- "better programmers/employees for the same money",

- "cheaper programmers with the same quality",

- you have it easier to find good employers (less skill shortage) since you can also include potential employees who live somewhere else and are not willing to relocate.

I know that personally the most productive I've ever been was attending an office each day which had people co-located in rooms of 4-7 people by team / project.

I absolutely love my remote situation, it's 1000% better for my general happiness (I feel like my work is a part of my life rather than something which puts my life on hold) and stress levels, and there are days where I can be very productive, but due to the simple factor of motivation and the symbiosis which can occur in co-located teams it simply doesn't compare to the productivity I experienced as a part of a good team in a well-planned office.

As an employee I definitely prefer remote, but as a (heartless) employer optimising only for medium term productivity (and ignoring the trade-offs of overheads etc) it wouldn't be so straightforward and would probably depend on the people and projects.

Edit to add: here I'm talking about productivity as quality output per unit time

I think remote work can theoretically be a lot more productive for solo-ish tasks like coding. On some days this is definitely the case for me, after I pull marathon coding sessions that likely couldn't have really happened so smoothly in an office setting. For some days or weeks where I'm consistently in the "zone", I really feel like I've gotten more done than I could've if I spent those days in an office.

But in practice, unless you have very high self-discipline, you're probably going to be battling motivation and boredom to some degree on a daily basis. You often might in an office, too, but it's not the same. In an office, you see everyone else working around you, probably talking about work, some of whom can see your screen (maybe not ever actually looking, but still in line of sight), and that's a potent cocktail for human psychology. At home, you're in or right near the same place you watch TV and movies and relax and sleep, alone or with your SO/family, and there's probably nothing really going on around you, so the environment is basically the same as your non-work environment. There's nothing around to light a fire under your ass.

I also prefer remote work, but I'm definitely trying to find ways to feel more motivated and symbiotic, and am interested in ways a manager or employer could help foster that for remote employees. I've been trying to work from coffee shops more, and that sometimes seems to help.

My place is trying remote, and sometimes I'm more productive in the office. However, if I get in the zone at home I will accomplish significantly more. I would definitely rather go outside for 10 minutes to take a break instead of chatting in the office. Unfortunately, it seems like there is no attention on how to make people more comfortable and engaged.

Too many places dip their toes in the water, but as a remote employee, I can sniff out immediately if a team is ‘backchanneling’ in the office, starting or ending meetings before/after the remote call is over, etc.

If the team is not remote-first, living and breathing with the sense that nothing should be isolated in a single physical location, it’s not going to be fun, especially for the remote workers.

It can sort of work in a sense where everyone gets together for some time, then everyone breaks off and does something, then they get back together.

But more often I see a team where 3 people are in the office, and 2 or 3 are remote—I’ve never seen this model be successful in the long run.

This is the offshoring holy grail. Let’s be honest here please, exactly the same structures and cultures that allow effective remote work also enables continued and increased offshoring. With the accompanying negative effect on US developer salaries. Indeed companies should be focusing on this significantly!

The (microeconomic) problem with offshoring is that other countries (think of India, to use a stereotype) have a quite different level of education, work morale, sense of quality etc. That is why it worked so badly. On the other hand, inside a common cultural area, this should be much less of an issue.

We get excellent work out of India, with the primary downsides being the related factors of 10.5 hour time zone difference to either US coast and higher demands for coordination/communication.

If India was in a time zone with more overlap with the US, the situation would be far more dire for the average US software developer I think.

If you go in and just want "lots of bodies, cheap", you're going to light money on fire, waste your time, and pull your hair out.

You shouldn't determine how much you charge by how much you need to survive, but charge instead by how much the company can afford to pay, or how much they're going to make (harder to determine the latter).

After all, the company doesn't price its products by how much it needs to stay solvent, it prices them by how much they can get people to pay.

Let's rather put it this way: the company saves money; if they give some amount of the savings back to the employee (via salary), both sides should be satisfied.

Yes. I work remotely from Uruguay. It´s basically the only option to compete with U.S. talent, the whole point of remote work for the company is to get the best talent at a price they wouldn´t get in the U.S.

I know that if I get an H1B visa or whatever my salary would immediately go up. Location and salary are unfortunately correlated (it´s not even cost of living, Uruguay is more expensive than 2/3rds of the U.S.).

https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/resource...

Gitlab would be the opposite example of an influential company the business decision makers are looking for. Gitlab has gotten $350M in VC money but they haven't yet demonstrated high profitability. And so far, they haven't "won" over Github.

The business world hasn't yet seen a trendsetting and influential company that has shown obvious evidence of competitive advantages because of remote work. The evidence includes beating the competition.

Examples of influential companies where their business practices spread would be Ford Motors and the assembly line improving manufacturing efficiency and therefore being copied by other manufacturers. Or Toyota's lean manufacturing and JIT inventory management reducing defects and saving money and also widely copied. Or Google's single-repository and Facebook's trunk-based-instead-of-branch-based development with continuous deployment to production being widely copied.

The Gitlab/Automattic/Basecamp companies are not influential enough (not big enough, not succesful enough, etc) ... so their remote work culture isn't copied like the previous practices of Ford/Toyota/Google/Facebook.

Though I would probably argue with this article to some extent, the strength of remote isn't as big a sell for this large influential companies. I think the real selling point is that you can get high level talent form anywhere, the Googles and Facebooks of the work already have access to that talent, and have hubs all over the world. I would argue remote work is a bit of a bottom up movement, and we won't really see it shift to top down unless there is another wide market adoption that it becomes a requirement by potential employees. And as long as you're offering at least 50% more than competitors, I don't see that happening.

Stripe is doing what many other older companies already do: have a core of on-site office workers but also open a satellite office that has remote workers.

Google and Microsoft also have pockets of remote workers.

Again, I don't think Stripe's 5th hub being "remote" is going to radically convince a lot of business managers. But that blog announcement is recently dated May 2 2019 so it's too early to predict its potential influence.

Do you think it will really turn the heads of business leaders?

[EDIT correction to Gitlab amount above; funding was $168 million not $350 million: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-o...]

> fully remote

Is it just me or does this make no sense? Does Stripe Inc. not know what the word hub means?

Zero-sum is the only measure?

Even if the CEO and the board are truly, honestly, sincerely pursuing actual productivity (which is far from granted), there are lines and lines of middle managers below them who have realized that achieving the illusion of productivity by cramming people elbow to elbow in a cacophonous open office and demanding daily or even hourly status reports is far easier than achieving actual productivity.

There seems to be limits to remote first though- GitHub is a remote first culture, but even then they had a non-insignificant in-office population, ~30% if I remember correctly. There are many job functions that require geographic presence- dealing with physical things obviously, but also some types of sales and I’m sure other functions I’m not thinking of. It is also harder to onboard entry level workers in a fully remote team.

According to analysts, Github in 2018 was still losing money when Microsoft acquired them. This is another example of remote work enthusiasts inadvertently undermining their case. If the strategy is "use remote workforce for happier employees and it doesn't matter if you're bleeding money because one of the FAANG companies might swoop in to acquire you" -- you can see why that narrative is not convincing at all to business leaders!

This is the same issue as citing Gitlab's remote work culture while the CEO (Sid Sijbrandij) mentions they're not yet profitable. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014)

Another example is highlighting Elastic's IPO with 700-employee distributed workforce: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18168423

Elastic has also been losing increasing amounts of money for the last 3 years (see their SEC 10-K filings) and has never had a profit since their IPO. They lost $109 million in 2019.

To be fair, it doesn't mean that financial losses should be blamed on remote work -- but you also can't use them as positive case studies either.

tldr: do not cite Gitlab/Github/Elastic as evidence of remote work "being a success" to convince skeptical business managers.

To re-iterate the issue: the Remote Work Movement still needs a slam-dunk-world-beating story of its success. They haven't gotten one yet that convinces skeptical business leaders to fully adopt it.

Yes, Github remote employees were productive in an absolute sense. The employees obviously created a usable website with enterprise customers before MS acquired them.

Instead of absolute productivity, the issue is if remote worker is more productive relative to office workers. (See the 3 repeated claims from the author I quoted in my first post.)

What we want is for Github's remote workforce to demonstrate such obvious superiority that it causes Bloomberg/WSJ/HBR to write articles explaining how business managers are incompetent idiots for not fully adopting remote work. But that didn't happen because Github wasn't successful enough to influence the business landscape like that.

In contrast, the business media has already written plenty of stories about Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity of workers. So far, influential business publications have not highlighted Github's remote culture as a competitive advantage.

Out of curiosity, are there any actual documented improvements, or is it the same "this makes us more productive" that we're talking about the remote promoters spouting?

> set aside a place that is only work

Crucial.

That being said, if your team was mainly non-remote with some remote employees, then I'm not surprised: it is the worst possible organization and a motivation killer for the remote person. Every article about experience of remote work I've read says: "don't put remote people on non-remote team" and I wholeheartedly agree.