Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?

Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by rbritton on Friday April 24, 2020 @01:56PM (#22971065)

Hiring is more difficult. It's not that you can't find applicants, but the people capable of performing without direct supervision is (mostly) a subset of those capable of performing in an office. It can be difficult to identify those who will actually perform well in that environment. It takes some degree of maturity and responsibility to provide value as a remote worker because there's always that temptation to do something else.

That said, I wouldn't trade this lifestyle for anything. The only complaint I've ever had is that coworkers not capable of performing in a remote environment sometimes last too long at the company.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by nathan_long on Friday April 24, 2020 @02:13PM (#22971262)

> Hiring is more difficult. It's not that you can't find applicants, but the people capable of performing without direct supervision is (mostly) a subset of those capable of performing in an office.

OTOH, your applicant pool is limited only to the time zones and legal jurisdictions you're willing to hire from. If you're office-based, it's limited to those who can reasonably commute there.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by youeseh on Friday April 24, 2020 @02:03PM (#22971159)

The other side of this is that managers need to be more mature too. There's a fairly significant difference between communicating asynchronously. If you can figure it out, it'll actually increase the company's overall productivity because it'll reduce interruptions.

A great way to approach this is to build trust incrementally. Small projects where responsibility is given to individuals to own work end to end with reviews and feedback. After a few iterations, everyone will get used to it.

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by minasss on Friday April 24, 2020 @03:33PM (#22972028)

> A great way to approach this is to build trust incrementally. Small projects where responsibility is given to individuals to own work end to end with reviews and feedback. After a few iterations, everyone will get used to it.

Thank you very much for providing a useful practical advice!

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Re:Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work? by youeseh on Saturday April 25, 2020 @02:00AM (#22975985)

I meant to say, "There's a fairly significant difference between communicating as needed in the office, and asynchronously when we're remote".

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