As a remote worker myself, I agree with most of the points in the article. I lived on my own right out of school and it was a blessing and a curse. It forced me to go out and be social which brought me out of my comfort zone at first.
> I’ve never worked from a real office or even had a “real” job
I really think that a precursor to working remote should be working in an office. I always advise against younger workers to go remote early in their career. There's a huge benefit to being in the office when you're young and have much to learn in your field. Once you've been in the industry for a few years I think it's much easier to switch to a remote lifestyle.
As far as the loneliness of remote work...my 100% remote company is taking a slightly different approach to solve this problem. The more we spoke with other remote workers in coworking spaces, coffee shops, etc...the more we realized that people work in those spaces to get the feeling of human interaction, whether or not they actually talk to people while they're out working.
What we started doing is hosting these "Work Clubs" where we get 5-6 remote workers together at a table at a coffee shop and we all work together for a couple of hours. It's not a networking event, but more of a casual way to meet people while you get your work done. It gets you out of the house and around other people and we got such good feedback from other remote workers that we're looking to help others hold their own work clubs wherever they work.
We're currently hosting work clubs in San Francisco, San Diego, and Portland, and hoping to grow. If you're interested you can find out more at https://outofoffice.app/workclub/remote
I hope I'm not spamming when posting this, but this is exactly what we're trying to solve at Out Of Office with "Work Clubs" [0]
We've spoken with thousands of remote workers in the last 2 years and the one recurring theme we kept hearing about was loneliness. We're testing out this Work Club concept as a way for remote workers to get together and work together throughout the day. It's a low-friction way to meet people during your work day, while still getting your work done.
We've seen a lot of positive initial feedback and want to continue trying it out in new cities.
Hey guys, Dave here from Out Of Office. At Out Of Office we're a 100% distributed team, so we're aware of the pitfalls of working remote. It can be isolating, lonely, and often times hard to start the day. That's why we started Work Club - our way to get a little extra motivation to get out of the house and start the day.
It's super simple: sign up for work club notifications, find out where other people are working, show up, get your stuff done.
We host 1-2 Work Clubs a week at cool places in the SF Bay Area (coffee shops, breweries, co-working spots). You can sign up to be notified of future events, or if you're interested in hosting your own Work Club, you can send me an email (contest details in my HN profile). Hope to see you there!
What about ordering Mary’s free range chicken? Lots of restaurants advertise that on the menu. Sounds better than a normal chicken sandwich. Or Coca Cola braised short ribs from your favorite food truck? Sounds better than cola braised short ribs.
Some people wouldn’t even consider a veggie burger on the menu, but an impossible burger? Sure. It’s about _branding_.
The first time I tried impossible meat I was eating dinner with my old boss and he’d asked if I had heard about impossible meat. I’d heard about it but never tried it, so I ordered it and it was honestly better than I expected.
I never would have tried it if it wasn’t for word of mouth marketing because it was on the menu. Restaurants are in the business of selling food. It’s their job to make items on their menu sound appealing. Just like those Michelin star restaurants including ingredients I’ve never heard of, let alone can’t pronounce. I could never find that ingredient at my local store. Maybe I should try it.
Based on your tone it sounds like you’ve never tried “imitation meat” as you describe it but i can see why people are hyping it. I eat plenty of meat but have started buying beyond meat patties at the store every now and then. It’s magnitudes better than your run-of-the-mill black bean veggie burger.
We use github for our code repository and code reviews, sentry.io for error reporting, asana to track our weekly objectives, slack to communicate, google hangouts for team meetings, google docs for sharing proposals, spreadsheets, various documents, and figma to share design assets.
This has worked well for us so far for about a year. No complaints really.
While there are a few companies that are actually trying to build this idea with renting out homes by the hour, at Out Of Office[0] we're working on a similar concept of a more general marketplace for coworking spaces. We've scouted hundreds of locations in San Francisco, both free and bookable, that you can search for in our app. You can find coffee shops, hotel lobbies, public spaces, or book private desks, and conference rooms throughout the city.
We’re a remote first company at Out Of Office, though we’re still small (less than 10 employees). It’s the first remote job I’ve had as a software engineer and I find that I’m more productive than I’ve ever been. I have my days where I can’t concentrate but for the most part I’m able to get more done.
We err on the side of too many meetings because we don’t have the luxury of in person conversations, but we encourage people to speak up when the meetings aren’t productive. We also encourage having meetings just to socialize to avoid feeling lonely or get to know each other better. We hold standups on Monday/Wednesday/Friday so Tuesday/Thursday we’re just heads down getting stuff done unless there’s a meeting.
We’re building a product for people we want (or already have) location flexibility so we’re practicing what we preach in a sense. We believe the future of work may not be 100% remote but companies will become location flexible, meaning they still encourage employees to work in office but give them one or two flex days to work from home, a coffee shop, or shared workspace.
The benefits to the employee are quite obvious—greater flexibility in the schedule and they’re able to take care of life events like kids, doctor appointments, running errands, etc.
The benefits to the employer have been shown that it increases employee retention. 84% of workers want location flexibility[1] and companies that support remote workers have 25% lower turnover[2].
We're big proponents of location flexibility in the workplace at Out Of Office. Work doesn't have to be so black and white with 100% in the office or 100% remote work. We think a combination of both working in the office and offering employees one or two flexible days to work from home or a coffee shop leads to higher employee retention.
I'm 100% remote but have never experienced some of the downsides mentioned in the article, but I know others who have. I'd like to see companies transition from their rigid policies to more flexibility that gives their employees greater control over their schedule.
Do you have employees that live in SF by any chance? We're big proponents of location flexibility at Out Of Office and we want to encourage more companies to give their employees greater control over their schedules, even if it's just one day a week.
Shoot me an email (address is in my profile) if you'd like to chat more.
We're focusing on mobile right now because finding a workspace is heavily dependent on where you are or where you need to be. We're a small scrappy team right now so we don't have the resources to build out a proper web experience that we'd be proud of. We'd love to build one in the future though!
We run our infrastructure off of cloudflare, so we can easily spin up a staging environment that's an exact replica of production (only difference is # and size of instances). We also run a staging jenkins server that's defined in the cloudflare config.
We keep our jenkins jobs version controlled by checking in each job's config.xml into a git repo. In the past I've seen the config.xml files managed by puppet or other config management tools.
This helps us get around the "hard to backup" and "test in production" issues. We can test out jenkins changes in staging, commit those changes to our jenkins repo, and then push up the config.xml file to the production jenkins server when we're ready to deploy.
This is exactly what we're building at Out Of Office. We've built a database of free and bookable spaces to work, meet, take calls, or take a break. We've collected all sorts of data you might find useful, like the number of seats, number of outlets, noise level, and other different amenities that we've rolled up into an 11-point score for each venue.
We've scouted thousands of coffee shops, hotel lobbies, parks, libraries, coworking, and other public spaces.
Right now we're only operating in San Francisco, but looking to expand to other cities in the future.
Take a look at Out Of Office next time you're looking for a place to work. We've built a database of free and bookable spaces to work, meet, take calls, or take a break. We've built it for ourselves and for people like you who work on the go and may work in multiple locations throughout the day.
Right now we're only operating in San Francisco, but looking to expand to other cities in the future.
At Out Of Office we use slack for day to day communication and always require video chat for team meetings unless you're on the go or not able to use video.
For longer term alignment we always post "decisions" that are made during these meetings in a slack channel so that others can keep up to date if they weren't in the meeting. We can also go back in time to see the context of why a decision was made.
PHP is 25 years old this year. Despite all the hate it gets, the core team continues to move the language forward, and it most definitely has its niche in web development.
Every single example the OP laid out is solved by an official laravel package. People love to hate on PHP but I can spin up a laravel app with all of those features in a matter of hours.
I can build a traditional server side rendered app or I can use the front end scaffolding to build an API driven SPA based on vue or react.
A related question: Are there any programming books you wish were written?
My long term side project has been to bootstrap an independent publishing house focused on technical topics. I'm always looking to hear what programming books people think are missing in the market.
Some recurring topics I keep seeing are more books on the soft skills / career development side of things, and more project based books that help you learn how certain technologies work internally by building a database, queue system, web framework, etc. from scratch.
> I’ve never worked from a real office or even had a “real” job
I really think that a precursor to working remote should be working in an office. I always advise against younger workers to go remote early in their career. There's a huge benefit to being in the office when you're young and have much to learn in your field. Once you've been in the industry for a few years I think it's much easier to switch to a remote lifestyle.
As far as the loneliness of remote work...my 100% remote company is taking a slightly different approach to solve this problem. The more we spoke with other remote workers in coworking spaces, coffee shops, etc...the more we realized that people work in those spaces to get the feeling of human interaction, whether or not they actually talk to people while they're out working.
What we started doing is hosting these "Work Clubs" where we get 5-6 remote workers together at a table at a coffee shop and we all work together for a couple of hours. It's not a networking event, but more of a casual way to meet people while you get your work done. It gets you out of the house and around other people and we got such good feedback from other remote workers that we're looking to help others hold their own work clubs wherever they work.
We're currently hosting work clubs in San Francisco, San Diego, and Portland, and hoping to grow. If you're interested you can find out more at https://outofoffice.app/workclub/remote