Technology

I have worked as a freelance for around 14 years, from home. My husband, a developer, always had told me that he couldn,t work without his colleagues around. Then the pandemic come and he had to work from home for more than two years. He loved it. No distractions, no commuting (I think that is the worst), better environment to concentrate in silence....he didn,t want to go back to an office. Like never ever.

But then the company he worked for said that everybody had to go back to the office because that is what's the company wanted. My husband and the rest of his department got very angry. In three months, all the 10 people in it had gone to other remote works. The day my husband said he was leaving in three weeks was the last day of his immediate boss. So he gave notice to a higher boss, that had a big tantrum because he thought it was a workers plot.

It wasn,t, but seems that nobody has to be forced into the office if they can do better work elsewhere. Because they leave if they can. As a consequence they lost all their senior developers and two middle managers. My husband now is happy, works from home and travels to the office for meetings and things like that a two or three days every three months. He works for a big international company with people in remote in several countries. His prior company is struggling really hard to finde people to work for them. It is up to them: expert people on remote or junior people wanting experience to go remote later on other job.

Remember y'all, unionize your workplace so they can't take away remote work from you

I will never again accept a job that isn’t 100% remote. My main gig has about 50 devs, we all used to commute to the office everyday in a high COL city. My commute would sometimes take 90 minutes each way, and I only lived around 15 miles away. We’ve been 100% remote since March 2020 and our overall productivity has gone up by 20%, which isn’t surprising considering the commute alone sucked the life out of all of us.

Before the pandemic, my old company allowed us to remote work on occasion, but it was rare. With the pandemic we started to work from home regularly and it was a game changer. Little bit after the pandemic they forced us to go back to the office (also, in summer, in spain, to a office with broken AC), so I changed jobs.

Best decision I ever had. The company I work for now is US based, so obviously its remote only for me. There's a big culture shift, both from being American and for being remote focused, but I think its fantastic. Never have been as productive in my life.

There's a great difference between companies allowing remote and being remote oriented as well. Management has to fully buy into it and promote using remote tools, otherwise it won't work.

It is a thing to note about starting an IT business. Office space is an overhead you cannot afford. I was involved as a founder for a small custom dev and consulting company in the middle 2000s. We were about 10 and very distributed. Every Friday we would meet at a coffee shop with bottomless coffee 😉. Do our version of a standup and then get on with it for the week. Even then we managed with email and google chat and cell phones. The tooling is so much better today than then. So there is no reason to waste money on renting fancy spaces.

My employer recently announced plans to lay off much of their Finance department and outsource their work to a remote team based in Delhi. Basically means I'll be made redundant within the next 6 months.

Why are they doing this? Because they're having problems attracting and retaining staff.

This may be a shocker, but nobody wants to come into the office three days a week, work in an incredibly stressful high-volume transactional finance role, deal with shoddy systems which frequently crash, end up shackled to a lengthy notice period, and have 30% of their calendar year blocked for taking annual leave - all on low pay that isn't competitive.

I work in Purchase Ledger and my team alone has suffered from a 95% employee turnover rate. The only reason I haven't walked yet is because the severance package is actually quite generous.

In my last year of uni now but I'd love to get remote work in the future. I've seen it totally change my mother's lifestyle.

Also, no office rent.

It's a free incentive to attract people who would otherwise go with a higher paying position. No-brainer for smaller companies IMO.

I wish someone in my field would attract me with that 😭.

A lot of great companies were remote focused for a very long time before the pandemic. ArsTechnica, StackOverflow, ... - they have a physical office space, but it's mostly for legal & admin purposes and to let externals tour at least something.