Why We'll Stay Remote

https://supabase.com/blog/why-supabase-remote

by todsacerdoti • 3 years ago

79 33 3 years ago

supabase.com

ecf2• 3 years ago

There’s been a major U-turn in people’s attitudes towards remote this year

No there hasn’t. Saying there has is just falling for executive corp-think.

SOLAR_FIELDS2• 3 years ago

Anecdata: the previously “remote first always” startup I work for has recently started to backpedal on that and target onsite hiring. So at least in VC land there seems to be push from investors to shift more to hybrid or onsite

ecf2• 3 years ago

The same VCs who caused some banks to fail because they all copy what each other is doing?

steve_adams_86• 3 years ago

I've been slowly perusing the job market since May or so, and the number of remote jobs in the area I'm looking has certainly decreased. I wouldn't call it a U-turn either though... The opportunities are still orders of magnitude better than even 5 years ago. From that perspective, we're still way ahead (for those of us who want these opportunities, at least).

Gigachad• 3 years ago

In my experience, it seems every tech company around has let their office lease expire. We have been pushing for a while to get a coworking space for ages but management refuses because it costs money they don’t have to spend. Pretty depressing but I’m having a hard time finding any job listing that has an office available.

warning262• 3 years ago

It's good to see them adopting a stance instead of weird half-measures.

Remote vs in-office tends to get wrapped up in all kinds of narratives: it's a thrilling tale of the Evil Corporatocracy vs the Common Man, or perhaps it's the Future of Work, or even a dark conspiracy driven by Big Real Estate.

The fact is, it all comes down to personal preference: some people like WFH and some prefer in-office. It's best that companies pick one and stick with it, so people can work in whichever environment they prefer.

jcparkyn• 3 years ago

It's best that companies pick one and stick with it, so people can work in whichever environment they prefer.

What about all the people that prefer some combination of the two? I'd hazard a guess that they outnumber either of the other two groups.

welshwelsh• 3 years ago

I consider those people to be on the "I want to work in an office" side.

Companies with RTO policies still usually give the option to work from home a couple days a week, right? Just not every day. You still need to live within commuting distance of an office, which is a pretty big restriction.

re-thc2• 3 years ago

The fact is, it all comes down to personal preference

But who's preference? The problem is the VP or CEO or whoever that has a preference but won't come out to admit it and makes up an excuse.

warning262• 3 years ago

Making up excuses instead of telling the truth is an issue with everything CEOs tend to say.

They never tell you the real reason for anything. During the various tech layoffs, I honestly wished CEOs would just lean into the "I am doing this because I'm greedy and I want more money" angle instead of trying to pretend they had to do it due to some phony line reasoning.

phnofive• 3 years ago

However, if I know anything about high performing teams, it’s that you need to have mutual trust (which breeds psychological safety), and a shared model of what success looks like (metrics anyone?). Without these you’re going to struggle to produce results office or no office.

Hear, hear.

Note that these points are interdependent: Staff must trust management will collaborate and iterate on metrics, and management must trust employees will not game the metrics. If those things are true, then success measured against those metrics (that flows into business health and employee rewards) will reinforce mutual trust. The opposite is true, too.

TexanFeller• 3 years ago

Staff must trust management will collaborate and iterate on metrics, and management must trust employees will not game the metrics.

In my career I've never once seen either of these conditions met.

SkyPuncher• 3 years ago

Shared success is not metrics. In fact, most people’s understanding of “metrics” erodes any ability to have a high performing team.

In my experience, there’s an intangible aspect of “doing what the team needs” that fixed metrics simply cannot capture.

naijaboiler• 3 years ago

Correct. In fact too much metric-ing gets in the way of that

mycall• 3 years ago

As more and more people do this, public transit will shrink to a point of failure.

NoZebra120vClip3• 3 years ago

I am not sure that the primary usage of public transit is commuting. Perhaps it is more prevalent in some regions of these United States, such as NYC and environs, and perhaps it is prevalent for certain routes. Certainly, most metro areas provide special "Express" lines with prices, routes, and hours geared for commuters.

But what I've found in transit authority policy is that they typically disregard workplaces when planning routes and schedules. The terminus and transfer point for a typical local bus route is in a shopping mall. Sure, this is a workplace for many people, but for every mall worker aboard a bus, I see 10-20 shoppers, and 10-20 students, and 5+ homeless people.

Furthermore, public transit service levels are not determined by payments of fare, but by taxpayer funding and ridership levels, etc. So if ridership dwindles on commute-oriented lines, those lines could die out. And certainly, WFH will reduce the number of people traveling and the miles we travel as well.

But transit as a whole will still be OK. There will be less private ownership of vehicles as time wears on. People will opt for ride sharing more, and those who get rid of their cars entirely will probably want to take a bus or train, once in a while, for a doctor's appointment, a mall visit, a baseball game, you name it.

rcme3• 3 years ago

The primary usage of public transit is 100% commuting. Malls are often used for bus hubs because they have ample parking. If you're seeing shoppers and students on the bus, then you're not riding the bus at rush hour.

re-thc2• 3 years ago

Then the public transit in your city / country was already a failure.

Public transit in a lot of places does more than just getting people to office jobs. The bigger problem sounds like your city is not attractive and there's no reason to visit it physically or that everyone is forced to drive because the public transit is terrible.

ttymck• 3 years ago

If you think this is true, I'm skeptical you would ever support public transit in the first place.

winrid• 3 years ago

We don't need to waste resources moving people around that can work at home so that politicians can pretend to justify public transportation budgets.

We have the money. California alone had tens of billions of dollars sitting around last year. There is no reason public transport should be a concern other than building more.

Not every public service needs to be profitable. Building roads isn't directly profitable either. That's why we have taxes.

RadiozRadioz• 3 years ago

I don't know about you, but many of us living in walkable European cities highly value public transit as a day-to-day amenity, regardless of whether we're commuting or travelling for leisure. It sounds like you live somewhere with poor quality infrastructure and car-dependent city planning.

brianjking• 3 years ago

I don't agree, furthermore, the united states has next to no public transit anyway.

janosdebugs• 3 years ago

I think that a companys ability to do full remote heavily depends on its culturenas the article also points out. I worked for Red Hat for ~2.5 years as an engineer and not once have I been to an office or even met anyone else from the company. However, my manager for most of the time was an old school RHer and really treated work as work and had his social life outside the company. We got a ton of work done in that time with a minimal amount of meetings.

I've also been in teams/departments that were heavily concentrated in certain offices, had a tendency to hire from that area, or needed frequent offsites. The people in those departments were much more pf the sociable kind, spent much more time in meetings, even when doing so remotely. They also tended to do much less in writing. Working remotely and in a documentation-first fashion was a lot more difficult here, but given their line of work (closer to the customer) this is not exactly surprising.

It doesn't work for everyone, if you want a remote company you, you have to hire and organize accordingly. YMMV.

kioleanu• 3 years ago

Appreciate the sentiment but, checking the career page, man does this place sound cultish as hell

ahansen• 3 years ago

What part in there gave you that impression? I had a read through and it seemed okay. Maybe I missed something.

mikhailfranco• 3 years ago

Ask HN about geo-adjustment for fully-remote companies...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36981745

Supabase does not geo-adjust, claiming the point of fairness: equal pay for equal work.

Why We'll Stay Remote

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