in such a place. You may be overpaying; you probably are. I don't think anyone has good data on this, which is why the extortionist mega-landlords who set prices (by limiting supply through NIMBY regulations) can get away with so much. No one has a good handle on what it's actually worth to live and work in a star city. I think a lot of people pile into star cities because they're driven by FUD and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
I don't know what "the right answer" is but I can see the appeal of living in these high-rent areas. It really sucks, though, because we're in an uncanny valley where people are just mobile enough to stratify by ambition (with a lot of noise in the mix; I am not saying that people who don't live in expensive places aren't ambitious, but the correlation exists) in their 20s, but not enough to render location obsolete.
> Getting that seems to require in-person contact. It requires trust so it rarely happens when people haven't shared physical space.
It's difficult, but it's not impossible. I was recently promoted to CTO, and the company I work for is based on the opposite coast from me. It helps if you work for a company where working remotely is part of the culture - we have people all over the world in many different timezones, about one third of use work remotely. You can definitely make it work in the right company.
Ok, so I piled into star city purely because of FOMO. What are you going to do ? FOMO is real. You sit in Charlotte and say "I want to write cutting edge machine learning code in Scala", you get back emails from Managing Directors who make 400K saying "you've misspelt Scale as Scala" ( true, I swear ). The level of ignorance outside of SF/SV is staggering. Its ok if you want to do generic bread and butter crud apps in ruby/js/whatever, but if you want meaty sizeable R&D type work, you are not going to find it in Kentucky and the midwest outside of some very small pockets. FOMO is very real.
What makes you think that non-PhDs (except for the politically skilled) are more eligible for "meaty sizeable R&D type work" in Silicon Valley?
You may be right. I have no idea. I'm not in SF/SV. I will say that I'm not convinced that VC-istan has any real edge over the rest of the business world. It's just better at marketing itself.
FOMO is real but it's not only about geography. There are just very few companies that will pay for anything interesting. It's not like every 22-year-old in Silicon Valley gets to work on cutting-edge machine learning algorithms.
Ultimately, it's hard to get decent work. I don't know if moving to an otherwise overpriced location has decent ROI. I just don't have the data to answer that question.
You need to expend time and energy on:
- preparing precise specs instead of explaining and interacting
- interpretting imprecise specs instead of questioning and interacting
- writing precise emails
- interpretting imprecise emails
- guessing body language and tonality from written communication
- dealing with conference calls and web-based meetings
- building relationships without benefit of breaks and meals
- understanding the human terrain without benefit of gossip and the water cooler
- being noticed and recognized for who you really are by new people
- being included when you're "out of sight, out of mind"
You kinda get the idea. If you can be excellent at these things, great. Otherwise, be prepared to see your work suffer.