Ask HN: How is the remote vs in-person trend looking?

[aruanavekar]

How is the remote vs in-person trend looking? With so many rescinding on offers and freezing hiring, is there a shift where remote jobs are going more global and in-person staying local?

Are layoffs making finding remote jobs easy or more difficult.

Are indeed, linkedin best places to look for jobs or is working via recruiter more beneficial during these times?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/06/27/layoffs-netfl...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tech-companies-ramp-layoffs-h...

[ketzo]

This doesn't quite answer your trend, but personal anecdote:

I recently switched jobs, and as part of my job interview process, I was pretty firm about only looking for companies that were working at least part of the week in the office. I just really thrive on in-person work.

Fast forward a few weeks... and I ended up taking a job with a startup that was fully remote. I loved their product, loved the founders, loved the team I had met; I figured I would make it work.

Two months in and I have hardly noticed that I'm not working in person. There's just such a huge difference when you're working at BigCo remotely and working at an eight-person startup. Particularly at my company, people just really give a shit and it shows. I feel genuinely connected to and engaged with my teammates. Makes remote work a lot better.

[CoffeeOnWrite]

I'm happy for you!

Out of curiosity, did your current housing situation provide the space for a comfortable and productive home office, or is this unexpected development putting pressure on your housing situation? (If you're part of a trend, that has implications for preferred housing layout and square footage. And, of course people in different housing situations should be expected to respond differently to fully-remote opportunities..)

(FWIW I'm single in a 600 sq ft apartment. I'm also a manager. My workspace needs for desk layout, equipment, and quiet are minimal compared to individual contributors, but I sometimes think of the perceived status implications when my humble abode appears on video, though I've reflected and don't really care..)

Edit to add regarding status implications: believe it or not, a candidate I was interviewing actually blurted out "You're a manager in tech! How come you don't have a nicer house?". That got into my head briefly, until I decided that I don't care.

[fatnoah]

I had a very similar experience when looking for roles in the fall. I explicitly wanted to makes sure there was an office to go to and ended up (via a personal) connection, applying for a fully remote role where there was a local office I could work from if I felt the need.

Seven months later, I've gone to the office a total of 4 times, and two of those were because I had other appointments/errands nearby that day. I've surprised myself at how much I didn't miss the office environment.

[alexk307]

I have had the same experience! Remote work at a big company is miserable

[ragnot]

We are still full remote and I don't think anyone has any intention to go back to "in-person" honestly.

As a side note: I think the reason you are going to find so much friction with this is for the first time in recent history "workers" (specifically software engineers) have incredible leverage over management. I honestly don't think we've seen this since the days of labor unions.

Think about it: software engineers have such an in-demand, ubiquitous skillset that they can command huge salaries, get incredible perks AND now they can say "I don't want to be constrained to a location". Don't like your job? Don't worry about it, get a pay raise and you don't even have to change your office (because it's your bedroom/study/den/whatever). Boss is being a dick? Move and get a raise. Don't like co-workers who talk to much? You don't even have a water cooler to gossip around!

Software engineers have so much power now it's ridiculous and it honestly pisses off a lot of people who spent their entire lives brown-nosing and grinding only to have a young hotshot come in and earn more than they ever did at their age. I mean if I could get $5 for the number of times I've had older people tell me that I'm being too greedy for demanding SWE comps because "I never earned that much at your age" I could buy a really nice house in the Bay Area.

[ajcp]

I wonder if that makes it the best time for software engineers to form a union? I think the conventional wisdom is that unions are formed to benefit those without power otherwise, but would it make sense to unionize to maximize an already outsized position? Would that thereby ensure (to an extent) those proceeds for when a bargaining position might not be as powerful? The Icelandic press industry (I know, just hang in there with me) had a couple of amazing years in the 80s that the journalist(?) unions used as an opportunity to lock down some really progressive benefits that they still exercise today.

[alldayeveryday]

In a similar position - we went fully remote and have stayed that way. I do sense from the c-suite that they would love to get people back into office - I think driven more than anything by distrust of their workforce.

Re: engineers having leverage I am keen to see if this changes in the coming months. With so many layoffs will come more competition for each open role. Do we hit a point where there are more unemployed software engineers VS open engineering roles? Time will tell. If we do hit that point employers may go back to having leverage to dictate office.

As an aside, I really dislike recruiters who deceive you during recruiting. Both my wife and I have had recruiters tell us a company was allowing fully remote or hybrid, just to find out the actual policy is 3,4 days a week in office.

[ipaddr]

Yet most of us live in agile standup factory farming shops and where each time we interview we have to win a star search competition.

[make_it_sure]

That's not great for bootstrapped startups looking to hire. I see this will hit the startup ecosystem hard, at least bootstrapped ones.

Even for venture backed statups, the money doesn't flow around as much as before so eventually this big power developers have it's way too much and it will balance in the next few years.

[recvonline]

I was looking for new work this year and found a company which hired me for +40% salary increase and remote/timezone free.

Personally I have young kids and therefore prefer flexible times, fully remote etc.

Being in Europe, I think fully remote is getting embraced. It‘s the third company where I get US level salary plus all the benefits (30 days vacation, unlimited sick leave etc).

I see a strong trend from young families moving to the country side and paying off a house from one tech salary. At least in my circle.

I hope it stays.

Thus being said, I am a bit nervous moving away from tech hubs and having to hope this remote trend truly stays. What if there are no good remote jobs in a few years or I get laid off? Being in a tech hub still seems, somewhat, more secure to me.

[idiotsecant]

I think remote work is definitely a double-edged sword. For the time being wage pressure is high but as large organizations find out that they can recruit talent that would have accepted a little bit less and done just as good of a job they will begin to lower wages for these remote positions, which will lead to people being willing to accept a little less, which will lead to lower wages, etc until an equilibrium is reached a little bit above what typical tech wages would have been remotely but well below what US tech wages are now. This will be a moderately good thing for workers outside the US, a moderately bad thing for workers inside the US, and a fantastic thing for the companies who reduced the cost of their labor pool substantially.

I feel like there is definitely a little bit of job security in staying with a place that insists on local work only, but those places will become less attached to that position as they see industry peers successfully migrate away from it.

[DoingIsLearning]

> Being in Europe, I think fully remote is getting embraced. It‘s the third company where I get US level salary plus all the benefits.

But this is as an actual employee not as a contractor? Most of the US roles I've seen, that would consider EU ppl, the expect contractor arrangements where you deal with your own taxes.

[mettamage]

Is your company looking for other people? It sounds awesome.

Email is in profile :)

[pram]

I'm in the interview loop with two places atm (one is Google) and they're both remote. Last time I was frantically looking hard in 2019 I couldn't find any remote positions, so it's still a lot easier from my pov.

Also I've found that submitting job applications through LinkedIn's 'easy apply' thing is rarely successful. It doesn't seem like recruiters often check that. I've had the most replies from going through the company job posting websites. I know it's a pain in the ass but shrug

[_fat_santa]

Personally I never use easy apply or go through websites, I always talk to a recruiter on LinkedIn. Usually I'll get 1-2 messages per week from recruiters about a position, I'll politely decline but tell them I would like to keep in touch.

Whenever I go looking for another gig, all those recruiters are hit up. IMO, having a recruiter helps you cut through a ton of BS like filling out job applications, recruiter takes care of all that for you.

[rebeccaskinner]

My guess is that the current market conditions will accelerate the market toward whatever the new normal will be. Companies that hated having to give into demands for remote work will use this as leverage to get people back into the office. Companies that were going to look at remote work as a way to save costs (either by hiring from cheaper regions, saving on real estate costs, or both) will be pushed into those decisions sooner, and companies that were remote first, or on a path to it, in order to get the best talent will be pushed to improving their remote work processes so they can be as efficient as possible.

I’m not going to try to make a bet on where the lines will get drawn between remote and in person, but I expect hybrid work will become less common since it often ends up being then worst of all worlds (you pay for office space, limit your hiring pool, and decrease worker efficiency by encouraging repeated Covid exposure leading to both more short term leave due to sick employees and less effective employees in the long run due to long Covid, but you still have many of the organizational, communication and infrastructure challenges of a remote team)

[timr]

> decrease worker efficiency by encouraging repeated Covid exposure leading to both more short term leave due to sick employees and less effective employees in the long run due to long Covid

PSA: this is wild speculation. There's no definition of what "long covid" is, and there's certainly no evidence that it is made worse by getting Covid more than once. If anything, the opposite is true: we know that repeat infections lead to fewer symptoms and milder illness.

Regardless, Covid is an endemic cold virus now, along with the other four circulating coronaviruses. It isn't going away. Everyone is going to get it multiple times in their lives, whether or not they work remote or in person.

[jelling]

For some hard data, in San Francisco and NYC, the mass transit agencies are starting to plan for never getting back to full ridership again. And by plan, I mean starting to ask for federal funding to keep the systems alive (which I think they should) because the fare revenue is never going to return to pre-pandemic levels but the physical plant remains just as expensive to operate.

Keep in mind: these are two of the densest cities in the U.S., where people typically have less space for a home office and commutes are shorter vs an exurb type city. WFH is here to stay in my view, especially for employers in competitive recruiting spaces.

[jrochkind1]

> commutes are shorter vs an exurb type

I'm not sure about that. People i know in NYC typically spend as much time commuting as in any other city I've known, if not more. It's a big city, and because of the nature of public transportation (or traffic) it takes a while to move across it.

NYC is also, of course, a place where office space is more expensive than most other places -- employer choices could be effecting this as much as employee choices.

But I don't disagree with your general conclusion, as a general sense of things. I don't think NYC and San Francisco are the especially driving examples though.

[jedberg]

I've noticed interesting trends in the Bay Area. Up until about three weeks ago, traffic during rush hour was lighter than pre-pandemic. But about three weeks ago, traffic in the south bay (specifically 280N from 85 to 101) has returned to pre-pandemic levels.

However, just last week I drove home from SF to Cupertino at 5pm and did it in 54 minutes (which is basically $min_time). Pre-pandemic that drive would have been 90+ minutes.

[waylandsmithers]

Boston too is switching some lines permanently onto weekend schedules with less frequent trains

[wuliwong]

My team at ParkMobile is looking for a Staff engineer (Golang&Kafka), fully remote but if you're in Atlanta you can come in the office. There is normally one or two days in a month where we have an all hands type meeting or planning where they want us to come in. Even those days aren't mandatory but if you are in Atlanta, it's expected that you will show.

For Parkmobile, we have been battling to hire in the past year's ultra competitive market. We still have a ton of hiring to do and are probably even looking to accelerate our recruiting. I would imagine there are a number of companies that for one reason or another aren't freezing hiring because of the economic climate.

I think we have been very productive since going remote but I do miss the camaraderie in the office and I believe our "culture" has taken a bit of a hit. There are less interactions outside of what is specifically scheduled on the calendar. This leads to more focus during the day but I am one who thinks great things come out of casual conversations with people in the office that I don't directly work with every day.

[toyg]

Anectdotally, I get more fully-remote offers from recruiters. They used to be rare exceptions, most contacts would basically end with me saying "I'm not moving to London/Amsterdam"; some would try to fake it ("yeah we said remote ok, but actually that's just a day or two a week..."). Now most will say "fully remote" upfront and stress it throughout.

I reckon the UK sector in particular has finally locked on the realization that they can save boatloads of money by hiring outside London/Thames Valley, and the sky will not fall if IT folks are not lined up in big City offices like chickens in pens. Covid was a big game-changer.

[lefstathiou]

Early on (during Covid) I made the decision that remote work was not for our company (SAAS for financial services) and two years in have zero regrets about it. We are clear about our expectations so there are no surprises to employees and new hires (or we filter out people that want it). Most of our clients in financial services have reached the same conclusion.

One of my clients at a large bulge bracket said “if these people insist on not being in the office we may just outsource the job for a tenth of the comp”. I think more companies will take that view personally.

Our attrition is sub 5% over trailing twelve months. I get what works for us isn’t what will work for everyone else.

[marcus_holmes]

I always see this attitude as a management failure. For a couple of reasons:

1. as a manager, I need to be able to manage people when I can't see them. I need to look at what they're outputting, what results they get, not just whether they're moistening a chair for enough hours in the day.

2. people aren't fungible. Or rather, if they are, then I've recruited the wrong people. If I could outsource the job for a tenth of the salary and get the same results, then I absolutely should do that immediately. If I'm paying 90% of this person's salary just so they can moisten a chair in the office, then I'm not doing my job right.

[ragnot]

I at least respect that you are being upfront about it. I do think that you'll have a hard time sourcing the high-caliber software engineer you might want to get though.

Sure you'll get junior/mid-grade ones (which honestly might be enough for you) but I don't think you are going to like what happens to your candidates in the coming years. Remote work is just such a perk that it is literally one of the make or break points for many software engineers. People will inevitably migrate to companies with the better perks and it is hard to beat coding with your own kitchen and bathroom 10 steps away.

You also kind of gave yourself away with the "if these people insist on not being in the office we may just outsource the job for a tenth of the comp" in the sense that your industry views developers as a cost center and not the reason the company is generating value. If you've ever outsourced you know the challenges of time zone, language barrier and quality are a hard one to beat. You might as well hired a half-way decent developer in the beginning, but hey at least you saved a buck so you got your quarterly bonus right?

[y-c-o-m-b]

> if these people insist on not being in the office we may just outsource the job for a tenth of the comp

Hah, they can go ahead and do that. In fact I encourage it because it makes me more money in the end. When the software falls apart due to shoddy practices, they'll learn a very hard lesson when coming back to reality and end up paying people like me double (at best) what they would've originally paid to fix the mess. My last company was in the finance space and this is precisely what happened. They ended up pouring millions of dollars into fixing the disaster from outsourcing. If you ask around, you'll find this is a very common story.

[ImprobableTruth]

>One of my clients at a large bulge bracket said “if these people insist on not being in the office we may just outsource the job for a tenth of the comp”. I think more companies will take that view personally.

That's obviously an empty threat. If they could save 90% by outsourcing, they'd already have done it. The idea that the tech market rate is as high as it is because of good-hearted managers is absolutely laughable.

[ipaddr]

So no one is leaving and you are not hiring any technical positions. Growth seems flat.

The question is if you ditched the costly New York city office and support staff would you be in a better position.

That may not matter to you because your company is part of your identity. Living in New York and going into the office is a million times better than doing it from home for most. I'm not sure life is the same elsewhere.

[enchantments]

Is this for your sales team in the US or your engineers in Ukraine (based on your open positions)? Do you manage engineering remotely but make them come into an office together?

[dx034]

Do you expect 100% presence or are 2-3 days per week from home ok for you? I'd also never go fully remote but have found a hybrid model to be really productive.

[sys_64738]

You sound like a micromanager who can't tolerate losing control.

[as1992]

Based on my own experience as a SWE (Working with a previous company up until May 2022, job searching from Feb 2022 , and now at a new company)

The vast majority of companies are willing to hire remote, but a lot only within locations they have the legal means to do so (eg. Legal entity, contract with Deel or other company). It seemed during 2020/early 2021 people were saying it was going to be a "global job market", which in my understanding meant you could get a job in any country in the world, easy.

While it's true in my experience you can get a job in any country in the world, it's not that easy. A lot of companies do not want to hire outside areas they have a legal entity in, Eg. a company has an office in Paris, they'll hire remotely anywhere in France, but good luck if you're based in Spain.

Companies that will hire most anywhere are far and few between, and generally from what I've seen are smaller, startup/small business sized companies.

Take the above with a pinch of salt as that is purely my own experience, and could be bias based on what I was looking for.

[phpisthebest]

"global job market" generally means contract labor, not direct hired employees

Either individually contract, or via a 3rd party firm like Tata, or Infosys

[bityard]

At the beginning of the pandemic, the CEO of our company was very adamant about working from home being a temporary situation, with all of the usual explanations.

Although I still have to go into the office occasionally to things that can't be done remotely, midway through the pandemic I had decided that I am going to work from home as much as I like from now on. And if this company doesn't let me, I'll switch jobs.

Earlier in this year, the CEO set a "back to the office" date of June 13th. I've been in occasionally since then and it's still basically a ghost town. So apparently most of my co-workers have the same idea as me.

[sys_64738]

CEOs who set these edicts are mugs when they don't work out. These idiots want to assert control and flex their managerial muscle. Most employees just want to get on with the job and stop being hassled by managerial idiots.

[zxexz]

My company maintains an office, which some people local go in once or twice a week. But it's 100% remote-first, and everybody (including leadership) has no desire to go back to "in-person-first". The remote shift was a major boon to hiring - being able to recruit talent from all over the US.

[sdevonoes]

I just joined a new company fully remote. Been working in a fully remote company during COVID. I receive offers in Linkedin where 70% of them are fully remote and the rest are hybrid (I don't receive offers which are 100% on site. Funny). So, I think fully remote is winning so far. This in Europe.

[paxys]

My large FAANG-equivalent company has been trying to mandate return to work for months now, but employees simply ignore them. After 2+ years it's hard to believe things will ever return to "normal".

[Casteil]

Not an engineer, but I am in software development; I'm about to accept an offer after only having gotten serious about applying ~1 month ago. Applied to ~17 roles between ~2-4 weeks ago (all but 1 fully remote), and the role I'm about to accept was the second place I applied to.

There was no shortage of fully remote roles, in fact.. there were so many new ones popping up every day on LinkedIn that I was quite selective about what type of companies / projects I applied to (avoiding financial/health/crypto and anything else that felt dull or ethically questionable).

In my own personal experience... the "widespread hiring freeze" feels like little more than media sensationalism.

[zelphirkalt]

In Europe here. Still working remotely. Saves me tons of time. We get our stuff done. Recently had a few days office work, which was OK for a workshop, but I wouldn't want to have it every day or even most days of the week, because of the loss of time.

There is a voluntary office day now and I'll try to make it work. I hope it stays voluntary and does not become mandatory.

[fbrncci]

I interviewed a lot this year; the amount is probably between 50-75, with at least 15 take homes (all 100% remote jobs). The great majority of those came from LinkedIn recruiters, and that all sucked, I got three offers which I declined because they weren't great. In the end, what got me a new job was my blog and the branding I have on Twitter. At some point my posts where getting traction, and companies started reaching out to me. It got me a job without even interviewing. If it wasn't for that, I would probably still be interviewing with recruiters on LinkedIn.

[cehrlich]

I'm currently looking for a job, and in my experience everything is at least hybrid, and a lot of places are full remote. I've not interviewed with a single full on-site company so far. Remote-first companies, if they have a good process in place, can have a huge advantage in terms of access to talent.

Personally I enjoy being in the office 2-3 days a week as long as the commute isn't too bad, but I'm seriously considering going full remote as it opens up a lot of life possibilities.

[nimajneb]

I don't know if this answers your question, but my employer (engineering firm) just announced last Friday that starting July 5th being in the office Tue-Thu is mandatory. Then Sept 5th Mon-Fri is mandatory. Pre-covid there were very very few remote positions at my employer, we are going back to that I guess. I've been going in Mon-Fri anyways, so it doesn't really effect me.

[akhmatova]

My employer just announced last Friday that starting July 5th being in the office Tue-Thu is mandatory.

Then you need to remind your employer that your presence on the team is not "mandatory", but rather optional. In the form of the 2-week notice you give once you have found a much better job that also respects your health and sanity.

[ipaddr]

Just in time for the next covid wave.

[yboris]

I've been at Forbes for 5 years now. 2 years ago we went 100% remote; we're still committed to 100% remote. Many job listings still showing: https://boards.greenhouse.io/forbes/

Unsure how it is out there - I've not jumped jobs because it's been great here so far.