jonhmchan

What I Need to Hear That I Don't Want to Hear

I'm curious what you think about remote work and whether it's overall a net positive for companies that are struggling to find talent in their own country.

There seem to be some obvious benefits: no need to worry about getting people visas, expanding your talent pool to beyond your geographic region, and so on. There's also legal tradeoffs: dealing with complicated laws with taxes, benefits, and so on.

In your experience, is opting for remote a net benefit? Or perhaps more fittingly, in what situations do you think it's appropriate for a company to consider building a remote workforce, wholly or partially?

Stack Overflow does. I'm an engineer there and we still think providing private offices to our engineering team is important for their productivity. This includes engineers, SREs, designers, data scientists, PMs, and others.

However, most of our engineering team is remote and if they're not in one of our locations, we give them pretty much what they'd like to build their own home office or go to a coworking space.

For me, I'm actually nomadic, so I tend to work from wherever I'm staying or end up in cafes a lot of time. I still get the support I need if my work "station" isn't optimal.

TL;DR Stack Overflow provides private offices, but is really flexible, especially given its remote policy.

Work at Stack here. We still provide private offices for developers when they're in one of our offices. A lot of the engineering team is remote too, which lets people have their own workspace as well.

I wake up earlier. Both the meditation and pledge to write take up an extra hour in my day. It's causing me to readjust my old habits too: if I don't sleep late and get a good night's sleep, waking up earlier is easier and I can make the time.

I'm curious to see how this evolves in future weeks.