Been working remotely for a long time now and was beginning to feel that loneliness. So, I started going to a co-working space to be around people again. Two/three days a week I'm in the "office" with my new "coworkers". It's been great to get to socialize and talk to other tech folks who are working on interesting and different things.
But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more offices should operate more like this.
I work remotely following a divorce because my children live here. It's not something I would choose for myself and will be looking to move once they graduate.
This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored.
People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc.
The post above as well is predicated on a 1973 style consumer transport shock. At least in most developed countries, the average MPG has dramatically increased [0].
In 1973, the average MPG was around 12 MPG. In 2015 (before EVs were normalized) it was almost 25 MPG. In 2026, numbers would be significantly higher.
A more realistic prior is what happened in 2006-07: your boss will expect you to go to work.
Actually, there are reasons not to offshore. See near shoring as a trend for evidence. Places in South America are preferred over Europe and Asia for U.S. companies. Beyond that though, local workers are easier to communicate with, culturally compatible, higher skilled, and tend to behave better.
[Edit: source: I led a consulting team of about eighty Brazilians and Ecuadorians]
There's definitely a more nuanced way to write that which would be far more accurate. I certainly have worked with fantastic workers from outside the US. There's nothing magical about living here that makes people better at their jobs. You are correct that I've never worked outside the US except for work trips.
Part of the dynamic is that with wages and costs here being high, the bar for acceptable is higher so there's a filter effect. Another part is that a lot of people emigrate and the costs associated means only the better people get to do so. If your international collaboration experience is from working in FAANG/whatevs or the best augmentation houses (e.g. Thoughtworks), you'd have very different experiences than are the common case. In that case you're not benefiting from financial arbitrage so much which is another relevant dynamic. That same dynamic means you're less likely to be outsourcing or nearshoring from other high cost of living places that tend to have better schools (although the US seems to be struggling on this). You could replace US with HCOL places and the statement would be improved. Further, those that are good who don't emigrate can demand wages on the global scale (even if adjusted for local COL) which means they aren't working offshore contracts unless they're early in their career and you got lucky (in which case their team isn't similarly great) or, again, you're working with one of the premium houses and outsourcing isn't a cost saving exercise. In the places where wages are strangely low (e.g the UK & some other HCOL parts of Europe) the industry draws a smaller proportion of the brightest minds because the premium is smaller.
So I believe your statement about your experience. I also think the general refutation of my sub-claim as distilled is correct. Yet the comment was in the context of outsourcing/nearshoring and implicitly about the median places, statistically speaking, looking to cut costs and exert downward pressure on wages. For those the local talent demanding the higher wages is higher skilled on top of having the meatspace/hand shaking advantage.
For the context: I worked for a US company in a very senior position in EMEA and APAC. I lived in several places. The company was huge and dynamic/innovative, until it was not anymore.
For two people with the same "work quality" let's say, one in France and one in the US and both wanted to work in a high-paced industry or startup -- the US is much, much better. From the perspective of the US person, hiring someone in France is a road of problems not because they are not good enough, but because they will be a bureaucratic burden.
For both US and France, hiring someone in India will be problematic because of major cultural differences, and given the size of the country, quality of work. There are very good Indian engineers, they are just much more difficult to find.
There is of course a lot of historical bias too, not to mention racism.
If you are in France today, it is economically better to hire someone from India, but the major differences in basically everything make it difficult. Hiring someone in Poland does not have this problem. The language would be the barrier, mostly (they would need to speak English, and our Frenglish is pitiful). So we hire for economic reasons, but the gap is closing quickly, especially for the top jobs (for the very top ones it is actually more interesting in Poland).
We could hire someone in the US but the salary structure is completely broken, and effectively we have people emigrating to the US (and sometimes coming back to France when they have a problem expecting that they will be taken care of, but that's another problem)
So yes, there are gaps between countries -- but not all countries.
Thanks for the extra detail. Sounds like we largely agree. I have definitely envied the vacation and other works staples of French colleagues. I'm glad you have it and for all "our" "negotiating power" we have some serious no gos in our negotiating space. Which is why I'm now my own boss.
> People keep complaining on HN, but the reality is WFH during COVID proved async works, and if async works then there's no reason not to reduce hiring in MTV and NYC and shift to (eg.) Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, etc.
Async works because the same people you worked with before, are now on zoom just like when you were in the office. Because when you were in the office, you were on zoom most of the time because there were not enough conference rooms.
The WeWork business proposition was correct; it was just implemented/executed poorly. Starbucks and other cafes can make a killing just by offering subscription/reservations based access to conference rooms for the day.
(WFH since ~11 years), the issue with remote work lay in the many who do not really know how to work in the present time. We're full of people who don't know how to use email even though they use it every day, or a chat app even though they're on it day and night; they can't use a bloody generic website even though they spend most of their lives online, and so on.
These people are simply a problem when working remotely, and while they're certainly present at the bottom of the ladder, they are particularly numerous among management. There are really very few who understand IT well enough not to cause issues and actually be productive.
The handful of people who have a financial interest in keeping the masses enslaved in the city, namely those with financial interests in office spaces, ready made food, fast-tech, fast-fashion, ... prey on this.
This is the real problem. The way out is to teach IT, not CS, not CE, at school, starting from early childhood, and to really teach it: FLOSS desktops, not cloud+mobile is mandatory. And since we don't have enough teachers, the only way is through video lessons, but to do something like that at a national level requires a level of understanding and commitment that currently seems largely absent among most people.
My experience in corporate life has been that, as you go up the corporate ladder, you have to dumb down and goo-goo-ga-ga-ify information for managers.
Like, we have a log of all our work done, it's git. It tracks and timestamps each individual commit. But my manager can't use our git frontend. I guess it's too hard? Not sure. So, we then re-enter our time in Jira.
Of course, his manager can't open up Jira. So, we also create a word document every week documenting everything we have done. We actually also spell out and link the Jira issues (???). And then that gets sent to him.
Some of this I can understand. Reporting and distilling data is important. But nothing is being distilled, it's the same information just duplicated. This could all be automated but, of course, it's not.
I admit among my coworkers, for a few, I wonder how they manage to work remotely and be productive. These same people are the one who suck up all the oxygen out of meetings; and leave a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day.
> This is the norm now for the past few years, and is one of the few ways to protect your job from being fully offshored.
Not necessarily true. A company that operates 100% remotely in country X not necessarily can hire people from other countries (and let them work there). I work for a french company, 100% remote. The company doesn't have branches in other companies, and so everyone works within France. This is ideal, because the HQ is in Paris, and many people don't (want to) live in Paris. Having to go to the office 2-3 times per week, makes it impossible for my company to hire outside of Paris... which is idiotic
> company that operates 100% remotely in country X not necessarily can hire people from other countries (and let them work there)
Can't speak for French companies aside from some players in DefenseTech and Quantum, but for most American companies this is a solved problem already - we already have a legal entity in most jurisdictions or the ability to spin one up within a couple days.
Additionally, if an organization is spending enough to open a dedicated branch in a country (even if it's only going to house 20-30 people), we tend to get FDI grants and subsidizes unlocked.
Pasqual did something similar when opening up their American campus in Chicago.
> Having to go to the office 2-3 times per week, makes it impossible for my company to hire outside of Paris... which is idiotic
There's no reason to - you aren't getting a significant cost benefit shifting hiring from Paris to (eg.) Toulouse, and are only incurring an additional operational headache.
At that point you may as well open a Francophone development office in Rabat or Tunis, or shift the office to Bucharest or Prague because the CEE countries can outcompete France in ICT hiring subsidies.
I was in the same boat around the 10 year mark as well. I started a t-shirt business on the side. It took a while but after a few years made enough to live off of.
Eventually I came back to tech as a contractor/consultant and like it so much more. My passion for development and engineering is much higher now.
A React Native mobile coffee shop map of all coffee shops in New York City. It's integrated with Google Places so I can return summaries of each coffee shops via Googles AI summary feature.
The next step is going to explore building a local LLM into the application itself to then skip over the entire Google part. I want to implement some question/answer features that I THINK could be solved with a local LLM integration. But for now it's just a quick app to help you find coffee.
React Native mobile app + React web app that shows all the coffee shops across New York City. The idea is that you can open it and the app instantly displays the closest coffee shop to you. It integrates with Google Maps reviews AI summaries for a lowdown on the coffee shop and vibe.
This is a good way to look at it. I recently starting thinking something similar now that chatgpt.com and Perplexity are showing up as referral sources to my blog. So there is some verification (or hope there is) that someone got to my content and learned something from it.
What about hiring junior developers to do the work I don't want to spend time training AI to do? Humans retain context, over time learn the ins and outs of the business and will sit in a meeting with stakeholders to gain understanding of the business rules and ask the 'stupid' questions that need to be asked.
I would much rather have that junior take some hacks at building some features with AI along with my guidance than context switching over to AI just to walk it through doing a task which means having to explain the business and our business rules over and over again.
To me cutting out a junior developer adds more time for senior developers than making their work lighter.
I created a website and mobile app to display all the coffee shops in the state of Minnesota. It's a .Net Core MVC website and React Native mobile app that is pretty much entirely vibe coded.
I've had fun with building the data loaded, website and mobile app via Claude Code from VS Code. However, I didn't find building the project as enjoyable as actual coding myself. The code is a mess and is definitely overengineered and hard to read. I have had to consistently fix bugs and calibrate my prompts so the machine could produced the features that I was trying to create.
Another thing I learned is to commit early and often. Then create PRs to check what code was updated as things got away from me quickly without me knowing or asking the machine to do the thing it did. A few times entire sections of code were removed that had nothing to do with the feature I was working on. Being able to go back to the previous working commit probably saved me hours.
Vibe coding an entire project was a good experience. There's a lot to learn and focus on the next time I go this route.
One suggestion: your “open now” toggle is confusing. I can’t tell what state it’s in without relying on inspecting one of the aggregates decreasing from 7 to 6. Use a non-color visual indicator (icons or words).
But I also love that freedom of staying home whenever I want to. IMO, more offices should operate more like this.
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