> missing real human contacts

For me, personally, working from home has amplified the good parts of working with people and human contact and removed the bad parts.

When we do meet in person (4-5 times a year) we have a blast.

When we communicate via video the communication is a lot of fun and very purposeful at the same time. Sometimes it feels like I speak to remote co-workers by video more than family and people in real life! So, lot's of human interaction there.

At the same time, there is now no interruptions when someone gets bored and wanders over for a chat.

There is no need to instantly answer questions when overly eager bosses have a brain... idea.

There is no need to watch the clock and make it look like I'm staying late just cos everyone else is.

And I can work on stuff anytime I like, like if I wake up at 5am by accident I can knock out the current sprint board and have a break during the day.

So, in my case at least, saying "the most obvious are missing real human contacts" is simply not true.

I do think that remote working is a bit difficult to pull off well and I've found the key is to really get to know people well when in person and on video chat.

Yeah, "missing real human contacts" doesn't reflect my experience with remote work either. I'd characterize it as giving me much more control over my real human contact: I get to spend time with who I want on my own schedule to a much greater degree than I could in office jobs. Day to day that's mostly people who have nothing to do with my current work: girlfriend, friends, family, people at my krav maga classes, etc. and as a (sociable) introvert I don't burn through so much of my "social energy" just having to be around people in an office all day.

I'm sitting at my desk with my noise-cancelling headphones doing a mediocre job of blocking the 20-minute "standup" happening next to me in our open office. I'm going to be transitioning to a remote position soon, and can't wait. I already have two unsolicited offers from friends with office space to let me work in their spaces occasionally, so I have options for getting human contact—when I want it.

My need for human contact is not only verbal communication: it's cleaning the coffee machine, taking a walk, playing around, throwing a duck, being randomly head-butted by a scrum master, going for an afterwork beer... Lot of interaction with people

Yes, I don't think it's one size fits all by any means. It sounds like any company you work for needs to have real world team interaction as part of the day to day. Nothing wrong with that!

No shoulder tappers at home! I'm happy.

I agree here. The extra time I get to spend with my young kids, my wife, and my friends instead of commuting is the polar opposite of a drawback with regards to human contact.

I don't share your pessimism about the list of downsides, and am honestly surprised, as while normally I chuckle at the "HN is always negative" sentiment, this post being the top reply is a real head scratcher, as someone who is both 1. on a >75% remote team, and 2. who has been advocating/watching HN advocate for remote for quite some time.

I'd say "missing real human contacts" is summarized well under a combination of harder rampup/scares some potential employees; as the lack of "Real contacts" seems more of a personal/subjective or team-process-and-tooling-rooted feeling than anything I've observed to be inherent and unsolvable; it's trivial for me to get a face to face with anyone on my multi-national team. Now, to try and read this charitably, if you meant something like "increased difficulty networking" I'd actually agree, but again, if you're at a place in your career where you accept that, it's significantly less of a downside.

Mostly, that's the gist of a lot of the things people list as hard negatives to my ears, including your second point of harder life/work separation. I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem." (Edit: see my clarification in child post re: this wording, I came off more accusatory than I'd have liked, but didn't want to rewrite history) With the broad slew of coworking spaces, home offices, coffee shops, and other ways to partition one's time and mental spaces, I don't accept that that's something that can't be solved in the same proactive fashion as a professional would approach any assorted social frictions one might run into in _any_ office environment.

If you read any frustration in this, it comes from a place of, "a lot of the complaints I read are solvable problems or isomorphisms of in-office problems", and a hope that we'd be self-interested enough as a field to be more proactive in seeking solutions, given the benefits that can come from a more distributed workforce. I want to encourage and productively improve sites that try to support this, and part of that is avoiding a re-encroachment of remote work stigma/fear in many people's eyes.

Edit: yes, I'm going to break the HN rules, but christ people, at least _respond_ before blindly downvoting. This was not a glib response, and this topic (remote work) is something we should be able to discuss in good faith without accruing negative score before I even finish grammar-checking my own writing.

>I don't mean to be dismissive, but "that seems like a personal problem."

This is incredibly dismissive. Almost all the "advantages for employees" are personal. How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit? The advantages for remote work are almost entirely being sold that they are better for people. If someone has a personal problem with an aspect of it, then it should be taken seriously.

Imagine if you told an employer that the commute to work was rough so you would like to work remote and he told you "that sounds like a personal problem, why don't you move closer to work?"

> How is "No commuting time or stress" not a personal benefit?

My commute is a 20 minute walk through a very nice park, and my partner walks the same route in the morning. It’s one of my favourite parts of the day, and it would be a hard push to get me to give that up right now.

You 're suggesting that you have to be forced by your employer to take a walk in the park. I think you 're justifying the parent's dismissive comment.

How would working remotely affect your routine? You could even work all day in that park.

If you two didn't have that commute you'd be free to do it whenever you felt like, not forced to twice a day at mostly-fixed times.

We're all very jealous.

Where do we draw the line though? Do we draw the line? At what point do my personal preferences/issues (and trust me I have plenty of my own) become my team's/workplace's problem? I certainly fall closer to the side of "it's my job as a professional to find a situation that doesn't drive me nuts", which is probably where our disagreement might arise. (Candidly, and unfortunately, it's probably born out of the pragmatic "a job don't owe you nothing" upbringing)

You aptly point out that "no commuting or stress" is a personal benefit; to play devils advocate with that, wouldn't having a "typical job" then be "dismissive" in not catering to someone who might be incredibly sensitive to the commute? I bring up this contrast since I think a lot of the friction with remote is that it's a change from the status quo, not necessarily that the status quo doesn't incur its own comparable (if inverted) costs.

Let me try and rephrase my point better, regardless. I don't think there's a one size fits all, period. Some people simply want/like/work better in some environments than others, and to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.

You asked the question at the end re: a boss telling me that about my commute. Honestly, yes, this has happened to me. And I switched teams, to the one I'm currently on, which is extremely remote friendly. I don't mean to whitewash remote work for any given person or say that everyone has such a lucky opportunity, I see it as two sides to the same coin, in which we shouldn't assume highly-granular personal choices to be a global downside to remote work, and we should enable as many opportunities for that choice to be present as possible.

Edit: After rereading my posts, I'll concede that "personal problem" may not have been the best way to put it, and comes off as far too accusatory. I want to delineate between problems I expect a professional adult to be able to understand their own exposure to and handle via their own autonomy, vs problems that are only in the purview of the workplace to solve/that we can't expect individuals to navigate feasibly.

> to paint these often personally-aligned preferences as generic pros/cons, we muddy the waters.

I'm not sure that listing pros/cons paints them as anything (or vice-versa), though maybe I haven't quite gotten your point (and I've read all your edits).

I've never had an opportunity to work anywhere all-remote, remote-first, or even truly remote-friendly, and I harbor an interest in the discussions, including anecdata, primarily because so many of these things are personal. I, as a reader, am pretty capable of figuring out which personal preferences don't actually match up to my own and which pros/cons may not actually apply to my situation or profession. The water isn't muddied for me by more information.

As such, I very much would prefer to hear a more complete [1] and expansive list of both advantages and disadvantages to a remote-only culture. I find it's even important to include what you describe as "isomorphisms of in-office problems" if only to point how they're easier/harder to deal with when working remote.

[1] I think a grandparent comment used the adjective "honest", but I think that's only relevant as maybe a jab at the article itself, which is clearly promoting an agenda.

> At what point do my personal preferences/issues (and trust me I have plenty of my own) become my team's/workplace's problem?

At the point when the company is losing value and opportunities that you could be providing. It's a business.

To be clear: whether or not it's economical to deal with this problem also matters.

The advantages are not all personal. The environmental benefits that come from reduced travel and reduced need for office space (which sits empty much of the time) is no joke. Neither is the economic / environmental benefit of freeing people up to live anywhere, not just where the corporate offices / factories happen to have located. That means people can go where the housing is available and affordable. We can repopulate areas -- like many midwestern small towns and medium towns -- that have emptied out as jobs have moved away.

These are very significant societal benefits, not personal ones.

That said, remote working isn't going to work for everyone. Extroverts, especially, I think tend to struggle with it a little bit.

I actually do agree 100%, both issues that I've posted are personal issues, however, remote work is also meant to solve personal issues in the first place, so I don't think it's disconnected.

I do have made my company fully remote so I do believe remote work is way of the future, but we can't be disingenuous about its downsides.

I think a lot of it has to do with HN being frequented by people in SF who do like their workplaces, and are being overwhelmingly incentivized monetarily to like them. People outside US seem to be a lot more sympathetic to the idea.

If the downside is "lack of separate workspace / human contact", then it is blown way out of proportion imho. It's easily solved by using a coworking space, and it's not reason enough to dismiss remote work.

You might want to try using a writing style less similar to coding. I don't know if I'm noticing a trend between an influx of new users from reddit after their BS UI redesign, but your text can get quite dense (it's not lacking in information that makes sense). Did upvote you because I feel you made some very experienced and work-aware points.

Meta-comment: You're right, and it's a weakness I've observed in my own posts for years now. There are other commentators that often come into HN threads I post in, and make my point better+more succinctly than I could have. I wish I could replicate/learn from those examples better. I think it's less of a redditism and my own overly-loquatious style/attempting to avoid misunderstanding through verboseness. The feedback is really appreciated.

I found Twitter helped me unlearn Reddit verbosity. You learn to write succinctly or else you'll have trouble expressing your thoughts at all.

It's a life long habit to unlearn, because you have to balance the skill set.

When you are intending to speak to an audience, I think it matters to know your audience, which gets complicated, when the audience is constantly shifting.

Cheers!

This assumes that the only place a remote worker can work from is their home. There is nothing more detrimental to a person's psyche. Cafes and coworking spaces are the most obvious and effective solution to this problem.

I made countless friends while working remotely and a good 90% of them I met in a coworking space (and the so called "digital nomad" community is made of some really awesome people). Plus you have the option to change coworking space if you don't like the people, the coffee, the wallpapers or whatever. You can't do that with a traditional office (or it would be reaaally hard to justify).

> This assumes that the only place a remote worker can work from is their home. There is nothing more detrimental to a person's psyche.

That is rather hyperbolic. Many remote workers do fine working from home. Others do not. Not all people are the same. Any of us can think of things that are "more detrimental to a person's psyche" for nearly all individuals.

For example, coworkers who use the bathroom and just rinse their hands. That is worse for my psyche than working from home.

Is there something filthy on your junk? Better get it clean than keep dirtying your hands

What does it have to do people using the bathroom and not washing their hands with my junk?

I can only suppose you mean everyone can just rinse his hands after using the urinal because his genitals are clean. They aren't, unless your sweat is both antiseptic and insecticide. Anyway, I meant using toilets too, not just urinals.

But, see, the way to get it "clean" is by washing ones hands regularly with soap and warm water (ideally before touching it [1]).

Really, though, you're making the (likely false) assumption that ones "junk" is the only thing touched in the restroom. You're also ignoring the potential for aeresolized bits of feces sprayed by commercial flush mechanisms.

None of this adds up to "filthy" per se, but hand washing is one of the best disease spreading preventions we know of.

Personally, if they're not going to wash I'd rather someone not go anywhere near the sink after using the restroom instead of also touching the fixtures and giving the bacteria on their hands a drink of water.

[1] I once worked in a building with a dentist who washed both before and after.

I always do both and it feels extremely weird to see people not actually do it. In between bathroom breaks at work I've touched my desk, keyboard, smartphone screen, perhaps adjusted my shoes, perhaps shook someones hand. By that time, hands already feel filthy enough to not want to touch myself anywhere before washing.

I suspect that's where you may be crossing over into an irrational fear of dirt and/or germs, which can lead to, at the very least, people being dismissive of concerns.

After all, your desk, keyboard, smartphone screen, and even shoes aren't likely to be places other people have touched, so not much potential for spreading anything.

Shaking hands, though.. filthy habit ;)

Your keyboard is filthy, but your fingers aren't really the best bet for germs to infect you, unless you put them in an orifice or touch some skinless area probably. I'll avoid further details.

But yes, I'm not suggesting that not washing your hands all the time greatly increase your likelihood of getting infected with something. Just slightly. I just have slight OCD and it's still weird to me how people don't feel anywhere close to the same way I do about these things.

I guess I don't see the risk? It's been close to 20 years since I last had a stomach flu, and never got salmonella yet. I believe total avoidance of all bacteria is just going to make my immune system more lax.

Don't worry though, I do wash my hands after a bathroom visit. I just don't care that much if someone else doesn't.

> I guess I don't see the risk?

That's the point, though. Once you "see" it, it's way too late.

> It's been close to 20 years since

That's just anecdata, but, as you point out, you do wash your hands.

> total avoidance of all bacteria

That's not exactly possible (and essentially deadly, unless there are archea that can take the place of all our gut bacteria.. I'm not sure).

> I just don't care that much if someone else doesn't.

I'd agree it's unreasonable to care more than just slightly, since they'd be increasing the risk more for themselves than for you. However, increased risk for everyone (including you) is non-zero.

> That's the point, though. Once you "see" it, it's way too late.

I see your point, but it simply falls to things I rather not care about. Adding a mental/habitual burden on something that is either unlikely or not that serious isn't just worth it; a life is more relaxed if it can be disregarded.

I also acknowledge that it's not something that can be simply chosen though. I do I know about certain things way more than some of my friends, even if I didn't want to.

Everybody is different, which is something that I think HNers seem to forget sometimes.

Some people thrive working from home. Some people thrive working with a colocated team in a private office. Some people would thrive on a remote team, but working in a coworking space (I'm in this boat).

Personally, I'd go stir crazy if I worked from home on a regular basis, not just from social isolation, but from working where I live. I try to keep my life compartmentalised; my gym, my work, my home, and the bar I drink at are all different places and I like it that way.

I work alone from home and love it. I can have quiet/nap time when I need it, make my own food, and spend time with my dog.

I'm very social and love spending time with people, but work isn't my outlet for that. I find that friends in an office end up decreasing my productivity and causing me to have less free time for friends, family, and relaxation.

Agree completely. The power of remote work is not just avoiding your commute and working in pyjamas, but being free to choose your environment. You could work for a company based in a big, expensive city, but live hours away in a smaller town.

Or perhaps your partner works in a regional area, but you can take a tech job from afar rather than be limited by the local market.

I don’t think it’s very detrimental if you have a separate room or area of your home that is only used for your remote work.

That surely helps but at the end of the day it depends on your personality. Some people can go a lot longer working completely alone (e.g. if you have a family), others prefer working in a more social environment (e.g. solo travellers), at least occasionally. I definitely prefer the latter.

I've worked exclusively remotely for a number of years, and while I tend to prefer it, there are times where I miss the hustle and bustle of an office place.

For those occasions, I've always just relocated to either a coffee shop (or similar) or a co-working space with drop-in rates. If you're extremely rural, or those aren't options, I don't know what to tell you.

I got a 3 monitor setup at home, which basically quadrupled my productivity. I now work from coffee shops only if I’m doing “shallow work” - lots of small tasks, none of which requires deep thinking. For example if I need to answer a bunch of emails I’ll do that from a coffee shop.

I think this is a great balance and something I'm interested in trying more. I have three displays at home and four displays at my co-working space desk, but I'm interested in periodically using a local pub for sessions of 2-3 hours to do single-screen work over a beer. e.g., dealing with emails, invoicing, etc.

How can you work and drink at the same time?

Generally speaking, two beers over two hours with a meal is not going to push most people even to being a bit tipsy.

Ballmer Peak! https://xkcd.com/323/

But seriously, how would it be a problem? In the afternoons, we often have a beer at our desks while working. I often work at night after having a drink at dinner or in the afternoon after lunch at the pub. Having a pint beside the laptop while answering emails or working on a side project or making content changes for a client wouldn't be especially difficult or problematic.

I've worked for myself for 20 years (http://www.isaacforman.com.au/) so there are rarely issues with time and place of work either. I'm mostly anchored to my desk because I like the room to move of four displays.

It never occurred to me to be desirable to mix alcohol and working. I don't drink much but if i choose to have a pint it is as a reward after finishing work. It's like a ritual that delineates clearly that work has finished and it's time to unwind. That feeling is practically the best thing about the pint.

This hasn't been my experience. I have worked remotely for years and I don't miss the open-office environments in the least. For me, nothing is more detrimental to my psyche and health than an open-office environment. I guess we all have different needs.

There are, factually, things more detrimental to a person's psyche.

There's also a good chunk of people actively seeking that because of their personal characteristics (psyche?).

I really hate "real human contacts", when absolutely everybody can interrupt you, when you need to listen somebody's else "interesting" stories just because saying "stop trash talking" is not polite.

This is a valid criticism of the list. Please submit an issue for further discussion!

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/issues/

Added some changes here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_reque... (username: hartator)

Sure, will do!

Working remote is not for everyone. I was in a 100% remote position for 3 - 4 months and really missed the human contact. We had numerous calls, great tools for sharing, but for me personally I need to be around people.

Perhaps it would be better to remove "remote" from the title completely. You may have several locations where people can come together, don't call them headquarters and those not there remote, but instead everyone is team member who sits in various sites. Some of those sites have 1 person, others have 4 or 5 or 10. And those with more than an individual

Came to the thread to say this. The site loses a lot of legitimacy by glossing over very real tradeoffs to having a fully remote team.

One person's disadvantages is another's nirvana.

I'll start by saying that pushing to normalize remote-work is a noble endeavor. But that being said, as you said, glossing over the disadvantages leaves this site/post feeling very one-sided. I say this as someone worked fully remote for 2 years. It was a fantastic job but the main reason I left was the disadvantages of being remote. To say that the advantages are far more numerous, and far outweigh the disadvantages is subjective and myopic. It works for some people and some types of work but to say it's the Best Solution sadly seems to be to just be being disingenuous.

Another disadvantage of global employees is the overhead of understanding employment law, taxes, etc for each of your employees' countries and/or provinces.

Having clusters of remote workers, perhaps there is a sweet spot.

This seems more like an opportunity for a company to come in and handle those details for you. I believe those exist already but they seem mostly targeted at larger multinationals rather than scrappy remote-only startups.

I think the HN population is strongly skewed towards people who prefer to sit alone and work.

I just changed job from an open office to remote work, and while everybody thought my new job sounded like a great opportunity, no one was jealous of the remote part - "So, now you have rent a shared office, huh?" (and yes, that is what I did)

I've been working remote for 3 years now in software and I agree completely.

The biggest downsides are: loneliness, feeling like a shut in, and working all the time because you're only two steps from your "office". These are NP-hard problems to solve, especially for an introverted 4-eyes like me.

> the most obvious are missing real human contacts

Human contact for me is more about friends and out of work activity. Colleagues are colleagues, if you want "real human" interaction, you'd need to get out of the office anyway.

Yeh.

They don't pay us to socialise, and I can count the number of times on my middle finger of how many people who at the offices I've worked at I'd want to spend my free time with.

Strangely, now that I'm working remotely, I actually do socialise with my colleagues when we meet every 3 months, and enjoy it.

Apart from that, I'm around people who I enjoy being with instead of staring the clock or the rear of a car. And I have more social energy to do so.

I merged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/merge_reque... which added a lot of advantages and disadvantages. Looking forward to more MRs to improve the list.

Can you expand on the disadvantages then?

If you were to write that list, what would it look like?

I worked for a company that was mostly a remote workplace for almost a year, and there were a lot of problems i found while trying to manage a team.

Time zones, were a huge issue and pain point when trying to get a large number of people on the same page. I found my self often having to give the same meeting twice, which put more pressure on me. Even worse was when i would have to go over points only for someone who wasn't available for the first meeting, to raise issues that we didn't notice, and so on.

After 6 months the team basically felt like it dissolved into the European team, and the North American Team. With me trying to ferry information from one team to another.

So many times regardless of how amazing the latest tools we tried were, it still pales in comparison to a whiteboard. The company bought me a high end digital whiteboard, that allowed me to pass control to other people, it was a buggy POS. On top of that since i was the only one unfortunately with the white board, it meant i was the one who was always doing the drawing and trying to extrapolate a diagram from what someone says.

Sometimes some team members would spend hours drawing up a digital mock up of what they were going to push for only for it to become completely useless within a very short time.

I also found some people no matter how hard i tried, some people seemed to interpret working remote meant, they got to work in their own silo, and would ignore 99% of everything going on around them. This lead to numerous conflicts, and other issues.

Also one other thing i found, was that 1 on 1's became super impersonal, and frankly felt extremely uncomfortable.

The website appears to emphasize communicating via the written word and other asynchronous forms of communication. I'm curious whether you found communicating asynchronously didn't work or wasn't as effective or if it was the team members specifically that were the issue?

I'm not the parent poster, but I think the document glossed over the biggest perceived disadvantage:

Despite technological advances, I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information and come to conclusions on difficult decisions. It's also the least susceptible to misinterpretation.

> I still believe that face-to-face communication is the most efficient way to transfer information ...

Why do people think this. For one thing, and I think it is most important, face to face communication does not give either parties time to think. It ends up with awkward, unproductive pauses.

Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought...

I’ve found face to face communication effective for resolving contentious disagreements and, as the parent said, difficult conclusions. I’ve seen things get a bit out of hand over email that then get resolved quite efficiently after a face to face.

Live video chat is a good alternative, but I think more natural human empthay comes out in face to face experiences. People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved quickly before they fester. Live video chat gets you much of this but isn’t quite as effective in my experience.

To me this observation just means that on remote teams you need to be observant of such issues and spend a little more time to resolve them, which can be a fine trade off for remote teams. (Or ideally avoid overly contentious debates in the first place)

In my experience face to face communication is great for resolving contentious technical disagreements because whoever is doing the most thinking and the least talking falls behind, thinks "fuck this" and capitulates instantly; usually resulting in the wrong decision being made.

If the metric is "time to decision" then face to face will do very well.

>I’ve found face to face communication effective for resolving contentious disagreements...

I have observed the same. But 9 out of 10 times, it was because the losing party couldn't spend much time thinking about counter arguments.

So again, it cures the symptom, but it benefits only the person with the loudest voice in the room, and not the one with sound reason.

>People seem to understand the other side’s perspective more fully and confusions that can show up in email from things like poor word choice can be resolved...

Don't buy this either. As I said before, the "seem to understand" bit might come from the fact that people often does not express disagreement in face to face communication that often, because they didn't have time to think it through.

EDIT: This is assuming that the both parties in the discussion are more or less on the same level of competence. If the communication is going to be mostly one sided, then face to face communication (Like a teacher in a class room) is fine.

> So again, it cures the symptom, but it benefits only the person with the loudest voice in the room, and not the one with sound reason.

..or even just the facts. I have, on (fortunately rare) occasions, refused to heed a manager's encouragement to speak with someone directly, because my disagreement isn't even about reasoning, but about facts.

It can be remarkably frustrating to have to repeat the same thing to someone who believes in something that is demonstrably false. At least over e-mail one can copy-and-paste.

It's as if (some) people can't tell the difference between matters of fact and matters of opinion (or judgment).

It may be true that face-to-face is best at resolving contentious disagreements on matters of opinion. However, I'd think it could only be true if those disagreements are based on everyone reaching their opinions from the same facts, and even determining if that's the case could easily be short-circuited by a premature opinion (e.g. loudest voice in the room).

"Face to face communication is great for small talk, chit chat and rumors. Not for communication backed by actual thought..."

wat.

You know, face to face communication is good if you are repeating stuff you heard from somewhere or stuff like "Hi there, how was your weekend" type of talk.

When you want productive communication, you want thought backing content and framing of every one of your sentences...

There are ways to alleviate these problems though. By "disadvantages" in this respect I understand "inherent problems that can't easily be solved or at least alleviated".

You can establish policies that ensure life and work separation (as in: "No calls outside of designated work hours") but you can't easily allay an instinctive as well as indistinct fear that everything will go the dogs if people don't work in the same office anymore.

...and timezone differences