Personally I think many in the pro-remote crowd have a limited view of what a software engineering job is.
If you have a job where your entire job is to crank out some website in Rails or to be the only person building some billing system then sure, remote can make sense. These jobs tend to be on smaller teams with limited scope.
But projects can easily get to a size where you need to:
- Collaborate with other engineering teams
- Work with people on the business side
- Work with product managers, data scientists, comms people, etc
- Gather requirements because what you have is fairly vague
- Determine if what you're doing is having the intended impact and adjusting as necessary
While remote can still work in these cases it's much, much harder. It's even harder when you have two teams in different sites even if you're in the same time zone.l
Some pro-remote people also say "I don't need the social interaction", which I think misses the point. You might not but what about your teammates? Doing things like having lunch with your team, going on an offsite, etc actually matters. It helps build a better working relationship.
This is I think particularly the case for more junior engineers. If one is two desks over from you and swearing at their computer then you can see that and intervene. If all the senior people are remote, who is going to do that?
So if you really want to live in [small town X] here and work at home to drop your kids off at school or whatever, that's fine but there's no getting passed the fact that you'll always have less opportunities and only a subset (a small one IMHO) of jobs will be suitable for that. And you just have to accept that.
Fully disagree and your opening line is a little bit patronising. Let me try the same!
Presumably the pro-remote crowd are working for tiny little companies where their engineering teams, product managers, data scientists, comms people, etc all fit in the same diddy little office.
But projects can easily get to a size where you need to:
- Collaborate with various government departments
- Work with people in other suppliers
- Work with people across an international supply chain
- Gather requirements because what you have is fairly vague (isn't this every project ever?)
While local work can still work in these cases, it's much, much harder. It's even harder when you have to fly people across time zones.
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Look, this is all silly IMHO - it doesn't have to be this way.
The company I work with is setup for remote first, employees get a rundown of how we use tooling to solve all the communication issues that could arise. You can even sit in voice conference with other devs so you can actually hear each other swearing at code - if you choose to. But if people want to colocate the company will pay for them to have office space in a WeWork or similar.
FWIW, I make 4x working remote what I ever did for a local company. And the work is more interesting. Accept that!
I think its a case of argue for your limitations, and there yours to have. All of the bullet points you list can easily be solved with the many tools that are freely available.
"Some pro-remote people also say "I don't need the social interaction"
I think this is a good point. It's important to meet people in person and then you learn the niches of their character and won't find yourself trying to find translate the intent of someone typing in slack ("is that sarcasm or are they really upset?"). My engineering remote team resolves this by us having twice yearly meet ups, where we all spend a week together eating, drinking and discussing strategy.
If you have a job where your entire job is to crank out some website in Rails or to be the only person building some billing system then sure, remote can make sense. These jobs tend to be on smaller teams with limited scope.
But projects can easily get to a size where you need to:
- Collaborate with other engineering teams
- Work with people on the business side
- Work with product managers, data scientists, comms people, etc
- Gather requirements because what you have is fairly vague
- Determine if what you're doing is having the intended impact and adjusting as necessary
While remote can still work in these cases it's much, much harder. It's even harder when you have two teams in different sites even if you're in the same time zone.l
Some pro-remote people also say "I don't need the social interaction", which I think misses the point. You might not but what about your teammates? Doing things like having lunch with your team, going on an offsite, etc actually matters. It helps build a better working relationship.
This is I think particularly the case for more junior engineers. If one is two desks over from you and swearing at their computer then you can see that and intervene. If all the senior people are remote, who is going to do that?
So if you really want to live in [small town X] here and work at home to drop your kids off at school or whatever, that's fine but there's no getting passed the fact that you'll always have less opportunities and only a subset (a small one IMHO) of jobs will be suitable for that. And you just have to accept that.